A Home in Hill Country (Harlequin Heartwarming) (6 page)

He looked wary as she prepared to draw blood samples. “Are you okay with this? Do you want to lie down?”

“No,” he growled. “Let’s just get this farce over with.”

She bit back the impulse to defend her training and experience as she applied the tourniquet, swiftly found a good vein and drew two test tubes. He turned slightly ashen, and his skin felt damp by the time she finished.

When he started to climb off the table, she held
him gently back. “Do needles bother you? Maybe you’d better sit for just a minute. You’re a little pale.”

He jerked his arm away. “I don’t need your advice, missy. Now leave me be so I can dress.”

She lingered close by, anyway, as he stood, wavered a little, then seemed to regain his color. “I’ll go on out to the front desk and see if your records have come yet.”

She’d gathered her lab tray and was almost to the door when he barked her name. “Yes?”

He’d shrugged into his shirt and was starting to do up the first button, but his gaze was pinned on her face with an intensity that made her shiver.

“I don’t know why you’re back in town, and I don’t much care. But you keep away from my son, you hear?”

D
R
. H
ERNANDEZ HAD PROMISED
that a nurse would arrive the Tuesday after Labor Day weekend. She hadn’t mentioned that he’d be balding and burly, with a massive tattoo of an 18-wheeler on his left upper arm and a gold-capped front tooth.

“I’m Max Zimmerman.” He shook Kristin’s hand with enough force to make her wince, his eyes sparkling behind trendy wire rims at odds with the rest of his well-aged biker image. “Boy, howdy. Thought I’d never get here today. Dr. Lou did my health exam, blood work and TB-tine at the main clinic this morning, and then I must’ve watched six orientation videos. I’m still on a caffeine high from trying to stay awake.”

Kristin had been in a dark mood since Clint and Ryan left a few hours earlier, but now she grinned at Max. “It’s great having you aboard.”

He followed her second glance to his truck tattoo and smiled ruefully. “My clinic jacket will cover it. I got a little wild in my days after the service, and unfortunately wasn’t content with a simple ‘Mom.’”

Though he had that, too, along with a heart and the name Rosalie on his other muscular forearm.

She gave him a tour of the building, ending up at the front desk where she offered him a seat and pulled up an extra chair for herself. “You and I will be on our own for a while, until things pick up. I understand that, for now, you’ll handle the phone. We’ll make sure the insurance and billing forms are complete, but they’re computerized and bookkeepers at the main clinic will handle them.”

“Good deal.” He opened the appointment book with obvious relish and flipped through some of the pages. His face fell. “There’s hardly anyone in here.”

“Today is our first day. Doc Grady died a few years back, so it might take a while. There’ll be notices in the
Homestead Herald
and some of the papers in the surrounding towns.”

“And the town should grow, with the Home Free homesteading program. I understand you and I are both part of it…though I didn’t fit the preferred family profile.” His smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Still, I had nursing skills to offer, and I’ll have a small-engine repair business on the side. They gave me a house at the end of Pecan Street, with a shop building in back.”

“How long have you been in nursing?”

“I was a medic in the service for a few years. I wanted to go to college afterward, but just
couldn’t hack it given some of the stuff I was still dealing with. Nightmares, flashbacks—you know the drill. I ended up driving a truck for a while.”

Kristin tipped her head in silent acknowledgment of all he’d gone through. “What made you change jobs?”

“After my wife died, I went back to school. Seeing what those nurses did for her made me want to give back something, you know? They made all the difference.”

The pain in his voice sounded so fresh that she wanted to give him a hug. “I’m sorry about your loss.”

“I miss her every day.” He flipped back to the current date in the appointment book. “I see you had a patient this morning. How’d that go?”

“Not the best start.”

He gave the name a second glance, then looked up at her in surprise. “Clint Gallagher. The state
senator?
”

“One and the same. His son made him come, but he wasn’t happy about it. He seems to be in denial regarding his health and hasn’t been compliant with medical advice.” She nudged Clint’s patient file with a forefinger. “His old medical records just came from Austin. Hyperlipidemia, with a cholesterol of 325 and elevated triglycerides of 550. A history of angina, with a few E.R.
visits. He was started on a beta blocker, Lipitor and aspirin therapy two years ago, but he’s never followed through. Today’s EKG showed occasional PVCs.”

Max whistled under his breath. “A walking heart attack.”

“And he’s not going to listen to me, either. He made that clear enough today. His family and mine have some…history, so Dr. Lou will probably have to talk to him.”

“He’d better get over it. She isn’t here that often, and in an emergency he’ll have to see you anyway, the fool.”

Max’s disgust made Kristin laugh. “I think he’d have to be unconscious.”

“Sounds like quite a guy. Now he’ll have to deal with a female doctor, a P.A. he dislikes and a tattooed ex-trucker. He’ll probably decide he’s safer at the vet.”

C
ODY STOOD
on the sidelines with his fists clenched, watching the other fourth grade boys gather around the football coach. He’d been given a time-out for the last half of the practice just because stupid Ricky Garner was a big fat baby.
It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t, wasn’t fair.

And now, because he couldn’t walk home like most of the other kids, he had to wait here for Mom…and she was at work, so she might be late.
Fighting back tears, he blinked hard and watched the coach—one of the fourth grade teachers—clap Hayden Gallagher on the back.

At the edge of the schoolyard, a bunch of dads leaned against the hoods of their pickups. They’d been there the whole time, cheering and shouting, as if they were watching the Dallas Cowboys instead of some stupid grade school practice, where hardly anyone caught the ball and some of the kids cried if they got tackled just a little too hard.

“Come on over here, Cody,” the coach called out. “You need to hear this, too.”

A surge of rebellion made him want to stand still, but somehow his feet started moving. A couple of the kids snickered and elbowed each other when he reached the group, and he felt his face heat.

“…so tomorrow, be here right after school. We have enough boys so we can divide into two teams for practice. Got that? Three-thirty sharp, in uniform. And remind your parents, because we don’t always meet on Thursdays.”

The town boys raced for their bicycles. Others headed for their dads in the parking lot. Cody kicked at a clump of dry grass as he watched them go. Hayden’s dad came out onto the grass to meet his son halfway and—oh, boy—so did the neighbor guy who’d given Cody a ride on his horse last Friday night. Ryan somebody.

Jealousy burned through Cody. How fair was that? He had a dad, too, but he lived in Dallas and never found much time to visit. And when he did…

A single tear burned down Cody’s cheek, so he turned his back and angrily rubbed it away with the back of his hand, glad everyone was too far away to see.

“Hey, son, do you have a ride home?” The voice was deep and familiar, and Cody turned to find Ryan standing by the open door of a silver pickup. “Do you need to use my cell phone?”

The guy was
sooo
cool. Hayden had taken over Show and Tell for three days running, blabbing on and on about his uncle who went on secret missions for the army and had been badly hurt. Just having Ryan notice him made Cody feel warm inside, but out of the corner of his eye he could see Mom’s pickup coming down the street. “Nah, my mom’s here.”

Ryan looked up the street. “Is that her?”

Cody nodded, wishing she hadn’t showed up so soon.

“You did a great job at practice today. Keep it up.” He got in his truck and shut the door, but didn’t drive off until Mom’s truck pulled to a stop and Cody climbed in.

“Howdy, Tiger.” Mom reached over to give him a one-armed hug, then put the truck in gear and
drove out of the parking lot. “Did you have a good time?”

Embarrassed by the hug, even though no other guys were around, Cody peered out the window and watched the silver pickup disappear.

Football wasn’t about having a good time. It was about being one of the guys, and trying superhard, and doing something better than you ever thought you could, so people would cheer and say you were great. It was about dads giving bear hugs and
way-to-go!
punches on a guy’s arm. It was about a lot of things Cody would never have, because he already knew he was awkward and slow…and his dad thought sports were boring.

“Why doesn’t Dad visit us?”

Mom glanced at him before she turned out onto the highway. “You saw him not too long ago—just a couple weeks before we moved.”

Cody picked at a ketchup stain on his jeans.

“Remember?” she coaxed. “You were there for the whole weekend, and he took you out for pizza.”

Where Dad had complained about the waiting line, the slow service and the pizza itself…and had grumbled the entire time about wanting to just walk out of the place. Back at his condo, his new wife, Darla, had kept frowning at Cody as if he might get things dirty if he even breathed. “Yeah, I remember.”

“You know how busy he is—he has a very important job at that bank, and he helps a lot of people. He’ll still come to see you, though, and I know you’ll get to visit him, too.” Mom gave Cody a teasing smile. “Why so glum? You’ve got someone named Rebel waiting for you, and that sure wouldn’t have happened in the city.”

“Can we ride tonight?”

“You bet. If you do your homework while I make supper, we’ll have plenty of daylight left. And I know just the place I’d like to go.”

R
YAN PULLED TO A STOP
on the crest of the hill overlooking the Four Aces. Below him lay white-fenced corrals, horse barns and loafing sheds, and farther on, the cattle pens. On another gentle rise, the sprawling brick house that had once been his home.

It sure didn’t feel like home anymore, though, and after a week of living under that roof, he figured he’d be happier just about anywhere else.

Trevor put in twelve-hour days as the foreman, then went home to his wife and family. Garrett still hadn’t shown up after his last rodeo…and after supper, Adelfa retired to her own apartment at the back of the main house. Mom had been living in Dallas for years.

That left only Clint, who holed up in his office until nearly midnight working on his upcoming
reelection campaign and fielding countless phone calls that came in on his private office line.

The house felt hollow, echoing with memories. It offered far too much solitude now. Too much time to think. To second-guess.

And to mourn.

Shaking off his melancholy thoughts, he promptly ended up with yet another—Kristin. Leland had suggested that Kristin might have received some embezzled money from her father, but that sure didn’t seem plausible.

She was homesteading a rundown house in the middle of nowhere. She drove a rusted truck and mostly wore old T-shirts and jeans. There hadn’t been any evidence of new bikes or expensive toys for Cody at that place, and Ryan had a feeling that if anyone enjoyed nicer things in that family, it would be him.

Kristin’s boy.
According to Trevor, Cody was in Hayden’s class at school, but the similarity pretty much ended there.

Hayden was a handful. Wild and exuberant, he was always looking for adventure, his eyes full of mischief and a fast comeback ready at any time.

Standing out on the field alone this afternoon, his chin raised at a belligerent angle and his hands jammed in his pockets, Cody looked like the loneliest kid Ryan had ever seen. There was anger in him, too, and defiance…yet he’d seemed almost
pathetically grateful when Ryan had offered the use of his cell phone. What was going on there?

Abuse came to mind. But Kristin had never seemed the type, and there didn’t seem to be a dad in the picture anymore.

Ryan felt a twinge of anger. She’d kicked him aside like a pile of dirty laundry when she learned that he wouldn’t inherit any part of the ranch. After that, Kristin had gone after the first rich boy she met. And apparently that hadn’t lasted, either.

And now the one who was suffering was that young boy.

The children…it was always the children who suffered most. He closed his eyes against the images from the Middle East that still haunted his nights, but he couldn’t block the sounds. The screams. Bowing his head, he immersed himself in the guilt and the horror of it all. There was nothing he could do to change things. Nothing he could do to bring them back.

All he could do was remember…and remember. Until the day he died.

The roar of a truck shook him out of his private memorial. In the rearview mirror he saw a cloud of dust boiling skyward behind a pickup that had to be doing nearly seventy on a gravel road.

He threw his truck into gear and pulled way over to the side, hoping the driver didn’t lose con
trol at the crest of the hill. Seconds later, gravel hit the side of his truck like a barrage of buckshot as the vehicle thundered by.

Ryan followed the other driver home and parked next to him. He was out of his truck and at the other driver’s door as the guy stepped out. “I hope there was a fire,” he snapped. “You could’ve killed someone driving like that.”

The man hoisted a bull rope onto his shoulder, turned and gave him an arrogant grin.
Garrett.
“Just clockin’ good time out of town. Most people are smart enough to get out of my way.”

Ryan’s anger blazed. “But everyone deserves to live, punk. You’re just too dumb to realize it.”

Garrett tipped back his head and laughed, his brash cockiness unfazed. “Well, aren’t we lucky. The big hero is back. I can’t wait to see what happens around here now.”