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“It was quite a blow.” He pointed to the cluster of buildings that had come into view as the truck reached the top of a small rise. “Take a left at the stop sign. The hospital is right behind the high school.”
They were at the small clinic within minutes, a single-story cinder-block building painted sterile white. Sara parked directly in front of the double glass doors, ignoring the yellow-striped parking spaces on the other side of a low brick planter.
“Wait here. I’ll get somebody to help you.”
Sara jumped from the truck and disappeared inside. She was back almost immediately, followed by a nurse pushing a wheelchair.
“Afternoon, Susie. How are you?” he greeted her. Susie wore her usual no-nonsense white uniform covered by a shapeless, colorless sweater. She was as wide as she was tall, and her faded brown hair curled tight to her scalp like sheep’s wool. She’d been playing around with those home perms again, he saw.
“Mac Wallace, what have you done to yourself?” She yanked open the truck door and stood with her hands on her massive hips, her look disapproving.
“Have you been losing weight again?” he asked. “I swear, you’re going to disappear on me one of these days.”
“That didn’t work when you were a kid trying to get out of a shot, and it won’t work now. Come on, let’s haul your butt out of there.” She took off her wire-rimmed glasses and let them dangle from the gold chain around her neck, motioning with her hands. “Scoot forward. Try to take your weight on your good leg.”
He couldn’t believe the agony caused by the slightest movement. His denim shirt was soaked with sweat by the time he’d maneuvered himself into the wheelchair. He took a deep breath, steadying himself, before he looked at Sara. She stood in front of him, beside her blue truck, uncertain, looking as worried and as near tears as Michael had. He tried to smile reassuringly.
“Thank you,” he said.
She nodded. “You’re welcome.” The silence lengthened while Mac stared into dove gray eyes, suddenly hesitant to say goodbye.
“The doctor’s waiting for you,” Susie said, releasing the brake on the chair. “And he’s not too pleased about having his fishing interrupted, so we better get a move on.” She started to turn the chair to the door.
“Goodbye,” Sara called. She lifted a hand in a halfwave.
“Goodbye. Thanks again.” The chair faced the hospital entrance, and he could see Sara’s reflection in the glass doors. He watched her walk around the truck before the automatic opener on the hospital doors swung them wide, stretching her image until it broke and disappeared. He heard the truck door slam and the engine start as Susie pushed him over the threshold into the cool, antiseptic hallway. His teeth began to chatter. Delayed shock, he told himself, clamping his mouth shut. The empty feeling in his gut had nothing to do with loneliness.
Sara pulled into the hospital parking lot an hour later. Instead of heading down the highway, she’d had a hamburger from a drive-through ice cream stand and wandered around the four-block main street of Dutch Creek, self-proclaimed gateway to Yellowstone National Park. Miniature stuffed buffaloes and gaudily dyed geodes seemed to be the tourist merchandise of choice, along with the ever present T-shirts.
She’d followed the sidewalk past the last shop—a combination frozen-yogurt-southwestern-pottery store—to the park at the end of the street. She’d sat on a bench next to the empty playground under the shade of a cottonwood tree and worried about Mac. After a half hour of internal debate, she’d walked to her truck and returned to the hospital, unable to drive away without checking on him.
She felt guilty, she decided. That was why she was so reluctant to leave. It had nothing to do with the way his hand had lingered on her face that brief moment in the truck, his roughened fingertips gentle against her skin. She just needed to be sure he’d been released and was on his way to the ranch. Just a quick stop at the front desk was all it would take. She’d make it to Jackson Hole before dark.
But the admissions desk was shuttered when she entered the hospital, and there was no bell on the counter under the hand-lettered please-ring-for-service sign. A single hallway stretched before her, its waxed gray vinyl reflecting the overhead fluorescent lights, the walls a no-nonsense, industrial-strength green. She started down it, searching for the nurse’s station.
Mac’s voice was audible after only a few feet, coming from an open door at the end of the hall. She peeked around the edge of the frame. A narrow hospital bed, both foot and head raised, took up almost all of the tiny room, and Mac took up almost all of the bed. His one-size-fitsall beige gown came only as far as his knees, so the old-fashioned, white plaster cast, molded from mid-calf to toes, was the first thing to draw her eyes. The intravenous drip attached to the back of his hand was the next.
Mac was shouting into the perforated circle in a metal panel on the wall near his head. He held a cord in his free hand and was viciously poking the white button at its end with his thumb.
“Susie, this is the last time I’m saying this, I want to go home!”
Sara heard the nurse’s voice echo from the panel, impatience clear despite the scratchy intercom.
“You can’t go home, Mac. Now settle down before I come give you another shot of something. And stop pushing that buzzer.”
“The boys are home by themselves. I can’t just lay here. I’ve got to get home.”
“Listen, I’ll call the Swansons and have Libby go over—”
“They’re in Cheyenne.”
“At the Cattlemen’s Association—”
“Yeah, yeah,” he interrupted. “Now bring me my clothes and the only boot that damned doctor didn’t mutilate and—”
“Mac, the doctor said we need to keep an eye on you overnight. I can’t do a thing about—”
“I can stay with them.”
Mac’s head shot around at the sound of her voice.
“What was that, Mac?” Susie asked over the intercom.
“Just a minute, Susie. I’ll buzz you.”
“You touch that buzzer one more time and I’ll—”
Mac flicked the switch on the wall, cutting off the nurse’s threat.
“Hi.” He looked at Sara as if nothing would surprise him anymore. “I thought you’d gone.”
“I came back.” She didn’t elaborate.
“Oh.” He paused. “Did you know that damned doctor cut off my boot? Elephant. Genuine elephant. It’s not like you can go down to the local five-and-dime and get another elephant hide boot!”
“I’m sorry. They looked like nice boots.”
“Damn right! And now they’ve got me pumped so full of painkillers they say they want to keep me overnight so they can drip it into me drop by drop!”
“Mac, I’d be happy to go to the ranch and stay with the boys,” she said. Why not? That was the whole point of her new life—no schedule, no worries, no one to answer to. If she could help out someone who’d helped her, what did it matter if she took a day longer to get to Yellowstone? “Besides, I still owe you for that last batch of repairs. I could keep an eye on the boys tonight, come pick you up in the morning, and we can settle the bill then.”
“I can’t have you go to all that trouble.” Mac bounced his good leg against the mattress in frustration. “There’s got to be somebody who didn’t go to Cheyenne for the weekend.”
“You’d be doing me a favor, really,” she told him. “It’ll be difficult finding an RV spot this late in Jackson. I need a place to park.”
“It’s nice of you to offer, Sara, but...” Mac hesitated and she was surprised to see a look of embarrassment on his face. Of course! She realized the problem with a start. That time they’d shared in the truck had made her feel so close to him, she’d forgotten they were strangers. She couldn’t ask him to leave his children in the care of someone who’d wandered into his gas station mere hours before.
“But I could be a mass murderer or something?”
“I don’t mean that, but—”
“Hey, you can’t be too careful these days. You’re absolutely right. I’d feel the same way in your place.” Sara thought for a moment. “I tell you what, why don’t I give Cyrus a call over at the university? He’ll vouch for my sanity.”
“Any friend of Cyrus’s is a friend of mine?” Mac thought it over for a moment. “Sure, sounds like a good idea. Of course, it could be the morphine talking, but right now all I want is to go to sleep and I can’t think of any other alternatives.”
Mac did look tired, sick-tired, with dark smudges under his eyes. Sara picked up the phone next to his bed and dialed the number of her late husband’s oldest and dearest friend.
“Cyrus?” She was pleased to hear his voice after only the first ring. “You’ll never guess who I ran into in Dutch Creek.”
“Mac Wallace,” he replied promptly in his crisp English accent. When she gasped, he said, “My dear girl, there are only a dozen people living in that entire half of the state. It wasn’t exactly a stumper.”
She laughed. Cyrus always made her feel good. Briefly, she explained the situation, then handed the phone to Mac. “He wants to talk to you.”
Sara could hear only one side of the conversation, but Mac laughed out loud several times. She could just imagine what Cyrus was telling him about her.
“All right, Cyrus,” Mac said. “I’ll keep that in mind. It’s been great talking to you. The boys can’t wait to see you in August.” He held out the phone for her to hang up.
“Well?”
“Cyrus said you’re definitely sane, the salt of the earth, he’d trust you with his children any time—if he had any—and he urged me to marry you immediately.”
Chapter Three
“He what!”
“His exact words were, ‘Please pry that lovely child from that vile truck and wed her immediatus, which I think loosely translates into pronto.”
“Or, if your Latin’s as good as mine, could mean ‘when hell freezes over.’”
Mac grinned. “Cyrus has been trying to get me remarried for years. He thinks it’s my dumb luck that you happened into my garage and said I shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.”
“I’m a gift horse?” She tried to sound lightly amused in spite of the way her heart had jolted at Cyrus’s eccentric suggestion.
“I was sort of paraphrasing what he actually said. He lost me when he started quoting Julius Caesar.” Mac’s smile faded. “Seriously, Cyrus said I should jump at your baby-sitting offer. So I’m jumping—as high as I can under the circumstances. And I really want to thank you for your help.”
“That’s all right. As a man once told me when he fixed my water hose for free, it’s just being neighborly.”
His look was warm and she felt unreasonably pleased by his gratitude. She felt as if she’d done something wonderful, rather than simply offered to baby-sit in exchange for a parking place. His blue eyes held hers, and she read things in them she told herself came from the morphine, not from Mac. Things that made the narrow hospital bed suddenly appear plenty wide enough for two, if she was pressed up tight enough against him... Discomfited, she picked up the phone and held it out to him. “Here, call the boys and tell them I’m coming—with pizza.”
“They like pepperoni.”
“Got it.” It was as hard to leave him now as it had been in the parking lot. “Is there anything I can do for you before I go? I think your nurse sounded pretty serious about not touching that buzzer again.”
“Not unless you happen to have an extra elephant-hide boot tucked away in that camper of yours.”
“Sorry, it’s just me and my spider plant, remember?”
“Then I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.” His inflection made it a question, a lonely-sounding question. The small hospital seemed quiet and empty, no ringing phones, no gurneys whisking down the corridors on rubber wheels, no clipboards crisply snapping shut.
“I’ll ask what time they think you’ll be released. Try to get some sleep now.” Impulsively, she took his hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze as she dropped a light kiss on his cheek. But his skin was so firm and warm, with his shadow of whiskers prickling her sensitive lips, that an erotic jolt caught her unaware. She jerked upright and stepped away from the bed. Murmuring good-night, she walked quickly from the room before she found an excuse to linger any longer, her mouth still hot and tingling.
She arrived at the ranch just over an hour later. The sun hovered on the horizon, fiery layers of pink, orange and mauve, as she guided the truck up the gravel drive and pulled around the side of the two-story house. She walked up the wooden steps that led to the porch, balancing two large, flat pizza boxes.
Michael answered her awkward knock on the back door, delivered with the toe of her tennis shoe.
“Hi. Come on in.” He took the boxes from her and politely moved aside for her to enter.
His older brother stood in the kitchen, hair still wet from a shower. Jacob looked at her a little warily. She was sure the boys wished she were Libby—the name that had come first to everyone’s mind when Mac had needed help—rather than some stranger who’d been dropped in their laps. At their age, they didn’t need an adult hovering over them, making sure they brushed their teeth before bed, so she hastened to reassure them that she wouldn’t intrude.
“I just wanted to deliver these pizzas.” She stayed at the threshold. “Your dad said you liked pepperoni.”
They nodded and smiled stiffly.
“I’m all set up for the night in my camper—” she started to back away “—but if you men need anything, be sure to give a knock on the door.”
“Aren’t you going to have some pizza?” Michael asked, obviously surprised.
She shook her head. “I had a hamburger in Dutch Creek. Good night, then.”
“But Dad said to put clean sheets on the bed in the guest room,” Michael blurted. “And we even changed the towels in the bathroom.”
She tried not to smile. “That was sweet of you, but—”
“At least come in and have a cup of coffee,” Jacob offered. “Dad said to have some ready for you. I made a whole pot, and me and Mike don’t like it.”
“I like it,” Michael said.
“You like the cream and sugar,” his brother scoffed. “It’s a wonder your teeth haven’t rotted off under those braces.”
“Thank you.” Sara stepped into the kitchen before the argument escalated. “A cup of coffee would be nice.”
Jacob sat the pizza boxes in the middle of the large butcher-block table while Michael rather defiantly got out two mugs. She poured them both a cup of coffee without comment, although she spooned a generous amount of sugar and creamer into her cup so Michael’s lavish use of both wasn’t so obvious.
“Does he have a cast or just one of those bandage things?” Michael asked, dunking the end of a slice of pizza into his coffee.
“A regular cast,” she assured him.
Jacob sounded suspicious as he asked, “Is he really going to come home tomorrow? Sometimes Dad treats us like we’re still little kids so he won’t tell us stuff if he thinks we’ll worry.”
“I mean, they’re not planning to amputate his leg or something like that, are they?” Michael added, fishing out a slice of pepperoni that had slid off the cheese into his cup.
“Heavens, no!” Sara set her cup down so suddenly that coffee sloshed onto her fingers. “Of course not.” She wiped her wet hand on to her jeans. “He’s royally mad about his boots—”
Michael stopped her with a groan. “We heard. We heard all about it.”
“But other than that he’s fine. They said he’d be released right after lunch. I’ll run in and pick him up and bring him back here—”
She broke off, frowning at the thought. “Is your dad’s bedroom downstairs?”
The boys shook their heads.
“How about that guest room you got ready for me?”
Another simultaneous shake.
“I was just thinking, it’s going to be hard for your dad to go up the stairs for a few days. Is there somewhere downstairs we could set up a bed for him?”
“The couch in the office folds out into a bed,” Jacob volunteered. “But it sort of sinks in the middle.”
