That Burke Man

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He made a sound deep in his throat that could have meant anything. He set about examining her with steely hands that looked menacing until they touched and probed with a tenderness that set Todd’s teeth on edge.

“Muscle strain,” Coltrain pronounced at last. “You’ll need a few days in bed on muscle relaxers. Did you rent that traction rig I told you to get?”

“Yes, we did, under protest,” Tim said with a chuckle.

“Well, get started, then.”

He lifted her as if she were a feather and carried her off to her bedroom. Todd, incensed out of all reason, followed them with an audible tread.

Coltrain glanced over his shoulder at the other man with a faintly mocking smile. He didn’t need a road map to find a marked trail, and he knew jealousy when he saw it.

He put Jane down gently on the double bed with its carved posts with the traction apparatus poised over it.

“Need to make a pit stop before I hook you up?” Coltrain asked her without a trace of embarrassment.

“No, I’m fine,” she said through clenched teeth. “Go ahead.”

He adjusted the brace that lifted her right leg, putting a pleasant pressure on the damaged hip that even surgery hadn’t put completely back to rights. “This won’t work any miracles, but it will help,” Coltrain told her. “You put too much stock in articles written by idiots.”

“He didn’t write it about you!”

He lifted an eyebrow. “He wouldn’t dare,” he said simply.

She knew that. It irritated her. She closed her eyes. “It hurts.”

“I can do something for that.” Coltrain reached in his bag and drew out a small bottle and a syringe. He handed a package to Todd. “Open that and swab the top of the bottle with it.”

He had the sort of voice that expects obedience. Todd, who never took orders, actually did it with only a lopsided grin. He liked the doctor, against his will.

Coltrain upended the bottle when Todd had finished, inserted the needle into the bottle and then drew up the correct amount of painkiller.

He handed Todd another package containing an alcohol-soaked gauze. “Swab her arm, here.”

He indicated a vein in her right arm and Todd looked at him.

“It’s not addictive,” the doctor said gently. “I know what I’m doing.”

Todd made a rough murmur and complied. It embarrassed him to show concern for a woman he barely knew. Coltrain’s knowing look made it worse.

He swabbed her arm and Coltrain shot the needle in, efficiently and with a minimum of pain.

“Thanks, Copper,” Jane told him quietly.

He shrugged. “What are friends for?” He took a few sample packages out of the bag and gave them to Todd. “Two every six hours for severe pain. They’re stronger than the others I gave you,” he told Jane. “You can push this to five hours if you can’t bear it, but no sooner.” Coltrain fastened his bag and gave Jane a reassuring smile. “Stay put. I’ll check on you tomorrow.”

“Okay.” Her eyes were already closing.

“I’ll sit with you until you go to sleep,” Cherry volunteered, and Jane smiled her agreement.

Coltrain jerked his head toward the living room. Tim and Todd followed. He closed the bedroom door behind them.

“I want her X-rayed,” he told them without pre amble. “I think it’s muscular, but I’m not going to stake my life on it. The last thing she needed was to get on a horse.”

“I tried to stop her,” Tim told him.

“I realize that. I’m not blaming you. She’s a handful.” He eyed Todd openly. “Can you keep her off horses?”

Todd smiled slowly. “Watch me.”

“That’s what I thought. She isn’t safe to be let out alone these days, always trying to prove herself.” He grabbed his Stetson and started toward the door. “She’s in too much pain to be moved today. I’ll send an ambulance for her in the morning and make all the necessary arrangements at Jacobsville Memorial. She won’t like it,” he added wryly.

“But she’ll do it,” Todd replied easily.

For the first time, Coltrain chuckled. “I’d like to be a fly on the wall tomorrow when that ambulance gets here.”

The telephone rang and Tim answered it. He grimaced, holding it out to Coltrain.

The other man picked it up with a rough sigh. “Coltrain,” he said as if he knew who was calling.

His face grew harder by the second. “Yes. No. I don’t give a damn, it’s my practice and that’s how I do things. If you don’t like it, get out. Damn the contract!” He glanced at the wide-eyed faces near him and shifted his posture. “We’ll talk about this when I get back. Yes, you do that.” He put the receiver down with a savagely controlled jerk of his lean hand. His eyes glittered like blue water on a snake’s back. “Call me if you need me.”

After he was gone, and was driving away in a cloud of dust, Tim whistled through his teeth. “It won’t last.”

“What won’t?” Todd replied.

“Him and Lou,” he said, shaking his head. “They’ll kill each other one day, him with his old-fashioned way of practicing and her with all this newfangled technology.”

Todd found himself vaguely relieved that the doctor had someone besides Jane to occupy his mind. He wasn’t sure why, but he didn’t like the tenderness Coltrain had shown Jane.

Chapter Three

Jane was restless all through the night. When Cherry went to bed, Todd sat with Jane. Tim had handed over the books earlier, so he took the heavy ledger with him. He looked through it while Jane slept, his reading glasses perched on his straight nose and a scowl between his eyes as he saw the inefficiency and waste there on the paper.

The ranch had almost gone under, all right, and there was no need. In addition to the beef cattle, Jane had four thoroughbred stallions, two of whom had won ribbons in competition, and on the racetrack before her father’s death. She wasn’t even putting them at stud, which could certainly have added to the coffers. The equipment she was using was obsolete. No maintenance had been done recently, either, and that would have made a handsome tax deduction. From what he’d seen, there was plenty of room for improvement in the equipment shed, the outbuildings, the barn and even the house itself. The ranch had great potential, but it wasn’t being efficiently used.

He scowled, faintly aware of a tingling sensation, as if he were being watched. He lifted his head and looked into curious blue eyes.

“I didn’t know you wore glasses,” Jane said drowsily.

“I’m farsighted,” he said with a chuckle. “It’s irritating when people think I’m over forty because of these.” He touched the glasses.

She studied his lean, hard face quietly. “How old are you?”

“Thirty-five,” he said. “You?”

She grinned. “Twenty-five. A mere child, compared to you.”

He lifted an eyebrow. “You must be feeling better.”

“A little.” She took a slow breath. “I hate being helpless.”

“You won’t always be,” he reminded her. “One day, you won’t have to worry about traction and pills. Try to think of this as a temporary setback.”

“I’ll bet you’ve never been helpless in your whole life.”

“I had pneumonia once,” he recalled. His face hardened with memory. He’d been violently ill, because he hadn’t realized how serious his chest cold had become until his fever shot up and he couldn’t walk for pain and lack of breath. The doctor had reluctantly allowed him to stay at home during treatment, with the proviso that he had to be carefully watched. But Marie had left him alone to go to a cocktail party with his best friend, smiling as she swept out the door. After all, it was just a little cough and he’d be fine, she’d said carelessly. Besides, this party was important to her. She was going to meet several society matrons who were potential clients for her new interior-design business. She couldn’t pass that up. It wasn’t as if pneumonia was even serious, she’d laughed lightly on her way out the door.

“Come back,” Jane said softly.

His head jerked as he realized his thoughts had drifted away. “Sorry.”

“What happened?” she persisted.

He shrugged. “Nothing much. I had pneumonia and my wife left me at home to go to a cocktail party.”

“And?” she persisted.

“You’re as stubborn as a bulldog, aren’t you?” he asked irritably. “You’re prying.”

“Of course I am,” she said easily. “Tell me.”

“She went on to an all-night club after the cocktail party and didn’t come home until late the next morning. She’d put my antibiotics away and hadn’t told me where, and I was too sick to get up and look for them. By the time she got home, I was delirious with fever. She had to get an ambulance and rush me to the hospital. I very nearly died. That was the year Cherry was born.”

“Why, the witch!” Jane said bluntly. “And you stayed with her?”

“Cherry was on the way,” he said starkly. “I knew that if we got divorced, she wouldn’t have the baby. I wanted Cherry,” he said stiffly.

He said it as if it embarrassed him, and that made her smile. “I’ve noticed that you take fatherhood seriously.”

“I always wanted kids,” he said. “I was an only child. It’s a lonely life for a kid on a big ranch. I wanted more than one, but…” He shrugged. “I’m glad I’ve got Cherry.”

“Her mother didn’t want her?”

He glowered. “Marie likes her when she’s having guests, so that she can show the world what a sweet, devoted mother she is. It wins her brownie points in her business affairs. She’s an interior designer and most of her work comes from very wealthy, very conservative, Texans. You know, the sort who like settled family men and women on the job?”

“Does Cherry know?”