Austin

by Linda Lael Miller

  “Of course you weren’t in a coma,” Paige told him. “I would have called an ambulance immediately if you had been.”

  “You mean I was just sleeping? For the better part of two days?”

  “In a word, yes.”

  He was off the bed again, crossing to the dresser, where he must have stashed some clean clothes before the big sleep, because now he had jeans, shorts and a black T-shirt with no sleeves. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”

  “Because you needed to rest.” She inclined her head toward Shep, now rising off his improvised dog bed. He was doing so well that Doc Pomeroy had replaced his first bandage with a new and much lighter one. “So did your buddy, here.”

  Shep stretched, yawned big and then crossed to Austin in a sort of skippy trot, wagging his tail and smiling a huge dog smile.

  Austin grinned and ruffled the animal’s ears, but when he looked at Paige, she saw frustration in his eyes. And a flash of that legendary McKettrick temper.

  “Did you double up my pills or something?” he asked suspiciously.

  The question set Paige back on her figurative heels. She rose slowly from the rocking chair, but only because she didn’t want to startle Shep by shooting toward the ceiling like a geyser. “You did not just ask me that question,” she said evenly, glaring at Austin.

  He shook out the jeans, scrounged up a pair of socks. Maybe he thought he was all better now, and he could just shower, dress, saddle up and ride the range as though his back had magically healed and so had the bullet wound in his shoulder.

  He made a grumbling sound, rubbed his stubbly chin, and started for the bathroom without offering a verbal response.

  Paige marched over and started stripping the sheets off his bed, and she did it with such vigor that Shep, instead of following Austin as he normally would have done, stood watching her with his ears perked and his head tipped to one side.

  She heard the water go on in the shower.

  After a day-and-a-half-long sleeping marathon, Paige didn’t blame Austin for wanting to suds up and sluice off, but attempting the feat on his own was a stretch, after so long in bed. Having removed the sheets from his bed, she waited until she heard the shower turn off to carry them out to the laundry room and fetch replacements.

  Then she left the apartment and crossed the wide kitchen to the laundry room, stuffed the sheets into the washing machine, set the controls and added soap. By the time she got back, carrying a fragrant armload of fresh linens Esperanza must have washed and dried before she went on her trip, Austin was wearing the jeans and the black T-shirt, and he’d shaved, too.

  The sling had been dispensed with, and probably the bandages—which she’d changed twice while he was sleeping—as well.

  Paige refrained from commenting on the absence of the sling. She’d spoken to his doctor at the clinic in town a couple of times, and he’d asked her to bring Austin in for a checkup as soon as he felt ready to make the trip.

  Today, he was going to the clinic—whether he felt ready or not. If he needed more bandages and another sling—Paige doubted he would—then it would be young Dr. Colwin’s responsibility to break the news.

  Paige didn’t plan on wasting her breath. She said nothing, but nodded and began making up the bed. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Austin sag into the rocking chair and draw a few slow, deep breaths before putting on his socks and reaching for his boots.

  “Feel up to taking a drive?” she asked, keeping her tone light in hopes that he wouldn’t balk.

  “I was planning on saddling a horse,” he said, but he sounded uncertain.

  “Plenty of time for that later on,” Paige replied in that same breezy voice. “Let’s take my car and go to town.”

  “I wouldn’t mind a steak,” Austin speculated.

  Once again watching him at the periphery of her vision, Paige noted that he was having trouble pulling on his boot, but she pretended not to see. “It’ll be good for you to get out of the house,” she agreed. “Good for both of us.”

  “I guess it would be easier for Shep than following a horse,” he allowed thoughtfully.

  “I was thinking we’d leave Shep here with Libby,” Paige ventured. “Otherwise, he’ll have to wait in the car while you’re seeing the doctor and then having that steak you mentioned.”

  Somewhat to her surprise, Austin did not give her grief about stopping by the clinic. He hadn’t had an incident with his back, even after carrying Shep inside the night the animal was hurt, but given that he’d been in bed most of that time, that was no sign that he’d recovered significantly. Now that he was going to be up and around again and, if he stayed true to form, behaving like a movie stunt man, she knew she’d have to stay on top of things.

  So to speak.

  “I guess you’re right,” Austin said. And when she turned around, having finished changing the bed, she saw that he was still sitting in the rocking chair, and wearing both boots.

  She knew by the way he grinned that he’d been watching her as she worked, especially when she bent over to fluff the pillows and tuck in the sides of the heirloom quilt. Or, more properly, watching her butt.

  She blushed, but she couldn’t help smiling, because she’d missed this side of his personality, as irritating as it sometimes was.

  “Of course I’m right, Austin McKettrick.”

  He grinned, shook his head slightly, and let the comment pass.

  Paige changed her clothes—jeans for jeans, sweater for sweater but, hey, different jeans, different sweater. She ran a brush through her hair, wished it were longer and dabbed on some lip gloss.

  Shep, joined by Libby, Hildie the Lab and the two overgrown puppies, Buford and Ambrose, in the main kitchen, didn’t seem to mind being left behind. For him, just leaving the bedroom probably constituted a change of scene, though, of course, he’d been outside regularly, doing his business.

  Libby filled his dish, and Austin inhaled a bowl of cold cereal, after swigging down a pint of orange juice pulled from the fridge. Then he was on the move again.

  Paige found that heartening, as well as frustrating. He’d have some rocky times ahead, especially if he overdid things before he was ready, but she had to admire his capacity for rapid healing.

  “I’m driving,” Austin informed Paige, when she caught up with him in the garage. He dangled Garrett’s Porsche keys and held the door open for her on the passenger side.

  “You might have low blood sugar,” Paige protested.

  “I drank a slug of OJ and ate some cereal. My blood sugar is fine. I’m fine. And I’m driving.”

  Clearly, she wasn’t going to win this round.

  “Does this qualify as grand theft auto?” Paige teased, slipping inside. Austin’s truck, badly damaged by the bullet and subsequent plunge into the ditch, was still in the repair shop and he apparently didn’t own another vehicle.

  Austin grinned. “Only if Garrett decides to press charges,” he replied.

  “I’ll say I was held hostage,” Paige told him, grinning back.

  “He’ll probably believe you,” Austin said just before he shut her door.

  As soon as he was settled behind the wheel, he pushed the remote to open the garage door, turned the ignition, and the powerful Porsche started with a satisfying roar.

  Naturally, Paige considered the possibility that Austin wasn’t well enough to be driving yet, orange juice and cereal aside, but the new light she glimpsed in his eyes as he backed out of the garage stopped her from pressing the point. Her intuition told her that, while this man didn’t hesitate to risk his own safety, he’d be a lot more careful with someone else’s.

  So they drove, with the windows up but the sunroof open, and it frightened Paige that a relatively ordinary thing like cruising over a country road in a sports car with Mr. Oh-So-Wrong could make her oh-so-happy.

  “I feel like Rip Van Winkle,” he said after a few minutes of silence. “Anything happen in the last day and a half that I ought to know about?”<
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  Paige smiled. Held her windblown hair back from her face with one hand. “You mean, besides the aliens landing and taking over the government?” she said.

  Austin chuckled. “Reckon that might be considered an improvement in some quarters,” he said.

  She laughed, wondered again at the simple fact of her happiness. “First you steal your brother’s car,” she said, “and now you’re lampooning his line of work.”

  Austin shifted easily, slowing the car as they passed the oil field, where he’d been shot only a few days before. For a moment, Paige was afraid that he intended to turn off the main road and return to the scene of the crime, maybe thinking he’d find some evidence that Chief Brogan and his colleagues had missed, but it didn’t happen.

  “Garrett isn’t a politician anymore,” he reminded her. “Thank God when my brother took up with your sister, he saw the error of his ways and turned back before it was too late.”

  Paige was still holding her hair. “You seem pretty sure he’ll never go back to it,” she said. Garrett had worked for the late Senator Morgan Cox since his graduation from law school, and everybody in Blue River had expected him to be president one day.

  Again, and with a purely masculine kind of grace, Austin shifted the Porsche into a higher gear. His left arm might have been injured, but his right was as strong as ever.

  “Loving your sister changed Garrett,” he told Paige, “in ways I wouldn’t have thought possible. He’s interested in changing her last name to McKettrick, helping to raise Calvin, siring a whole passel of kids and running the Silver Spur with Tate. The ranch alone wasn’t enough for Garrett, any more than it was for Tate, but finding the right woman, well, that tipped the balance for both of them.”

  The talk was moving so easily between her and Austin that Paige almost—almost—let her guard down far enough to confess that she sometimes envied Libby and Julie because they’d finally figured out what they wanted, and they were getting it.

  Afraid Austin might misinterpret the confidence as a come-on, an attempt to make the New Year’s Eve wedding a triple instead of a double, she zipped her lip.

  She nodded to show she’d been listening, and then they lapsed into a comfortable silence.

  Reaching the clinic, Austin parked the Porsche, shut down the engine and offered Paige the keys.

  “Maybe there’s something you’d like to do while I’m seeing the doc,” he said.

  The backs of Paige’s eyes scalded with tears she would never have shed in this man’s presence. Austin could be so thoughtful, a real gentleman, as he was now, and then turn around and act like such a monumental jerk.

  She had to be careful, especially now, when she wanted so badly to be reckless instead.

  “I’d like to see how things are progressing over at the house,” she said. “You know, check up on the construction workers. But that can wait—maybe we could stop in after we have supper.”

  “The house?” Austin asked.

  Of course he wouldn’t have known that she was renovating her dad’s old place, planning on moving in there when Austin was well enough not to need a nurse and her new job, right here at the Blue River Clinic, finally opened up.

  It was going to be beautiful, that house.

  She’d been looking forward to moving back in after a decade spent in various apartments, but now the idea made her feel just plain lonesome.

  She could see it all now. After a few years of living alone, she’d be an advanced eccentric. Adopt her fourteenth cat. Start knitting things like golf club cozies.

  Crazy Aunt Paige, Calvin would call her, though she figured he’d use a fond tone of voice. But he’d cluck his tongue and roll his eyes when he thought she wasn’t looking, and when he graduated from college, she’d probably present him with knitted golf club cozies coated in cat hair.

  The whole picture was so dismal that Paige groaned out loud.

  “Paige?” Austin said. “Hello?”

  She blinked. Came back to the present moment with no small measure of relief. “Huh?”

  “What house?” Austin repeated.

  “The family place,” Paige said, catching up, hoping she sounded normal. “The one Libby lived in before she and Tate got engaged.”

  “Oh,” Austin said, pushing open the driver’s-side door to get out. “Yeah, I remember.”

  You should remember, Paige thought. You used to pick me up there practically every Friday and Saturday night for a date.

  “Let’s go in and see what the doctor has to say about your shoulder,” she said, pushing open her door before he could come around to open it for her. Which was what he would have done, because his good Southern mama, Sally McKettrick, had raised him to mind his manners.

  Too bad he’d missed the other qualities she and his dad, Jim, had modeled: do the right thing, always. When you take up with somebody, be faithful to her. Don’t betray her trust.

  “I’m surprised you’re interested,” Austin remarked, without a trace of sarcasm. If anything, he seemed baffled, a little off balance.

  Good, Paige thought.

  They walked toward the entrance to the clinic, close enough but not quite touching. Once in a while, their knuckles bumped, but the recoil was instantaneous.

  Austin held the door open for her, and she stepped through.

  Dr. Colwin, the newest physician on staff, happened to be standing in the lobby when they walked in.

  Seeing Austin on his feet, Colwin looked pleased.

  He and Austin shook hands, while Paige just stood there, suddenly feeling awkward. She’d been so concerned about her patient’s condition, but she was Austin’s nurse, not his mother, which meant he probably didn’t want her hanging around, especially in the exam room.

  Duh. That was why he’d offered her the keys to Garrett’s car.

  She made a production of choosing a magazine from the fanned-out array on the coffee table and tried out two different chairs before settling on one on the opposite side of the room from the reception desk.

  Austin watched all this with a wry twist to his mouth, then he and Dr. Colwin disappeared into the examination and treatment area.

  Concentrating on the magazine she’d selected proved to be too much work, so she set it aside, craned her neck to see if she could spot any of the nurses and lab and X-ray techs she’d be working with eventually.

  Paige wasn’t much for chatting, but today, probably because she hadn’t left the ranch in several days and her sisters were both so busy all the time, she felt like someone emerging from a long stint in an isolation chamber.

  Now that Dr. Colwin and Austin had left the area, the place seemed to echo with emptiness. But then Mary Kate Dorten came out of the hallway that led to the restrooms and crossed to the reception desk. Mary Kate was a hometown girl, like Paige, but because of their age difference—Mary Kate had been in Libby’s class, so she was three years older—they’d never been more than cordial acquaintances.

  In fact, Paige realized, she’d been so close to her sisters, from the very beginning, that she hadn’t felt a need to make a lot of friends until she’d gone away to nursing school.

  She’d been so homesick, and so crushed by the breakup with Austin, that she’d gone a little wild at first, partying and generally behaving like a fool, but, fortunately for her, the demands of nursing school proved so stringent that she’d given up the weekend binges and buckled down to study.

  “That’s going to be some wedding,” Mary Kate said happily, smiling over the desk at Paige. “I am so excited. Everybody in town is excited.” She gave a great, swoony sigh. “It’s so romantic. A double wedding—the grooms are brothers and the brides are sisters. It’s—” She paused again, sniffled, and plucked a tissue from the box to dab delicately at the area under her lower lashes. “Well, it’s like something out of a Harlequin romance novel.”

  Paige smiled. “Libby and Julie are having a great time planning the event,” she said. She’d wanted someone to talk with, while sh
e waited for Austin to come out of the exam room, but given her druthers, she would not have chosen the wedding of the century as a topic.

  “I heard there would be movie stars there,” Mary Kate went on, wide-eyed. “And some famous country-music people, too.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised,” Paige said, brightly noncommittal. That particular rumor happened to be true, but Tate and Libby and Garrett and Julie wanted to keep the more sensational elements of the guest list private until the big night arrived.

  That way, they wouldn’t need to hire a riot squad to provide security.

  Mary Kate’s chair squeaked as she leaned forward, and her voice dropped to a confidential near-whisper. “Isn’t it kind of weird?” she asked. “Both of your sisters being brides, and marrying McKettricks, for Pete’s sake, and you’ll just be a bridesmaid?”

  Paige knew Mary Kate didn’t have a mean bone in her ample body. Still, Paige’s lower lip might have wobbled slightly as she framed her answer because, like it or not, this was a sore point with her.

  Something she’d better get over, and pronto.

  “The only weird thing,” Paige said, putting on her game face, “is the bridesmaid’s dress I’ll probably get roped into wearing. It’s pink. Organza, no less, with cascades of ruffles, puffy sleeves and a big bow in back.”

  Mary Kate gasped. “Oh, no,” she said, her dark eyes luminous with sympathy.

  Paige nodded solemnly. “Oh, yes,” she replied.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  BY THE TIME PAIGE AND MARY KATE had thoroughly discussed the upcoming wedding, Paige evading umpteen not-so-subtle attempts on the receptionist’s part to elicit the name of at least one celebrity guest, Austin had finished his examination. He and Dr. Colwin stepped into the waiting area together.

  Paige almost leaped to her feet, before her pride reminded her that she was Austin McKettrick’s private-duty nurse, not some eager-to-please flunky.

  “A few more weeks, Austin,” Dr. Colwin was saying, in a conciliatory tone, “and you can do everything you did before the shooting.”