“Now, about your father. Any idea where I can find him?” Ronni asked.
“Probably in the lodge,” Bryan said with a shrug, but beneath his nonchalance and the pain that caused his skin to be the color of chalk, there was hint of guilt in his eyes as he avoided looking directly at her. “I, uh, was supposed to meet him.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll find him.”
The nurse on duty, Linda Knowlton, was a friend of Veronica’s. With a “Well, what have we got here?” she wheeled Bryan through a maze of stainless-steel equipment, desks and occupied beds to an area behind a heavy door where an X-ray machine was located.
Once Bryan was out of sight, Veronica used the phone mounted on a wall near a cupboard containing first-aid equipment and called the information desk. She asked the receptionist to try to find a male skier by the name of Travis Keegan who might or might not be in the lodge. If located, Travis was to be sent to the clinic to pick up his son, who, though injured, wasn’t in any medical danger.
Now all they could do was wait for the father to come looking for his missing boy.
After a few minutes with Linda in the X-ray room, Bryan was lying on one of a series of hospital beds that were crammed against one concrete wall of the small clinic. His boot was off, his leg in a brace. “Nothing’s broken,” Dr. Fletcher told his patient. “You were lucky this time.”
“Don’t feel lucky.”
Fletcher chuckled. “Well, no, I imagine not.”
Veronica felt a measure of relief for Bryan though she couldn’t help remembering the little girl that had been rushed away by ambulance. The mountain had a way of taking its toll on young and old alike.
Unforgiving. Savage.
Gritting her teeth, she noticed the other patients. One woman in her sixties had twisted her ankle and seemed to think it was a snowboarder’s fault for cutting her off and causing her to fall. “They shouldn’t be allowed on the mountain,” she asserted. “Dangerous, reckless wild kids who have no place on ski runs! I’ve been skiing for forty years and never seen the like. Rude. That’s what they are. Should be barred!”
“Hey, I board and it’s safer than skis,” a teenage boy with long bleached hair and a splint on one arm chimed in.
A little girl wearing a thumb splint was waiting for her parents and a man in his twenties was being given pain relievers. His right arm was in a sling and the preliminary diagnosis was that his elbow was broken. An ambulance had already been called. “When’s it gonna get here?” he demanded as Bryan stared at the ceiling.
There was something about the boy that tugged on Veronica’s heart strings. Beneath his macho I-don’t-give-a-damn attitude was a scared little kid. She could read it in his eyes whenever he glanced in her direction.
“Look, I’ve been here for half an hour,” the twenty-year-old complained.
“The ambulance will be here soon,” Fletcher remarked without looking up from the chart on which he was scribbling.
“I’m dying here.”
“I don’t think so.”
“But there was already a vehicle.”
“Which took away a little girl who was in worse shape than you,” Fletcher snapped. “This isn’t a cafeteria line where it’s first come first served. Everything here is done by priority—the more serious the injury, the faster you get medical attention.”
The patient rolled his eyes. “I’ll never get out of here.”
The nurse, Linda, a blond woman with a patient smile, said, “I know it feels like it, but it will be just—”
The doors burst open and two attendants stormed into the room. With a cold rush of air and the smell of exhaust was a glimpse of an ambulance, lights spinning eerily as it idled next to the clinic. “Here you go,” Linda added, and without the least bit of wasted motion, the two attendants, dressed in ski coats and caps, hustled their charge into a wheelchair and out the door. Within seconds they were gone.
“Thank God,” Linda muttered.
“So how’re you doing?” Veronica asked Bryan.
“Fine,” he mumbled and wouldn’t look in her direction.
“You up here for the day?”
His gaze flattened as if he was bored. She could hear the words, What’s it to ya, lady? Buzz off! though he hadn’t uttered a sound.
“Well, good luck,” she said. It was four o’clock and she was officially off duty. She could pick up Amy from the Snow Bunny area where the little girl had taken toddler ski lessons earlier. After the group lesson, Amy was fed lunch, then encouraged to nap on one of the cots placed around the play area. She spent what was left of the afternoon in a special day-care area of the lodge where she played with kids her age under supervised care.
Ronni had just started for the double doors when they flew open and banged against the wall. A tall man, mid-thirties from the looks of him, with harsh, chiseled features and dark hair dusted with snow, strode into the room as if he owned it. His mouth was turned down at the corners, his gray eyes dark with worry, his thick, unruly eyebrows slammed together in concern. “I’m looking for—” He stopped suddenly when he saw Bryan lying on one of the beds. “Thank God,” he said, relief softening the hard angles of his face. His gloved hands opened and clenched in frustration. “Hell, Bryan, you gave me the scare of my life. I thought you might be dead or unconscious somewhere.”
“May as well be,” the boy responded. He glanced sullenly around the room, disdain radiating from him. “This place is about as lame as it gets.”
“But you’re okay?”
“He’ll walk again.” Syd extended his hand. “I’m Dr. Fletcher—”
The phone rang shrilly.
Linda answered it and waved to Fletcher. One hand over the receiver, she said, “It’s Dr. Crenshaw. He wants information on the little girl who came in this morning with the injured spleen. Her name was—” She searched for a chart.
“Elissa, I remember. Excuse me for a second.” Dr. Fletcher took the phone from the nurse’s outstretched hand and turned his back on Bryan while he concentrated on the conversation. Meanwhile, Linda attended the older woman who was asking for a pain pill while she waited for her husband.
Keegan turned his attention to his son. “I thought I told you to meet me at the lodge.”
Bryan scowled deeply. “I lost track of time.”
“You’ve got a watch and the lifts have clocks at the bottom as well as the top.”
“Yeah, I know, but I said I lost track of time,” Bryan repeated sullenly.
Keegan rubbed a hand around the back of his neck in frustration. “It doesn’t matter. You’re all right and that’s what I really care about, but why don’t you fill me in? Tell me what happened, how you ended up here.”
“I caught a little air and landed wrong.”
“Where were you?”
Bryan didn’t answer.
Veronica thought she had to step in. She didn’t want to get the kid into trouble with this large man who looked as if he was barely hanging on to his patience, but it was important that they both realize how dangerous it is to ski in closed areas, how lucky Bryan was not to be in worse shape.
“I found him on Devil’s Spine,” she said, stepping to the other side of Bryan’s bed.
“Devil’s Spine?” the man echoed, seeing her for the first time. His troubled gaze centered on her face, hesitated, then dropped for an instant to skim her chest where her name tag was pinned.
“I’m Veronica Walsh, one of the rescue team.”
He was staring into her eyes again and she noticed just how intense his gaze was—flinty gray, the color of storm clouds gathering over an angry ocean. “You found Bryan?”
“Yes.” She bristled slightly as she always did when she came up against someone who didn’t seem to think a woman could handle the job. But she held on to her temper as she realized he was upset about his son. Maybe he wasn’t a first-class chauvinist.
“Where on earth is Devil’s Spine?”
“North canyon,” Bryan said.<
br />
“That’s right. Because of the windy and icy conditions today, parts of the north side weren’t groomed and the area around the spine, which is an expert run, was closed today.”
“Closed?” Keegan repeated and his son’s face hardened.
Feeling like a rat, Ronni did her duty. “I think Bryan might have been jumping from the top of the spine to the bottom. That’s a drop of nearly ten feet.” She stared at the kid. “Am I right?”
Bryan shrugged.
Keegan’s mouth thinned into an unforgiving line and Ronni couldn’t help comparing him to the mountain. Fierce, savage, challenging. Keegan’s fingers tightened over the rail of the hospital bed as he stared at his son. “For the love of God, Bryan, what were you thinking?”
“Look, Mr. Keegan, people do it all the time, but not when the run’s closed,” she said, trying to soften the blow. Bryan’s father needed to know that his son had broken the rules, but she didn’t want to get the boy into big trouble. She touched Bryan on the shoulder and he flinched. His gaze was hard and accused her of being a traitor. “It turned out all right,” she added. “Bryan was lucky.”
“Lucky?” Bryan grumbled under his breath. “Lucky?” He rolled his eyes. “Why does everyone keep saying that? I’ve been so lucky lately, I can barely stand myself.”
“That’s enough,” Travis said, embarrassed by the boy’s lack of gratitude, even though this woman was getting under his skin a little. She was pretty, with all-American looks and a smile he found beguiling, but he didn’t need her, or any woman, for that matter, messing with his mind. “The least you could do is thank these people for helping you,” he said to his son. Then, despite his best efforts to hold his tongue, he added, “Geez, Bryan, what was going through your head? Why were you skiing where you shouldn’t have been when you were supposed to meet me?”
A defiant light flared in his son’s eyes and Travis gave himself a hard mental shake. The boy was hurting already and Travis needed to remember that Bryan was just a kid.
“Mr. Keegan?” a woman in a lab coat asked. Slightly overweight with short, straight, blond hair, she was sliding X rays into a large manila envelope.
“Yes?” His attention returned to the nurse.
“Hi, I’m Linda Knowlton and I’ve been working with Bryan.” She grabbed a clipboard that hung suspended from the foot of Bryan’s bed. “We have a few forms for you to fill out.”
“Can I just get outta here?” Bryan complained.
“In a minute,” Linda said patiently. Winking broadly, she clucked her tongue. “You’re going to make me feel like you don’t love us.”
“I don’t love…geez—” Bryan flopped back on the bed. “Nothin’s busted. I don’t see why we just can’t leave.”
“We will, once the doctor gives you the okay,” Travis said, too relieved to be angry. When he’d split up from his son on the mountain a couple of hours ago, he hadn’t panicked. Bryan was a good skier and they’d planned to meet at the lodge for a snack at two. He’d gotten in early, drunk a cup of coffee and when Bryan was late, Travis wasn’t worried. Hell, the kid still let time slip away from him, but after an hour had passed, Travis had become concerned, and was on his way to the information desk when he’d been paged. His heart had nearly stopped. In his heavy ski boots, he’d sprinted through the carpeted hallways, shouldering past slower-moving people. In terrifying mind-numbing images, he’d imagined his son’s broken and bent body, even his death.
Fletcher hung up the phone and walked back to Bryan’s bed. “As I was saying, I’m Dr. Fletcher.” Travis yanked off his ski glove and shook the shorter man’s hand. About five-ten, Fletcher had lost a good amount of his hair. What remained was a clipped horseshoe of red blond strands which matched his thick moustache. “Your son’s going to be fine, but I’m afraid he’ll be laid up for a while.” Quietly, while the nurse looked in on the patients in the other beds, Fletcher explained his concerns for Bryan’s knee, the possible torn ligament and cartilage damage, though no bones appeared to be broken. “You might want to have an MRI on the knee and check with your orthopedic surgeon,” he said. “If you don’t have one, I recommend any one of these….” He opened the desk drawer, withdrew three business cards, including one of his own, and offered them to Travis. “I have a clinic in town myself.” Winking at Bryan, he added. “I just moonlight up here.”
“Thanks.” Travis took the cards, then noticed Ronni stepping away from the bed.
She patted the top rail. “I’ll see ya, Bryan.” Smiling, she waved to the other people in the room. “Linda…Syd…that’s it for me for the day. Someone else will have to bring you your next victims.” Winding her rope of braided hair onto the crown of her head, she tugged on a ski hat. “See you next weekend.”
“Not me, Ronni, I’m off, till after Christmas,” the nurse, who was placing a plastic cover on a thermometer, said. “Nancy and Cal are rotating through the holidays, so the only way you’ll see me is if I need help getting down the mountain or medical assistance.”
“Don’t tell me you’re going to spend your honeymoon back here?”
Linda shook her head and for an instant her eyes, behind her oversize glasses, gleamed. “Nope. Ben and I are going to Vegas and then spending a week at Timberline on Mount Hood, in the old lodge.”
Ronni couldn’t help smiling at the blush of romance in her friend’s cheeks. Linda was forty-five, her children grown, her first husband a man who had walked out on her and the kids when they were still toddlers. Linda hadn’t dated much over the years. All her time and energy had been devoted to her kids. But two years ago, she’d met Ben through a mutual friend. Now they were going to run away and get married. It almost made a person believe in romance again. Almost.
“So, if you’re patrolling on Hood next weekend and see a downed skier in a hot-pink jumpsuit and a wedding veil—”
“Don’t even think it,” Ronni said, zipping up her jacket. “I guess I should say merry Christmas, as well as congratulations.” She was tugging on her gloves.
“You, too. I hope little Amy gets everything she wants.”
Ronni’s smile faltered slightly before she managed to pin it back into place. “She wants a puppy. I think I’m doomed.”
“I know someone who’s got a litter. Blue Heeler and spaniel, I think. Call me if you’re interested.”
“I’m not, but Amy is. Give my best to Ben. Tell him he’s lucky to have you for a bride.”
“I remind him every day,” Linda assured her before being summoned by the woman who was complaining about snowboarders ruining the runs for the skiers.
Ronni tossed a look to the boy with the sad eyes. “You, too, Bryan, have a good Christmas, and the next time you’re up here, be sure to check the signs so you know which runs are open and which are closed.” She glanced at the kid’s father, an imposing man if she’d ever seen one. She’d give ten to one odds that he was a corporate big shot—all take-charge energy and impatience. An out-of-towner, coming to the mountain to unwind. Now, with his son injured, he was rattled. “Have a great holiday.”
“It’s not starting out so great, is it?” he asked, motioning to Bryan.
“Then it’s bound to get better, right?” She offered him a smile that Linda had once told her could melt ice.
“Let’s hope.”
“’Bye.”
Travis watched her leave. There was something about her that he found damnably fascinating. He, a man who had sworn off women. He, who had been through a gut-wrenching divorce that he still found painful. He, who didn’t trust any female.
Suddenly hot, he unzipped his jacket and found his son staring up at him. “You want to tell me why you were skiing on a closed run?”
Bryan lifted a shoulder. “Not really.”
“I’d like to know.”
With a grunt, Bryan moved on the bed then winced. “What’s the big deal?”
“It was unsafe. As you found out. The only reason they close a run is—”
“Yeah, I know, it’s dangerous. I already heard the lecture. From her.” He jutted his chin toward the empty spot where Ronni had stood only moments before.
“Fine.” This was no place for an argument. From the corner of his eye, Travis watched Ronni shoulder her way through the double doors that swung slowly closed as she passed through. She didn’t bother looking over her shoulder as she found her skis and poles, which had been propped against the outside of the building. Then the doors swung shut.
“How are you doing?” Dr. Fletcher, looking harried, was back at Bryan’s bedside.
Shrugging, Bryan mumbled, “Okay, I guess.”
“I’ve prescribed some pain pills, just enough for the next couple of days. You might not even need them.” He looked at Travis. “Bryan’s young and strong. This will slow him down for a while, but he’ll be up and around and probably be able to ski by next season.”
“Next year?” Bryan said, closing his eyes in disappointment. “Oh, man.”
“And you might be prescribed a special brace to wear when you’re involved in sports.”
“No way!”
Fletcher grinned. “They’re not too bad, really. I wear one myself.”
Glowering, Bryan’s eyes silently accused the doctor of having to resort to such a device because Fletcher was old.
Fletcher didn’t seem to notice. “Let’s not jump the gun. Wait and see what your orthopedic doctor suggests.”
Bryan swallowed and blinked.
“Feelin’ rough?” Travis asked, laying a hand on his son’s head.
“Like sh—horrible.” Bryan slid away from his touch.
“It’ll get better.”
Suddenly, the doors swung open and a woman, dressed in a silky aqua jumpsuit, hurried into the clinic. Her nose wrinkled in disgust at the concrete floor and tight quarters. “I’m Wanda Tamarack. Is my daughter, Justice—”
“Mommy!” The girl nursing her sprained thumb sent up a wail loud enough to wake the dead in another continent.
“Dear God.” Wanda hurried past the desk and around a curtain to spy her daughter stretched out on one of the beds. “Oh, honey, what happened?” Wanda asked.
Memories: A Husband to RememberNew Year's Daddy (Hqn) Page 26