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Before he’d gotten halfway into his tale of how he’d brought Neil Anderson into the world during a blizzard in ’58, Cletus McCully interrupted. “Doc, I swear you could talk the ears off a deaf man. I ain’t necessarily gonna live forever, ya know. Would you get to the point?”
Another time Louetta might have smiled, but she glanced over her shoulder, straight into Burke’s eyes, and she couldn’t have smiled if her life had depended upon it.
“Burke,” Doc called. “Come on up here, would ya?”
What could Burke possibly have to do with Doc Masey?
Like the quiet before the storm, silence filled the room. Surely Louetta’s heart wasn’t the only one thumping a little wildly at the way Burke carried himself, at the width of his shoulders, the fit of his black pants. However, it was highly likely that she was the only woman who averted her eyes.
“As you all know,” Doc Masey declared, “I’ve been searching for a replacement for a few years now. I’m pleased to say I’ve found one. Looks like he got the jump on me, but I like a man who knows his own mind. Folks, I’d like you to meet my new partner, Dr. Burke Kincaid.”
Louetta’s head came up, her heart rising to her throat. “What did Doc say?” she asked Lisa McCully, the young woman sitting next to her.
“It looks like Doc Masey’s taken on one of your fiancés as a new partner,” Lisa whispered.
“One of my—”
A freight train sounded in Louetta’s ears. The lights went dim, her muscles turned to liquid. And she keeled over in a deep faint.
Louetta came to amid a blur of faces and a whir of voices.
“She fainted, you say?”
“Is she gonna be all right?”
“How would I know? I ain’t no doctor.”
“There’s no need to snap my head off.”
“Boys, would you give me a little room?”
Louetta recognized Doc Masey’s voice. Although she couldn’t quite make out the two cowboys who were stepping out of the way, she could see Isabell hovering over her right shoulder, Doc Masey over her left. Burke’s and Wes’s faces were inches apart, and someone—a quick glance at the masculine hand touching her wrist told her it was Burke—was taking her pulse.
“Are you all right?” His voice was edged in velvet, just as it had been that night two and a half years ago.
“Of course she’s all right. You are all right, aren’t you?” Wes asked.
Louetta nodded and tried to sit up. Had she really fainted before a roomful of people? Lord, her humiliation was nearly complete.
“I’m fine. I’d really like to go up to my apartment now.”
Suddenly Burke was bending down, gliding his arms underneath her, lifting her up. No, she thought, her dark purple skirt hitched up around her thighs, her white sweater askew, her face inches away from his, now her humiliation was complete.
“Please,” she protested, “I can walk.”
“For heaven’s sake,” Isabell sputtered, “put her down this instant. Haven’t you done enough?”
Burke eyed the old biddy over the top of Louetta’s head. As far as he was concerned, he hadn’t done nearly enough. He hadn’t kissed Lily or Louetta or whatever the hell her name was. He hadn’t explained. He had yet to see her smile.
Wes Stryker’s voice cut into Burke’s thoughts. “She said she can walk.”
Reading the challenge in Stryker’s eyes, Burke tightened his grip around Louetta. Wes took a step closer and held Burke’s stare.
“Come on, you two,” insisted a woman with large brown eyes, a sultry voice and a protruding stomach that indicated a baby was due in a month or two. “Why don’t you go shoot some bottles off a fence or duke it out over at the Crazy Horse or do whatever else men do to compete for a woman’s hand. Melody, Jillian and I can take it from here. That okay with you, Louetta?”
As a doctor, Burke supposed the blush on Lily’s cheeks was a good sign. As a man, he didn’t want to let her out of his arms, let alone out of his sight. Since she nodded at the pregnant woman, he didn’t see what choice he had. He lowered her feet to the floor, slowly stepping aside as two women each slid an arm around Lily’s back.
There was a lot of noise all around him as people spoke amongst themselves. Burke stayed where he was, watching Lily walk away, regal even now.
He’d imagined her reaction to his return a hundred times. He would have liked her to welcome him with open arms. He would have settled for a small smile and a shy hello. He supposed he should have known this wasn’t going to be easy. Nothing about the past two and a half years had been easy.
She stopped suddenly in the doorway and glanced over her shoulder, bravely meeting his eyes. Her lips trembled. Although she didn’t smile, a look passed between them. He swallowed, but it only made him aware of the pulsing sensation in his throat and the growing pressure much lower.
Burke could feel all eyes on him, and he knew that this wasn’t the time or the place to say what he’d come here to say. Meeting her serious expression with a serious expression of his own, he said, “We’ll talk later.”
Her throat convulsed on a swallow. Neither nodding nor shaking her head, she allowed the other women to lead her away.
“For a doctor, you have lousy timing.”
Burke glanced at the man who had spoken. Wes Stryker looked the way a person would expect an ex-rodeo champion to look, all cheekbones and squint lines and stiff joints, rugged and haggard at the same time. Burke wondered if Lily was in love with the man. While he was at it, he wondered if it was possible that she was still in love with him. Releasing a breath he hadn’t known he’d been holding, Burke squared off opposite the other man. “Maybe, but I’m told I have a good bedside manner.”
Stryker’s eyes narrowed. “I’m more concerned about your in-bed manner.”
“Sorry. I don’t kiss and tell.”
The other man’s eyebrows rose slightly, and Burke sensed a grudging respect in Wes Stryker’s expression.
“You gonna step aside, Wes,” somebody called from behind, “and let the new doctor run roughshod over you?”
Wes shook his head. “It looks like Boomer was right. My competin’ days aren’t over after all.”
Burke accepted the challenge, along with the hand Wes held out to him. Wes’s knuckles were bony, his palm callused, his grip bordering on painful. Squaring his jaw, Burke squeezed the other man’s hand in return.
Wes grunted. “May the best man win.”
Burke nodded stiffly, tightening his own grip. “Believe me,” he said, wondering whose bones would crack first, “I intend to.”
Bets were made among the other men. The old biddy who’d helped Lily earlier insisted that this was exactly the kind of thing the Ladies Aid Society had been afraid would happen. A few old-timers grumbled that folks needed a little fun and excitement now and then, and the meeting was finally adjourned. Burke and Wes might have gone on shaking hands all night if Doc Masey and another old man with white whiskers and tattered suspenders hadn’t broken them up.
The man on the right snapped one suspender and rocked back on the heels of worn cowboy boots. “Name’s Cletus McCully. Looks like you and Wes are evenly matched. That’s gonna make things more interesting, that’s for sure. Tell us, boy, where are you from?”
Refusing to give in to the impulse to cradle his right hand in his left one, Burke met the old codger’s inquisitive stare. “I grew up in northern Washington. My practice was in Seattle.”
“Ah, you must have met our Louetta when she went with her mother to that cancer research hospital last year. Didn’t do much good. Opal died right on schedule. She raised Louetta by herself, you know.”
No, Burke hadn’t known. And that wasn’t where he’d met Louetta. Since Cletus McCully didn’t need to know that, Burke held the old man’s piercing stare a few seconds longer, then strode out to the sidewalk with the country doctor.
The snowflakes were getting bigger, the air colder. Several men jaywalked across the street and disappeared inside what appeared to be the town’s only bar. Burke glanced up at the lighted window in the small apartment over the diner.
Following the course of Burke’s gaze, Doc Masey said, “Looks like you have more reasons than one for taking this job.”
Burke nodded, but didn’t elaborate.
The ensuing silence didn’t deter Doc Masey in the least. “No matter what the boys say, I don’t like the looks of this. It has trouble written all over it. Two men. One woman. Nope. Don’t like the looks of it one bit.”
“She’s not just any woman,” Burke said quietly.
“You love her.”
It was a statement, not a question, but Burke found himself nodding anyway. “Until I met her, I didn’t know I was capable. But yes, I love her. I have since the day I met her.”
“There’ll be hell to pay if you hurt her.”
Inhaling a deep breath of cold November air, Burke could hardly blame the old doctor for the warning. Miles Masey wasn’t stupid. Everyone had seen how Lily had reacted to Burke’s arrival. A person didn’t faint for no reason. Although they obviously didn’t know the circumstances, Burke had already hurt her. Oh, he’d had good reasons. The question was, would she be able to forgive him?
Tucking his chin inside the collar of his black overcoat, he accepted the key from Doc Masey’s outstretched hand and turned down the old man’s offer to escort him to his new residence. He was perfectly capable of getting settled into his new place by himself. Once he was settled, he would find Lily, or Louetta, or whatever folks around here called her. And he would try to explain.
Chapter Two
“Were those footsteps I heard on the stairs?”
Louetta pushed the cool cloth off her forehead and swung her feet over the side of her flowered sofa. Sitting up, she pretended not to notice the looks Lisa McCully and Melody and Jillian Carson cast one another.
“I didn’t hear a thing,” Melody said, taking her turn checking the stairs.
“Me, neither,” Lisa agreed, trying to find a comfortable position on the rocking chair across the room.
Jillian simply smiled encouragingly at Louetta, who dropped her face into her hands in defeat. In her defense, there had been footsteps on the stairs when Isabell, Doc Masey and a few of the members of the Ladies Aid Society had come up to check on her. The last visitor had left more than an hour ago, and Louetta was beginning to worry she was hearing things.
“Goodness gracious, I’m a wreck. Worse, I’m probably the talk of the town.”
“Everyone’s the talk of Jasper Gulch,” Melody said, toying with a strand of shoulder-length blond hair as she dropped onto a cushion on the floor. “Folks still talk about the time I dressed up in platform shoes, a skirt up to here and a shirt down to there to teach Clayt a lesson.”
Brown eyes flashing, Lisa declared, “And after word got out that Wyatt and I were trying to have a baby, folks stopped me on the street to ask if I was pregnant yet. You wouldn’t believe some of the advice I got. Why, Mertyl Gentry, of all people, told me to try standing on my head in a corner, after, well, you get the picture.”
Jillian Carson brushed her wispy red hair off her forehead and leaned ahead in her chair. “Is that how junior here came about?”
Laughing, Lisa said, “Junior here came to be because of her daddy’s philosophy. ‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.’”
Even Louetta forgot about her discomfiture long enough to laugh at that one. Some people took friendships for granted. Not her. Until Jillian and Lisa had moved to Jasper Gulch, Louetta’s only friends had been the members of the Ladies Aid Society, women who were closer to her mother’s age than hers. Although Melody had been three or four years behind Louetta in school, she was one of the few people in town who had always made it a point to give Louetta more than a nod in passing. Still, they hadn’t become good friends until a few years ago when Louetta had gotten up her courage and had taken that first painful step out of her shell.
Lisa, Melody and Jillian had all brought laughter into Louetta’s life, but Melody was the one Louetta felt closest to. The two of them had grown up right here in a town chock-full of rugged cowboys and ranchers. And the two of them had been overlooked by each and every one of those cowboys and ranchers for years. Melody had finally snagged the man she’d been in love with all her life. Now she and Clayt Carson had eleven-year-old Haley, and two little boys, twenty-two-month-old Jordan and newborn Slade.
When Louetta had first decided it was up to her to fill the lonely gaps in her own life, she’d been convinced that a few wonderful friends was the most she could hope for. It was certainly more than she’d dreamed she’d have. And then Burke had driven into town. She’d heard stories and whispers about a kind of magic that could sweep a woman right off her feet when the right man came along. Burke had swept into her apartment to use her phone. To this day she couldn’t remember how she’d gone from fixing a pot of tea to helping him out of his clothes. Lord, she still blushed when she thought of how totally out of character her behavior had been.
There hadn’t been a doubt in her mind that she’d fallen in love. At the time, she’d thought he’d felt the same....
“Earth to Louetta.”
“She’s either thinking about a man or—”
“Sex. She’s thinking about sex.”
Once Louetta’s vision cleared, the expressions on her friends’ faces were enough to send a blush to her cheeks. Melody, Jillian and Lisa were a godsend. No doubt about that. At the moment they were all far too perceptive for her peace of mind.
“Were those footsteps I heard on the stairs?” Louetta asked again, straining to hear.
After Lisa had taken her turn checking, Louetta said, “I’m really sorry about this. And I appreciate everything the three of you have done. I’m fine now, and I think you should go home to your husbands and—” she looked at Melody and Jillian “—your children.”
After ten minutes’ worth of reassurances from Louetta that she was really and truly over her fainting spell, the other three women finally left. Alone, Louetta wandered through the tiny apartment she’d been living in these past three years. Tilting the blinds, she peered down at Main Street. A handful of cars were parked in front of the Crazy Horse Saloon across the street, but not a soul was in sight.
Although the time of year had been different, the street had looked this way that night two and a half years ago, too. Arms folded at her waist, Louetta had been looking out the window when she’d noticed a man walking down the middle of the street. His gait was different from that of the ranchers and cowboys who lived around here. And yet, as she’d opened the window and leaned out, fear hadn’t crossed her mind.
“Can I help you?” she’d called.
He’d stopped and glanced around, slowly raising his head. Dressed in dark clothes, a long black coat and city shoes, his tall, broad-shouldered frame had cast a herculean shadow.
“I seem to have run out of gas near the village limits,” he’d said, the wind ruffling through his dark hair.
Something must have been in the air, or in his eyes, because suddenly Louetta had felt like Rapunzel or some other beautiful fairy-tale princess. “I don’t own a car, but I could go back to the wedding reception being held in the town hall and ask one of the local men to give you a lift and a can of gas if you’re sure that’s what’s wrong.”
He’d shrugged sheepishly, and had taken a few steps closer. Lowering his voice as if revealing a secret, he’d said, “I know men are supposed to be mechanically inclined, but I really hate engines. Could you just point me in the direction of the nearest gas station?”
Butterflies had fluttered in Louetta’s stomach. Not just a few, but an entire flock of them. It made her bold and daring and giddy. “Nothing’s open this time of night,” she’d answered. “But you can use my phone if you want to call a wrecker in Pierre.”
She’d directed him around to the back, and she’d let him in, taking the steps to her apartment ahead of him. She’d expected there to be long, tension-filled stretches of silence. After all, she was Louetta Graham, the shiest woman on the planet. But the smile he’d slanted her way had broken through her horrible timidness, and the butterflies in her stomach had moved over to make room for another sensation entirely. Some people would have called it attraction. She’d called it magic.
It had to be magic. It was the only explanation she’d been able to come up with for the way she’d been able to talk to him, and laugh with him, and make love with him. She’d fallen in love that night. There was no doubt about that. Her doubts had come later, when he’d failed to return.
She’d believed him when he’d promised to come back as soon as he’d taken care of business back home. “Two months, no more,” he’d whispered huskily, lingering over his goodbye kiss.
Ah, yes, she’d believed him, heart and soul. She’d waited patiently those two months, but as the days had turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, her heart had broken and her dreams had been lost.
She’d been naive for a thirty-three-year-old woman, and yet, after that one night with Burke, she’d never felt more like a woman in her life. A searing loneliness stabbed at her. She hadn’t felt that way again in all the time he’d been gone.
Staring at the lighted window of the Crazy Horse Saloon across the street, Louetta knew that seeing Burke again was what had brought so many dark emotions back to the surface. She hadn’t been able to help the tiny flicker of hope that had sprung to life when he’d said they would talk later. That had been three hours ago. He wasn’t going to come. When would she learn?
She had learned, she told herself. She wasn’t the same woman she’d been two and a half years ago. Thank heavens. Day by day, she’d replaced her quiet hopelessness with determination. Bit by bit, she’d realized she liked the new Louetta Graham. She might always be shy, but she was less introverted. And she’d finally struck out on her own. She’d purchased the diner and her apartment. She was slowly becoming an active member of the community. She had friends and she had goals. Some were far-reaching. Others pertained to today.
No more blushing every time she remembered how it had felt to be in Burke’s arms.
No more reliving every detail of the night they’d met.
No more silly daydreams about what might have been.
No more waiting on pins and needles and listening for footsteps on the stairs.
“Hello, Lily.”
