When it dawned on him that she might be frightened of him, he felt a little guilty for being so blunt. He could even understand her reluctance to take him up on his offer. The few times they had come face-to-face, he had been angry. She probably thought he was an ill-tempered bastard. Unfortunately, he wasn’t doing anything now to correct that impression.
“Hey, I’m sorry,” he said, making a conscious effort to remove the impatience from his tone. “It’s dark, cold and I’m getting soaked to the bone out here.” He hoped the friendly smile he gave her helped to alleviate some of her fears. “It’s warm and dry at my place and I’ve got plenty of room.” As an afterthought, he added, “And all of the bedrooms have locks on the doors.”
She glanced in the rearview mirror at something in the backseat, then hesitated a few seconds longer before she shook her head. She sounded tired and utterly defeated when she finally murmured, “I don’t have a choice.”
“When we get to the house, you can park in the garage,” he offered. “There’s plenty of room and you’ll be able to stay dry getting inside the house.”
“All right. I’ll follow you,” she said, rolling up the driver’s side window.
He jogged back to his truck and started it up. Once he had it turned around and checked to make sure she wasn’t having any trouble doing the same, T.J. drove back to the lane leading up to his home. When he steered the truck around the ranch house to the attached three-car garage, he pressed the remote to raise two of the wide doors and parked inside. By the time he got out, the woman had stopped her older Toyota between his truck and the Mercedes sedan he rarely drove.
He walked over and opened her door. When she got out of the car, his breath caught. The times he had taken her errant horse back to her and knocked on her door to demand she keep the horse on her ranch, as well as during their conversation a few minutes ago in the dark, cold rain, he had been so frustrated, he hadn’t paid much attention to his neighbor’s looks. But he sure as hell noticed them now.
A few inches over six feet tall, T.J. didn’t meet many women who could look him square in the eye without having to tilt their heads back. But the Wilson woman was only four or five inches shorter than him. When their gazes met, he felt like he had been kicked in the gut.
She had the bluest eyes he’d ever seen and for reasons that baffled him, he wanted to take her long, strawberry blond hair down from her ponytail and run his fingers through the soft-looking, wavy strands. The woman wasn’t just pretty, she was heart-stoppingly gorgeous. He couldn’t believe he had missed seeing that before.
When she turned to open the back door of her car and reached inside, he briefly wondered if she carried an overnight bag around just on the outside chance she got stranded somewhere. But when she straightened and turned to face him, T.J. barely managed to keep his jaw from dropping. She held a blanket-covered child to her shoulder with one arm, while she tried to keep her grasp on her purse and a diaper bag with the other.
In the course of about three seconds several questions ran through his mind. First, he remembered that when he’d stopped to see if she needed help, she had been sitting in her car contemplating how she was going to get back to her ranch. Surely she wouldn’t have tried to cross the flooded road with her kid in the backseat? The realization of what might have happened if she had tried such a thing caused a tight knot to form in the pit of his stomach. Second, when he’d asked her if there was anywhere else she could go, she had told him there wasn’t. What would she have done if he hadn’t come along and offered her shelter for the night? Would she have tried to tough it out all night in the car with a child?
“Let me help you,” T.J. said now, stepping forward to take her purse and the diaper bag. Aside from the fact that it was just good manners for a man to help a woman carry things, the dark smudges beneath her eyes were testament to the fact that she was extremely tired.
“Thank you...Malloy.” She shook her head as she closed the car door. “I don’t know your first name.”
When he stepped back for her to precede him through the door leading into the mudroom, he did his best to give her a friendly smile. “The name’s T.J., Ms. Wilson.”
He suddenly realized that in the four years since he’d bought the ranch, he’d been so busy starting his breeding program and getting settled in, that he hadn’t bothered to get acquainted with more than one or two of the other ranchers in the immediate area. And the few times he had met up with Ms. Wilson, it hadn’t been under the best of circumstances. He had been pissed off about her stallion impregnating his mares and hadn’t bothered to introduce himself and, understandably, she hadn’t been inclined to give him her name or exchange pleasantries when he had put her on the defensive.