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No point telling him the real odds. That he had about as much chance of returning to his true love in her lifetime as he had of being struck by lightning.
Again.
Chapter One
A whopper of a west Texas thunderstorm was headed her way.
The hair on the back of Dr. Mallory Peterson’s neck prickled the instant she stepped out the back door of the Western Plains Medical Clinic. The severe weather front, predicted to move in at midnight, had arrived ahead of schedule. Heavy black clouds boiled across the sky, and the sharp scent of rain tingled in her nostrils. She squinted in the unnatural gloom of an unseasonably hot and humid early May evening. No doubt about it. Trouble was brewing.
A stiff wind yanked the heavy door from her hands and slammed it shut with a bang. Blue-white lightning flickered on the horizon, followed by the rumble of distant thunder. She shivered, unsure whether the chill was due to dropping temperatures or a premonition of disaster.
After ten on-her-feet hours caring for a steady stream of patients, she was ready for a quiet Friday night alone with a good book and a bag of microwave popcorn. A big bag. With extra butter. She’d earned a treat. Not just for today, but also for every grueling shift she’d worked since accepting the position last autumn.
Clutching her medical bag, Mallory locked the deadbolt. If she got a move on, she could make it up the hill before the rain hit. Free living quarters close to the clinic was one of the perks of being the only physician in Slapdown. A native Texan who’d cut her teeth on cyclones, she had no qualms about riding out a little bad weather in a double-wide.
Yet, she couldn’t shake the feeling that all hell was about to break loose.
She glanced over the fence dividing the parking lot from the property next door. She’d slaved all spring to keep her lawn and flower beds alive in the unseasonable heat. By what freak of horticultural nature did her neighbor’s straggling patch of monster grass and gargantuan weeds grow so abundantly?
Neighbor? Squatter was more like it. The insolent, ill-mannered oaf did not pay his too-kind landlord a dollar’s worth of rent. How many times had she told Brindon Tucker that helping a lazy down-and-out bum like Joe Mitchum exceeded the limits of human generosity? Unfortunately, her longtime friend was a big-hearted guy who looked for the best in people.
What he saw in Mitchum was beyond her. Texas was filled with good ole boys, but Joe wasn’t one of them. After being thrown out of his manufactured home by a woman smart enough to finally divorce him, the shiftless ne’er-do-well had moved into a ratty, forty-year-old travel trailer he’d rescued from the salvage yard. Mere moments before it was scheduled to be flattened into a cube the size of a 29-inch television from the looks of it.
Aside from a few female tavern dwellers whose judgment was obviously impaired by frequent applications of hair bleach, his only regular companions were a pack of mangy dogs. None of which had ever had a bath, received a rabies vaccination or seen the inside of a vet’s office.
Which only proved the adage, “No man ever sinks so low that a dog or a woman won’t take up with him.”
Pumped up by righteous indignation, Mallory ignored the approaching storm and her unsettling undercurrent of misgiving. She glared at the rusting car bodies and heaps of scrap metal. How had Mitchum managed to accumulate such an impressive collection of junk in the few short months he’d lived there? The place was a scandal and a danger to community health. It was a veritable wonderland of tetanus just waiting for an unsuspecting victim to stumble and puncture something. She shuddered at the thought of the chiggers, toxic ticks and poisonous snakes lurking in the overgrown brush.
She’d lodged numerous official complaints about the eyesore on the clinic’s behalf. The citizens of Slapdown subscribed to a “live and let live” policy, but that hadn’t stopped her from trying to convince the town council to issue a citation. Warnings hadn’t worked. Maybe if they made it official and ordered Mitchum to clean up the place, haul off his junk and mow the offending vegetation, things would change.
Oh, wait. Something had changed. Another gutted auto hulk had been added to the landscape. According to the mayor’s wife from whose shoulder Mallory had removed a questionable mole this afternoon, the lazy redneck had laughed in response to the last warning.
“Sure thang,” he’d said. “Soon’s I get around to it, I’ll have the place lookin’ fresh and dewy as The First Lady’s rose garden.”
The heavy clouds squeezed out a few fat raindrops, which practically bounced off the hard, dry ground. Mallory bolted for home, jogging over the well-tended clinic grounds where flowers bloomed in color-coded symmetry and grass was not permitted to grow longer than three inches. She glanced up to track the storm, and a disturbing sight stopped her in her tracks.
Joe Mitchum was perched atop a utility pole on the clinic side of the fence. Dressed in scruffy jeans and a T-shirt, he looked grungy even from a distance. His precarious position was loosely secured by a makeshift lineman’s harness. She had never mistaken him for a genius, but lightning was flashing, and the man was clinging to the highest object in an otherwise open area. Tampering with electrical wires.
Somewhere a village was missing its idiot.
The wind kicked up as she dashed across the parking lot. She stopped at the bottom of the pole and looked up. Rain stung her face like liquid needles. “Hey! What do you think you’re doing up there?”
“Borrowing a little juice. Power’s out.” Mitchum grinned down at her. He had an annoyingly wide smile that revealed naturally straight, white teeth. Had to be natural. No way did orthodontia fit into his unemployed slacker budget. Heck, the four-syllable word wouldn’t fit into his caveman vocabulary.
As far as she knew, there had been no power outages in the area. Mitchum’s electricity had probably been cut off due to failure to pay. “Are you crazy? Or just plain stupid?”
“I’m a wrestling fan,” he called over the wind. “Wanna come over and watch the WWF with me tonight? You can bring a six-pack.”
What a waste of decent looks and bulging muscles. While he could be creepily charming at times, she’d rather break both her thumbs than set foot in his tumbledown, flea-infested trailer shack. “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s a storm rolling in.”
“Better get inside then. You’re so sweet, Doc, the rain might melt you.”
A few ginger-colored curls had escaped the ponytail elastic securing her unruly mop. She pushed an errant strand of wet hair out of her eyes. “I realize Mr. Hardy flunked you out of physics class, but are you at all familiar with the basics of electrical conduction?”
“Yep. Electricity makes the world go around. Or does love do that?”
“You’re hugging a lightning rod there, Einstein.” Mitchum had been two grades ahead of Mallory throughout junior high and high school. She’d finished at the top of her class, earned a full college scholarship, gone on to graduate summa cum laude from Baylor Medical School.
Joe had dropped out a month before his own high school commencement for reasons known only to his unambitious self. In the twelve years since, he’d accomplished nothing noteworthy, nor done anything even remotely useful. Unless you counted his career as the poster child for brainless wonders.
Then there was his precocious three-year-old daughter, Chloe. Mallory recalled the adorable preschooler from a recent clinic visit. Mitchum’s ex-wife Brandy had recently moved to a neighboring town to live with her parents but continued to bring her child to the clinic. She was doing an admirable job of raising Chloe, but the little girl deserved more than the paltry child support Joe managed to scrape together each month, and occasional court-mandated visits.
While he’d never been caught committing a crime, Mitchum had no visible means of support. He called himself a mechanic and sported the dirty fingernails to prove it, but Mallory had never met anyone whose car he had actually repaired. Judging from the automotive debris littering his yard, he was more adept at taking them apart than he was at putting them back together.
“You’d better shinny down that pole,” she called up to him. Unless you have a burning desire to be a fried hick on a stick.
“Don’t get your panties in a knot, Doc.” He pulled the steel spike strapped to his boot out of the pole and lowered it a notch. Repeating the move with the other foot, he started down. “I’m done.”
So was she. Her hair was soaked, and she was cold. If the bozo wanted to risk electrocution in order to watch half-naked overweight men throw chairs at each other, who was she to question his choice of entertainment? Joe Mitchum wasn’t worth catching pneumonia, and she had a date with some hot buttery popcorn.
She turned and stalked away. Tomorrow she’d have a little chat with Nate Egan, the county sheriff. Texas hadn’t passed any laws against being a dumb jerk, but bootlegging power was definitely illegal.
She was halfway across the parking lot when a bright spear of lightning knifed to earth, followed by a deafening boom of thunder. The distinctively pungent odor of ozone assaulted her nostrils, and her scalp tingled as the super-charged air lifted her hair. Heart racing, she wheeled around and gasped. Popping, crackling flames erupted from the reduction transformer atop the utility pole. A shower of sparks, like a miniature fireworks display, cascaded to the ground and rained upon the still, silent body of Joe Mitchum.
With no thought for her own safety, Mallory surged into doctor mode and rushed to the fallen man’s side. Kneeling beside him, she immediately assessed his condition. Eyes closed, skin pale beneath a dark three-day growth of beard, he lay motionless as drops of rain splashed onto his face. She checked his airway and palpated his carotid for a pulse, silently willing him not to die.
His shirt and jeans were tattered, but he didn’t appear to be burned. The bolt of lightning had probably not struck him directly. More likely, the current had zinged down the pole, conducting a charge through the steel spikes attached to his boots. Still, he wasn’t breathing, and the electrical shock had stopped his heart.
She crouched beside him, punched 9-1-1 into the cell phone clipped to the waistband of her slacks and ordered the dispatcher to send an ambulance from the hospital in Midland. It would not arrive for at least fifteen minutes, and she couldn’t afford to waste another second. Just as she initiated cardiopulmonary resuscitation, the clouds opened up, and a cold rain poured onto her and the man whose life was now in her shaking hands.
She pinched his nostrils shut and sealing her lips firmly over his, administered a series of life-giving breaths. Under normal circumstances, she never would have allowed their lips to touch, but nothing was normal now. When she determined he still wasn’t breathing, she locked the fingers of her hands together and delivered the rhythmic chest compressions needed to keep his heart beating and blood flowing. An average human brain could survive only three or four minutes of oxygen deprivation, but this was no average man.
Joe Mitchum couldn’t afford to lose any brain cells.
Fifteen compressions, two breaths. Mallory performed the cycle over and over. After four unbelievably long minutes, she heard him gasp in a breath. Color gradually seeped back into his face, but she still couldn’t detect a pulse.
“Come on back, Mitchum.” Mouth-to-mouth was no longer required, so she straddled her patient for better leverage. The change of position gave her tired arms a respite. Counting aloud, she rocked forward with each cycle of compressions. Keep breathing, you stupid son of…don’t die on me. Being only human, it occurred to her that his death would be no great loss to the world. In fact, his untimely end might have been ordained by a higher power.
The thought shocked and sickened her. What was she thinking? She was a doctor who’d sworn an oath to save lives, no matter how wasted that life might be. And what about little Chloe? The child needed a father. The poor kid had the rotten luck to be stuck with a lousy one, but Joe was only thirty years old. He still had time to turn his life around and make something of himself.
If he lived.
“Come back to me, dammit.” Grimly determined and focused on her task, Mallory lost track of time as the rain pelted down, soaking her cotton blouse and khaki slacks, and plastering her hair against her head. She’d never administered one-man CPR in a real life-or-death situation, and the extended effort tightened her muscles into hot knots. She sighed with relief when the shrieking ambulance siren wailed in the distance.
The unconscious man probably couldn’t hear, but she spoke to him anyway. “Hold on, Joe. The paramedics are coming. If you can make it to the hospital, you have a chance. Hang in there for Chloe. Don’t die.”
Please, God, don’t let him die. It was a plea and a prayer. She only hoped Someone was listening.
His eyes fluttered open. During his last life as a Texas Ranger, Will Pendleton had sure enough woke up in some pretty strange places. Border town bordellos. Fancy Fort Worth hotels. Gulf-front flophouses. He’d even come to at the bottom of a dry well once after a gang of drunken malfeasants had knocked him out and thrown him down the hole. Plenty of times, he’d awakened with nothing but the wide blue sky over his head and the cold ground beneath him. The best place for a man to wake up was in a sweet woman’s arms, but in his line of work, he’d learned to be alone.
His skin bristled like a nervous colt’s. It was one thing to wake up in a strange place. Waking up in a strange body was a whole new experience.
When his blurred vision cleared, the only thing familiar was the color of his surroundings. Everything was white. Besides his own, there were five other beds in the room. All held forms draped with white sheets and attached to contraptions that made noises like birds trying to chirp.
He lifted his head for a better look-see, but it flopped weakly onto the pillow. Two women, dressed in blue pajamas like the Chinese laundryman used to wear, tended the folks in the beds. He heard their murmuring voices, but couldn’t make out what they said. Their soft, white shoes made no sound on the floor.
He tried to move, but he was hog-tied by some kind of cord that ran from a needle taped to the inside of his elbow to a bag of clear liquid suspended from a metal pole. A fancy clothes-peg attached to another cord clamped painlessly on the end of his finger. He examined the hand. Long-fingered, callused and sun-brown, it had obviously belonged to a hardworking man.
Where was he? Had the transference been completed? It was possible he hadn’t returned at all, but was stuck in yet another corner of Reception, still awaiting a routing assignment. The thought that he might not have made it back to earth—back to his precious Molly—filled him with aching sadness.
He wouldn’t get another chance. Celestian had barely explained the possibility of walking-in when an appropriate mortal coil had been vacated. At the right time. In the right location. He wasn’t too clear on events after that. Everything had happened fast. So fast the time-out monitor had little opportunity to give instructions, issue cautions or provide historical updates. He only knew one thing for sure. Due to another stunning accident, the spirit inhabiting the mortal coil known as Joe Mitchum had alighted unexpectedly in Reception, his life over and his number up.
In her assigned role as healer, Molly, or Mallory as she was now called, had persevered until she revived the uninhabited coil. According to Celestian, the resident spirit had given up first reenter rights, electing to remain in the Reception queue in hopes of receiving a better assignment.
That’s when things had gotten really lively. Celestian started squawking about how they only had a small window of opportunity during which another spirit could take over, if Mallory succeeded in snatching the coil back from the brink of permanent death. He hadn’t been blowing smoke when he said he’d do anything, take any form, to go back. He had snatched the walk-in opening without considering the implications. Like a baseball player who had spent a hundred seasons on the bench—during which all the rules had changed—he was unexpectedly thrust back in the game.
At least he hoped that’s what had happened.
Thankfully, he’d observed Molly/Mallory often enough on the spirit monitor to know some of the details of her Molly life. In 1973, at age ninety-seven, she’d passed over quietly in her sleep. She had returned as Mallory, born later the same year to a hard-working local couple. Because memories of past jaunts were mercifully deleted before reentry, Mallory recalled nothing of Molly’s existence or any of the other lives she’d lived.
That was the way it had to be.
Oh, yeah. He knew something else. Celestian had emphasized this was the last chance for his warrior spirit and her healer spirit to unite. They would not share the rest of these lives, nor would they be allowed to spend eternity as mates, unless she fell in love with him this time around.
That, too, was the way it had to be.
Another half-formed memory floated into his thoughts. Celestian had yelled something just before he’d been sucked into the new coil. What was it? Thinking only made his head hurt worse, but he had to remember. Celestian had been so danged insistent, it must have been important. He closed his eyes, concentrating until the monitor’s words came back to him.
Yeah. He could never tell Molly/Mallory who he really was, or reveal any details of their past lives together. It was against the rules.
That was the way it had to be.
The fact that Molly was Mallory, and he was now Joe complicated things. What if she didn’t recognize him? She might not even like him. Uncertainty gnawed at him, and he calmed his fears by telling himself it shouldn’t be too difficult to win Mallory’s heart. Not after all they’d been through together. Not after all the lifetimes they’d shared.
When he moved, pain ricocheted through his body and settled in his sore, bandaged feet. Being cooped up in the cooler with that ornery hombre Celestian for a hundred years had been a trial. Getting a ticket home had been nothing short of a miracle. Lying still when he wanted to crawl off the bed and search for the woman who would help him fulfill his destiny by fulfilling her own? That required every shattered bit of his willpower.
He tried to relax. The hard part of this trip was behind him. Charming Dr. Mallory Peterson into falling in love with him again, even after a lifetime apart, would be simple.
As easy as eating pie.
He must have nodded off for a while, because when he awoke again one of the pajama-clad women was fussing around the machinery by his bed.
“There you are, Mr. Mitchum. You’re back.”
“Am I?” Dry and raw at the same time, his throat was so sore he couldn’t make spit or speak above a whisper. “Am I still in Reception?”
“Oh, no, sir. You’re in the ICU.”
He groaned in frustrated agony. Why couldn’t people call things by their proper names? “What is this place?”
“The hospital. You had an accident. Don’t you remember?”
“Not much. Who are you?”
“I’m Kathy. I’ll be your nurse tonight.” She smiled and wrapped a heavy cloth tightly around his upper arm, squeezing a small bulb until it tightened uncomfortably. After a few seconds, she released the bulb. “Your blood pressure is almost normal. How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve been lightning-struck.”
She patted his arm. “I’m not surprised. Take it easy now, the doctor will be in to see you soon.”
“Is that Mol—er, Mallory?” The name didn’t feel as strange coming out of his mouth as he thought it would. “Is she here?”
“You mean Dr. Peterson? I don’t know. Would you like to see her?”
“Yes.” A rush of emotion tightened his damaged throat and threatened to cut off his breathing again. “Please.” He’d waited a hundred years for this moment. Mallory Peterson looked nothing like his former fiancеe, midwife Molly Earnshaw. Nor did her appearance match any of the other mortal coils she’d inhabited over time. Still, he couldn’t wait to see her. From tribal bonesetter to medieval herbalist to village wise woman, she’d always been a healer. Now she was a doctor. She’d finally reached the goal she’d yearned after so long.
The nurse picked up his wrist, felt his hammering pulse, frowned and wrote something on a paper clamped to a board. “I don’t know if Dr. Peterson is still in the building, she may have gone home by now.”
“No!” Not seeing her would hurt more than the injuries he’d suffered.
“Okay, calm down. I’ll have her paged. Maybe she’s still around.”
“Thank you. Please, just find her.”
The woman tucked the sheet around him. “You rest, and I’ll see what I can do.”
“I have to see her,” he whispered tightly. He had to. He couldn’t wait another moment.
“It was the darnest thing I ever saw.” After changing into clean green surgical scrubs, Mallory sat in the doctor’s lounge with a cup of coffee. She related the evening’s events to Andrew “Mac” McKinley, the on-call physician who’d taken charge of Joe in the emergency room. “I’m telling you, that fork of lightning hit the pole like a heat-seeking missile. It was almost as though it had made a special trip down from heaven, specifically to strike him.”
Mac shook his head. “I’m surprised at you, Mal. That’s not a very scientific explanation for someone with an undergrad major in physics.”
“I know, but it was still pretty amazing.”
“What’s amazing is the fact he’s still alive. You saved his life, you know.”
“I did, didn’t I?” She grinned. “That’s what we’re here for, right? Mallory Peterson’s my name, saving lives is my game.”
“Are you planning to hang around until our patient wakes up?”
“I’m thinking about it.” Mac was an excellent physician. She had no reservations about handing off Joe’s care. Yet, she felt responsible for the man whose heart had resumed beating under her hands. She’d insisted on riding to Midland in the ambulance with him and had assisted in the initial assessment. She didn’t understand, and couldn’t explain to her colleague, the indefinable connection she felt for the man she’d brought back from death.
“Inconsiderate of him to get toasted on a Friday night,” Mac teased. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”
“No. I’ll just see how he’s doing before I go.”
“Suit yourself.”
