Granite Man Read Free

father who had been left behind. She had wept for Luke, the brother who had loved her when their parents were too consumed by private demons to notice either of their children.
     That's all in the past. I've come home. Everything will be all right now. I'm finally home.
     The reassuring litany calmed Mariah until she looked at the hard profile of the man who sat within touching distance of her. And she wanted to touch him. She wanted to ask what she had done to make him dislike her. Was it simply that she was alive, breathing, somehow reminding him of an unhappy past? It had been that way with her stepfather, an instant masculine antagonism toward another man's child that nothing Mariah did could alter.
     What would she do if Luke disliked her on sight, too?
    ~2~
    Arms aching, Mariah held up the rumpled hood of her car while Cash rummaged in the engine compartment, muttering choice phrases she tried very hard not to overhear. A grimy, enigmatic array of parts was lined up on the canvas cloth that Cash had put on the ground nearby. Mariah looked anxiously from the greasy parts to the equally greasy hands of the big man who had taken one look at her sedan's ancient engine and suggested making a modern junk sculpture of it.
     "When was the last time you changed the oil?"
     The tone of voice was just short of a snarl. Mariah closed her eyes and tried to think.
     "I can't remember. I wrote it in the little book in the glove compartment, but I needed paper for a grocery list so I—"
     The rest of what Mariah said was lost beneath a rumble of masculine disgust. She caught her lower lip between her teeth and worried the soft flesh nervously.
     "When was the last time you added water to the radiator?"
     That was easy. "Today. Several times. Then I ran out."
     Slowly Cash's head turned toward Mariah. In the shadow of the hood his eyes burned like dark, bleak sapphire flames. "What?"
     Mariah swallowed and spoke calmly, quietly, as though gentleness and sweet reason was contagious. "I always put water in the radiator every day, sometimes more often, depending on how far I'm going. Naturally I always carry water," she added, "but I ran out today. After that little town on the way in—"
     "West Fork," Cash interrupted absently.
     "That's the one," she said, smiling, encouraged by the fact that he hadn't taken her head off yet.
     Cash didn't return the smile.
     Mariah swallowed again and finished her explanation as quickly as possible. "After West Fork, there wasn't any place to get more water. I didn't realize how long it would take to get to the ranch house, so I didn't have enough water. Every time I stopped to let things cool off, more water leaked out of the radiator and I couldn't replace it, so I wouldn't get as far next time before it boiled and I had to stop. When I recognized MacKenzie Ridge I decided it would be faster to walk."
     Shaking his head, muttering words that made Mariah wince, Cash went back to poking at the dirty engine. His hands hesitated as he was struck by a thought. "How far did you drive this wreck?"
     "Today?"
     "No. From the beginning of your trip."
     "I started in Seattle."
     "Alone?"
     "Of course," she said, surprised. Did he think she'd hidden a passenger in the trunk?
     Cash said something sibilant and succinct. He backed out from beneath the hood, wiped his hands on a greasy rag and glared at the filthy engine; but he was seeing Mariah's lovely, uncertain smile, her clean-limbed, sexy body and her haunting aura of having been hurt once too often. He guessed that Mariah was a bit younger than his own sister, Carla, who was twenty-three. It made Cash furious to think of a girl who seemed as vulnerable as Mariah driving alone in a totally unreliable car from Seattle to the Rocking M's desolate corner of southwestern Colorado.
     Cash took the weight of the hood from Mariah's hands and let the heavy metal fall into place with a resounding crash.
     "What in hell were you thinking of