by Cindy Gerard
She started, her eyes big and round as she stared at him, waiting for him to continue as the phone rang a second time.
He stalked over, snagged the receiver off the hook and shoved it toward her. Then he dragged his hands through his hair, resigned to wait out another call.
“Um, Shiloh Ranch,” she said after a long heartbeat. “Oh. Hi, Buzz. Good. I’m good. Thank you… No. No, I don’t have a list. No. I’ve got everything…actually, um, Lee should be able to pick up anything I need from now on.”
Lee frowned as he listened to her end of the conversation.
“Oh, Buzz, of course you can still come out and see me. Whenever you like. Yes. What would I do without our cribbage games? Right. Okay. I’ll see you sometime soon.”
She hung up, turned to him again with another embarrassed little lift of her shoulders. “That was Buzz.”
“Stop & Shop Grocery Store Buzz?”
She nodded.
“He has to be pushing eighty…and he’s delivering groceries to Shiloh?”
She turned abruptly, showing him the view he’d been trying not to appreciate the hell out of since he’d walked into the kitchen and found her nose in the refrigerator and her sweet little butt pointed his way.
“He started when Momma got sick and Daddy was busy with foaling,” she said reaching into the refrigerator and digging out a bowl of potato salad to go with the chicken she’d already set on the table. “We needed groceries one day, I called and asked if anyone happened to be coming out this way and would he be willing to send out an order. Buzz ended up bringing it out, and he’s been delivering groceries ever since when we needed them.”
He was about to ask why it was necessary for decrepit old Buzz to deliver their groceries when she met his eyes, looked quickly away, then started fussing with the tea towel that hung over the handle on the old gas stove.
Because she couldn’t drive, that’s why, he realized a split second later. He understood then, on a level that made him stop and really consider the implications, another facet of her limitations. It was pretty much common knowledge that, by law, the probability of seizures prevented many epileptics from possessing a valid driver’s license. And what till now had been a tidbit of information that had never affected him or his life affected him deeply.
How would it feel, he wondered with a knot of realism tightening in his chest, to lose a basic freedom that he’d always taken for granted? How would it feel to be denied the excitement of plopping down a fee and trying to pass a driving test when you were sixteen years old? How would it feel to know you were breaking the law if you drove without a license to just get to work or to school or to the grocery store?
He studied her face, saw in her eyes both the pride she was entitled to and the shame that she had no reason to claim.
“Okay,” she said into the silence that settled, “you wanted to talk.”
Then she blushed from the roots of her hair to the pale flesh that disappeared beneath the round neck of her T-shirt. She’d dropped the tea towel. In fact she stood utterly still. The rise and fall of her breasts beneath her shirt was the only indication she was breathing.
He’d so been worried about how he would handle the information about her epilepsy. Well, what about her? How would talking about it make her feel? It would be hard for her. Harder than he’d ever realized. It would hurt her. Leave her feeling exposed and vulnerable and, as she so often was, dependent on someone else’s decision on how they would deal with the information. Would he reject her? Pity her? Use it against her? Worse, would he ridicule her as he was sure so many had?
Hell. He didn’t want to think about it anymore. And he didn’t want to talk. He wanted to hold her. He wanted to kiss her. Long and deep. Then he wanted to carry her to bed and do things to her that would guarantee she’d forget, at least for the moment, everything that put that look in her eyes.
And accomplish…what, Savage? He’d feel a hell of a lot better, yeah. But what about her? What kind of threat did a physical relationship pose to her health? That was the issue here. That was the only issue, he assured himself, refusing to acknowledge feelings that were as foreign as they were unthinkable.
The phone rang again.
He swore under his breath, waited out the call, then raised a brow when she finally said, “It’s okay, Dorothy, we’ll be right there.”
Everything happened at warp speed then, as she disconnected then shoved food back into the refrigerator all the while giving him a hurried explanation of where they had to go and why it had to be right now.
Five
“There.” As Lee’s truck rolled to a stop, Ellie pointed toward a large pole building about a hundred yards west of the Fergusons’ ranch house. “She’ll be in that barn.”
The phone call had been from their neighbor, Dorothy Ferguson. Don and Dorothy had always been good neighbors. When Ellie had lost her mom, it had been Dorothy who had sat with her in the night and held her while she cried. It had been Don who had watched over Shiloh when her dad had gotten sick and Ellie was dependent on someone to help her with chores and drive her to the hospital to see him and into town for supplies.
Now the Fergusons needed her. She would move heaven and earth to help them.
“Ellie, we’re in a fix over here,” Dorothy had said, her voice sounding breathless and worried over the phone lines. “Don is down in the back. Doc put him to bed this morning with some muscle relaxants and wouldn’t you know it, May Belle picked today to deliver. The fact is, darlin’, I’m just no good with birthings. Cal won’t be home for his spring break until the end of the month, so I don’t have anyone here to help me.
“Gosh, honey, I hate to ask, being you’re on your honeymoon and all, but do you suppose I could borrow that beefy bridegroom of yours to help pull the foal? I’m afraid it’s comin’ breech or it would be over by now. The vet’s out of town—something about a convention and the on-call vet is tied up at Chester Gorman’s place. It may be hours before he can get here. I really hate this, honey.”
Lee had listened to Ellie’s urgent but calmly detailed accounting of Dorothy Ferguson’s frantic call as he’d buttoned up his shirt. Then he’d snagged his truck keys from the windowsill above the kitchen sink. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he’d said, as the screen door slammed shut behind him.
As bad as he felt about the Fergusons’ dilemma, he was suddenly more than grateful for the chance to put a little distance between his libido and his bride.
What little perspective he’d gotten from his hour of slamming steel to wood had gone AWOL when he’d found Ellie in the kitchen, looking luscious and wholesome and, curiously, like she had a burr the size of Texas under her saddle. Even more curious were the violet eyes that had blurred to a cool-blue flame and suggested he might have been the one to put it there.
That had thrown him. That sweet, innocent, dependent little Ellie also had a backbone and a temper that could simmer near flash point had thrown him in spades. It had also excited him and gotten them right back where they’d started when he’d left her in the tub to let off some steam.
Dorothy’s call was going to give him the distance he needed before he made another mistake. So he didn’t walk, he ran to his truck at a fast jog. When he reached it and realized that Ellie was opening the passenger door at the same time he was crawling in the driver’s side, he figured he’d kissed his distance—and his sanity goodbye. That didn’t stop him from giving it one last try.
“You don’t need to go with me, Ellie,” he stated firmly as he jammed the key in the ignition and waited, his hand on the wheel, hoping she would climb out of the cab.
She didn’t budge. She buckled herself in, looked straight ahead and said, “Yes, I do,” in a deceptively soft voice that fronted a quiet and set determination.
He looked at her over his extended arm, saw the stubborn set of her pixie chin and recognized not only another interesting facet to this woman, but a force to be reckoned with.
It could have been pride in her as much as surprise that sneaked in to undercut his irritation. And he might have smiled at her tenacity if the situation weren’t so urgent—and if he hadn’t needed some distance from her so badly.
He was supposed to be the voice of experience here. He was supposed to be the one who knew what to do, yet he’d made one mistake after another with her. The first had been in not realizing the extent of her dependence on him because of the epilepsy. The second had been in underestimating the strength of her will.
The most costly error of all, though, had been in letting her totally and completely mess with his head with that little stunt in the tub. He couldn’t afford to make any more mistakes where she was concerned because she was the one who was going to suffer if he did.
But since the issue of her staying home or going along to the Fergusons’ wasn’t a hill he would pick to die on, he slipped the truck in gear and tore out of the drive.
Dorothy was wringing her hands when she walked out onto the porch to greet them.
“Thank goodness you’re here! I can’t go down there. I just can’t stand to see May Belle struggle that way. Besides, it’s all I can handle keeping Don in bed. He’s bound and determined he’s going to crawl down to the barn and help that mare.”
“You go take care of Don,” Lee heard Ellie say as he rounded the truck and headed for the barn at a trot. “We’ll take care of things.”
“Ellie, you stay with Dorothy,” he ordered over his shoulder—for all the good it did. She was right behind him when he unlatched the barn door and let himself inside.
“I told you to stay with Dorothy.” He leveled her his best, take-charge glare. “You don’t need to be involved in this.” And he didn’t need her distracting him. He thought again about that close call with the ax. He’d been thinking about her, seeing her all wet and willing and naked.
It hadn’t ended there. He’d just spent fifteen long minutes in his truck at breakneck speed getting over here—had almost lost control at one curve because, instead of concentrating on his driving, he’d been thinking about her. The buoyant softness of her breasts, the inviting resilience of her thighs, the downy copper curls sheltering her virginity.
And she was a virgin. He’d been a fool to doubt that. A jealous fool. Everything about her response to his kisses said she was untried, from the sweetness of her sighs to the tentative explorations of her tongue.
He, however, wasn’t nineteen anymore, randy as an alley cat and ruled by the pulse below his waist that was raging yet again as he glared down at her. And just kept on glaring because he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off her.
A desperate, high-pitched whinny brought his head around and reminded him why he was here. “Please. Go to the house,” he said one more time, because he really had to get away from her.
“How long has it been since you pulled a foal?” she asked, sticking to his side as he headed for the back of the barn.
He set his jaw, drew a breath between clenched teeth and, finally resigned to the fact that she wasn’t going away, kept on walking. “A while. But I’ve pulled plenty of calves. It’s not that different.”
“This is very different.” She shouldered past him and unlatched the birthing stall where a big bay mare lay panting and frothed with sweat. “It’s different because this is May Belle and she’s very special, aren’t you girl,” she crooned softly as she knelt by the mare’s head and soothed her with tender strokes to her jaw.
Another one of those strange, fisting sensations clutched at his chest as he looked at her there on her knees in the straw.
He made himself look away, check out the situation.
Oh, man. He scrubbed his hand over his jaw. They were in trouble. The mare had lost a lot of blood and, judging by the consistency of the fluid leakage, the umbilical sac may have broken. May Belle’s eyes were wild, her breaths rapid. She knew she was in trouble, too. Fatigue and pain showed in the tension in her abdomen and her stiff-legged stretch.
He cupped his nape with a palm, shook his head. Very likely Dorothy’s call had come too late.
“No.”
He shifted his gaze to Ellie’s. The passion of her denial told him that she’d read his thoughts.
“Ellie—”
“We can’t lose her. May Belle—May Belle is Don’s foundation mare. He’s built his breeding program on her babies and her babies’ babies. She’s Bud’s momma,” she said, referring to her own chestnut gelding. “We cannot lose her.”
Both a child’s hopes and a woman’s determination fired in her eyes—and kicked an errant Lancelot gene into high gear.
With his gaze fixed on her face, he started rolling up his sleeves. “Talk to her, Ellie. See if you can get her to relax,” he suggested softly.
Then he went in search of a bucket of soapy water and prepared for both the physical and mental concentration required to pull, what he hoped, wasn’t a dead foal.
Late-afternoon sunlight filtered into the stall. The scent of must and hay and the struggles of life emerging permeated the air and melded with a quiet that had settled over the barn.
“She’s so pretty,” Ellie whispered as she stood by May Belle’s withers and stroked the hip of the still-wet and tentatively nursing filly.
A soft, reassuring nicker and the greedy suckling smacks of the newborn foal having her first meal brought a slow smile to her face.
For the past fifteen minutes Lee had sat quietly in the corner of the stall, watching Ellie, watching the foal, rubbing the circulation back into his right arm. And brooding. He was getting damned good at that.
A stray beam of sunlight flitted around her curls and set them afire. He wanted to wrap a fiery gold curl around his finger, fist his hand in the heavy silk of her hair, draw her to him, feel his hands on her skin, fill her as a woman can only be filled by a man.
He let out a deep breath, let his head fall back against the wall of the stall.
What are you doing to me, Ellie?
She drew feelings from him—anger, desperation, longing—that he had never let himself feel. He’d had little time for emotion in his life to this point, less need. And now…now he couldn’t think for the havoc she was wreaking. He didn’t like it, but he couldn’t muster up enough resistance to shove it all out of the way. It was starting to wear on him.
“Your arm? Is it getting any better?”
Her soft voice brought his head up. He blinked, willed the sexual haze to lift. “The good news? The feeling’s back. The bad news? The feeling’s back.”
She smiled. “It hurts bad, huh?”
He shook his head. “It’s fine.”
It wasn’t fine, and he’d been stupid. They both knew it—she was just kind enough not to point it out.
He’d made a mistake. Big surprise. He’d been on his knees in the straw behind the laboring mare and reached in to try to turn the foal. It was standard operating procedure. The trick was timing. Never enter a birth canal until after a contraction. He’d been so entranced by the look of his bride as she’d sweet-talked and whispered and murmured tender encouragement to a thousand pounds of laboring horseflesh, that he’d lost sight of anything but her.
When May Belle had gone into a full contraction, he’d been in shoulder deep. Idiotic move. Painful move. Only luck had kept him from ending up with a dislocated shoulder or a broken arm. Just like it was only luck that both mare and foal had pulled through.
“They’re going to be okay, aren’t they?” She left the bonding pair and walked to his side, looking down on him.
He let out a deep breath, still baffled. “They shouldn’t have made it. Neither one of them. But, yeah, they’re going to be just fine.”
He’d given them up for lost the minute he’d sized up the situation. Ellie hadn’t let him get away with it. He could tell that she wanted to give him credit, but if anyone was responsible, she was—just as she was responsible for a lot of things he didn’t understand and didn’t want to deal with right now.
/>
Determined not to, he rolled wearily to his hip, then his knees and started to stand.
Her hand reached down for his. He hesitated for a moment, then grasped it.
Her hand was small, but there was strength in her grip. It shouldn’t have surprised him—but then, why not. Just about everything about her did.
He let her help him to his feet—and then stood there, holding on to her hand, searching her eyes.
How did you get so strong, Ellie? he wondered. How do you stand so strong with all you have to deal with?
“Thanks,” he croaked around the lump that had suddenly lodged in his throat. And then he couldn’t help it. He pulled her into his arms, tucked her head under his chin and thought of a hundred things he wanted to say to her. But that would require some disclosure on his part. He wasn’t even close to wanting to deal with that—or with the truths he might reveal if he did start talking.
So what came out was, “I’m a mess.”
He squeezed her hard and because his overriding need was to keep her there, set her away. “Come on. Let’s go tell Dorothy the good news. Then let’s go home.”
Home.
He drove back to Shiloh in silence, trying not to think about how quickly he’d come to associate the word with the woman who sat by his side.
A sliver of lavender, deep purple and shimmering silver was all that was left of the sunset when Ellie watched Lee walk into the kitchen, fresh from his shower.
They’d been back from the Fergusons’ for a little more than an hour. She was determined to talk to him, and while he’d showered, she’d put all the words in place, lined them up like soldiers, steady, strong, direct. But then she saw him. Her mouth went bone dry and the words…the words got lost somewhere between her scattered heartbeats.
He was barefoot, his clean jeans riding low on his hips; the tails of his worn chambray shirt hung loose, the buttons were undone. The forest-green towel he held in his hands was damp. So was his hair. Thick and dark, it curled softly at his nape, even as he worked it ruthlessly with the towel, brushing it back from his forehead.