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Alain stared at the animal. He had to be hallucinating. What other explanation was there for his having a conversation, albeit mostly one-sided, with a dog in a cast?
This time Kayla returned more quickly. When she came back, she was holding a glass of water in one hand and an oval blue pill in the other.
“Here, take this,” she instructed in a voice that left no chance for argument. She held the blue pill to his lips.
Alain raised his eyes warily. For the most part, he was as laid-back as they came. But he also wasn’t a trusting fool. “What is it?”
“Just take it,” she told him. “It’ll make you feel better, I promise.” When he still made no move to swallow the pill, she sighed. “It’s a painkiller,” she told him, a note of exasperation in her voice. “Do you always question everything?”
“Pretty much.” Well, if she’d wanted to get rid of him, she could have done it while he was unconscious, he reasoned. So, with some reluctance, he took the pill from her, preferring to put it in his own mouth. “It’s in the blood.”
“What?” She raised one eyebrow quizzically. “Being annoying?”
“Being a lawyer.” He placed the pill into his mouth.
Kayla shrugged at the reply. “Same thing,” she quipped. Placing her hand behind his head, she raised it slightly so that he could drink the water she’d brought. As she did so, she could feel him tensing. He was obviously struggling not to show her that he was in pain. “This will help,” she promised again.
He had nothing against painkillers, but the pain actually wasn’t his main problem. “What’ll help is if I can get back on the road,” he told her. “I’m supposed to be in L.A. tonight.” Rachel wasn’t going to take it kindly if he rescheduled their date, and he was having too good a time with her to put a stop to it just yet.
And there was that impromptu get-together that the firm was holding. Dunstan had said there was no pressure to attend, but everyone knew there was.
The vibrant redhead was shaking her head in response to his statement. “Sorry, not going to happen. Your car is immobilized.” She tucked the coverlet closer around him. “And so are you.”
“My car.” Flashes of the accident came back to him. Had he really driven the car up a tree, or was that some kind of nightmare? He tried to sit up, and felt not so much pain as an odd sort of murkiness pouring through his limbs. And the cloudiness was descending over his brain again. What the hell was going on? “How bad is it?”
Kayla pretended to consider the question. “That depends.”
The town probably came equipped with a crooked mechanic who made his money preying on people who were passing through and had the misfortune of breaking down here, Alain thought. Everyone knew someone who had a horror story about being taken because there was no other alternative.
“On what?” he asked warily.
That, she assumed, was his lawyer look. But she could already see it fading away as the painkiller kicked in. “On whether you want a functioning vehicle or a very large paperweight.”
He’d only had the car for a year. It was barely broken in. He should have gone with his first instincts and rented a vehicle to drive up to Santa Barbara. “It’s totaled?”
This time she did consider his question. She really hadn’t paid that much attention to the condition of his car; she’d been more concerned with getting him out of the vehicle and out of the rain.
“Maybe not totaled,” she allowed, “but it’s certainly not going anywhere anytime soon.”
Suddenly the room seemed to be getting darker. Was the fire going out?
Or was he?
His ribs didn’t hurt anymore. Maybe he could pay her for the use of her own car, he thought. His head began to do strange things. Alain tried to focus. “I can’t stay here.”
“Why not?” she asked innocently. “It doesn’t look as if you have much choice.” And then she added with a smile, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to charge you rent.”
Thinking was rapidly becoming difficult for him. He needed to stay on point. “I’ve got places to go, people to see.”
“The places’ll still be there tomorrow. And the day after that,” she added for good measure. “And if the people are worth anything, so will they.”
Kayla had no doubt that the pill was taking effect. She should have given it to him in the first place, she thought, but she’d needed his input to see how bad he was. He was going to be asleep in a few more minutes, she judged.
She sat down on the coffee table facing him. Taylor lowered his haunches and sat down beside her like a silent consort.
“Right now,” she continued in a soft, soothing voice, “you need to rest. The roads are probably flooded, so you wouldn’t be going anywhere, anyway. Every time it rains like this, Shelby becomes an island.”
“Shelby?” he asked groggily.
“The town you’re passing through.” It was hardly a dot on the map. Most people didn’t even know they’d been through it. Leaning forward, Kayla placed her hand on his arm to make him feel secure. “I gave you something to make you sleep, Alain. Stop fighting it and just let it do its thing.”
He liked the way his name sounded on her lips.
The thought floated through his head without preamble. He was drifting, he realized. And his limbs were growing heavier, as if they didn’t belong to him anymore.
“If…I…fall asleep…” He was really struggling to get the words out now.
She leaned in closer to hear him. “Yes?”
“Will…you…have your way with me now?”
She laughed and shook her head. This one was something else.
“No,” she assured him, not quite able to erase the smile from her lips. “I won’t have my way with you.”
“Too…bad.”
And then there was no more conversation. His eyelids had won the battle and closed down.
Chapter Four
He was being watched.
The unshakable sensation of having a pair of eyes fixed on him, on his every move—from close range—bore through the oppressive, thick haze that was swirling around him.
Alain struggled to surface, to reach full consciousness and open his eyes. When he finally succeeded, only extreme control kept him from crying out in surprise.
Approximately five inches separated his face from the dog’s muzzle.
Alain jerked up, drawing his elbows in under him.
The salvo of pain that shot through him registered an instant later. This time, a moan did escape.
In response, the dog reared up and licked him. Alain grimaced and made a noise that expressed something less than pleasure over the encounter.
“Welcome back.”
The cheerful voice was coming from behind him. Before he could turn his head to look at her, Kayla moved into his line of vision.
She’d changed her clothes, he noticed. It looked as if she was wearing the same curve-hugging jeans, but instead of a T-shirt, she had on a green pullover sweater that played up the color of her eyes—among other things.
It took him a second to raise his gaze to her face. “How long was I out?”
She bent to pat Winchester on the head. The dog had spent the entire night at Alain’s side. There was a definite attachment forming, at least from the dog’s point of view.
“You slept through the night,” Kayla told him. She had spent it in the chair opposite him, watching to make sure he was all right. “Rather peacefully, I might add.” And then, because he’d mentioned a woman’s name during the night, she couldn’t resist asking, “Who’s Lily?”
That question had come at him from left field. Did this woman know his mother? It seemed unlikely, given that she was wrapped up with her animals, and the only animals her mother liked were the two-legged kind. In bed.
Alain watched Kayla’s face as he answered, “My mother. Why?”
“You called out to her once during the night.” She cocked her head, curious. “You call your mother by her first name?” She’d been around six years old before she even knew her parents had other names besides Mommy and Daddy. She couldn’t imagine referring to either of them by their given names.
“No, not really.” Since he couldn’t remember if he’d even dreamed, he hadn’t a clue as to why he’d call out his mother’s name, and he didn’t know any other Lily. But he was more curious about something else. “You stayed up all night watching me sleep?” Why would she do that? he wondered, feeling oddly comforted by the act.
Kayla laughed as she shook her head. “We’re a little rural here, but I’m not that desperate for entertainment. No, I didn’t stay up all night watching you sleep. I spent part of it sleeping myself,” she assured him.
In actuality, she’d spent very little of it asleep. His breathing had been labored at one point, and she’d worried that she might have given him too much of the medication, so she’d remained awake to monitor him. But she didn’t feel there was any reason for Alain to know that.
“Nothing I wouldn’t have done for any of my other patients,” she continued nonchalantly. “Even if you don’t have fur.” And then she looked a little more serious. “How’s the head?”
Until she asked, Alain hadn’t realized that the anvil chorus was no longer practicing their latest performance inside his skull. He touched his forehead slowly as if to assure himself that it was still there.
“Headache’s gone,” he said in amazement. The way it had hurt last night, he’d been fairly certain it was going to split his head open. And now it was gone, as if it had never existed. Except for the state of his ribs, he actually felt pretty good.
Pleased, Kayla nodded. “Good.” Moving away from the coffee table, she turned toward the kitchen. “Hungry?”
He was about to say no. He was never hungry first thing in the morning, requiring only pitch-black coffee until several hours after he was awake and at work. But this morning there was this unfamiliar pinch in his stomach. It probably had something to do with the fact that he hadn’t had any dinner last night, he reasoned.
He nodded slowly in response to her question. “Yes, I am.”
Kayla caught the inflection in his voice. “You sound surprised.”
“I am,” he admitted. “I’m not usually hungry first thing in the morning.”
He was probably always too busy to notice, she guessed. People in the city tended to spin their wheels a lot, going nowhere and making good time at it. She should know; she’d been one of those people for a while. “Country air will do that to you.”
Her comment surprised him. “So you consider this the country?”
That seemed like an odd thing for him to ask. “Don’t you?”
Alain laughed shortly. “Last night, I considered it Oz,” he admitted. “But usually ‘country’ means farmland to me.”
She supposed there was an argument for that. To her, any place that didn’t pack in a hundred people to the square yard was the country.
“There used to be nothing but farms around here. We’ve still got a few.” And she loved to drive by them whenever she had the chance. Not to mention that the families on that acreage were always opened to taking in some of her dogs. “Corn and strawberries, mostly,” she added.
Ariel was shifting from foot to foot behind her, silently reminding her that she had yet to be fed.Which brought Kayla full circle. “So, what’s your pleasure?”
The question caught him up short. Without fully realizing it, he’d been watching the way Kayla’s breasts rose and fell beneath the green sweater with every breath she took.
As for her question, he wasn’t about to give her the first response that came to his lips, because he doubted that the beautiful vet would see it as anything more than a come-on. And maybe it was, but he’d never meant anything more in his life. His pleasure, at the moment, involved some very intimate images of Kayla—sans the green sweater—and himself.
“Whatever you’re having,” he told her, glancing toward Winchester. The dog was still eyeing him, an unrelenting polygraph machine waiting for a slipup.
His answer satisfied Kayla. “Eggs and toast it is.” She nodded.
The choice surprised him. Somehow, he’d just assumed that Kayla would be a vegetarian. Half the women he knew turned their noses up at anything that hadn’t been plucked out of the ground, pulled down from a tree or gotten off a stalk. In addition, he would have thought that the cheerful vet would have been health conscious.
He watched her face as he said, “Don’t you know eggs are bad for you?”
She shook her head. “They’ve been much maligned,” Kayla countered. “The FDA says having four eggs a week is perfectly acceptable. Besides, an egg has a lot of nutrients to offer. My great-grandfather ate eggs every day of his life and he lived to be ninety-six.”
“Might have lived to be ten years older if he’d avoided eggs,” Alain deadpanned.
His quip was met with a wide grin. Something inside of him responded, lighting up, as well. “You have a sense of humor. Nice,” she said.
The last word seemed to whisper along his skin, making him warmer. Since the response was something a teenager might experience, Alain hadn’t a clue as to what was going on with him. Maybe it was a reaction to whatever she’d given him last night.
The way he was looking at her, looking right into her, stirred up a whole host of things inside of Kayla. His smile alone made lightning flash in her veins. She didn’t bother squelching it, because for once, entertaining these kinds of feelings was all right. She wouldn’t act on it, and at the moment, she was willing to bet that he couldn’t. By the time he could, he would be gone.
She held off going to the kitchen to make breakfast a moment longer. “I almost forgot. I’ve got some good news.”
He immediately thought of the disabled BMW. “My car’s all right, after all?”
His car. She hadn’t even looked at it since she’d pulled him free of the wreckage. It was still raining and the power was still out, which meant the phones weren’t working. There was no way to call Mick’s gas station to get someone out to look at the fancy scrap of metal.
“No, your car’s still embracing my tree,” she told him, “but your clothes are dry, so you don’t have to put on my father’s coveralls.” Her mouth curved into what her mother had once called her wicked grin as she added, “Unless you want to.”
“If I’m going to get lost inside of someone else’s clothes, I’d rather the clothes belonged to someone of the female persuasion.” Preferably with her still in it, he added silently. “No offense.”
“None taken,” she assured him.
Was it her, or was it getting warmer in here? Kayla wondered. The fire certainly hadn’t gotten more intense since she’d lit it earlier this morning.
Kayla placed the clothes that she had just gotten off the line in her garage on the coffee table in front of him. “You can put them on after breakfast, if you’re up to it. How are you feeling?” she asked, suddenly realizing that she’d only asked about his headache, nothing more.
Alain quickly took stock of his parts before answering. His ribs were still aching, but not as badly as they had last night. And while there was no headache, he was acutely aware of the gash she must have sewn up on his forehead. It pulsed.
“Good enough for me to put my clothes on now,” he told her.
She opened her mouth to say that maybe he should wait until after he ate before he went jumping into his clothes, but then she shut it again. The man should know what he was capable of doing. She wasn’t his mother or his keeper.
“Okay.” But being distant and removed just wasn’t her way. Kayla came closer to the sofa again.“Why don’t I help you to the bathroom so you can change in private?” she suggested.
He thought that was a little like closing the barn door after the horse had run off, seeing as how she’d been the one to undress him in the first place. But he didn’t raise the point, since it might sound like a protest. He didn’t have anything against beautiful woman doing whatever they wanted with his clothes and his body. What he didn’t like was the idea of being an invalid and needing help.
“I can make it on my own,” he informed her.
