A Triple Threat to Bachelorhood

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It took effort to block out the thought. Memories of her only undermined his resolve to somehow keep this whole incident, and her, at arm’s length, albeit a somewhat mangled arm at the moment.

“I’ll stay put,” he promised. He slanted a disparaging look at the damage on his arm. “Although you’re making more of this than you should.”

No, she thought as she hurried into the bathroom just beyond the family room, she wasn’t. If anything, she wasn’t making enough of it. It took very little imagination to carry this all one step further. The Angora could have easily swiped at his face instead, leaving it a bloody mess.

Thank God for small favors.

“Indulge me,” Melinda called back out of the depths of the medicine cabinet as she hunted down peroxide, gauze pads, iodine, cotton swabs, bandages and tape.

That’s what he had been doing, he thought. Indulging her. For most of his life. And it had gotten him nowhere, which only meant that it wasn’t meant to be. He was finally coming to terms with that.

Or trying to.

Giving in, Carl shrugged. “I suppose, for old times sake, I’ll let you play doctor.”

She returned, carrying the retrieved booty in her arms close to her body. Stopping by the table, she allowed the objects to gently rain down, then quickly sorted through everything. She armed herself with the swabs and peroxide and crossed to him.

Carl eyed the littered tabletop. He’d never been particularly fond of iodine. “Hey, I was only kidding about playing doctor. You’ve got enough stuff there for minor surgery.”

Her mouth curved. Maybe there still was a little bit of the boy left within the man after all.

“Better safe than sorry.” She glanced at her threesome, who were now heavily involved in a game of make-believe. Mollie and Matt were the mommy and daddy with Maggie, born a whole two minutes after them, being the baby. “Being a mother has taught me to be a little more cautious than I used to be.”

That, considering how reckless she’d once been, Carl thought, could only be a good thing.

“All right,” she ordered him, “I want you to hold still.”

Taking his forearm and holding it against her to steady it, Melinda began dabbing peroxide on the long scratches. When Carl winced, she could actually feel the liquid penetrating his skin herself. White foam lines formed along the area where Mr. Whiskers had wantonly left his mark.

“Sorry,” she murmured, dabbing more slowly. “Mr. Whiskers is usually a very docile cat.”

He watched her work, finding that he had trouble drawing his eyes away. With his arm tucked against her, pain was the last thing on his mind. “Maybe I just bring out the worst in Mr. Whiskers.”

“That would be a first.” She could feel him looking at her and raised her eyes to meet his. “For you, not the cat. As far as I can remember, you generally brought out the best in people, especially me.” Carl could always evoke a smile from her, no matter how down on the world her father had made her feel.

Carl searched for something to wrap his mind around, anything but the way her fingertips felt, gently moving along his skin as she cleaned the wounds. Anything but the way her hair fell into her eyes, a sexy golden curtain that made him want to reach out and…

Nothing. Reach out and nothing, he told himself firmly. He wasn’t going to do that to himself again, let his mind wander freely in fantasies that weren’t going to materialize. He was a man now, not some lovesick boy. Why did he have to keep reminding himself of that?

“Yeah, well, apparently not your cat.” He looked over to where the cat was sitting in a corner, grooming himself. Maybe it was his imagination, but damned if the furry creature wasn’t staring at him as he worked on each paw. “How long have you had him?”

Tossing out one swab, Melinda reached for another, mentally counting back the months.

“Nine months.” Melinda moistened the swab with peroxide. “I got him for the triplets.”

The cat wouldn’t have been his first choice for the children. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t people usually get dogs for their kids?”

She glanced over toward the trio. “Mollie, Matt and Maggie wanted Mr. Whiskers. They picked him out in the animal shelter. Actually Mollie picked him out and the others agreed. That’s the way it usually works around here. Mollie’s the ringleader.”

“You went to the animal shelter to get him?” He would have more easily pictured Melinda going to a fancy pet shop in Los Angeles, or to a private breeder.

She nodded. “I can’t bear seeing an animal thrown away like that. He was barely a kitten when we got him.” There was a fond smile on her face as she remembered. It was like love at first sight. The instant that Mollie saw the somewhat bedraggled kitten, she refused even to look anywhere else. It was either the Angora or nothing. “He took to them immediately. They really seemed made for each other.” Because he’d gotten hurt rescuing the animal, Melinda felt compelled to sell Carl on the cat’s virtues. “He’s really very smart—”

“No argument here.” Carl watched her sure, even strokes as Melinda finished cleaning the scratches and wiped off the peroxide residue. “He already knows how to get a deputy sheriff to jump through hoops.” As she bent her head down to more closely examine the scratches, he caught a whiff of her scent. Something tangy and arousing. He fought for order in his mind. “So, what are your plans?” he heard himself asking despite silent promises to the contrary. What she did was no business of his. Why couldn’t he remember that? “Just here to catch your breath?”

She glanced at him, wondering if by rephrasing the question, he was trying to subtly persuade her not to remain. “That, and to think about setting down roots again.”

“You?” Though she’d said words to that effect while he’d been in the tree, trying to capture the cat, it still somehow didn’t seem possible. “I can remember how hell-bent you were on never seeing Serendipity again.”

Melinda allowed a small sigh to escape. There were things she would have done over, given half a chance. Mistakes she wouldn’t have made. But there was no use in lamenting the past. She couldn’t do anything about that.

She could, however, do something about the present and the future. And she intended to.

“I said a lot of dumb things back then.” She looked back down at his arm and shook her head. “Any deeper and you would have had to have stitches.” Still cradling his arm between her hip and arm, she took two gauze pads and tore them open, then placed them over the length of the scratches. “Hold still,” she instructed as he tried to pull back his arm. Deftly she taped the pads down on the outer edges.

Carl looked at the tape stuck now to the hairs along his arm. “That’s going to be a bear to take off,” he predicted.

She knew that, but there was no way around it. “I’ve always found it best to rip it off quickly rather than to prolong the pain.”

“I noticed.”

The tone of his voice had her looking at him. A hidden shaft of guilt sliced through her. “Carly—I mean Carl—”

Whoever she was evoking, whether it was the boy she turned her back on or the man who had come to rescue her cat, he shouldn’t have said that, Carl thought. It was too much like a dig and that was beneath him.

Rather than apologize, he nodded at her handiwork-in-progress. “When did you develop this gentle touch?”

Again, she unconsciously glanced toward her children. Their game of make-believe was becoming rather animated, with hand gestures and much pointing coming into play.

“Comes with the territory. I’ve cleaned countless scrapes. Three children aren’t three times as much work as one, it’s an exponential function with an increase that goes up tenfold with each child who’s added into the mix.”

There were days when she realized she’d had less than four hours sleep, with a full day ahead of her. Sometimes, she wondered how she managed. Other times, she couldn’t imagine life any other way.

Picking up the large roll of bandage, she began to wind it around his forearm, anchoring the gauze and tape in place.

Carl shook his head. “Melinda, it was just a few scratches, not a war wound. I’ve seen fewer bandages used for a heart transplant.”

She sniffed, a little of the old give-and-take banter that had existed between them returning to her. “When did you ever see a heart transplant?”

He hadn’t, not close up at any rate. Offhand he only knew of one Serendipity resident who had had any heart surgery at all and that had been merely an angioplasty. “On the Discovery Channel,” he replied evasively. Because he wanted to draw attention away from himself and the scratches she was fussing over, he switched back to the question he’d just asked her. “So, you didn’t answer me. What are your plans?”

“I want to start a day-care center. That way I can be earning money and not be away from the triplets. I need a few credits before I can get certified to teach in Serendipity’s public school system. That’ll mean taking a couple of classes and then an exam.”

Half the students would be in love with her before the first week was out, Carl thought. “Sounds very noble.”

Embarrassed by praise she didn’t feel she deserved, she shrugged. “Nothing very noble about it.” Finished wrapping, she secured the bandage with more tape. “Just practical.” She broke off the tape and looked up at him. “I’ve gotten a lot more practical since you last saw me. Motherhood does that to you.”

“Fatherhood didn’t seem to do that for Steve.” Annoyed, Carl upbraided himself for the slip. “Sorry, that was a low blow.”

Nothing he could say about Steve could begin to bother her. “But an accurate one. Since my cat mauled you, I figure you had that one coming. And maybe a couple more, too,” she added. And then she smiled, the old Melinda back for a moment. “Don’t worry. There’re no feelings left between Steve and me. Just a very civil divorce.”

Her tone was crisp, but he knew there had to be more to it than that. You couldn’t give your heart to a person, follow him wherever he wanted to go and not have some sort of residual feelings. But he let her have her dignity and her lie.

“Child support payments?” he asked mildly.

“That, too. But no alimony,” Melinda added with pride in her voice. She saw Carl raise a quizzical brow. She squared her shoulders as she said, “I don’t want anything from him.”

The way he saw it, Melinda had put in the time, she deserved some kind of compensation. “Isn’t that like cutting off your nose to spite your face?”

“No, that’s like telling him that he has a responsibility to the children, but that he and I are irrevocably through. Taking alimony from him would make me feel like a kept woman. I want to earn my own way, Carl, not have checks coming in because of a mistake I made.”

He studied her for a moment, mildly surprised by the stand she’d just taken. The old Melinda would have wanted her chance at revenge if she’d felt the least bit slighted. “You have grown up, haven’t you?”

She supposed she had at that. “Way I see it, it’s about time.” Pushing the paraphernalia on the table together, she turned her attention to the next step. “Okay, now take off your shirt.”

Rising, about to take his leave, Carl stared at her. “Excuse me?”

“Your shirt.” She pointed to it to underscore her words. “Take it off.”

“Why?”

“Because blood sets if you don’t treat it right away.” Melinda indicated several red blotches on the blue material. Somehow, he’d brushed his arm against his breast pocket as well as the left side of his shirt. “Now, if you don’t want to throw away a perfectly good shirt, take it off and give it to me so I can soak it.”

He made no move to comply. This wasn’t exactly orthodox. “Quint doesn’t like having his deputies come back half-naked from an assignment.”

Serendipity was as close to paradise as anywhere on earth. The sheriff’s department had always been there out of a sense of tradition rather than from any real necessity. It was also traditional for it to be a two-man operation at best. “There’s more than one now?”

He’d used poetic license and frowned now. “No, but I’m sure the rule would apply to anyone else he’d hire if the need arose.”

He was stalling. She held out her hand. “Give me the shirt, Carl.”

Instead he laughed, shaking his head. “Well, some things haven’t changed. You’re still the stubbornest woman I ever met.”

“Everyone needs a hobby.” Her hand outstretched, Melinda beckoned for the shirt.

With a sigh, Carl pulled the shirttails out of his waistband and unbuttoned his shirt, then stripped it off, moving the material gingerly along his right arm before finally handing the shirt to her.

The moment the shirt had come off his shoulders, her mouth had turned to cotton. The last time she’d seen Carl Cutler without his shirt on, he’d been working on his uncle’s ranch, digging fence holes for posts. His body had been sweaty with perspiration and there had been just the barest hint of muscles that were to be.

The hint had turned into a full-fledged reality. The man had an upper torso that belonged to a body builder, or more accurately, in Carl’s case, to a man who was no stranger to heavy labor.

“I guess your name’s not the only thing that’s changed,” she finally said, blinking before her eyes dried into a permanent stare. Forcing herself to look elsewhere, she folded her fingers around the shirt.

The smile that took his lips was slow, mesmerizing and had more than a tinge of satisfaction woven through it. “I help Uncle Jake around the ranch whenever I get a chance. Kent’s got his hands full,” he told her, mentioning his middle cousin who had taken on most of the duties involved with running the Shady Lady Ranch now that his uncle had gone into semiretirement. There was a great deal involved in keeping the horses in top-quality condition and perpetual demand.