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Curly turned back toward Maude and rolled his eyes, but he let the boy help him as if he needed it.
“Thanks a million, Doctor,” Jimmy called over his shoulder as he stuffed Curly into the cab of the truck.
“Curly, either stay on the horse, or stay off it.” Maude smiled at the old man.
He grinned and waved with the cast she had applied because she didn’t think he’d keep a splint on for any longer than he was in her direct sight. The pink had been his idea.
As they drove off, an eddy of dust from their wake made its way across the town’s wide main thoroughfare and dissipated against the white-and-blue facade of Alice’s Diner. There had been many an “Alice” over the years. In the distance, a flock of birds flew above the trees with the sun glistening off the white of their feathers.
“Home.” Contentment like she hadn’t known in years swept through her. Soon, it wouldn’t matter that she had once been the little girl everyone called Maudie.
As she reentered the building, Abby came toward her with a paper in her hand. “There’s two more coming in, Dr. DeVane. An ankle. Not too serious, by the sound of it. The other was kicked in the chest.”
“Any details on the second one?” Kicked in the chest by a horse or a steer was often life threatening. Broken ribs. Punctured lungs. Bruised heart muscle. “Kicked by what?”
“They say he seems fine, but he was apparently kicked by the other one.”
“Hard enough to hurt an ankle?” Maude gave a small shudder as she thought of how that might have come about. “How soon?”
“A few minutes. And there’s one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“They’re coming from Mountain High.”
“But—” Maude stopped as pain rushed in and nearly took her breath away.
“I’m sorry, Dr. DeVane. I know Henry was your friend.”
“It’s okay.” Maude waved off the nurse’s concern and turned into the office. Someone had restarted Henry Daley’s business. When the young entrepreneur had died last summer, she had thought Mountain High Executive Services had died with him.
She sat down to enter notes in Curly’s medical record, but tapped a pen tip on the clipboard instead. The first time she met Henry, he had tried to die on her. Before she got the chance to make a diagnosis, his arrogant, older, M.D. brother whisked the younger man away to another hospital.
Henry…
“Dr. DeVane?”
Maude cleared the tightness from her throat and faced Abby. “Are they here?”
“The van’s coming up the street. Carolyn’s still here and we’ll call if there’s something you need to see right away.”
“Thanks, Abby,” Maude said as Abby hurried away.
Maude repositioned the squeezy clip in the back of her wavy, shoulder-length brown hair. The clinic was old-fashioned in some respects, but the nurses, like Abby, and techs, like Carolyn, were as good as those at big-city clinics.
They had to be; they cared for their neighbors every day.
After a few minutes, the automatic doors opened, and a loud wail filled the clinic. Maude leaped from her chair and stepped out into the hallway to see Carolyn pushing a wheelchair filled with a mildly obese, fifty-something woman.
“Is that the doctor? Help me, Doctor.” The woman reached toward Maude with outstretched hands.
Carolyn, a small woman with big red glasses, an X-ray technician by training and one of Doc Avery’s long-standing assistants, patted the woman’s shoulder. “Dr. DeVane will be in as soon as I get you more comfortable, ma’am.”
The woman wailed again, and the tech hurried her off to a treatment room.
The outside doors whooshed open and Abby entered, pushing an empty wheelchair. The second patient walked beside her. When he saw Maude, the man touched a finger to the brim of an imaginary hat. “Hello, Dr. DeVane.” Grief touched his look.
She led him toward the treatment room. “Mr. Hancock, I’ll be in to see you after the nurse gets you settled.” Jake had been the one who’d called her in Chicago about Henry’s fatal accident, but true to his tacit nature, she got few details. Jake must have somehow restarted Mountain High.
Maude turned away and as she did, she noticed a man in the clinic doorway standing with his back to her. The glare of the bright sun pouring in the doorway outlined his tall form, his broad shoulders and trim waist, a man of her fantasies, if she ever had time for those anymore. The man lifted a folded piece of paper and tilted his head like—
“Guy Daley.”
The name escaped as her heart began to pound. She forced a breath in and out…remembering.
In spite of the cold, his kiss had made her feel as if she were riding a wind on fire. Dangerous and exciting, it had left her soul scorched. But whatever she had thought she felt for this man, he had killed on that rainy Chicago night.
He stepped forward out of the halo of sunlight into the artificially lit hallway, dressed in ranch-work clothes, his challenging gaze fixed on her. She found herself staring into dark eyes. Eyes she once gazed into wondering if there were feelings for her buried somewhere in the deep shadows.
A primal urge arose in her, a craving she had wanted never again to have for this man. She crushed it.
Fool me once…
“Hello, Dr. Daley,” she said, glad her voice came out strong and firm. So much for being the only doctor in the valley.
“Dr. DeVane.”
“I’m sorry about your brother.” She squared her shoulders as if he might fight her on her right to feel anything for Henry. He had in the past.
“Thank you,” was all he said, but his expression slid to one with a chilling lack of emotion as he tucked the paper he had been reading into his shirt pocket.
“Are you here about the people from Mountain High?” She gestured down the hallway toward the treatment rooms.
“I am.”
“Did Mr. Hancock restart the program?”
“No.” The clipped response demanded no further questions.
But she ignored it. “Then who—”
“I would have thought you’d know I was on the ranch,” he said before she had a chance to finish what she was about to ask.
The sharp tone of his words almost made her laugh. He had disliked her for so long it didn’t bother her much anymore. And now that Henry was gone, she realized, it didn’t have to bother her at all. “I’m the last stop on the gossip network.”
A loud wail filled the hallway.
“Does this clinic have the facilities to see these patients or should I take them to a bigger town?”
She thought of her first week of emergency medicine rotation when the great Dr. Daley had yanked his younger brother from her care and taken him to another hospital.
“I’ll see them and if you don’t like what I have to say, Kalispell is about two hours away—each way—from the ranch.”
She lifted her chin, but he said nothing.
Into the silence, the patient wailed again, this time holding the quavering tone like a coyote announcing territory.
“I have patients to see.” She headed toward the keening.
“There’s nothing wrong with her ankle.” His voice was a low rumble behind her.
“I get to decide that,” she said without turning.
As she walked toward the room, she found herself wondering why the highest and mightiest emergency medicine physician in the Midwest was tucked away on a ranch in Montana.
“Hello. I’m Dr. DeVane,” Maude said as she pushed back the curtain in the room where the woman sat with one foot elevated on a pillow.
Ms. Stone greeted her and then shifted to fidget with the bright white sheet the way one might expect a nervous queen on her throne to tend the folds of her velvet gown.
“Tell me what happened, Ms. Stone.”
“What happened is that seminar leader made me break my ankle.” She put her head back and her arm over her face.
Seminar leader? She called Dr. Guy Daley a seminar leader?
“Let me take a look at your ankle, and then you can tell me how you were injured.”
Maude lifted the sheet and the ice pack to see a pale, puffy ankle.
“It all started…”
It all started was usually not a good place to begin.
“…when my father—”
“Why don’t we start with when you injured your ankle?”
After listening and examining, Maude had to agree. Guy Daley’s assessment was probably correct. There was no injury, but in case there was some unseen problem, she gave the patient the benefit of the doubt. “We’ll get some X-rays.”
“Thank you so much, Doctor.”
The long, low moan the woman gave out this time had Maude biting her lip and hurrying out the door, grateful she had somewhere else to be. Abby should have a set of vitals and a brief history from Jake by now.
“Really? X-rays?” Guy Daley put out his hands to fend her off as she nearly plowed into him.
She sidestepped and exhaled a huff of air to short circuit the emotions her brain was trying to make from the smell of clean cotton and male pheromones. “This clinic may be in the back woods, but we treat the patient’s privacy as a serious matter.”
“Don’t let that seminar leader tell you what to do, Doctor,” Ms. Stone called from the treatment room.
Guy pulled her away from the doorway.
She frowned down at where he held her arm and then up into his face. His dark gaze challenged her and then he let go. “I suspect Ms. Stone is looking for sympathy.”
“If she’s not injured, why did you bring her here?”
“She wanted to see a doctor. Jake and Bessie are the only people out here that know I’m a physician—and you.”
The level gaze he aimed at her told Maude he wasn’t about to expound. This time she didn’t challenge him.
“You can have a seat—” she started.
“—in the waiting room? No, thank you. I’ll be back after I see to a few things.” He immediately walked toward the exit. The arrogance that should have been in his step was missing.
She wondered if he had secrets as desperate as her own.
“Dr. DeVane?”
Maude turned as the nurse approached her. “Yes, Abby.”
“You might want to come right away.”
CHAPTER TWO
GUY SLIPPED OUT into the warming wind of the early afternoon. He had seen the questions in Maude DeVane’s eyes, and he had no intention of sharing his grief with someone whose loss could be measured in dollars. He kicked a pebble with the toe of his boot and stepped off the curb to cross the wide street.
He remembered the feel of her responsive lips beneath his. Five years ago, for one brief moment he had wanted to be wrong about her. He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth. He wouldn’t be surprised if Maude DeVane still held out hope that Henry had somehow left the ranch that had been her parents’ to her.
As he reached the far side of the street, he stopped in front of the diner and slid the letter that had arrived in this morning’s mail from his pocket.
To Whom It May Concern: the letter began. Kelly was right about his parents. This letter was from their attorney, most likely at his mother’s behest. Any and all persons now occupying the Whispering Winds Ranch shall vacate…
Nice bluff, Mother. His parents had no control over Lexie’s inheritance, but that didn’t stop them from trying. As the firstborn son, Guy had been the only focus of their attention. Everything he did mattered. Everything Henry did was irrelevant. Guy had tried to shield Henry as much as he could, but Henry was only eight when Guy went off to college. After Guy left, Henry accelerated his campaign to get their parents to notice him. By the time Henry got out of high school, he had already begun a series of extreme adventure trips that would ultimately take his life.
Now Lexie’s grandparents wanted control of the ranch. If Guy thought for a moment they had forgiven Henry for fathering a child at age fifteen with a casual acquaintance, he might think they were trying to protect Lexie. He knew his parents well enough. If there was wealth they could control, they thought it some sort of negligence not to try.
Guy tossed the letter into a nearby trash can, and headed down the block. “Stop at the hardware store,” was Bessie’s plea to anyone from the ranch who went to town. There was always something at the cluttered, dusty old store the ranch needed.
“Hello, Mr. Daley.” The storeowner smiled at Guy and furrowed his well-trimmed eyebrows. “Bessie called. Said she didn’t have lightbulbs on her list this morning and she’d appreciate if you’d get some. Also says she wishes you’d carry your phone.”
“Thanks.” Guy gave the storekeeper what he hoped was an equally friendly Montana-like smile. At the light-bulb display, he touched where the pocket of his lab coat would have been and where his cell phone and pager had spent most of his waking hours. No lab coat. No cell phone. No hospital pager.
He bowed his head and studied blue-and-yellow light-bulb packages before he chose several with no dust.
At the checkout, he picked up a handful of Tootsie Pops in a bouquetlike arrangement and laid it on the counter beside the lightbulbs. He thought about it for moment, and added a second colorful bouquet.
MAUDE PUSHED OPEN the treatment-room door to see Jake Hancock perched on the edge of the patient cart, hospital gown draped loosely over his torso. As Maude stepped inside the room, Abby took up a position at the door, as if she might tackle him if he tried to leave. And she might.
“Abby says you’re trying to bolt.”
“The longer I sit here, the sillier I feel, ma’am.”
“Tell me what happened to you.”
“Nothing worth frettin’ about.”
Maude took a step closer. “Well, now that you’re already here, I’ll examine you, take a listen to your chest and if need be, we’ll go from there.”
“Is it really necessary?” He swung one leg and tapped the cart’s metal end with a boot heel.
She stared steadily at him and knit her eyebrows as if contemplating a great puzzle. She knew his type. Needed a limb dangling before help seemed necessary. “That’s one of the tricky things about trauma medicine. Sometimes I don’t know if it’s ‘necessary’ until I examine the patient and see if it’s necessary.”
“You’re sure?”
“There is one tried-and-true way to cover the worst-case scenario without examining you.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small tag with a string attached to it by way of a reinforced hole. One of the M.D.’s who’d helped her train in rural medicine had given it to her. One of my old tricks, he had said.
Maude had thought she’d never use it, but here she was handing it to her third patient.
Abby laughed out loud and came up to stand beside Jake.
Jake took the small tag and let it dangle from his fingertips. “What’s this?”
“A toe tag.” Abby doubled over as she spoke.
Maude held a steady, serious expression. “Tie it on your big toe. Saves us the trouble if…”
Jake held up a hand to stop her. “You’re very persuasive, Dr. DeVane.”
“It’s how I can afford my yacht.” She took the tag from him and tucked it back into her pocket.
He looked at her briefly and then laughed. “Trying to picture someone tugging a yacht up into these mountains.”
She took the stethoscope from her pocket and held it in her hands. “So, tell me how you feel.”
He settled back as if he might stay for the exam. “Like I was kicked into the dirt by a Boardroom Betty. Mostly a pride injury, I suspect. I was only down for a couple seconds.”
“He has two small impact marks on his chest,” Abby offered.
Maude examined him, read the electrocardiogram and found nothing to make her think he had any serious side effects from the kick or the fall, but harbored her usual suspicion for a posttrauma case.
“Sir, you seem to have pronounced your diagnosis correctly. You are ‘fine’ as far as your exam and tests show.”
He leaped off the cart and grabbed the blue work shirt from the counter.
“We’ll give you privacy to dress, but don’t leave yet.”
“Yes, ma’am. And, please, tell the boss I didn’t just get up and run away. He’s likely not to believe me.” He smiled at them as Maude and Abby stepped into the corridor.
“I’ll tell him, Mr. Hancock.” Maude pulled the door closed.
Now, back to the seminar leader’s problem pupil.
Seminar leader. It’s not that she hated Guy Daley or anything—not really. He was being a big brother looking after Henry. Though he was overbearing and a snob and sometimes…
Maybe she hated him a little. She’d have to work on that one if they were going to live in the same valley. Henry had loved him after all. Maybe he’d mellowed in the years since she’d seen him.
“Excuse me.” Guy stood in the hallway, his hair a bit disheveled. A dark lock fell over his forehead, making him look a little like a cross between a certain superhero and his alter ego.
Feelings shot through her which she banished almost before she acknowledged them.
“The tech has the X-rays finished. They look…Well, they’re ready for you to read,” he said, as he followed her down the hallway.
She stopped and turned. “Dr. Daley.”
“I’ll be waiting down there.” He gestured toward the entrance and walked away.
She smiled a little. He couldn’t stand to be sent to the waiting room instead of doing the sending.
She continued to the small recess that served as the tiny clinic’s supply closet and X-ray viewing room. The tech had kindly moved the mop and pail out of the way so she could get a good close look at the X-ray films.
A few minutes later, she went in to see Ms. Stone and found her patient reclined on the cart with a damp wash-cloth over her eyes. Maude touched the woman’s arm.
“Yes.” Cynthia’s voice was weak and, well, pathetic if Maude was to go there.
“Ms. Stone, I’ve looked at your X-rays.”
The patient removed the cloth from her eyes. A hopeful look spread over her face. Maude liked giving good news. It was one of the best parts of being a doctor.
“There’s no break and no signs of any degenerative joint disease. The bone structure of your foot and ankle looks just fine.”
Ms. Stone’s expression became distorted. But she remained silent.
Not exactly the reaction Maude expected.
“You might have a small muscle tear or a strained ligament which wouldn’t show up on X-ray. The tech will tell you what you need to do for it, give you home-care instructions and wrap it with an elastic bandage. If it hurts too much, use an over-the-counter pain medication. I’ll call—”
Ms. Stone began to squirm and look around the room, to look anywhere except at Maude.
“Is there something wrong?” Maude asked.
“I can’t go with Mr. Daley. You’ll have to keep me here until I’m better.” She still avoided looking at Maude.
“Is there a problem I should know about?” Other than a problem with a hotshot emergency doctor not telling anyone he was a physician? Maude quickly put the thought away. She could examine it when she had no one else’s welfare at stake.
“I can’t go back to that place.” Ms. Stone studied her chipped nail polish intently.
“I’m sorry. We have no overnight facilities at the clinic.”
“I need to stay here until I can travel,” she said after a few more moments of polish-studying.
“There are motels nearby.”
The woman looked away, and when she looked back, there were tears in her eyes.
“Then I’d—” She paused.
“Yes?” Maude placed a hand on her patient’s shoulder.
“I’d be alone.”
Maude wondered if Cynthia Stone had ever been alone. She’d met the type, always had nannies, traveling companions, live-in servants. Never alone.
“You wouldn’t be by yourself at the ranch. It’s such a pretty place.”
“You know it? You know that place and about that thing he has strung across the canyon?”
Maude smiled. She hadn’t seen Henry’s contraptions, but he had an uncanny respect for the land; she trusted him to somehow make Mountain High fit in to the natural surroundings.
She realized Ms. Stone was waiting for a response.
“You chose to participate in the program, didn’t you?”
“Well—um—yes.”
“And you paid for it?”
“Of course.” She looked at her fingernails again. “Well, my father did.”
Maude stepped back and folded her arms over her chest. “Then you’re the boss. Choose to participate or choose not to. They can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. You can discuss options with the people from Mountain High.”
Cynthia Stone crossed her arms over her chest, mimicking Maude’s stance, but said nothing.
“I’ll send in D—um—Mr. Daley.” Mr. Daley. Dr. Daley, whatever. It wasn’t her place to rat him out.
Cynthia huffed out a derisive sound. “It won’t do any good. I don’t trust any of them. I don’t know what they think they’re doing out there in the middle of the wilderness on that horrible ranch.”
“I’ll send him in.”
Maude left the door slightly ajar as she exited the room. Horrible ranch. She thought many things of the ranch where she grew up, but horrible was never one of them. Not even when its isolation helped cause great harm to her sister.
She remembered the ever-present smile on the face of her beautiful sister. A sister who had once been so smart and capable.
“You can go in and see Ms. Stone now,” Maude said as she approached Guy Daley. “She’s convinced she needs to stay.”
He nodded and disappeared into the treatment room.
If he didn’t talk the woman into leaving, there was always Sheriff Potts. The imposing man with the badge had little trouble in a face-to-face confrontation. Though law enforcement was rarely needed in the small rural valley’s only clinic, the sheriff was always glad to help out—at least that’s what Doc Avery told her. He had told her a lot of things during the short two weeks she had to get acquainted with his, and now her, practice.
Not much later, Maude looked up from the office desk where she was finishing paperwork to see Guy coming down the hallway toward her. So soon. She wondered if she’d need the sheriff after all.
“The tech is helping her learn how to use crutches and then I’ll take her back to the ranch.”
Maude swallowed a startled “What?” She couldn’t believe the woman in the treatment room would consent to going anywhere with him, let alone back to the ranch, and so quickly.
“She said she’d leave because—” He paused.
She checked to see if he was gloating.
Holding his expression emotionless, he said, “I told her you’d make a house call.”
She pushed up from her chair to face him. “You what? A house call? For a minor ankle injury?” She thought of the old and the infirm patients Doc Avery used to visit at home. She would gladly see those people, but Cynthia Stone didn’t fit any category of patient who might need a house call.
“Having you come by to check up on her was the only thing that got her interested in leaving.”
The ranch. The place she had managed, with one excuse or another, not to go back to for over ten years.
“Tell her I won’t be there.”
“She’s your patient,” he stated matter-of-factly, and walked out the door.
Even after Henry most generously bought the ranch from her parents to save them from bankruptcy and to fund their retirement and her sister’s care—Maude could not make herself return.
Soon, Mountain High’s blue van pulled up to the door.
Yes, she did hate Guy Daley. She did so want to be bigger than that, but he made it too easy.
Worse—
He was forcing her hand. She should visit the ranch for her own sake. She hadn’t had the moral fortitude to go back there since she left for medical school, and had even less courage after her parents sold the ranch to Henry. Making a house call would keep her from chickening out.
She stepped into the warm afternoon sunlight and walked over to where Guy stood looking tall and Western, not at all like a Chicago doctor, and leaning on the van’s driver’s side door with his arms crossed.