Owen's Touch

  Could you fall in love with a stranger?

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Also by

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Copyright

  Could you fall in love with a stranger?

  Because that was what it felt like.

  It was wrong to succumb to the tide of longing that Owen made her feel. She barely knew him. And she didn’t know herself at all.

  “I must be clinging to my rescuer,” she murmured. “It’s making me feel attached to him. That’s got to be part of the explanation for why I...” She was afraid to say the words out loud. As if that would make the feeling more real than it already was. That’s got to be why I feel as if I’m falling for him, she thought, unable to entirely wash away the forbidden thought.

  “Owen...I wish I’d met you under different circumstances,” she murmured wistfully.

  Dear Reader,

  Winter’s here, so why not curl up by the fire with the new Intimate Moments novels? (Unless you live in a warm climate, in which case you can take your books to the beach!) Start off with our WHOSE CHILD? title, another winner from Paula Detmer Riggs called A Perfect Hero. You’ve heard of the secret baby plot? How about secret babies? As in three of them! You’ll love it, I promise, because Ian MacDougall really is just about as perfect as a hero can get.

  Kathleen Cteighton’s One More Knight is a warm and wonderful sequel to last year’s One Christmas Knight, but this fine story stands entirely on its own. Join this award-winning writer for a taste of Southern hospitality—and a whole lot of Southern loving. Lee Magner’s Owen’s Touch is a suspenseful amnesia book and wears our TRY TO REMEMBER flash. This twisty plot will keep you guessing—and the irresistible romance will keep you happy. FAMILIES ARE FOREVER, and Secondhand Dad, by Kayla Daniels, is just more evidence of the truth of that statement Lauren Nichols takes us WAY OUT WEST in Accidental Hero, all about the allure of a bad boy. And finally, welcome new author Virginia Kantra, whose debut book, The Reforming of Matthew Dunn, is a MEN IN BLUE title. You’ll be happy to know that her second novel is already in the works.

  So pour yourself a cup of something warm, pull the afghan over yourself and enjoy each and every one of these terrific books. Then come back next month, because the excitement—and the romance—will continue, right here in Silhouette Intimate Moments.

  Enjoy!

  Leslie Wainger

  Executive Senior Editor

  * * *

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont. L2A 5X3

  * * *

  OWEN’S TOUCH

  LEE MAGNER

  Books by Lee Magner

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  Mustang Man #246

  Master of the Hunt #274

  Mistress of Foxgrove #312

  Sutter’s Wife #326

  The Dragon’s Lair #356

  Stolen Dreams #382

  Song of the Mourning Dove #420

  Standoff #507

  Banished #556

  Dangerous #699

  Owen’s Touch #891

  LEE MAGNER is a versatile woman whose talents include speaking several foreign languages, raising a family—and writing. After stints as a social worker, an English teacher and a regional planner in the human services area, she found herself at home with a small child and decided to start working on a romance. She has always been an avid reader of all kinds of novels, but especially love stories. Since beginning her career, she has become an award-winning author and has published numerous contemporary romances.

  Chapter 1

  Without warning, blistering white headlights suddenly blinded her. The huge truck they belonged to hurtled around the mountain bend with an eerie roar and the grim face of certain death.

  The driver slammed his fist down on the horn and his foot on the brakes, filling the cool night air with grating, awful sounds. The huge eighteen-wheeler kept on coming at her, its glistening, reptilian gaze unblinking, its trailer beginning to slide across the highway, unable to stop in time.

  Her heart stopped. Her breathing, too. In that unending fraction of a second, she knew there would be no escape from what was about to happen. Visions of happy moments skimmed before her stunned and horrified eyes. Thirty years wasn’t long enough, she thought, numb with fear. After all she’d been through in the past year, to think she’d die in a freak accident on some isolated mountain road...

  She was squeezed between a stony wall that rose for hundreds of feet on her left and a steep plunge through dense underbrush on her right. Beyond the underbrush were trees, and lower still, the wildly rushing river in the canyon below. But straight ahead of her was the huge truck sliding into her at close to fifty miles per hour. No matter how good the brakes were, it wouldn’t stop in time. It was certain death to stay on the road, and the fishtailing truck would crush her against the side of the mountain if she swung into the left lane.

  She had only one faint chance of escape. In a heartbeat more, it would be too late even for that. This was countryside that could swallow a car wreck whole, and it was about to have the opportunity to gobble up hers. Oh, God...

  The truck’s horn bellowed harshly. There was a teeth-jarring grinding of gears and an agonizing squeal of brakes being asked to do the impossible. Tires smoked, and ugly black streaks marked the pavement, but still the truck slid on.

  Blinded by the looming headlights, half paralyzed with fear, she jerked the steering wheel toward the right in a desperate effort to escape the fatal collision. She lifted her foot off the accelerator and pressed hard on the brake pedal. And she prayed.

  Smoking snake eyes hurtled by her. The force of the beast shook the ground beside her like an earthquake. The truck grazed the car, biting off the edge of her left rear bumper, ripping it from the car like a dry piece of bread crust.

  She screamed, but the sound was drowned out beneath the shattering crunch of her front fender against the metal guardrail and the mournful howl of horn and brakes.

  She felt her front tires soar through air. Pure terror sucked the air from her lungs. She was too shocked to scream. Her mouth opened but no sound came out. Her knuckles whitened as she clutched the steering wheel with all her strength.

  Down, down banged the car as it plummeted over the steep embankment and bounced unevenly down the rugged mountainside. Her headlights briefly illuminated different bits of hillside. Glass shattered. One headlight went blind. The other sent light dancing wildly from one spot to another ahead of the car’s crazy descent.

  She was flung forward and instinctively crossed her arms in front of her face, trying to protect her eyes.

  Her car tilted and tossed, twisted and bucked. It was shoved up hard, then slammed down onto its right side. Then it was skidding...down, down, splitting young saplings, smashing wildflowers, uprooting hardy mountain shrubs. Branches and leaves whipped at the windows like desperate hands. She was tossed around hard.

  A blow to her left shoulder jabbed agony into her. Her seat belt bit into her chest, leaving a band of pain where it held her fast. Then, suddenly, the belt released her. A sharp pain lanced through her forehead as she bashed it against the steering wheel. She was slammed up
against the windshield, then against the far side of the car, finally onto the ceiling as the vehicle tumbled over and over.

  Pain and darkness warred with her frightened thoughts, but she was too scared to let herself pass out. She struggled to stay conscious, to save herself, to do whatever she could to survive. Out. She had to get out. To escape this battering.

  Sounds. Dim, but she still heard them. She clung to them like a lifeline. The car was still sliding. Grass and shrubbery scratched at the metal as it scraped by. How much farther? she wondered desperately. There was a river at the bottom of the mountain. It was fierce, fast moving. Cluttered with boulders and rocks.

  I will not die...I will not die....

  A jagged pain bit hard into her neck, then worked its way quickly down her back. Another vicious tooth sank into her side.

  The car slowed in fits and starts, until, finally, it smacked into something too big to be smashed down or knocked out of the way. She was thrown forward and to her left as the wet gravel and mud torn loose by her runaway car now pelted it with a brutal shower of stones and dirt.

  Will I be buried alive? she wondered, struggling to remain conscious. But hard as she struggled, consciousness began to slip from her panicked grasp, floating away from her. Coldness crept into its place, numbing her mind, dulling her senses. Pain receded until it was almost too far from her to feel anymore.

  Am I dead? Paralyzed?

  A trickle like sand running over rock was the last thing she heard. Then there was nothing but oblivion, swallowing her whole.

  Rocks and underbrush ripped loose during the crash spilled down the mountainside ahead of him as he scrambled down toward the wreckage. His flashlight skimmed over the area, searching for the car. Where the hell was it? He squinted and wiped the drizzle off his brow. Something glinted a little farther down. He pointed the beam toward it. There. Barely hanging on. Ten more feet and the car would have gone into the gorge.

  He heard an explosion farther down the mountainside, somewhere close to the river, and turned in time to see huge orange-and-yellow plumes stab into the blackness.

  For a few moments, the entire area around the explosion was as bright as day. Birds flew pell-mell out of the canyon to escape the inferno, and animals raced through the scrubby forest, frantically fleeing the unexpected disaster. A few plaintive cries of creatures injured or dying pierced the night.

  Grimly, he turned toward what was left of the car. He heard no cries there.

  He could see the lights turn on in the ranger station on the far peak, about half a mile down the river. They’d obviously seen the fire already. The truck’s tanks were burning like a huge torch. Help would arrive as soon as it could be mobilized, probably by air, since helicopters were often used in mountain disasters around here. Well, that was one piece of good news, he thought grimly. Now, to see whether the silence coming from the car was good news or bad...

  Sliding down the slippery slope, half on his knees, half on his feet, he reached the battered vehicle within moments. The car was balanced on something underneath the chassis, and its nose pointed toward the gorge below. He moved around it gingerly, using the flashlight beam to make a quick check for leaking fuel or smoldering parts. He sure as hell didn’t need to be blown to pieces.

  He crawled onto the car. Very carefully. It rocked as it took his weight. Sweat dampened his back. Hell, they might both end up in the gorge, he thought grimly.

  He wiped the rain from his face and shone the light into the car through the shattered hole that had been the passenger’s-side window of the badly damaged car.

  Folded in an awkward heap on the front seat was the form of a woman. He swore under his breath. The car began to teeter again. He held his breath. It stopped.

  She was a crumpled figure, lying against the driver’s door and wedged beneath the steering wheel. She was covered with finely crushed glass. There was blood all over. He couldn’t tell whether she was still alive.

  He gingerly moved off the metal and bent down, running the flashlight under the belly of the car to see what was propping it up. Her salvation had been the gnarled thigh of an old pine tree and the broad shoulder of an ancient boulder poking up from beneath the mountain’s dirty face.

  But would they be enough to keep the car from sliding down into the gorge if he climbed inside to get her out? He ran a critical eye over the car. Then he cautiously rocked his weight in two different directions, testing the stability of tree and stone. The car moved a little, but only when his weight shifted the center of gravity over to the passenger’s side of the car. If he tried to get her out by keeping off the car as much as possible, working through the driver’s-side door, he thought it just might hold.

  But it would be a gamble. Her life...and his...would be the stakes. Maybe he should wait until help arrived.

  A creaking sound caught his attention, and he swept his flashlight across the boulder and the tree again. The boulder seemed loosened but holding its own against the weight of the car. The tree, however, was losing its grip, apparently. He could see the huge roots slowly but inexorably pulling out of the shallow, rocky soil. The car was winning the battle.

  He swore softly.

  He couldn’t even hear sirens or helicopter rotors yet. While he sat here watching, the car would slide down the mountain, and it would take her with it, to certain death.

  He struggled with the jammed driver’s-side door until he finally managed to force it open. He eased himself inside the tangled wreckage a little, but the car rocked and he stopped, holding himself suspended half over her limp form. The movement stopped. The boulder-and-pine moorings were holding, but not for long.

  He braced himself against the dashboard and the seat back and took a closer look at her. He lifted her damp, tangled hair away from her delicate face and throat. Her eyes were closed. She was either out cold or dead.

  He adjusted himself so one hand was free to feel for a pulse in her neck. The blood on her made it difficult. His fingers kept slipping. He couldn’t find a heartbeat. Damn.

  Then he put his palm in front of her lips and waited tensely. Come on, come on, he thought fiercely. If you die here...

  There! He felt something. A light, feathery something. Her breath across his warm, damp palm. She was breathing. Yeah, he thought, allowing himself an unexpectedly triumphant sigh of relief. She was alive! There was something about her that stirred his desire to protect, in spite of himself.

  His relief was interrupted by the rhythmic beating of an approaching helicopter’s rotors. They were coming fast. He looked up and thought he saw lights in the sky. Considering how bad the visibility was, that chopper had to be pretty damn close. He frowned fiercely at the woman’s unconscious form.

  He ran his hands over her, trying to see if he could find the source of the blood, but it was no good. Even with the flashlight, he couldn’t see well enough. He didn’t see any pulsing rivulets, though, so he figured no arteries were cut. At least, none that were bleeding on the outside of her.

  He grimly looked toward the rescuers who’d begun to hover cautiously over the hillside, searching for signs of her wreck. They had found the truck already. That twisted, blazing wreckage had been easy to locate.

  She moved a little. Moaned. Struggled to lift her eyelids.

  “Don’t move,” he told her firmly.

  Her eyes opened, and she tried to find the face that went with the voice. It was hard. Everything was blurry at first. And it was dark, except for the thin wand of light he was shining over her body.

  He was leaning over her, staring at her. She blinked. Her vision cleared a little. Enough to make out his form and to see that he was looking down at her.

  “Help is coming,” he told her softly. “Hang on.”

  “Help...me....” she whispered, trying to reach out to him.

  He caught her hand before it could move far and he clasped it. His grip was firm. Strong. His strength flowed into her, as if he was willing her to stay alive.

&
nbsp; “I’ll help you,” he muttered tightly. “Just be quiet and don’t move. You’ll be okay.” He damn well had no idea if she’d be okay, but if he could get her to believe that, maybe it would make a difference, he thought grimly. Unfortunately, he could feel the car slide again. They had to get out of it. Fast.

  “Do...I...know...you?” she whispered, confused.

  “No. Don’t move. Let me try to slide you out of here. Can you tell if anything is broken?”

  Something in the way he was staring down at her connected with her in a very personal, very intimate way. Then it was gone. As if a steel door had slammed down and hidden part of him away.

  She struggled to get his face in focus, but it was impossible.

  “Everything...hurts....” she whispered.

  “Does your neck hurt?”

  “Yes.” She tried to move her head.

  “Don’t move! You might do more damage!”

  “I think my neck’s okay,” she said in a thin, thready voice. She felt the car slip a few inches, and she saw the fierce, grim expression in his face. “Pull me out before it goes...” She swallowed. “Or get out yourself...you don’t have to be a hero....” The pain throbbed everywhere. Scrapes, bruises, deep aches where she was unaccustomed to feeling hurt. Darkness swirled around her. She smiled a little. “Thanks for...trying....”

  He stuck his flashlight into his hip pocket, ripped off his canvas jacket and carefully slid it under her head and shoulders. He pulled her out as slowly as he could, tugging steadily on her clothes and his jacket, trying to minimize moving her body whenever he could.

  Ultimately he had no choice; he had to lift her out of the car to get her to the ground. The car tilted up just as he was pulling her free, and the side of the vehicle hit them as it suddenly turned up and slid down the mountainside with an agonizing scraping of metal against stone.