The Bride Wore Red Boots

by Lizbeth Selvig

  “Oh shut up,” he retorted. “I shouldn’t have considered the cow. I knew that before we went after it. But we have no recourse about anything, do we?”

  “We’ll find one,” Gabriel said quietly from the side. “But for what it’s worth, I understand.”

  Mia studied him. Two months ago she’d found the man an arrogant, self-serving, by-the-book stick-in-the-mud. How many times had she asked him for access to Joely’s insurance information, her eligibility for services, about the information he’d gotten in conversations with others, and he’d refused? Now here he was herding these damaged men like the foster father he’d compared himself to, helping them get out of hot water they almost deserved to face, and making it clear he understood why grown men broke rules in certain cases.

  She tried to break rules, too, with the colleagues on her teams, but clearly none of them—as her failed job interview proved—would follow her to trouble and back like this group followed Gabe Harrison. She was just the bitchy female doctor. Not tough. Not focused. Just bitchy.

  And bitchy didn’t win jobs.

  The weariness that had left her temporarily during the distracting examination settled back over her as the men broke away for their respective homes. She prescribed ibuprofen for Brewster’s pain, told him in no uncertain terms what signs and symptoms should send him to the emergency room, and accepted his now-heartfelt thanks without hesitation.

  “Lie if you feel you need to, but don’t stay away from the hospital if something changes.” She issued the warning with more gentleness now.

  “You found a cool one, G,” he said as he hobbled out the door flanked by Gabriel and Finney.

  “I guess I did.” Gabe winked at her. “I’ll be right back.”

  Alone in his apartment, Mia took her first chance to really look around. With the lights up and the men gone, the living room no longer looked dark or macabre. It was, in fact, nicely appointed with rich leather furniture, pale blue walls, thick beige carpeting and plenty of pictures and books. She wandered to an open-shelved bookcase and studied the framed snapshots on each shelf. She could surmise that some contained family members and others army buddies, but one image stood out. A boy with Middle-Eastern features and two piercing brown eyes, smiled from four or five photos. In one he wore an Arizona Diamondbacks baseball cap and held a flat length of wood on his shoulder like a bat.

  “I’m back.”

  She turned in place and met the genuine warmth of Gabe’s smile. For the first time she let the phenomenal good looks he bore so effortlessly sink in. She’d never let anything, from his thick brown hair to his classically angled cheeks to his sexy beard stubble, penetrate more than surface deep. But once she gave herself permission to ogle, his hot, hot . . . oh-so-hot face, voice, hands, and body, her exhausted female hormones thanked her with liquid hot sluices of pleasure that dove for all her feminine places.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, dreamily. “I’m so tired I could be standing on an empty corner hallucinating you. But I’ve decided it’s okay. I don’t think we dislike each other for the moment.”

  His laughter rolled, easy and comforting. “You are tired.”

  “Why, am I wrong? You dislike me?”

  “Lord, no. You saved my ass, Dr. Crockett. I am so in like with you. For the moment, of course.”

  “For reasons I will not bore you with, it seems I totally needed weird tonight. And believe me, this fit the bill. I don’t normally do weird.”

  “You do it well.”

  “I—” She frowned and tried to dissect the compliment, but it didn’t make any sense. “How can I do it well if I don’t do it?” She giggled.

  “It’s time to get you back,” he said. “I think jetlag has hijacked you.”

  “Wait. One thing.” She turned back to the shelves and pointed to the picture of the boy. “Who is this?”

  He couldn’t have shuttered up faster if he’d been planning for a hurricane. Immediately the warm roll to his deep voice cooled and tightened. “Why?”

  “He’s cute.” And he made her homesick—his deep brown skin reminding her of Rory. “And he’s here five times. I just wondered.”

  “He’s nobody. A kid who lived near the Green Zone in Baghdad. He reminded me while I was there that the war was always about people. That’s all.”

  It wasn’t all. Nobody got that upset over a random child. But she was too tired to pursue the question. “Ahh. Well, I’m sure he’s a great kid. Reminds me of a boy I know.”

  “Kids remind us of kids,” he said. “Nothing magical about that.”

  “That’s a little jaded.”

  “Yup.”

  He offered no more, but when she moved away from the shelf and the pictures he relaxed, and once they left the apartment, his humor slowly returned.

  “I can’t believe how well you handled Brewster,” he said, as they settled into his car for the drive back to the hospital. “He’s a good man, but he never lets anyone see it. It was like you spoke his language.”

  “The language of no BS. Most people don’t like that about me,” she admitted. “I’m supposed to learn to blow smoke up peoples’ butts even when they’re being idiotic.”

  “In the medical world, especially, there’s a fine art to smoke-blowing. It’s not easy to give people bad news and make them think they’re happy about it.”

  “Games.” She sighed. “I thought I’d learned very early on in life that if I had something to get done or a goal I wanted to meet, there was no time for game-playing and no substitute for honesty and hard work. What good does it do to cater to egos or lie?”

  “Like I said. A fine art.”

  When they’d pulled onto the highway that connected Wolf Paw Pass with Jackson to the north and the VA Hospital and Paradise Ranch to the south, Mia took out her phone and checked it for the first time since leaving the hospital ninety minutes earlier.

  “Ach, I missed a message from my mother.”

  “I’m so sorry. Everything okay?”

  She dialed the voice mail number and listened with trepidation until the reason for the call became clear.

  “Everything’s fine,” she said. “Joely’s awake and a little restless, so Mom wants to stay at the hospital. I’m supposed to pick up the car and take it home. Cole will come get her when she’s ready to leave.

  “It’s silly to strand her,” Gabriel replied. “Tell her I’ll take you home, and she’ll have her car whenever she wants it.”

  “I can’t ask you . . . ”

  “You do remember the huge favor you just performed for me, right? This is nothing.”

  “Are you sure? It adds half an hour each way.” And yet, she thought, she’d get to spend an extra half hour with him.

  “Don’t ask again.” He admonished her. “Do you need to stop by the hospital first?”

  “I’d like to pick up my suitcase from the car. But that adds another—”

  He stopped her with a tsking sound favored by grandmothers around the world. “What did I tell you? Close your eyes, put your head back, and enjoy the ride. I’ll have you and your suitcase home in no time.”

  She hesitated only a moment then did exactly as she’d been told. For a few blissful moments she was in a fairy tale, being whisked ever further from the person she really was. She didn’t recognize this woman who wasn’t annoyed by being ordered around, however kindly the orders were intended. She tried to figure out if Gabe was acting differently this visit, or if she was just so numb from the long, long day that she could ignore him.

  Her body relaxed into the Jeep’s comfortable bucket seat but then, rather than drift further into the sweet dream, her real-life memories returned. Slowly they grew and expanded, gobbling up the pleasant fantasy existence. By the time they reached her mother’s car in the hospital parking lot, she moved like a robot and retrieved her suitcase in silence.

  Gabriel didn’t fill that silence with questions or even concerns. He let her st
ay quiet and uncommunicative. For the first time since her dreadful failure of a conversation with Mason Thomas she allowed his words to play through her head. “A leadership position requires more than superior surgical skills . . . You haven’t gotten high marks on getting along with your fellow docs . . . This is just a postponement so you can take some more time to work on the floor and perfect your skills . . . It’s an area you need some more time to develop.”

  For the first time since Mason had handed her a tissue in his office, tears stung behind her closed eyes. She hadn’t failed at anything she’d put her mind to doing since she’d lost the spelling bee to Meg McPherson in seventh grade. It was like her father had always told her—“Your brain wasn’t built for failure, Amelia. You come from stock that knows how to make success happen.”

  She did know how to make it happen—her resume was proof positive. And the rub was, this failure wasn’t her failure—it was based on a difference of philosophy: What was more important, patient care or managing inflated, and therefore fragile, egos? Inflated egos needed to be deflated—she still believed that. And yet, she was the one who’d had her dream skewered with back-stabbing scalpels.

  “Hey. You okay?”

  Gabriel’s voice finally interrupted the silence, and as she surfaced from her trance, she heard the little squeak of unhappiness she’d let slip. Hastily she straightened in the seat and blinked her eyes to clear them.

  “I’m fine,” she said, too quickly. “I’m awfully tired. Must be half-dreaming.”

  “You never said what changed in your schedule to allow your trip. You must have had to do some fancy scrambling.”

  She supposed she had, since she’d taken only eighteen hours to set everything in order. Mason had casually reassigned and rescheduled her surgeries and smoothed the way for four weeks off. It was another prick to her ego that he’d accomplished it so easily. She hadn’t told a soul.

  “A change in the schedule,” she said, dismissing his query.

  “Lucky for us.”

  Her emotions finally cycled around to annoyance. What she wanted to do was tell him to drive, go back to saying nothing, and stop trying to schmooze her. Instead she was the one who said nothing as they continued toward Paradise Ranch.

  The scenery would normally have been obscured by the dark, but tonight the landscape, almost as far as she could see into the rolling hills that led toward the Teton mountain range, shone with silver-edged shadows and the blue-white light of a full moon. Harper, the painter, would have been able to capture the light perfectly on a canvas, but Mia could only stare mesmerized as the moonlight turned rugged Wyoming hills into ethereal beauties.

  The movement in the distance happened so subtly Mia dismissed it at first as just more distant shadows. But then, yards and yards away, several animal shapes broke from a single dark mass, and Mia caught her breath.

  “It can’t be,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “Pull over! At the overlook just ahead. Would you? Please?”

  She had to be making it up. She craned her neck as Gabriel swung the yellow Jeep off the road and aimed its nose out over the rolling valley.

  “What are we looking at?”

  “Turn your lights off,” she said, still whispering, although even if she was right, whispering didn’t make a bit of difference. “Straight ahead. Past that knoll.”

  She pointed, leaning left and peering through the windshield. Gabe leaned right so he could follow the line of her finger. His head bumped softly against hers.

  “Sorry.”

  “S’okay.” She watched a moment more and then the shapes defined themselves. One, two three, four . . . she counted to nine. “There!”

  “Are those?”

  “Mustangs!”

  Every dour, angry thought fled as the equine shapes fanned out. Running! Her heart thrummed like rain on a rooftop, and her breath quickened until she officially grew light-headed. She hadn’t seen mustangs in fifteen years. She’d been gone, of course, but in addition, nowadays the horses stayed north nearer the Montana border or south in the Buttes. Cattle ranchers had made sure they’d been driven off of grazing lands, her own father chief among the mustang detractors. The sight of this small band was like a gift of miraculous healing—to the land, to her sore heart.

  “I’ve never seen wild horses,” he said.

  “So rare around here.” Her voice continued to emerge in a reverent whisper. Tears formed again, but this time they had nothing to do with failure. This welcome home was simply overwhelming.

  “This is the damnedest thing.”

  “I know.”

  “No. I mean, weird. I’ve never thought about mustangs in my life, and it was just the other day I happened upon your sister Joely watching a documentary about something she called a Mustang Makeover. She was almost depressed about these horses, but this time, with you, it might as well be a heard of unicorns.”

  She turned to find his nose just inches from hers. The stubble of his beard was so close she could count the stiff, sexy hairs even in the dim interior of the Jeep. She swallowed, forgetting the horses for a long, dry-mouthed second. He smiled. “You didn’t strike me as a unicorns and rainbows kind of girl,” he said.

  His breath was sweet and hot, and he smelled of warm skin and his wool coat. She forced a slow breath and turned to look back out the window. “Every girl turns into a unicorns and rainbow believer when wild mustangs show up.”

  The herd had stopped running and now stood about two hundred yards distant, some grazing, some with heads up like statues gazing in their direction.

  “What does it mean that they’re here?”

  “They’ve wandered from their sanctuary and nobody has rounded them up yet.”

  “Someone will round them up?”

  “Ranchers don’t like them. They compete for grazing space with cattle.”

  “Really? There are, what, a dozen of them? How can that hurt?”

  His words elicited a smile. “In my opinion, exactly. Especially nowadays. A few generations ago there were a lot more horses and the land was more stressed. It’s an old fight.”

  “Aren’t they protected?”

  “To a certain extent. The herds are culled and their numbers controlled with yearly roundups and drives. You can adopt a mustang from the Bureau of Land Management. That’s how a lot of people get horses to train for the makeovers. My sisters and I used to get one or two and turn them into cow ponies.”

  “Joely said you were a good horse trainer.”

  “I guess I was.” She thought back to the days when she’d been the one to guide Joely, the bleeding heart, into toughness and Harper, the dreamer into focus. “I was the practical one. I didn’t care how pretty the horse was or how big. I watched its gaits and its heart.”

  “Ever sensible.”

  “We never won a makeover competition, but we came close every year. Consistency—that’s what my dad said we were after.”

  “Could you still do it?”

  She dared to turn back to him. His eyes twinkled, but his question was sincere.

  “Other than the fact that I don’t have a hundred days in a row to work on a horse, yeah. I think I could.”

  “Cool.”

  The simple word unattached to any expectation or questions, suffused with warmth. It was cool. She’d once had a life filled with strange, cool things.

  “Can we just watch them a little while?” She leaned forward and crossed her arms on the dashboard. “They’ll disappear tonight and chances of seeing them again are small. I’m sure it’s just a transient band.” She looked at him again. “I mean, if you can. I’m keeping you, sorry.”

  “No. You’re not. It’s fine. Hang on.”

  He left the Jeep and went to the back of the vehicle. A moment later he opened her door, two large, plaid wool blankets in his arms. “This Jeep has a tough old hood,” he said “Let’s get up off the ground and lose the reflections of the windshield.”

  S
he wasn’t quite sure how to react. He’d switched gears so many times tonight, this was just one of many quick changes in attitude, aspect, and activity he’d performed. She exited the car and followed two steps to stand beside the front wheel.

  “Step on the running board and then on top of the tire. Let me know if you need a boost.”

  “I’ve got it,” she said in a low voice, and looked over her shoulder at him as she climbed the side of his Jeep.

  He grinned. “I’m gonna hand it to you, Doc. You’ve been a pretty great sport tonight. Considering how tired you must be, another little adventure like this is a fun surprise. Meet you up top.”

  She blinked and he was gone. Mere seconds later he was kneeling on the hood and extending his hand. “Oh my gosh,” she said. “Did you just fly up there?”

  “Yup. C’mon.”

  Their palms met, and his thumb hooked around hers, solidifying his grasp. With smooth, easy power, he helped her over the fender, and she sat nimbly, letting him release her hand only after he sat as well. Deftly he folded one of his blankets lengthwise and laid it against the junction of the windshield and the hood, covering the wipers. The second one he shook out and spread across their legs.

  “This’ll give us a few extra minutes out here in the cold,” he said.

  “So prepared,” she teased.

  “You grew up in these mountains. You know what the weather is like around here. I’ve learned the hard way over six years to be prepared.”

  She was glad for her heavy jacket, which, although not a full-fledged parka, had kept her plenty warm through the past two New York City winters. The Wyoming night was still, but a bite in the November air nipped her cheeks and had her pulling the edge of the blanket up to her chin. The hood beneath her seat radiated warmth from the engine. When she leaned gingerly back against the windshield Gabriel did the same, and his arm aligned with her as they snuggled, accidentally but pleasurably, together adding more warmth to the chilly night.

  “They’re still watching us,” he whispered.

  She focused into the platinum-etched night and found the herd. Five or six horses still faced the Jeep and its humans, and the others grazed peacefully. Somehow, climbing around and clattering on the car hadn’t spooked the little band.