Noel, Alabama

by Susan Sands

  “I’ll let you know when I come up with something good,” she said. “What if you win?”

  “We go on a date.” His blue eyes shot sparks.

  “A date?” Bailey got a tingling feeling in her belly.

  He nodded, smiling. “A real one. I pick you up and we go someplace nice for dinner. Just the two of us. And I get to talk about anything I want, and you have to be honest and participate.”

  These were high stakes indeed, Bailey realized, and she accepted that the risk of losing meant honesty. She’d not ever allowed herself the risk of honesty. Was it a bet she was willing to make?

  Bailey would simply have to outrun him, just like she’d been doing for the last twelve years. “Fine. But if I win, you pay for dinner and I don’t have to talk about anything I don’t want to.”

  His grin showed those straight, white teeth. “Deal.”

  “Better make that reservation,” Bailey said.

  Chapter Sixteen

  It seemed every single soul she’d missed running into since returning to Ministry had come out for the first day of filming. And that would have been super had Bailey not had to keep one eye, or ear, as it were, on her job.

  They all wanted a hug, bless them. “Oh, honey. I told your daddy last week that I couldn’t wait to see you while you were in town.” Mrs. Paisley, her fifth grade English teacher, squeezed her face between large wet mittens. “Aren’t you a sight?”

  “It’s great to see you, Mrs. Paisley. How’s Ginger?” Bailey asked, trying to keep it somewhat short and sweet.

  “Oh, you remember, she got pregnant her first year in community college and now I have five beautiful grands. They call me Sugar, you know?” Mrs. Paisley beamed.

  “Congratulations. How wonderful,” Bailey said, for lack of anything better.

  “Great to see you, Mrs. Paisley,” Seth said. “Bailey is needed for the race. Hope we see you at the finish line.”

  “Y’all run good, you hear? Tell them to point a camera this way. I want to be in the movies.”

  They waved and moved away, but not before Bailey was stopped another three times in similar fashion.

  “You’re awfully popular this morning,” Seth acknowledged.

  “You noticed that?” she muttered. “They all want an on-screen cameo.”

  Security was working to keep the non-runners from the staging area for the runners. “Or maybe they want to welcome you home, since they haven’t seen you in forever.”

  Bailey snorted. “Unlikely.”

  They finally made it to where the other runners were stretching. Bailey and Seth both laced up their running shoes and placed their boots and bags in the bins for runners’ belongings. Bailey immediately went into job mode, making certain everything was in place for the opening shot. The gun cracked for the competition runners. They took off and left everyone else behind at the start.

  The crowd had to behave, and the rest of the runners were positioned behind the actors. The actors were getting in place now. An email was sent out to all participants ahead of time, apprising the runners of filming during the race. The competitive runners were allowed to start several minutes ahead of the others so as not to be hindered by filming.

  The main hero and heroine of the film were perfect. Their hair and makeup ready for their action shot. She was blond perfection, and he was a perfect dark-skinned hero. Bailey didn’t interact with the talent much as a rule. Her job rarely called for it. There would be dialogue dubbed in later after the race scene was shot. Seth and Bailey would run nearby to keep others at a safe distance, though it had been specified in the email. The director announced the scene. They all got into place, and they were off.

  The actors were only being filmed running for a short time. After that, the Jingle Jog would continue as normal for everyone else. Tracking shots were done by a moving dolly, which required room to move alongside the actors, which was why people and cars had been restricted in the path needed for it to move smoothly. All of the aspects of the race would be filmed to get lots of crowd and action shots. That way the scene, complete with the actors, could be edited later to include whatever parts of the race were needed.

  As the actors faded out of the race at the end of the take, Bailey and Seth continued on, pacing themselves. Neither seemed especially winded at the moment. This wasn’t an especially challenging distance for Bailey normally. But it was a bit more humid here, even with the lower temps, and she’d noticed a tiny patch of ice here and there, so she was careful to watch where she stepped.

  Seth didn’t appear to be struggling, so Bailey lengthened her stride a little. She had driven the route and was familiar with the course, and therefore knew how much farther they had to go.

  “Somebody’s a regular runner, I see.” Seth matched her pace beside her.

  “Somebody has to do something to support her love of rich foods.” She pushed a little harder. They were nearing the front of the herd of runners. “Looks like you’ve maintained your cardio as well.”

  “Every morning, unless it storms, and then I do it on my treadmill,” he replied, having no trouble keeping up.

  Bailey really didn’t want him to ask her the hard questions at their shared dinner, so she turned it up another notch. They were nearing the last mile, according to the signs held up by volunteers on the periphery of the route. There were non-runners along the sidelines cheering the race participants along.

  As Bailey increased her speed, Seth matched it. Until they were at a near sprint the last half mile. Well ahead of the other runners, Bailey realized they had fans rooting for them, specifically. This was no longer a friendly Jingle Jog; this was a race, plain and simple.

  The cheers became louder as the finish line came into sight. Bailey realized they were the first finishers since the competitive runners’ heat ended. The anticipation was high. Her breath was coming in short puffs now, but victory was in sight.

  She could hear Seth’s shoes pounding on the asphalt a couple feet behind her. Just. A. Little. Farther. “Bailey, can you hear me?” Mr. Stone’s too-loud voice boomed in her ear, causing her to lose her stride, and her step to stutter. Bailey could feel herself flailing into the void as she quite literally tripped at a full run. Panic filled her as she worked to roll out of the fall by crouching into a ball to prevent her face from hitting the street.

  For Bailey, the whole thing happened in slow motion, with Mr. Stone’s agitated voice in her ear. Pain exploded in her right shoulder, cheek, knees, hands—everywhere it seemed. She heard the hush of the crowd and then Seth yelling for help.

  *

  Watching Bailey go down was the most helpless moment in Seth’s life. It was a bad fall. She rolled and skidded across the road. They were running at top speed, so it took a few seconds for him to turn himself around and get to her stopping place at the edge of the curb. His stomach lurched. He roared to no one in particular, “Get help!”

  “Bailey! Bailey, can you hear me?” She was conscious, thank God. Her eyes were wide and her pupils were huge. She was in shock. They were both so winded from running. “Bailey, it’s okay. Help is on the way. I don’t want to move you in case you broke something.”

  “It-it hurts,” she moaned. There were tears in her big brown eyes, and it nearly ripped his heart out that he couldn’t take her pain into himself and away from her.

  “I know, babe, I know. I’m so sorry.” There were onlookers gathered around.

  “Could we get some water?”

  Someone handed him a bottle of water.

  He tried to give Bailey a sip of water but was afraid to move her. She coughed and sputtered. “Aagh. It hurts.”

  “Can you tell me what hurts?” he dared to ask.

  “My shoulder. My knees,” she whispered. Her teeth began to chatter and her body shook.

  Seth had been first on the scene many times at car accidents and other traumas, but never for someone he loved. This was different.

  “Seth, let me have a look.” Seth
turned to see Doctor Nick Sullivan, the head of trauma at Ministry’s local hospital, as the next wave of runners sped past, their collective pounding shaking the street beside them. But the paramedics who’d just arrived placed a couple orange cones beside them, causing the runners to detour around them.

  “Oh, thank God you’re here.” Seth moved aside enough to let Nick have a look. “She says her shoulder hurts. She’s pretty skinned up.” Seth could hear the near panic in his own voice.

  “Hey there, Bailey. I’m Nick. I saw the two of you smoke past me back there. I assume you fell at a good clip.” He was gently probing her. “Seth says your shoulder might have taken the brunt of the fall. I’m going to ask you to try and relax it for me if you can.”

  Bailey was lying on her side drawn up in pain; her knees and elbows were badly skinned and bloody through her leggings and shirt. Both the leggings and shirt had holes in them. She had a skinned place on the side of her forehead, but thankfully it wasn’t bleeding too badly. “C’mon, Bailey, let Doctor Nick have a quick look at that shoulder,” Seth said gently, trying to sound soothing.

  Bailey whimpered as Nick palpated both her good and bad shoulders. “I don’t want to take a chance moving her around too much if she’s got a fracture.”

  The EMTs were standing at the ready with a stretcher. They were already at the race should there be an injury. Nick and the paramedics discussed the best way of moving Bailey to cause the least amount of trauma. Seth wanted to yell at them all that she was in pain and that they should do something immediately.

  He’d been pretty much pushed out of the way for the moment and wasn’t dealing well with that. Just as he was about to insinuate himself next to Bailey, they lifted her onto the stretcher and then into the back of the ambulance, almost in one motion.

  Seth hopped into the back the moment they got her settled. Her eyes were glazed with pain. “Hey there. You won the bet, you know. Or, you were going to before you tripped,” Seth said, trying to do something to distract her.

  “The cat,” she whispered. “I need to move the cat out of the way.”

  Had she hit her head harder than they thought? “The cat? What cat, Bailey?” Maybe it was best to keep her talking.

  Bailey winced in pain. “The one that’s alive. Not the dead ones. You know, Scarlet O’ Hara. She’s in the way.”

  “Mrs. Wiggins’s cat?”

  “Yes. Mr. Stone called me on my earpiece to tell me to get the cat out of the shot.”

  Seth wanted to laugh; he really did. The idea of Scarlett O’ Hara sashaying through a scene being filmed, and a Hollywood producer going bonkers over it was a hoot. It made sense that Bailey would be the one called in to fix it. Locations people had to handle the local issues that interfered with filming, or so he’d been told. And Alexis wasn’t a cat person; that, he’d seen for himself.

  “So you tripped when Mr. Stone yelled in your ear?” Seth asked, to confirm what had brought her down. “About a cat?”

  “Yes. I wanted to win, but he yelled about the cat.” Her eyebrows went down in a frown.

  Keeping her talking, even if it was about a cat, kept her mind off the fact that they were speeding toward the ER. Seth’s hands were shaking with worry, but the fact that she was worried about “the alive cat,” relieved his mind a little.

  The ride to the hospital wasn’t a long one, but the two miles seemed like twenty to Seth, who tried hard not to squeeze Bailey’s skinned-up hand. Her knuckles had clearly dragged and rolled over the pavement almost as badly as her knees and elbows. She was a hot mess and he’d never loved her more. Actually, if he had to compare the two of them, Seth might be a close second to her as far as hot messes went.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Ooow!” Bailey wanted to punch someone. “Stop that.” She noticed they’d started an IV on the side of her wrist, where they pushed something for pain, or so the nurse said. Maybe the IV was on her wrist because her hand had a bandage on it. Both of them did, she was told because they were skinned from her fall.

  The handsome doctor was about to go on her list. “Okay, sorry, Bailey. Let’s get this shoulder X-rayed first, then we’ll see what’s next.”

  “Where’s Seth?” she managed to ask through gritted teeth. The pain meds were starting to kick in, but not enough.

  “Sheriff’s outside. Should I call him in?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

  Bailey nodded, but that hurt too. She hadn’t realized how much she wanted him by her side until this moment. Needed him. “Sit tight.” The doctor excused himself. “I’ll send Seth in.”

  The door opened and Seth entered. She almost didn’t recognize him. He was pale, with a deep furrow between his brows. He appeared sick. “Bailey, how’s the pain? Are you okay?”

  Then it hit her. He was worried. About her. She’d seen him upset. And worried. But not like this. “I’m okay,” she whispered, but her voice was raspy and low. She attempted to reach up to touch his face—the frown—and winced.

  “What is it? Do you want me to get Nick back in here?” He hovered.

  “N-no. Don’t want you to worry. Stop frowning, okay?” she directed, feeling the pain meds pretty good now, though they hadn’t taken the pain away, only dulled it, and her brain.

  He smiled then. “You’re telling me not to worry about you? Well, Bailey Boone, that’s not gonna happen. I will always worry about you. I have always worried about you, so while you’re lying here all banged up from a fall that’s mostly my fault, I’ll continue to worry about you.”

  “Your fault?” she slurred a little.

  There was a ruckus outside. Loud male voices, or maybe just one. “Don’t tell me to wait. My baby’s in there. I need to lay eyes on her and make sure she’s alright.”

  The door opened and her daddy appeared, his face resembling Seth’s a few minutes ago. He moved to Bailey’s bedside and removed his cap, staring down anxiously at her.

  “I’m okay, Daddy,” she said, hoping she sounded convincing.

  “I heard you took a bad tumble, baby girl.” The paramedics had stabilized Bailey’s shoulder by taping it to a foam board of sorts, best she could tell. What she did know was that it hurt—a lot—despite the pain meds they’d pushed as soon as the IV had gone in.

  “You don’t look okay to me. What are they saying?” he asked Seth.

  “She might have fractured or dislocated her shoulder when she fell. They’re about to take her for an X-ray,” Seth answered.

  The door opened, as if on cue, and a couple of very capable radiology technicians stuck their heads in and asked that Seth and Daddy clear out so they could take Bailey for her X-ray. Both were male. “We’re gonna take great care of you, Ms. Winged Feet. Heard you were in an all-out foot race to smoke the sheriff and win the Jingle Jog. You know, he wins every year, don’t you?” the tech named Star asked. Bailey liked him already.

  Bailey laughed a little. “I’m glad that’s the rumor going around.” But she wasn’t laughing when they bumped the breaks to her portable bed and started to move. The room spun and she thought she might get sick.

  Dave handed her a barf bag and called for a dose of anti-nausea meds, or she assumed that’s was it was. “Can I go with her?” Seth asked them.

  “Oh, you’re sweet, Sheriff, but gotta put the N and O on that. Our first-place girl here will be in capable hands. Be back in a flash,” Star assured Seth. Bailey wished she could have seen his reaction to Star’s uncharacteristic refusal.

  “Bye, baby. Try not to throw up,” Daddy said as she tried not to throw up.

  *

  “What will happen if she’s got a fracture, Nick?” Seth asked the doctor who’d recently settled into their community. About two years ago, Nick had been a big shot trauma surgeon at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta.

  “Possibly surgery if it’s necessary, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Shoulders are tricky, depending where the injury is.”

  “Can you do the surgery here?” Aames asked, st
ill a little pale.

  “Yes. We’re a level III trauma center now, which means we can handle most orthopedic cases. I’ve put a call in to Dr. Palmer, our orthopedic surgeon, for a consult. He’ll have a look at the digital images and come over if the X-ray shows a fracture.” Seth knew that Nick had worked hard to increase the level of care for the hospital since he’d arrived. Ministry pulled from a large geographical area of other small communities in the area, creating a pretty significant need for a well-equipped and staffed medical center.

  They also had a Life Flight team on call in case anyone needed transferring quickly to one of the hospitals in either Huntsville or Birmingham. They’d had a few critical patients involved in serious car accidents whose lives had been saved that way.

  Nick calmly spoke. “Bailey’s going to be fine. She took a fall while running, and I realize it’s scary to think she’s injured and in pain, but in a few weeks, whether or not she has surgery, I predict she will be just fine.”

  She took a fall while running. He was right. This wasn’t a life or death situation, only a scary one because it involved Bailey. “Thanks for putting things in perspective, Nick.”

  “Yeah, she’s my only kiddo, and the thought of her suffering drives me crazy,” Aames said.

  “Y’all excuse me. I’ll go check to make sure the images are sent to Dr. Palmer. I’ll be back with you shortly.”

  The two X-ray techs were laughing with Bailey as they wheeled her back to her temporary room in the ER. Seth figured that was a good sign. He guessed she wasn’t nauseated anymore.

  But the sight of her face, with its bruised left cheekbone, which was just beginning to show, and the skinned area on her forehead with the still-dried blood on it made Seth weak in his knees. Since when had he become so fragile?

  “Darlin’, you’re looking a little worse for wear,” Aames said, noticing her face too, Seth figured.

  The nurse, Evelyn was her name, entered the room. “Gentlemen, we’re gonna clean our girl up, so why don’t y’all grab a cup of coffee in our newly renovated waiting area?” she suggested; except it wasn’t a suggestion, more like a direct order.