Rescue Team (9 page)

“A
ND SO,”
K
ATE EXPLAINED,
suspecting her breathlessness had little to do with the trek across the Tanners’ pasture, “I thought Dad should see some of the Texas hill country, and . . . we’re here.” Had she ever done this? Introduced her father to a man who—

To Kate’s horror, she felt her face warm.
A man who . . . what?
She crossed her arms, glanced toward the sprawling stone ranch house. “Quite a spread.”

“The sign said, ‘Well drilling.’” Her father accepted Wes’s handshake. “Is that your business?”

“Three generations of us. Of course today—” Wes gestured toward the Scouts and K9 teams in the distance—“is about a whole different kind of community service. Rescue.” He glanced at Kate, a smile playing on his lips. “For folks who need that sort of help.”

Touché.
Kate decided to let him have that one. “And that’s
Duster, I assume,” she said, seeing that her father was already beside the muscular quarter horse, extending his palm toward the rusty-red muzzle. Her heart tugged unexpectedly as she recalled his words from so long ago.
“Put the carrot in the flat of your hand, punkin, and keep your fingers out of the way. That’s right. See there, he likes you already.”

“Valiant Duster officially, according to his papers,” Wes answered, “but I don’t let it go to his head. He’s passed all the qualifications for search and rescue. And now . . .”

Kate stayed back as Wes and her father talked, her father nodding and running a hand over the horse’s shoulder, listening intently as Wes described horsemanship skills like clearing water obstacles, dragging an object, and log jumping. She took a slow breath of country air, glad for an opportunity to collect herself for the first time since her father’s arrival. Her gaze swept what she could see of the acreage: rolling hills and live oaks, outcroppings of rock and clumps of the ever-present Texas cactus. A big barn and what looked like a workshop, pecan trees near the house, chairs on the front porch, and—she inhaled with appreciation—a barbecue going on somewhere.

She turned at the sound of the men’s laughter, noticed they were wearing similar boots. Wes was taller, his shoulders a bit broader in the orange search-and-rescue shirt, and the cut of his faded Levi’s—

“You didn’t tell me that Wes was an engineer too,” her father said, looking at her.

An engineer? She walked toward them, wondering if this had been a mistake after all. She’d already discovered that Wes had an uncanny knack for getting under her skin. Now her father—who’d
been safely mute almost two thousand miles away—had shown up wanting to talk. Putting them together probably wasn’t at all smart.

“He said you met at the hospital,” her father added, stroking Duster’s nose.

No . . .
Kate’s eyes met Wes’s. He told her father about the abandoned baby?

“Because I was there after a rescue,” Wes clarified, the earnest look in his eyes promising Kate that he hadn’t breached any privacy. “In fact, I was hoping to interest a few of the Austin Grace staff in volunteering today. Kind of thought Lauren might show up.”

“She wanted to, but she couldn’t.” Kate hugged her arms around herself. The distant voices and laughter of children seemed to intensify. Happy kids, close-knit families. “She’s working an extra shift in the ER.”

Kate knew this because she’d called Lauren last night. When she was pacing the house, frantic for ideas about how to deal with her father’s visit. And scared witless that seeing him would bring back the same black misery she’d felt at the debriefing. She’d been right.

-  +  -

“You sound . . . busy,” Lauren told her sister, hating the word that had really come to mind.
Manic.
This wasn’t clinical. This was Jess . . . being Jess. That’s all.

Lauren leaned back in the triage office chair and cradled the phone to her ear. “School’s good?”

“Great, easy, aced my physiology midterm. I’m like the star of the lab when everyone else says it’s so hard, whines, complains, yada yada: the class time is too early; they’re tired, overworked. I
say, what’s the big deal? Ha! Sleep is highly overrated—you can sleep when you die, ya know?”

Oh, Jess . . .
Lauren bit her lip, reminding herself not to give advice. Her “suffocating, impossible, mother-hen, preachy” concerns had threatened their close relationship too many times in the past. It was the biggest reason Lauren had taken the job in Austin. Space for Jessica and a cushion against her own inevitable worry. Not that the worry disappeared with distance.

Lauren took a slow breath. “Will you be at Mom and Dad’s for Thanksgiving?”

“Sure. Probably—maybe. Haven’t thought it out. It’s a long weekend and there’s this guy I met. He wants me to sign up for the Turkey Trot. I’m jogging every day now—can’t seem to stop. Anyway, he’s really cute—you’d drool—kind of Johnny Depp but more
Benny & Joon
than Jack Sparrow—”

“I love you, Jess,” Lauren broke in. “I’d better go now.” She nodded, tried to say good-bye, and finally hung up while her sister was still talking. Easier to capture a hummingbird.

Lauren was glad she’d taken the extra shift today, no matter what went down. If she were off, a rambling conversation like that would have her putting the VW in gear and heading to Houston. For no good reason . . .
because Jessica is fine. She is.

“No new patients out there?” Lauren asked after walking the short distance to the registration office. She peered over Beverly’s shoulder toward the waiting room.

“No. Only the girl with the baby. But I think she just hangs out here.” The clerk frowned, leaned toward the office window. “Where’d she go? I see the baby’s car seat, but—”

“I’m on it.”

Lauren strode into the waiting room, spotted the car seat at
the rear of the room, near the door. The baby was in the seat, unattended.
Where’s the mother?
She hurried to the sleeping baby and stood with her hands on her hips, scanning the few remaining people in the waiting room.
Where on earth . . . ?

She turned her attention to the double doors and connected immediately with the gaze of a young woman standing outside. The woman’s eyes widened. She glanced toward the parking lot, then hit the button for the automatic door and scuttled inside.

“Is this your baby?” Lauren asked, incredulous.

“Yes, I was just . . .” The woman pushed her dark-framed glasses up her nose. “I was making a call. The sign on the wall says you have to go outside to use cell phones.”

And you didn’t take your baby with you?
Lauren bit back the rebuke, reminding herself that the baby was fine and that some people simply didn’t think. Then she noticed how very young this mother was.
Don’t judge. She’s probably doing the best she can.
“Are you signing up to be seen in the emergency department?” she asked gently.

“No. I drive my father to the clinic next door for therapy,” she explained. “Sometimes I wait here until he’s finished.”

“Ah.” Lauren saw that the young mother was clutching several of the brochures offered by the emergency department. “And catching up on your reading material. That’s good.” She cocked her head, trying to see which ones the woman had gathered. “There are some good brochures,” she offered, “from the pediatricians’ offices. That one on top won’t be any help. It’s for pregnant women—about the Baby Moses law.”

“Baby Moses?”

“It’s called Safe Haven now,” Lauren explained. “Assistance for women who can’t keep their newborns. It was called Baby Moses after a Bible story about a baby who was left by his mother at
the river’s edge because she was afraid he was in danger at home. Anyway . . .” She stepped closer to the sleeping baby, dressed all in pink. “If you or your beautiful little girl . . . What’s her name?”

“Harley.”

Lauren smiled. “If you or Harley need anything while you’re waiting for your father, let me know. I’m Lauren. You can ask for me at the desk. And if you need to go outside, take Harley along, okay? It’s safer.”

“Okay.”

Lauren went back to the registration office, talked with Beverly for a few moments. Then took one last look around the waiting room before returning to the triage office. Harley and her mother had disappeared. She’d probably gone to pick up the baby’s grandfather. Then Lauren remembered it was Saturday. The offices were closed. She headed back to triage, deciding the young mother had simply wanted to escape from the house. How many times had Lauren done that when she and her sister butted heads? Families, regardless of love and good intentions, were never without their troubles.

-  +  -

Wes nudged Clementine forward through the shallow stream, following Duster, thinking that his gelding had never looked better. Not only because the quarter horse was fit, sure-footed, and shiny as molten copper in the late-afternoon sun, but because . . .
Kate’s riding him.

He smiled, not sure what he was enjoying more—the way her hips and legs moved with Duster’s stride or the fact that he’d managed to talk her into climbing up on that saddle, double-teaming her with the help of Matt Callison. It hadn’t been easy, and Wes knew—as well as he knew Clementine was prone to shy if a deer
came crashing through the brush—that Kate would be riding with her arms crossed if she could handle his horse that way.

But Wes had seen the look on Matt’s face at the prospect of taking the horses out, remembered Kate’s wistful childhood memory of fringed chaps and trail rides at a California lake. As well as her subsequent insistence that she and her dad didn’t talk anymore. It was no way to handle a team, let alone a family. He hoped that big chip on Kate’s shoulder, regardless of what had caused it or how long it had been there, would get jostled off somewhere along the trail. And Wes knew some fairly bumpy terrain.

“Hold up,” he called to her as Clem cleared the water and climbed the low embankment. “Let’s give your father a minute to catch up. Levi’s a plodder.”

Duster halted and Wes trotted the mare forward until he was alongside Kate.

Her hair was mussed even more than usual from the breeze, and the sun had coaxed a sprinkling of freckles across her nose. She’d removed the sunglasses, pushed up her sleeves. There was lace at the neckline of her T-shirt. No-nonsense khaki thermal . . . and lace? For some reason, it suited Kate perfectly. She couldn’t have looked more beautiful.

“How’s your backside?” he asked, glancing at Duster’s Australian saddle; then he scrambled to rephrase as her dark brows pinched together. “I mean . . . saddle okay, stirrups the right length?”

“You meant, can I handle it?” Kate’s eyes narrowed a fraction. “This big horse, the ride, being bullied into it. All because I made the mistake of telling you I’d done this before with my dad. As a kid. In a life that has no relation to my world today.” Her lips tensed in a way that said she was seconds from yanking the chip from her shoulder and hurling it at his head.

“I . . .” Wes rose in his stirrups and turned to check the trail. Matt and Levi were clearing the stand of brush just before the stream. “Okay,” he admitted, “maybe I pushed you. But I thought it was a good idea at the time.”

“You thought.” She looked down at the braided leather reins in her hands and then met Wes’s gaze again, surprising sadness flooding her eyes. “Have you ever thought that not everyone is like you? Or Sunni? Some of us aren’t ‘team’ people, the kind that Scouts rally around and old ladies call heroes. Or that hospital staff puts up on a pedestal. Some of us can’t even spend a random Saturday with family without risking . . .” Kate took a breath. “I came out here because I didn’t have a clue how to deal with a visit from my father. I didn’t know where else to go. I needed help with this
one
day. Putting me on your horse won’t change anything.” She shook her head, her eyes suddenly shiny with unshed tears. “Please don’t meddle in my life, Wes. Don’t do that.”

“Uh . . .” Wes held Kate’s unblinking gaze, forcing himself to say nothing. Do nothing. Though everything in him wanted to pull her down from that saddle, shake her. Hold her. Until she stopped fighting and he could somehow convince this prickly woman that she was wrong. No matter what her circumstances, there was always hope. Wes believed that. It was the reason he searched ditches in the dark, shouted a missing person’s name for hours against wind and freezing rain. Why he never gave up on stubborn horses . . . or people. He’d lowered ropes to the bottom of dozens of cliffs and never once had someone refused to grab hold because he was “meddling” in their lives. Kate was wrong. And maybe it wouldn’t happen now, but Wes swore he’d—

“Caught up with you two,” Matt said, bringing Levi to a halt
beside them. He wiped his brow and grinned. “This is great. Can’t thank you enough, Wes. Right, Kate?”

“Absolutely,” she said, sliding her sunglasses on before gathering her reins. “I was just saying the same thing.”

In a pig’s eye.

Wes pointed toward a fork in the trail, suggested to a very enthusiastic Matt that he and Levi lead the way. It was the least Wes could do, considering the man had driven all this way to spend time with a woman who wanted nothing to do with him. Wes was starting to understand how that felt.