by Lisa Jackson
“He should probably get it, at least partial,” Matt allowed.
“Maybe, maybe not. We don’t know a thing about this guy.”
Slade rolled his eyes and tossed the remains of his coffee into the sink. “For the love of Mike, Thorne, don’t you trust anyone?”
“Nope.”
“If Randi chose this guy, he might be all right,” Matt conceded.
“So then where is he? Assuming he knows that she was pregnant, why the hell hasn’t he appeared?” The same old questions that had been plaguing Thorne ever since learning of his sister’s accident gnawed at him. “If he’s such a peach of a guy, why isn’t he with her?”
“Maybe she doesn’t want him.” Slade lifted a shoulder. “It happens.”
“Any way around it, we’ll need to see about our rights, the baby’s rights, Randi’s rights and—”
“And the father’s rights.” Matt pointed out before taking a long swallow of coffee. “Okay, I’ve got to run into town and go to the feed store. While I’m there I’ll pick up some supplies and hit the grocery store for a few things. When I get back, I’ll call Larry.”
Slade reached into his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. “I’ll ride into town with you,” he said to Matt. “I want to talk to the sheriff’s department, find out what they know about Randi’s accident.”
“Good idea,” Thorne agreed. “I’ve called but haven’t heard back.”
“Figures. Look, I’ve left a message with Striker, but I’ll phone him again,” Slade promised, shaking out a cigarette and jabbing the filter tip into the corner of his mouth. “What’s your game plan?”
“I’m setting up my office in the den, already scheduled equipment delivery and then I’m going to run into town myself. Visit Randi and the baby.” He didn’t add that he intended to see Nicole again.
“Yeah. I figured we’d stop by the hospital, too,” Matt allowed. “If you get any calls from Mike Kavanaugh, tell him I’ll call him back.”
“Who’s Kavanaugh?” Thorne asked.
“My neighbor. He’s looking after my spread while I’m here.”
Slade crumpled his empty coffee cup and threw it into the trash. “How long will he take care of it?”
Matt shrugged into his jacket and squared his hat on his head. “As long as it takes.” He locked gazes with his brothers. “Randi and the baby come first.”
* * *
Nicole ground the gears of the rental car and swore under her breath. She wheeled into the parking lot of the hospital and told herself to trust that the mechanics looking at the SUV could find the problem, get the part, fix whatever was wrong, and return it to her soon, without it costing an arm and a leg.
She had half an hour before she was actually on duty and planned to use the time to check on Randi McCafferty and the baby before taking over in the ER.
Setting the emergency brake, she switched off the rental, grabbed her briefcase and told herself that her interest in Randi and the baby was just common courtesy and professional concern, that oftentimes she looked in on patients once they’d been moved from the ER. This wasn’t about Thorne. No way. The fact that he was related to Randi was incidental.
She argued with herself all the way through the physicians’ entrance and in the elevator to her office.
“Something wrong?” a nurse she’d known since she’d arrived at St. James asked as she passed the nurses’ station in the west wing.
“What?”
“You look worried. Are the twins okay?”
“Yes, I mean Molly has a case of the sniffles, but nothing a little TLC and a couple of Disney movies won’t cure. I guess I was just thinking.”
“Well, smile a little when you think,” the nurse said with a wink.
“I’ll try.”
She made her way to the Intensive Care Unit, where she looked at Randi’s chart. “Any change?” she asked.
“Not much,” Betty, the ICU nurse, said with a shake of perfectly coiffed red curls. “Still comatose. Unresponsive, but hanging in there. How’s the baby?”
“Not good,” Nicole admitted as she glanced into Betty’s concerned gaze. “I’m on my way to check on him now.”
Betty’s lips folded in on themselves. The gold cross suspended from her neck winked against her skin. “A shame,” she said.
“Where there’s life, there’s hope.” Nicole glanced over Randi’s chart, then headed down to Neonatal Pediatrics where little J.R., as Thorne called him, was struggling for his life. As she stared at the tiny baby, hooked up to tubes and monitors, her heart ached. She remembered the birth of her own twins, the elation of seeing each little girl for the first time, the feeling of relief that they were both so perfect and healthy. She’d been jubilant and even Paul, at that time, had seemed happy. He’d looked at her with tears in his eyes and told her, “They’re beautiful, Nicole. As beautiful as their mother.”
His kind words still haunted her. Were they the last he’d ever spoken to her? Surely not. There had to have been a few more compliments and tender glances before the toll of two high-powered jobs and rambunctious daughters had robbed the marriage of whatever gel had bound it together. Naively Nicole had believed that children would bring Paul and her closer together—of course she’d been wrong. Bitterly so.
“Has Dr. Arnold been in today?” she asked the nurse on duty.
“Twice.”
“Good.” Come on, J.R., she thought watching the tiny fingers curl into fists. Fight. You can do it!
But the baby looked so frail, so small and his vital signs hadn’t improved.
“Has the family been in?”
“All three uncles at one time or another.”
Nicole had suspected as much. If anything, the McCafferty brothers seemed determined to see that their sister and her son improved, if only by their sheer, collective will. If only it was that easy. “I’ll be back later,” she said and walked into the hallway, nearly bumping into Thorne in the process. She glanced up to his worried gray eyes and she felt her heart turn over for him as he so obviously loved this little baby.
“How’s he doing?”
“The same,” she said, turning to look through the glass at the baby. “I thought you’d already been in.”
“Couldn’t stay away,” he said, then cleared his throat. “I had business in town and thought I’d stop by again.” He stared at the tiny baby and for an instant Nicole wondered what it would have been like if she and Thorne had had a child together. If things had turned out differently, would they have become parents? Bittersweet were the thoughts, for certainly if she and Thorne had both stayed in Grand Hope, she wouldn’t have become a doctor nor would she have her own precious daughters.
“J.R.’s a fighter,” she said, touching the back of Thorne’s hand. “Try not to worry.”
One side of his mouth lifted in a cynical smile. “That seems to be impossible.”
“Anything’s possible, Thorne,” she said and wondered why she felt compelled to comfort him. He turned his hand around and clasped her fingers in his.
“Do you really believe that?”
“With all my heart.” Their gazes locked and she thought she might drop right through the floor. The hospital seemed to recede in a fine mist and she felt as if she and he were alone in the universe. Oh, God, this was so wrong....
Her pager buzzed and she dropped his hand. Digging in her pocket, feeling heat wash up her neck, she found the beeper and read the message. “I’ve got to run.” She looked up at him again. “Have faith, Thorne. J.R. will pull through.” Why she’d said something she couldn’t possibly know as truth, she didn’t understand, but she turned quickly on her heel and hurried to the emergency room where she was due to start her shift.
She was immediately accosted by an admitting nurse. “When it rains it pours. Been quiet here for hours, but now we’re swamped. You can start with room three. We’ve got a seven-year-old girl who fell off her horse. Looks like she might have broken her wrist.”
> “On my way.”
“After that, there’s a teenager with a sinus infection, and a toddler with a pea wedged up her nose. An RN tried to help, but the mother wants a doctor to look at it.” The nurse rolled her eyes. “New mother. This is her first.”
“Reassure her that the nurse can handle the extraction and I’ll check it out after I’m done with the others.”
“Will do—uh-oh.” The nurse frowned as she looked over Nicole’s shoulders.
“What?”
“Bad news. It’s the press. They’ve been nosing around here ever since the McCafferty accident, but I thought it would die down by now.” From the corner of her eye Nicole saw a van for a local news station roll to a stop just outside the windows of the waiting room. “Someone must’ve gotten wind that the baby was in distress.”
“Great.”
The nurse’s mouth curved into a pained expression. “It doesn’t take much in Grand Hope to cause a stir, does it?”
“Never has,” Nicole said. The McCafferty family had always been a subject of interest to the townspeople as John Randall had been a flamboyant, once rich man who had actually run for local politics. His public and private life had been the subject of more than one wagging tongue—and his sons had been wild as teenagers, always getting into trouble; but, as the town had grown and the McCafferty children had become adults and spread like seeds in the wind, they had garnered less interest.
“I’d better go see what’s up,” the nurse said.
Nicole had more important things to do than worry about the press. She pulled the chart of the girl with the broken wrist from the door, scanned the information and, managing a smile, forced all thoughts of Thorne’s family from her mind as she spied a frightened blonde girl with a tearstained face sitting on the edge of the examining table. Dirt and grass stains were ground into her bib overalls and her mother, a petite woman with worried eyes behind thick glasses stood as Nicole entered.
“You’re Sally,” Nicole said to the girl who nodded slowly.
“Yes, yes. And I’m her mother. Leslie Biggs. She was riding her horse and fell off just as they got back to the barn. I was on the porch when I saw it, heard her cry....” The mother’s voice, gruff and soft, fell away.
“I fell off a horse when I was about your age,” Nicole told her new patient.
“Did you?” The girl sniffed, her eyes rounded, but there was a hint of suspicion in her words, as if she expected the doctor to try to cajole her into a good mood.
“Yeah, but I was lucky, I didn’t hurt anything except my pride. I was showing off for a boy, thought I could make my pony jump over a pile of firewood and he balked. Stopped dead short. I kept going. Landed in a cow pie.” She sent the mother a quick glance. “I think a basic law of physics was involved.”
“Ick.” The new patient giggled then cried out as Nicole gingerly touched her swollen arm.
“Yep. I never landed a date with Teddy Crenshaw after that. Nope. In fact, he told the story all over school.”
“What a creep.”
“I thought so. Talk about embarrassing. Now, let’s see what we’ve got here. Looks like we’re going to need some X rays…”
* * *
Dead tired, Nicole, finished with her shift, rounded the corner to her office and spied Thorne, big as life, leaning one broad shoulder against the frame of her locked door. He was less intimidating in casual slacks and a sweater, a leather coat unzipped and gaping open.
She nearly missed a step and her stupid heart fluttered as she caught the intensity of his silvery gaze. Lord, what was it about the man that always put her on edge? The plain truth of the matter was that the man bothered her. He always had. He reminded her of a runaway train on a downhill track, a locomotive that gathered speed to race headlong toward his destination. “You work here now?” she joked.
“Seems like it.”
“Seriously, have you been here the whole time?”
“No.” He flashed her the remnant of a smile. “Believe it or not, I do have a life of my own. I came back looking for you.”
“For me?” She didn’t know whether to be flattered or wary. “So you just waited at my office? How’d you know I’d be showing up here? Sometimes I take off directly from the ER.”
“Lucky guess.”
She arched an eyebrow as she unlocked her door. “Somehow I don’t think you ever rely on luck.”
“So I called.”
“Mmm.” The door opened and she stepped inside. He was right behind her. “I assume you’ve seen your sister and the baby again.”
“Yep.”
“Any change?”
“Not that anyone’s saying.”
“I’ve got a call in to Dr. Arnold.”
“So do I.”
Rounding her desk, she slid into her chair and said, “Let me check my messages.” Thorne waited, standing in the doorway and she waved him inside as she listened to several quick recordings—one from the mechanic. They’d located a part and would start working on the SUV as soon as it arrived. The second call was from Jenny saying she was taking the twins to the park, two more were from specialists she’d consulted with and finally a quick message from Dr. Arnold, giving her an update. She called him back, got his machine again and left another message.
Hanging up, she shrugged. “Nothing. The baby’s stable. His condition hasn’t worsened and Dr. Arnold is guardedly optimistic.” She noticed Thorne’s eyebrows slam together, saw his jaw set in frustration.
“There must be something more you can do.”
She bristled slightly. “You know that Dr. Arnold’s in contact with other physicians and pediatric units across the country—linked up by computer.”
“Maybe it’s not enough.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“You’re the doctor.”
“Then trust me. Trust Dr. Arnold.”
“I guess I don’t have much choice,” he admitted, rubbing his jaw and scowling.
“There are always choices, Thorne. Just not good ones. Moving the baby to another hospital would be a big mistake.”
“Like I said, no other choices.”
Feeling as if he were questioning the integrity of the hospital, she wanted to argue, but she didn’t. He was upset, understandably so. A man who was used to being in charge, in control of every facet of his life, reduced to the mere mortal status.
“Have a little faith,” she told him.
If only he could. As Thorne gazed into Nicole’s amber eyes, he felt only a slight case of well-being. But he told himself not to be seduced into a lull, just because he was starting to care for this woman. He couldn’t afford to become complacent, not while his sister was battling for her life and the baby was struggling for his. There had to be something more that he could do. “I’ll try,” he said and caught a shadow of a smile tug at the corners of her lips.
For a second he thought of the kiss they’d shared so recently, the intimate linking of their hands this afternoon and how it had felt years ago, to make sweet, sensuous love to her. The turn of his thoughts was insane, here in this sterile office, with the sounds of the hospital vibrating behind him, and yet he couldn’t keep his mind from straying to a simpler, more innocent time when he and Nicole had made love in the long hay ready to be cut, while the Montana sun had shone on two naked bodies glistening with sweat, flushed from the heat of recent lovemaking and supple with youth. He’d kissed her then and she, giggling, had struggled to her feet, dashed through the waist-high grass and down a soft slope to the creek where she’d splashed through the shallow water and he, chasing after her, had caught her before she’d scrambled up the opposite bank. He’d kissed her again, the cool water swirling and eddying around her knees and then he’d cradled her body, drawn her down and made love to her in the creek, where the sunlight pierced the branches of aspen and pine to sparkle on the clear surface.
Finches and tanagers had fluttered in branches, singing over the babble of the creek and butterflie
s and water skippers had joined a few bees hovering near the water, but all Thorne really remembered was the silky feel of Nicole’s skin against his, the play of her muscles and the taste of her mouth as she kissed him wildly.
Now, staring at her he felt those same male stirrings that had been forever with him when he was near her. No longer a tanned girl running naked through a country field, she was a woman, a doctor dressed in a lab coat, seated in an office that boasted of the professional woman she’d become.
Surrounded by tomes of medical information, a sleek computer, certificates and degrees decorating the walls, Nicole Stevenson had come a long way since she’d been Nikki Sanders, a smart, pretty high school girl with big dreams and little else. As if she, too, in that split second remembered their reckless, jubilant lovemaking, she cleared her throat. “Well, good, then that’s that.”
“When are you finished here?”
“Just about done,” she admitted, and straightened a few files that were scattered over her desk. A forgotten, half-drunk cup of coffee, stained with peach-colored smudges from her lipstick sat unattended near her computer. On a small bookcase, along with medical books, were several picture frames that showed off photos of her daughters smiling and bright-eyed as they posed for the camera.
“So those are your daughters,” he guessed, surveying the snapshots of the sprites.
She nodded, her eyes glowing with parental pride. “Molly and Mindy and yes, I can tell them apart.”
He laughed. “But no one else can.”
“Just their father,” she admitted and seemed suddenly uncomfortable. “Or at least he could at one time. It’s been a while since he spent much time with them.”
“Why?”
She hesitated, sighed and picked up one of the framed photos. “Lots of reasons. Time. Distance. Space…but I’d say the most important was disinterest. Don’t quote me, though, I’m just the ex-wife who carries a grudge.” She set the picture back on the bookcase, ran her finger over the surface as if checking for dust and straightened. “But I’m sure you didn’t come here to hear me complain about my divorce.”
“Actually I stopped by to see if you needed a ride. Your rig’s not in the lot.”