Collision at Roosevelt Ranch

by Elise Faber

  Collision at Roosevelt Ranch

  Roosevelt Ranch Book Three

  Elise Faber

  COLLISION AT ROOSEVELT RANCH

  BY ELISE FABER

  Newsletter sign-up

  This is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are fictitious in every regard. Any similarities to actual events and persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental. Any trademarks, service marks, product names, or named features are assumed to be the property of their respective owners, and are used only for reference. There is no implied endorsement if any of these terms are used. Except for review purposes, the reproduction of this book in whole or part, electronically or mechanically, constitutes a copyright violation.

  * * *

  COLLISION AT ROOSEVELT RANCH

  Copyright © 2019 Elise Faber

  ISBN-10: 1-946140-22-8

  ISBN-13: 978-1-946140-22-7

  Cover Art by Jena Brignola

  Photo Credit: Tiffany Green Photography

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Elise Faber

  For “fucking bubbles”

  Because sometimes you just need to burst them . . .

  One

  Haley

  * * *

  “Just play already,” Haley muttered, fumbling with her phone as she pulled to a stop at an intersection on her way home from the hospital. It was late and she was tired and . . . she just wanted some boy band love, okay?

  Exhaustion tugged at her brain and she sighed, eyes burning, shoulders aching. She was very close to tears.

  She’d lost a patient that night.

  It hadn’t been her fault. It hadn’t been anyone’s fault. Sometimes those things just happened—accidents, everyone working frantically to pull someone back from the brink, a body failing—but that didn’t make a patient dying on her watch any easier.

  Her job was to save them.

  Life was fragile. As a nurse, Haley knew that firsthand. But she’d also left her job at the busy county hospital in California and returned home to Darlington, Utah because she was tired of seeing people die every day.

  She was damned good at compartmentalizing, but some things weren’t so easy to shove down.

  Sometimes those fuckers—e.g. memories—kept popping back up.

  And sometimes the cases hit too close to home—

  A horn beeped behind her and she jumped. “Shit.” Her phone was still not cooperating, the poppy upbeat notes of her favorite boy bands remaining silently trapped inside the technological device that never seemed to work correctly.

  Even though it was brand spanking new.

  Even though she’d gotten a complete tutorial from her brother-in-law, who had gone through all of the troubleshooting with her.

  Even though the freaking tech from the phone store had personally tested the Bluetooth by coming out to her car and showing her how it worked.

  Technology. She repelled it.

  Or rather, she was technology’s kryptonite.

  Two minutes around her, and she destroyed even the most powerful device.

  “Yay me,” she murmured, dropping the phone to her passenger’s seat. Haley shouldn’t be fussing with it anyway, not while she was driving, but—sigh—she’d really wanted to escape for the rest of her drive.

  Apparently, that was not to be.

  Checking for traffic, she pulled carefully through the intersection. Darlington was a small town, and signals were few and far between, but the roads at this time of the night were dark . . . and she’d had a deer jump right in front of her car once before.

  The car that had honked at her turned to follow her down the bumpy lane, headlights very bright in her rearview mirror, the front bumper just inside that bubble all drivers had.

  This one triggered her slightly-too-close alert but not the this-fucker-better-back-off alarm.

  Her lips curved.

  So, she might have gotten used to the more aggressive drivers of Northern California.

  The thought of her first months in San Francisco, of the busy roads, the huge buildings, the patient care that both challenged and devastated her, brought a smile to her face. For all the reasons she’d come home, Haley was still happy she’d left Utah for a time.

  Small town life was . . . well, small.

  Or it had seemed that way before she’d left.

  Now she saw how much her world had expanded by being . . . well, herself. Having found herself, as cliché as that sounded.

  She’d left a little girl, never feeling like she could measure up, and had returned—

  Still feeling like she would never live up to her expectations.

  Ha. Well, that was life for a girl. But Haley had come back with the understanding that she was the one setting impossible standards. Progress, yes? As in, she was a work in progress.

  Step one was realizing that not everything she did had to be perfect and exacting.

  Which was all well and good for her Pinterest attempts—cough—fails.

  It didn’t work as well for her patients.

  Hence the mental punch fest happening in her brain alongside the compelling need for cheesy pop music to provide her with some escapism.

  Had she done everything right? What had she missed? What could she have done differently? Would any of it have made any difference?

  No.

  No, it wouldn’t have.

  Tears stung her eyes, and she blinked them away.

  If Haley hadn’t blinked at that moment, things might not have turned out as they did.

  But she did blink, right as two other things happened simultaneously.

  Music exploded through her speakers—the Backstreet Boys singing about the way they wanted it—and a deer jumped into the road.

  By the time her lids had flashed back open, the jar of pop-tastic noise accelerating the process to near inhuman speed, the freaking deer was directly in front of her bumper and definitely within her bubble.

  Frankly, it was firmly in the she-was-gonna-plow-it-down-and-make-a-deer-pancake zone.

  “Fuck!” She slammed on her brakes.

  Tires screeched. She braced for impact and then . . .

  The deer executed a leap that was fitting of a figure skater and jumped clear of her car.

  Haley sighed in relief. For a single heartbeat.

  Because that relief disappeared before the next.

  Her body was propelled forward as the driver who had been—and here came that damned bubble analogy again—following her too closely before, plowed into her from behind.

  And she didn’t even have time to snort about the dirtiness of that particular innuendo before the seat belt yanked tightly across her chest. Pain shot up her leg as her foot compressed more firmly on the brake pedal, but before she could focus too much on the sensation, her head smacked against the top of the steering wheel a moment before the airbag deployed and punched her in the face.

  “Fucking bubbles,” she slurred as everything went b
lack.

  Two

  Sam

  * * *

  Sam was exhausted.

  He’d been in surgery for hours, trying to extract every last piece of shredded plastic from the belly of a six-month-old Yellow Lab named Dexter, and it hadn’t been an easy procedure. The pup was severely dehydrated and had probably been at most a day from dying.

  Dexter was lucky Sam had the ability to perform an emergency surgery in his clinic and hadn’t needed to be driven all the way to Salt Lake City, an almost three-hour jaunt.

  It had likely saved the dog’s life that evening.

  But it was also why Sam was bone-weary and driving along the dark road late at night.

  He’d gotten through the surgery then helped his overnight staff make sure Dexter was stable, which meant he was hours past his normal shift length.

  And considering he’d gone out to Roosevelt Ranch early that morning to check on a pregnant mare, Sam was lucky to still be coherent.

  He was also in a hurry to get home and crawl into bed.

  “Come on,” he muttered, beeping his horn at the car in front of him. It wasn’t familiar, a sleek black sedan with California plates he didn’t recognize, and considering Darlington was a small town, that in itself was unusual.

  Though being unfamiliar was also probably why the other driver was glancing at their phone. It was easy to get turned around out in the sticks. One wrong turn on a pitch-black lane and a car could enter a veritable Bermuda Triangle of farms, twisting roads, and hidden driveways.

  Part of him felt he should offer help, but the rest was relieved when the other driver put down their phone and headed decisively to the right.

  Of course, that was the direction he was going as well, though he wasn’t going to complain, not when they were moving along at a good clip and his house was less than a mile ahead.

  Sam could summon up some patience, at least for another few minutes.

  Unfortunately for him, his phone buzzed, and as quickly as it took for his eyes to flick down to check the Caller ID then flick back up to the road, everything went to hell.

  Brake lights flared bright red in front of him, casting the dark street in ghoulish repose, and the careful distance he’d been keeping between his car and the one in front of him simply . . . evaporated.

  In one instant, he was way too close.

  Cursing, he slammed on the brakes and swerved to the right.

  He almost missed the little sedan.

  What was the saying? Almost only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades?

  Yeah. That was it. And the noise his SUV made crashing into the car in front of him was what he imagined a grenade going off sounded like.

  The crunching of fiberglass meeting his metal bumper.

  Glass shattering. Metal screeching.

  Add in the squealing of his tires and the hissing of his engine after he’d come to a full stop, and he half expected to look out his cracked windshield and find that a war zone had materialized in the few heartbeats that had passed during the collision.

  No war zone.

  But there wasn’t any sign of movement from the other car.

  “Fuck,” he muttered and shoved open his door. It took a hell of a lot of effort, which probably meant that with his luck, the frame was bent and his SUV would be totaled.

  But none of that mattered.

  He ran over to the sedan and glanced through the window.

  The airbag had deployed, and the driver was slumped against the steering wheel and the rapidly deflating white nylon.

  A long blond ponytail trailed down the woman’s back, bisecting a medical scrub top that was patterned with galosh-wearing pigs.

  His heart dropped, and he yanked open the door.

  Because . . . Haley.

  Horrible music blared through the speakers, and he winced as he checked Haley’s pulse. It was strong, if a little elevated. Of course, then there was the fact that she was unconscious.

  “Damn,” he muttered, seeing the blood on the steering wheel. Guilt had already been flowing pretty free and loose through him, but now Sam felt even worse.

  He’d hurt Haley.

  “Fuck.”

  He whipped out his phone and called the emergency line at the police department, otherwise known as Rob Cooper, lead detective at the Darlington Sheriff’s office.

  “Rob speaking,” he answered, voice clear despite the late hour.

  “It’s Sam. There’s—”

  “You up past bedtime karaoke-ing boy bands again?”

  Sam snorted. “Hilarious. Now shut it. There’s been an accident on Old Creek Rd. I rear-ended Haley Donovan, and she’s unconscious.” He sucked in a breath, checked for the mile marker and relayed that as well. “Can you send an ambulance?”

  To Rob’s credit, the man could switch gears with the best of them. He was also calm in a crisis. Then again, he’d had plenty of experience in dealing with them. Plus, Sam knew he’d be able to get an ambulance out faster than just him calling 9-1-1 on his own. Rob was unruffled, had good connections, and could directly coordinate with dispatch.

  Haley groaned and started to push up.

  “I’m getting off the line now,” he told Rob. “She’s coming around.”

  “Ambulance is on its way,” Rob said then, “Don’t move her unless you have to.”

  “Roger that.” Sam hung up and pocketed his cell just as Haley flopped back in her seat. “Careful,” he told her. “You—”

  Fuck.

  He’d seen the blood but not the large gash marring her forehead. Not to mention the fact that her face was going to bruise to hell and back over the next few days.

  “Hold still,” he ordered, shrugging out of his shirt and folding it quickly to make a compress. “You’re bleeding.”

  “What’s the matter?” Her hands came up to bat his away when he pressed it to the cut above her eye. “Stop. That hurts.”

  “Haley. Hold. Still,” he ordered again and kept the pad firmly in place. Of course, the damned woman did not hold still, but at least she stopped trying to knock his hands off. “You were in an accident—”

  She shook her head, as though trying to clear it. “Sam?” Her eyes finally focused on his. “I was in an accident? What happened? Did I lose consciousness?”

  “Yes. I rear-ended your car when you slammed on the brakes. And yes,” he gritted, “you were out for a couple of minutes. Now stop fighting me and hold this”—he brought her hands up to the compress—"so I can shut off the damned music.”

  “I’m not fighting you,” she said, but because she finally did freeze, Sam didn’t bother arguing further with her. Instead, he just reached over her and pressed the power button on her stereo.

  The music kept playing.

  “It never cooperates,” she muttered. “Scared the crap out of me—”

  “That’s why you slammed on the brakes?” Sam asked, pressing the nob again.

  The music played on. Another band crooning about how it better be them.

  “Well, that, plus the fucking deer teleporting in front of my car,” she grumbled. “How long was I out?”

  He tried turning down the volume knob. Nothing. “A couple of minutes at most.”

  “My head wound?”

  “You’ll need stitches and a CT.” She started shaking her head, and Sam leaned back, glaring at her. “You nauseous?”

  Her lips pressed flat.

  “Head wound. Loss of consciousness. Nausea? Dizziness? A killer headache?” Those lips stayed firmly flattened. “I’m guessing I’m right, and so as a nurse, if you had a patient with these symptoms, what would you tell them?”

  Silence.

  “Exactly.”

  She huffed. “My phone is on the floor.” She pointed to the passenger’s side. “You might be able to turn it off that way.”

  “Stay.” Another order as he made his way around the car and opened the passenger door. Sure enough, her cell was on the floor and was miraculously undamaged
. He pressed the button on its side, swiped up and turned off the Bluetooth.

  Blessed silence rang out around them.

  Which was promptly punctuated by sirens.

  Haley sighed and glared over at him. “I’m guessing that’s my ride?”

  Three

  Haley

  * * *

  So as far as embarrassments went, being wheeled into the hospital on a gurney, when she could damn well walk—okay, so maybe it was more like limp. Anyway, walking ability or not, being brought into her place of work on a squeaking stretcher, was pretty much right up there with her most cringe-worthy moments.

  Especially since the small town Emergency Department was quiet and everyone blatantly watched as she was pushed in.

  Roxy, the nurse who’d relieved her barely an hour before, grinned as she was pushed by. “Couldn’t stay away?”

  Dr. Hamilton was in charge that evening. He clapped his hands together, pretending to send a prayer up to the heavens. “Finally, something to do.”

  What was that about ER staff and dark senses of humor?

  Oh yeah.

  They all had it.

  And in that exact moment their peculiar sense of comedy was hil-ar-i-ous.

  Yes, she got it. She knew that while the hospital just outside Darlington had its rare moments of busy—though that was certainly still relative when compared to the county hospital in San Francisco that she’d left—it was more often quiet than slammed. She also knew that it had been exceptionally quiet that evening by the time she’d left.

  So much so that had Haley been working, she would have looked at any arriving patient with the same amount of benefaction.