Redwood Bend Read Free Page A

slowly looked up, and he smiled and winked. He walked back to his bike, shoved the wet shirt in a side pocket and returned to the back of the SUV just as it was lowering onto a new tire.
Dylan began to reload the SUV and for a second she was just mesmerized, but then she shook herself and began to help, every once in a while meeting his eyes. Oh, God, he had Conner’s eyes—crystal-blue and twinkling beneath thick, dark lashes. She also had blue eyes but they were merely ordinary blue eyes while Conner’s (and Dylan’s!) were more periwinkle and almost startling in their depth. Paul Newman eyes, her mother used to say. And this guy had them, too! Her parents must have had a love child they left on the church steps or something.
No. Wait. She knew him—the eyes, the name. It had been a long time ago, but she’d seen him before. Not in person, but on TV. On magazine covers. But then, surely it wasn’t… Yes, the Hollywood bad boy. What had become of him since way back then?
“You can get back in if you want to,” Dylan said. “Turn the heat up. I hope you don’t have far to go.”
“I’m almost there,” she said.
Dylan put the cooler in, then the heaviest suitcase. He took a handkerchief out of his back pocket, wiped down his rain-slicked face and then began to wipe off his dirty hands. “You have a couple of stowaways,” he said, glancing into the car.
She peeked into the SUV. A couple of identical sets of brown eyes peered over the backseat. “My boys,” she said.
“You don’t look old enough to have boys.”
“I’m at least fifty now,” she said. “Ever been on a road trip with five-year-old twins?”
“Can’t say that I have.”
Of course he hadn’t, because he was some gorgeous godlike hunk who was as free as a bird and out either terrorizing or rescuing maidens in the forest. Wow.
“You’re all set, miss,” the big biker said as he came around the SUV, pulling on his leather gloves. Jeez, he had chains on those, too.
“Thanks for your help. The lugs get me every time.”
“I’d never leave a lady in distress by the side of the road, my mother would kill me. And that’s nothing to what my wife would say!”
“You have a wife?” she asked. And before she could stop herself, she added, “And a mother?”
Dylan burst out with a short laugh. He clapped a hand on the big guy’s back and said, “There’s a lot more to Walt than meets the eye, Miss… I didn’t get a name…”
She put out an icy hand. “Katie Malone.”
“I’m Dylan,” he said, taking the hand. How in the world he had managed warm hands after changing a tire in the freezing rain, she would long wonder. “And of course, this is Walt, roadside good Samaritan.” Then he addressed Walt. “I’ll ride back and get Lang. We’ll scoop up Stu on the way up the road.”
“You should be just fine, Katie,” Walt said. “Jump in, tell the little guys to buckle up, crank up the heater and watch the road.”
“Right. Yes. Listen, can I pay you for your trouble? I’m sure it would’ve cost me at least a hundred bucks to have that tire changed.”
“Don’t be absurd,” he said, startling her with his choice of words. It just didn’t seem like the vocabulary that would fit a big, scary biker dude. “You’d do the same for me if you could. Just be sure to replace that tire right away so you always have a spare.”
“You always go out for a ride in the rain?” she asked.
“We were on the road already. But there are better days for it, that’s for sure. If it had been coming down much harder, we’d have had to hole up under a tree or something. Don’t want to slide off a mountain. Take care.” Then he turned and tromped back to his Hog with the high handlebars.

Two
     
W hen Katie pulled up in front of the house in Virgin River, she saw her brother pacing back and forth on the front porch. He had told her that if she arrived before five the front door would be unlocked, yet there he was. She barely had the SUV in