Knight in Blue Jeans by Evelyn Vaughn Page A

explanation. Not even when her stepmother died.
    None of those had been her fault.
    But this…!
    Someone began to shout at them—a Dallas Area Rapid Transit cop. Arden couldn’t make out the angry words through her shock, though clearly the stocky woman was scolding them for what had happened. As if they’d meant for it to happen? As if they didn’t know…?
    Maybe Smith did understand. He drew her gently back from beside, right beside, the northbound train. For the first time, Arden saw how he’d stepped between her and danger, how close he’d come to being hit himself.
    Nausea tightened her throat. She held on to his hard arms for balance now—and more.
    Then, strangely, with another shriek of its whistle—the train pulled forward.
    To reach the poor girl? Surely not just to…leave? Unwilling to see, but less willing to avoid what they’d done, Arden twisted far enough from Smith’s arms to see the tracks as the light-rail train picked up speed and slid away in a yellow and white sequence.
    She saw nothing but brick and rails.
    “Smith,” she gasped, noting a definite paleness to his usually tanned face. He hadn’t wanted to see the carnage, either. Somehow, that realization softened something inside her, something hard that over the weekend had seemed to melt a little more, the more time she spent time with him. “Where is she?”
    The DART cop continued to shout at them—and at someone else.
    Belatedly, Smith loosened his grip on Arden and moved his gaze past the empty bricks to the sight of a big, swarthy man their age. She recognized Smith’s friend, Trace Beaudry, climbing up from the bricks and dragging the teenager by one slim hand.
    “— doing ?” Trace demanded, bent over the stunned girl as if to deliberately intimidate her. “When a train’s about to hit you, you move, you don’t just stand there!”
    “Oh, thank God!” Arden pulled from Smith’s dumbfounded stillness to hurry across the tracks and gather the girl away from her oversized rescuer. But the girl flinched away from Arden’s touch, back against Trace. “We didn’t mean to frighten you,” Arden insisted.
    “Sorry, Arden,” quipped another familiar voice—Smith’s old friend Mitch Talbott. All they needed now was the nebbish Quinn to round out the quartet. But Quinn didn’t seem to be nearby. That, or the light-haired Mitch just grabbed more attention. “I guess you don’t have the way with women that Trace does.”
    Trace seemed to like the teasing even less than Arden. “Yeah, well, my way kept her from being run over by Smith’s damned legacy.”
    Smith’s…?
    “My family was in railroads, not rapid transit,” Smith defended himself. Ah. The Donnell legacy. Arden watched him draw every bit of it around himself, despite his old T-shirt and jeans, as he spun on the transit cop. “Yes, we get it, no playing chase across the train tracks, won’t happen again, are you happy?”
    Since the woman drew her ticket book from her back pocket, Arden presumed she was not. Speaking of certain individuals’ way with women…“Let me handle this,” she suggested to the men. “Just get her…Vox…” What was the girl’s name? “Take her somewhere that she can catch her breath, all right?”
    “No!” So the girl could speak after all. She glanced frantically around them before turning her imploring gaze back to Trace. “Not with them, not….”
    Then the girl’s eyes widened, rolled upward, and she sank toward the ground.
    Trace caught her before she made it all the way. After a moment of apparent confusion, he lifted her with disturbing ease. “Crap.”
    But at least it distracted the DART officer from ticketing them.
    They got Vox07 back to the barbecue restaurant—in the air-conditioned shade, not the patio. Trace reluctantly held her in his lap until Arden’s attentions, dabbing the girl’s temples with a napkin dipped in ice water and fanning her with a menu, revived her. The girl’s eyes fluttered,