by Cathie Linz
“None taken,” Hunter replied, his face pale, the grim line of his lips proclaiming the amount of pain he was in.
“You two just sit tight and I’ll have you in Summerville in the wink of a possum’s eye,” Floyd declared.
Gaylynn knelt on the floor in the back, using both her hands to apply steady pressure to Hunter’s bandaged thigh.
“I’ve always wanted to have a beautiful woman on her knees before me,” Hunter muttered.
“You couldn’t think of an easier way to get attention?” she questioned with only a slight quiver in her voice.
“At least Floyd gets to fulfill a lifelong dream of driving a sheriff’s car.”
“Next time just lend him the keys,” Gaylynn retorted.
“Sure thing, Red.”
He was still shirtless, allowing her to see the shallow rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.
“Are you cold?” she asked in concern. “Do you want your shirt back?”
He shook his head and gripped her shoulder. “Keep it. Don’t want. any of the doctors. eyeing you.”
“Trust me, that won’t be a problem. It’s the nurses eyeing you that worries me,” she teasingly replied.
“Don’t. worry.”
Easier said than done, she thought to herself even as she kept up a steady prattle of conversation, hoping to reassure them both that Hunter would be fine. She didn’t give him time to answer, she just wanted to keep his mind occupied on something other than the burning pain in his thigh. And as she cheerfully babbled away, she was silently praying that he’d be okay, fervently calling on every saint she’d ever heard of and then some.
With sirens blaring and lights flashing, Floyd got them to the hospital in record time. As he’d said, he knew these roads like the back of his hand and the thick glasses he wore apparently did the trick on his “sore” eyes because he had no trouble finding the hospital’s emergency room entrance.
Orderlies came rushing out with a gurney, and Hunter was whisked away, out of sight. They wouldn’t let Gaylynn stay with him, instead waylaying her to fill out insurance forms. She filled out the lines she could. She didn’t know Hunter’s social security number, but she did know his mother’s maiden name. Handing back the forms, she said, “When can I see him? Is he going to be okay?”
“We’ll let you know,” a bland-faced nurse replied.
Floyd sat with Gaylynn as she paced the tiny emergency waiting room. Back and forth she went, as nervous as a cat. And all the while thoughts were dashing through her head—flashes of memories, mental snapshots. Hunter with his hand over her eyes, leading her to his secret waterfall. Making love to her in the grotto. Sitting across from her at the Lonesome Cafe and stealing fries off her plate. Grabbing her around the waist as she peeked into the library’s windows. Playing one-on-one basketball with her. Dueling with Blue. Introducing her to his many cousins. Joking with her even when he was in pain on the way to the hospital.
The accident sliced through her futile fears, making her realize how empty her life would be without him. Everything else was just minor stuff, things that could be worked out. She loved him enough for both of them. And she wasn’t afraid of anything as much as not having him in her life. Nothing was more terrifying than the thought of losing him.
The small waiting room got even more crowded when Boone, Stella and Ma Battle showed up. “I called home and heard about Hunter’s accident,” Boone said. “How’s he doing?”
“We don’t know yet,” Gaylynn replied, her voice tense. “They’re still treating him.”
“Now don’t you worry none,” Ma Battle said, putting a reassuring arm around Gaylynn’s shoulders. “Hunter is as strong as an ox. He’ll be just fine, you’ll see.”
“I hope so,” Gaylynn whispered.
“I know this might not be the proper time and all, but I do have some news for you. Good news about those literacy classes I was talking about having at the library. The Ladies Auxiliary League got their quarterly statement in and we done real good on our investing.”
“That’s nice,” Gaylynn said, only half listening.
“So we voted last night and decided to donate part of our profits to a library fund. We come up with a donation totaling fifteen thousand dollars, give or take a thousand here or there.”
Boone’s and Stella’s eyes looked ready to bulge out. It was their astonishment that gradually sank through to Gaylynn and made her concentrate on what Ma Battle had just told her.
“Fifteen thousand dollars?” Boone repeated.
The older woman nodded. “We done real well on those high-tech investments we chose. And on the health-care stocks, too.”
“You mean you didn’t win a contest or something?” Boone asked.
“No contest, no. For the past six years or so the Ladies Auxiliary League has been investing in stocks. We did the research on the companies and then chose small companies with wonderful growth opportunities that ended up giving us a very high yield and a mighty fine rate of return.”
“I thought you gals was just jawin’ and quiltin’,” Floyd said.
“You thought wrong. We pooled our resources, the money we’d made over the years from our quilts and other things. Land sake’s, we made quite a killing on Wall Street. Course in the early years we reinvested all our profits to make even bigger gains.”
“Well, don’t that beat all.” Floyd sounded stunned.
“Bessie was going to surprise you and tell you tonight,” Ma Battle told Floyd. “But I thought Gaylynn here could use some good news right about now, even though I know there’s no news that’ll be as good as her hearing that Hunter is going to be okay.”
As if on cue, the doctor walked into the waiting room. “You folks here about Hunter Davis?”
“That’s right,” Gaylynn replied. “How is he?”
“He needed a dozen stitches,” the doctor said, “but there was no arterial or tendon damage. He’s a very lucky man. You did a good job getting him in here right away and applying that bandage to the wound.”
“Can I see him now?” Gaylynn asked.
“Sure thing. The nurse will show you where he is.”
Hunter was sitting up in bed, glaring at a nurse who had a needle in one hand. “Get away from me! I’ve been stabbed and prodded enough for one day.” To Gaylynn he said, “They ruined my best pair of jeans. Cut the leg right off!”
“It was either the jeans or your leg—one of the two had to go,” the middle-aged nurse retorted tartly. “Be glad you’re not in worse shape.” With a sniff of disapproval she marched out.
“Yes, be glad,” Gaylynn agreed as she came to his bedside in the emergency room cubicle. “I know I am. How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve been hit by an ax.”
She held on to his hand as if afraid to let it go.
“How soon can you get me out of here?” he demanded.
“Soon. I’ve got something to tell you first.”
“Can’t it wait?”
“No. I. It’s. I love you,” she blurted out. “Now you may aleady know this. I’ve certainly known it for ages. But I need to tell you. I need you to know how important you are to me. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. No, don’t say anything yet. I need to get this off my chest. I’m not going to be ruled by fear anymore. I’m not going to let panic prevent me from going after what I want. And I want you. As my husband.”
She had to draw in a deep breath before rushing on. “Now you know I had a crush on you when I was a teenager, but this is more than that. If I didn’t know that the charmed box didn’t work on you, I would almost have said that it was destiny. Heck, it is destiny, box or no. So the Gypsy love-charmed box was supposed to make me fall in love with the first man I saw and that man wasn’t you—it was some derelict moonshiner walking through the woods by my cabin the first day I arrived. I mean, if you think about it, it’s really lucky for me that the love-charmed box turned out to be was just a fanciful legend,” she said. “Or I’d
have fallen for that guy.”
“There are no moonshiners in those woods, derelict or otherwise,” he said on the verge of laughter.
“Okay, so maybe he was just some strange old man.”
“He wasn’t that old.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he was me. I mean, I was the old guy dressed as a bum. I’d just come off a day’s undercover operation at the county seat. Someone was rolling drunk bums and they needed some extra help so I volunteered since I’d done some undercover work up in Chicago. Anyway, I didn’t change clothes after the job—I just headed straight up to my cabin.”
“But your car. I heard your car drive up later.”
“My car overheated,” he admitted. “I took a shortcut through the woods to get some water for the radiator. While I was at my cabin, I changed into my regular clothes before walking down again.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before? Didn’t you see me looking at you? Couldn’t you tell you’d startled me?”
“I didn’t think you’d seen me. It looked like you were engrossed in something on your lap.”
“The box was on my lap. The one you looked at in my cabin, with all the engraving on it, remember?”
“I remember. It’s must be made out of some kind of special metal because it’s warm to the touch.”
“Only when it’s working its magic. It was you all along! I don’t believe this!”
“Then are you going to have a hard time believing I love you?”
“Not at all,” she replied with a joyful grin. “Obviously, the charmed Gypsy box has worked its magic again!”
“Not the box, you.” He tenderly stroked her cheek with the back of his hand. “You worked your magic. On me. I know you’ve been through a tough time and that I may be taking advantage of your vulnerability-”
“Excuse me,” she interrupted him. “Who was the one who saved your leg if not your very life? Me. The way I see it, you owe me big-time, mister!” she stated, tenderly jabbing her finger against his bare chest. “And don’t think I’m not going to collect.”
“And how do you aim on doing that?”
“Oh, I figure thirty or forty years of marriage should do it,” she replied with a gleam in her eye. “For starters.”
“Sounds like a fair deal to me,” he readily agreed, raising their clasped hands to kiss her fingers. “Starting when?”
“As soon as possible,” she declared.
“It can’t happen soon enough for me,” he said, tugging her down to seal the pledge with a kiss, declaring his love for her more eloquently than mere words could.
Ten days later
“You know, when I made a wish and blew out the candles way back on my sixteenth birthday, this is what I wished for,” Gaylynn murmured as she laid in bed, snuggled against his shoulder while admiring the wide gold wedding band on her finger. “To be your wife.”
“I sure hope it was worth the wait,” Hunter replied, trailing his fingers down her bare arm to entwine them with hers.
“Oh, it definitely was. I’m just glad we decided not to waste any more time and eloped.”
“Are you sorry we came back here for our honeymoon?” he asked.
“Not at all. We’ve got our own honeymoon cabin in the woods here. Your place.”
“No heart-shaped tubs, though.”
“We don’t need any. We’ve got a grotto hidden behind a waterfall. And you’ve got remarkable healing capacities, even the doctors said so.” The wound on his leg had mended so well that he’d quickly been able to dispense with the walking cane he’d had to use for the first few days after the accident.
“Maybe it’s that Gypsy box of yours at work again. There’s still a scar on my leg, though.”
“So I’ll always remember how close I came to losing you. If you’d have been here alone cutting wood.”
“But I wasn’t.”
She nodded and deliberately chased that image out of her head, instead focusing on their surroundings in his bedroom. “You know, it’s very handy that the layout of this place is the same as my brother’s, right down to the windows. So the priscilla curtains will fit on the window. And of course the quilt—”
“Can hang on the wall,” Hunter interrupted her to declare. “No use having something that delicate and fragile on the bed.”
“No? You don’t think I’m delicate and fragile?”
He grinned wolfishly at her. “You have your moments.”
“You’re too kind.”
“And you’re too far away.” Placing his hand on the back of her head, he tenderly urged it back onto his chest.
“You think my mother is ever going to forgive me for eloping?” she wondered, tracing imaginary circles over the muscular curves of his chest.
“Come on, she didn’t sound that upset to me when we talked to her over the phone. And your father claimed he knew this would happen.”
Gaylynn raised her head to look into Hunter’s eyes. “Yeah, well, you do realize that later this summer we’re going to go up there and have a big wedding re ception at my parents’ house with all my relatives there toasting us with palinka.”
“And we’ll have to have a bash down here with all my cousins,” he added. “Floyd can play his fiddle. My folks will fly in from Florida.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have told them about eloping.
“And have them think we’re just living in sin? No way. Your father might have put a Gypsy curse on me.”
“Listen, you’ve already had a Gypsy curse put on you,” she told him with a saucy smile. “You were destined to find love ‘where you looked for it.’“
“Don’t forget the ‘and live happily ever after’ part,” he reminded her, running his fingertip down her adorable nose.
“You’ve been reading my folk stories again,” she murmured against his warm lips.
“Mrnm.” He inched his way around her mouth, gliding his tongue over every curve. “But this is fact, not fiction.”
“Being this happy should be against the law.”
“You’re married to the law in this town, so I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
Gaylynn knew she didn’t have anything to worry about. She’d found true love in the heart of the one man in all the world for her. She’d also found a new life as Lonesome Gap’s much-needed and much appreciated librarian. She’d experienced the magic, and now it was time to fulfill the rest of the family legend by sending the love-charmed box on to her brother, Dylan. He won’t know what hit him, was Gaylynn’s last thought before she focused all her attention on her new husband.
* * * * *
The box hasn’t finished working its magic yet.
There’s one more Janos to find love. See how
Dylan gets roped and wed in Book Three of
THREE WEDDINGS AND A GIFT—ABBIE AND THE COWBOY—
coming in November 1996
from Silhouette Desire!
eISBN 978-14592-7904-9
SEDUCING HUNTER
Copyright © 1996 by Cathie L.Baumgardner
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