“It’s my guess we have radiator problems.”
“That’s not good.” She pushed her owlish glasses up her nose with a brush of her hand—a gesture he’d come to recognize as a sign of her nervousness. “What are you going to do?”
“I’ll have to find a place to pull over so I can check it out.” He’d no sooner gotten the words out than they passed a sign indicating a rest area less than a mile ahead. “Looks like we’re in luck. At least it will be well lit and I can see what I’m doing.”
Ten minutes later, Caleb stood in the parking lot of the rest area with Alyssa peering around his arm at the truck’s steaming engine. “The radiator hose is busted,” he said when he noticed her questioning expression.
“Do you think you can fix it?”
He shook his head, stepped back and slammed the hood. “I’ll have to call roadside assistance.” Pulling his cell phone from the clip on his belt, he asked, “Is there another town between here and Socorro?”
She looked anything but happy. “No. This rest area is about halfway between Socorro and Truth or Consequences. And I’m sure that everything in either direction is closed by now.”
Pushing the button with the auto club’s preprogrammed number, Caleb gave their location and the nature of the problem, then waited for the customer-service representative, identifying himself as Jason, to contact the nearest associate. When the man came back on the line, the news wasn’t what Caleb wanted to hear.
“What do you mean they can’t get to us until tomorrow morning?” he demanded.
Alyssa cringed. “They won’t be here until morning?”
“I’m sorry for the inconvenience, sir. We have only one associate garage in that area and the mechanic is out on a call,” Jason apologized. “After that he has three more to take care of before he can get to you.”
Thinking fast, Caleb asked, “Could you send someone with a rental car?”
“Just a moment, please.”
“What did he say?” she asked anxiously.
“He’s checking.” Caleb smiled. “I’m sure we’ll have a car here in no time.” At least, he hoped they would.
“Sir, your rental car will be delivered to your location by four in the morning,” Jason said, sounding as if he’d accomplished something wonderful.
“Four!” Caleb checked his watch, then shook his head. “Five hours is unacceptable, Jason. Even if the car is coming from Albuquerque, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Jason said, beginning to sound like a broken record. “The agencies in both Truth or Consequences and Socorro are closed, the one in Las Cruces has all of its cars rented right now and the one in Albuquerque is having to call someone in to drive the car down to you.”
Caleb glanced over at Alyssa. She looked fit to be tied.
“So that’s the best you can do?” he asked the young man.
“I’m afraid so, sir,” Jason answered. “If there’s anything else we can do for you, please let us know.”
Caleb snapped the phone shut as he turned to Alyssa. “I guess you’ve figured out by now that we aren’t going anywhere until around four tomorrow morning.”
Looking more pale than she had a few minutes ago, she nodded and started for the passenger door. “I think one of us must be related to Murphy.”
“Who the hell’s Murphy?”
“I’m not sure, but his law has plagued us throughout this trip.”
“Ah, yes. Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, and at the worst possible moment.” He helped her into the truck. “Well, things could be worse.”
She looked at him like he had spit for brains. “How on earth could things be any worse?”
He grinned. “We could have broken down before or after we got to the rest area.”
“Small consolation,” she said, settling herself on the bench seat. “We’re still stranded.”
“Yes, but at least we’re stuck at a rest area with vending machines.” He hooked his thumb over his shoulder. “I’m going to see if they have bottled water. Do you want one?”
She nodded. “Thank you.”
As Caleb walked the short distance to the row of vending machines, Alyssa took one deep breath, then another. How much anxiety could one woman handle before she lost her mind?
She’d been stressed enough over her behavior when he’d kissed her. Then, after the phone call from the security guard, she’d spent the rest of the night tossing and turning as she’d thought of the office gossip that would surely be spreading like wildfire. Now, she was having to spend another night in Caleb’s disturbing presence.
Watching him get bottles of water from the machine, then start back toward the truck, she shivered. He looked darned good in his sports jacket, dress shirt and jeans. On some men, the combination just wouldn’t work. But on Caleb, it was sexy beyond words. And she had to admit that spending more time with him wasn’t an unpleasant thought. He wasn’t just devastatingly handsome, he was intelligent, easy to talk to and had a nice sense of humor. And boy, oh boy, could he kiss.
Her cheeks heated and she had to force herself to breathe. The more time she spent with him, the more she wanted to know about him, the more she wanted him to kiss her again. And therein lay the problem.
For heaven’s sake, they worked together. She shouldn’t want to spend more time getting to know him. And she definitely shouldn’t want his kiss. She knew all too well from past experience that becoming friendly with a coworker spelled disaster with a great big capital D.
But the choice had been taken out of her hands. Fate had stepped in and taken over—first with the room mix-up and now with a broken radiator hose.
When he opened the driver’s door, he handed her two bottles of water and a package of cookies before removing his sports jacket. Tossing it on the seat between them, he rolled up the sleeves of his white dress shirt, then slid in behind the steering wheel.
Her breath caught and she decided she was in real trouble if all it took to make her insides hum was the sight of his bare forearms. But as he turned up his shirt sleeves, the movement drew attention to the play of muscles and sent her pulse into overdrive.
“I thought you might get hungry while we’re waiting on the rental car,” he said.
She glanced down at the package of cookies. It was only a stale vending-machine snack, but his thoughtfulness touched her more than she could have imagined. No one, including her father, had ever shown her a lot of consideration. She’d always been the bookish nerd who blended into the background, no matter where she went or who she was with. There had even been times after her mother had died that she’d suspected her father had forgotten she existed.