Dr. Colton's High-Stakes Fiancée

She hurried into the kitchen and dumped her purse and mace canister on the table. She turned on the lights and opened the back door. “Come here, Brown Dog. Come.”

The dog cringed farther back behind an aluminum lawn chair. She squatted down and held out her hand. The dog leaned like it might take a step toward her and then chickened out and retreated even farther behind the chair. If she knew one thing about frightened animals, it was that no amount of coaxing was going to get them to go where they didn’t want to go. Looked like she had to go to the dog.

“Hang on, Brown Dog. Let me get some more light out there and then just have a look at you on the porch. Would that make you feel better?”

She kept up a stream of gentle chatter as she went inside, opened all the blinds and flooded the back porch with light. She stepped back outside. And gasped. The entire far end of her porch was covered with blood. As she watched, the dog staggered like it was nearly too weak to stay on its feet. Even though the dog had a thick, shaggy coat, she could still see hip bones and shoulder blades protruding. The creature was skeletal, his eyes sunken and dull in his skull.

And then she caught sight of his right hind leg. It was a bloody, mangled mess with white bone sticking out of a gaping wound she could put several fingers into. For all the world, it looked like he’d been shot. And the bullet looked to have nearly ripped his leg off.

Oh, God. This was way beyond her paltry skills with antibiotic cream and bandages. The sight of the wound nearly made her faint, it was so gory. She had to call a vet, and now. Dr. Smith, Honey Creek’s long-time veterinarian, retired a few months back, and the local ranchers had yet to attract another one to town. She’d have to call someone in Bozeman. She raced into the house and pulled out the phone book, punching in the first number she found.

“Hello,” a sleepy female voice answered the phone.

She blurted, “Hi. A dog is on my back porch. He’s been shot and he’s in terrible shape. I need a veterinarian to come down to Honey Creek right away!”

“I’m sorry, dear, but my husband doesn’t cover that far away. And besides, he’s out on a call. Said he’d be gone most of the night.”

Oh God, oh God, oh God. Breathe, Rachel. “Is there another vet in the area I can call?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know any small-animal vets who’ll go to Honey Creek. You’ll have to bring the dog up to Bozeman. Can I take your number and have my husband call you? He may have a suggestion.”

No way could she pick up that big dog by herself and hoist him into her car. And even if she did manage it, she suspected the dog on her porch wasn’t going to live another hour, let alone through a long drive over mountain roads. It might be twenty miles as the crow flew to Bozeman, but the drive was considerably longer. Especially at night, and especially when it got cold. Even the slightest hint of moisture on the roads would freeze into sheet ice in the mountains. “Thanks anyway,” Rachel mumbled. “I’ll figure out something else.”

She hung up, thinking frantically. Now what? She needed someone who could handle a gunshot wound. A doctor. Maybe she could take the dog down to the local emergency room—

No way would they let her in with a stray dog carrying who knew what diseases. She swore under her breath. She got a bowl of water for the dog and carried it outside. Tears ran down her face to see how scared and weak he was and how voraciously he drank. He was dying. And for who knew what reason, he’d wandered up to her porch. She had to get him help.

Without stopping to think too much about it, she pulled out her cell phone and dialed the phone number that hadn’t changed since she was in high school, and which she’d had memorized for the past decade and more.

“Hello?” a gruff male voice answered.

She couldn’t tell which Colton it was, but it definitely wasn’t Finn. She spoke fast before her courage deserted her. “I need to speak to Dr. Finn Colton. This is a medical emergency. And please hurry!”

While she waited a lifetime for him to come to the phone, the dog lay down on the porch, apparently too weak to stand anymore. Panic made her light-headed. He was dying right before her eyes!

“This is Dr. Colton.”

“Oh, God, Finn. It’s Rachel. You have to come. I tried to call a doc in Bozeman but he can’t come and there’s so much blood from the gunshot and I don’t know what to do and I think I’m going to faint and please, there’s no one else I can call—”

He cut her off sharply. “Unlock your front door. Lie down. Elevate your feet over your head. And breathe slowly. I’ll be right there.”

The phone went dead.

Why would she put her feet up? Time was of the essence right now. She ran into the kitchen and grabbed all the dish towels out of the drawer. The dog let her approach him and press a towel over his bloody wound, indicating just how close to gone he was. Pressure to slow the bleeding. That’s what they said in her Girl Scout first-aid training about a century ago.

The dog, which she noted vaguely was indeed a boy, whimpered faintly. “Hang on, fella,” she murmured. “Help is on the way.” She stroked his broad, surprisingly soft head and noticed that his ears were floppy and soft and completely out of keeping with the rest of his tough appearance. His eyes closed and he rested his head in her hand. The trust this desperate creature was showing for her melted her heart.

Oblivious to the pool of blood all over her porch, she sat down cross-legged beside the dog and gathered the front half of his body into her lap. He was shivering. She draped the rest of the towels over him and cradled him close, sharing her body heat with him. “It’ll be all right. Just stay with me, big guy. I promise, I’ll take care of you.”

The dog’s jaw was broad and heavily muscled, somewhat like a pit bull. Maybe half pit bull and half something fuzzy and shaped like a herding dog. Underneath the layer of blood he was brindled, brown speckled with black.

“Hang in there, boy. Help is on the way. Finn Colton’s the one person in the whole wide world I’d want to have beside me in an emergency. He’ll fix you right up. You just wait and see.”

Finn tore into his bedroom, yanked on a T-shirt, grabbed his medical bag and sprinted for the kitchen. He snatched keys to one of the farm trucks off the wall and raced out of the house, ignoring a sleepy Damien asking what the hell was going on.

He peeled out of the driveway, his heart racing faster than the truck. And that was saying something, because he floored the truck down the driveway and hit nearly a hundred once he careened onto the main road.

“Hang on, Rachel,” he chanted to himself over and over. “Don’t die on me. Don’t you dare die on me. We’ve got unfinished business, and you don’t get to bail out on me by croaking,” he lectured the tarmac winding away in front of his headlights.

He’d followed her home from the hardware store this morning—at a distance of course, where she wouldn’t spot him. He’d been worried at how she looked in her car in the parking lot. It was nothing personal, of course, just doctorly concern for her well-being. Good thing he had followed her, because he knew where she lived now. Turned out she was living in her folks’ old place. On the phone, she’d sounded on the verge of passing out from blood loss. And a gunshot? Had there been an intruder in her house? An accident cleaning a weapon? What in the hell had happened to her? First Mark Walsh, and now this. Was there a serial killer in Honey Creek?

He’d call Wes, but he’d left his cell phone back on his dresser at home, he’d been in such a rush to get out of there. He’d have to call his brother after he got to Rachel’s place. And after he made sure she wasn’t going to die on him.

“Hang on, baby. Don’t die. Hang on, baby. Don’t die—” he repeated over and over.

In less time than Rachel could believe, headlights turned into her driveway and a pickup truck screeched to a halt behind her car. Finn was out of the truck, medical bag in hand before the engine had barely stopped turning.

“Rachel!” he yelled.

“I’m right here,” she called back more quietly. “No need to wake the entire neighborhood.”

He raced up to her, took one look at the blood soaking her clothes and flipped into full-blown emergency-room-doctor mode. “Where’s the blood coming from? How did you get hurt? I need you to lie down and get these towels off of you—”

“Finn.”

“Be quiet. I need to get a blood pressure cuff on you. And let me call an ambulance. You’re going to need a pint or two of blood—”

“Finn.”

“What?”

“I’m not hurt.”

“Are you kidding? With all this blood? Shock can mask pain. It’s not uncommon for gunshot victims not to be aware that they’ve been shot for a while. Where did the bullet hit you?”

“I wasn’t shot. He was.”

She pulled back the largest towel to reveal the dog lying semiconscious in her lap.

“What the—”

“I’m not hurt. The dog was. Please, you’ve got to help him. He’s dying.”

Finn pulled back sharply. “I don’t do animals.”

“But you do bullet wounds, right?”

“On humans.”

“Well, he’s a mammal. Blood, bone. Hole in leg. Pretty much the same thing, if you ask me.”

Finn rose to his feet, his face thunderous. “You scared ten years off my life and had me driving a hundred miles an hour down mountain roads in the middle of the night, sure you were dying, to come here and treat some mutt?“ His voice rose until he was shouting.

Oh, dear. It hadn’t occurred to her that he’d think she was shot. And he’d driven a hundred miles an hour to get to her? Something warm tickled the back side of her stomach.

“Finn, I’m sorry if I scared you. I was pretty freaked out when I saw all the blood. I called a vet in Bozeman. But he’s out on a call that’s supposed to take all night and his wife said no small-animal vet would make a house call to Honey Creek anyway. And it’s not like I could take the dog to the Honey Creek hospital. You’re the only person I know of in town who can take care of a serious gunshot wound and make a house call.”

“I’m going home.” He picked up his bag and turned to go.

“Wait! Finn, please. I—” she took the plunge and bared her soul “—I’ve got no one else.”

He turned around. Stared down at her, his jaw rigid. Heck, his entire body was rigid with fury.

“I’m sorry for whatever I’ve done in the past to treat you badly. I’m sorry I did whatever I did that broke us up. If it makes you feel better, I’ll take full responsibility for all of it. But please, please, don’t take out your anger at me on a poor, defenseless animal who’s never done anything to you.”

Finn stopped. He didn’t turn around, though.

“Please, Finn, I’m begging you. If you ever had any feelings for me, do this one thing.”

He pivoted on his heel and glared down at her. “If I do this you have to promise me one thing.”

“Anything.”

“That you’ll never call me again. Ever. I don’t want to see you or speak to you for the rest of my life.”

She reeled back from the venom in his voice. Did he truly hate her so much? “But you’ll take care of Brown Dog?”

His gaze softened as he looked down at the injured animal. “I’ll do what I can.”

She nodded. “Done.”

“We’ve got to get him inside. Although the cold has probably slowed his metabolism enough to keep him alive for now, he’ll need to warm up soon.”

Working together, they hoisted the big dog and carried him inside, laying him on her kitchen table. It made her heart ache to feel how little the animal weighed given his size and to feel the ribs slabbing his sides. He was skin and bones.

Finn gave the dog a critical once-over. “This dog’s so emaciated that treating his gunshot wound is only going to delay the inevitable. I’ve got a powerful tranquilizer in my bag. It should be enough to put him down.”

“Put him down as in kill him?” she squawked.

“Yes. Euthanasia. It’s the humane thing to do for him.”

“Since when did you turn into such a quitter?” she snapped. “Our deal was that you’d do your best to save him, not kill him.”

Finn glared at her across the table. “Fine. But for the record, you’re making this dog suffer needlessly. I can’t condone it.”

“Just shut up and fix his leg.”

“Make sure he doesn’t move while I wash up,” Finn ordered. He moved to the sink and proceeded to meticulously scrub his hands. He hissed as the soap hit his palms and Rachel craned to see a series of raw blisters on his palms. Where had he gotten those?

Finally, he came back and laid out a bunch of stainless steel tools on the table beside Brown Dog. “You’ll assist,” he ordered.

Great. She never had been all that good with blood. A person might even say she was downright squeamish. And surely he remembered that. A suspicion that he was doing this to torture her took root in her mind. But if it meant he took care of the dog, so be it. “As long as I don’t have to look,” she retorted.

“Hand me both pairs of big tweezers.” He held out one hand expectantly.

She gasped as she got a better look at his bloody blisters. “What happened to your hands?”

“I helped Damien string fence today. Wasn’t expecting to have to scrub for surgery tonight. Had to take the skin off the blisters while I scrubbed up so no bacteria would hide underneath.”

She stared. He’d torn up his hands like that for the dog? Awe at his dedication to his work flowed through her.

For the next hour, the kitchen was quiet. Finn occasionally asked for something or passed her a bloody gauze pad. His concentration was total. And she had to admit he was giving it his best shot at saving this dog. He murmured soothingly to the animal, even though it was clear the dog was out cold from the injection Finn had given him.

She couldn’t help glancing at the surgical site now and then. It appeared Finn was reconstructing the dog’s leg. He set the broken femur and then began a lengthy and meticulous job of suturing tendons and muscles and whatever else was in there that she couldn’t name and didn’t want to.

Finally, when her head was growing light and she thought she might just faint on him in spite of her best efforts not to, Finn started to close up the wound. He stitched it shut in three different layers. Deep tissue, shallow tissue, and then, at long last, the ragged flesh.

Her stove clock read nearly 2:00 a.m. before Finn straightened up and stretched out the kinks in his back. He rubbed the unconscious dog’s head absently. “All right. That’s got it. Now we just have to worry about blood loss and infection and the patient’s generally poor state of health. I’ll leave you some antibiotic tablets to get down him by whatever means you can. If he wakes up, you can start feeding him if he’s not too far gone to eat.”

Although he continued to stroke the dog gently, Finn never once broke his doctor persona with her. He was cold and efficient and entirely impersonal. If she weren’t so relieved that he’d helped her, she’d have been bleeding directly from her heart to see him act like this. Again.

She would never forget the last time he’d been this angry and cold and distant. It had been the night of his senior prom. She’d been waiting for him in the beautiful lemon-yellow chiffon dress her mother had slaved over for weeks making. She’d had a garland of daisies in her hair, the flowers from their garden woven with her father’s own hands. Finn had been acting strangely when he came to the door but was polite enough to her parents. Then he’d taken her to the dance, waited until they were standing in front of the entire senior class of Honey Creek High and told her in no uncertain terms how she was worthless trash and vowed he never wanted to see her again.

He’d kept that promise until today. Well, and tonight, of course. Strange how he’d renewed his vow never to see her again within twenty-four hours of seeing her for the first time. She’d never known what had caused him to turn on her then, and she darned well didn’t know why he was so mad at her now. He was like Jekyll and Hyde. But mostly the monstrous one. Were it not so late, and she so tired and stressed out and blood covered, she might have asked him. But at the end of the day, it didn’t matter. They were so over.

He plunked a brown plastic pill bottle on the counter. “Based on his weight, I’d say half a tablet every six hours for the next week or until he dies, whichever comes first.”

She frowned at him. “That was uncalled for.”

“I said I’d treat the damned dog. Not that I’d be nice about it.”

“Well, you got that right. You’re being a giant jerk,” she snapped.

Finn scooped the rest of his surgical instruments into his bag and swept toward the door. “Goodbye, Rachel. Have a nice life.”

All of a sudden everything hit her. The shock and terror of the past few hours, the stress of the surgery and its gory sights, but most of all, the strain of having to be in the same room with Finn Colton. All that tension and unresolved anger hanging thick and suffocating between them. Watching him walk out of her life again. She replied tiredly, “Go to hell.”

She thought she heard Finn mutter, “I’m already there.”

But then he was gone. All his energy and male charisma. His command of the situation and his competence. And she was left with an unconscious dog lying in the corner of her kitchen, a bottle of pills, and a bloody mess to clean up.

So exhausted she could barely stand, she mopped the kitchen and the porch with bleach and water. How Brown Dog had any blood left inside his body, she had no clue. She was pretty sure she’d cleaned up an entire dog’s worth of blood.

Just as she was finishing, he whimpered. Now that his surgery was over, Finn had said it was safe for him to eat. Maybe she’d better start him off with something liquid, though. She pulled out a can of beef consommé that had been in the back of her cupboard for who knew how long and poured it into one of her mixing bowls. She thinned it with a little water and warmed it in the microwave before carrying it over to the groggy animal.

“It’s just you and me now, Brownie boy.”

She sat down on the floor beside him and used her mother’s turkey baster to dribble some of the broth into his mouth. At first he swallowed listlessly, but gradually he grew more enthusiastic about licking his chops and swallowing. By the time she finished the soup, he was actually sucking at the tip of the baster.

“We’ll show Finn, won’t we, boy? We’re survivors, you and me.”

Chapter 4

Rachel came home at lunch to change the newspapers under Brownie, give him his antibiotics and use the turkey baster to squirt canned dog food puréed with water down his throat. He was still too weak to do much but thump his tail a time or two, but gratitude shone in his eyes as she tenderly cared for him.

“What’s your story, boy? Where’d you get so beat up? Life sure can be tough, can’t it?”

She settled him more comfortably in the corner of her kitchen in his nest of blankets and headed back to work. The afternoon passed with her finding more and more discrepancies in the Walsh Oil Drilling Corporation records. She’d be worried about it if she weren’t so tired from last night and so concerned about the wounded animal in her kitchen. So when Lester Atkins called her and asked her to come to Mr. Warner’s office, she merely grabbed her latest evidence of the embezzlement and headed upstairs.

But when she stepped into the office, she pulled up short. Wes Colton, in full sheriff garb, was standing beside Craig Warner’s desk. Wes’s arms were crossed. And he was glaring at her. Good lord. What had Finn told him when he’d gone back to the ranch last night? Had Finn sicced Wes on her to get her fired?

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she managed to choke past her panic.

“Have a seat, Miss Grant,” Craig started.

Oh, God. This was an exit interview. Wes was here to escort her out of the building. The sheriff parked one hip on the corner of Warner’s massive desk, but he still loomed over her. The guy was even bigger and broader than Finn.

“How are you feeling today, Miss Grant?” Wes rumbled.

“Tired, actually. I’m sure Finn told you about my rather adventurous evening last night.”

“He did. Any idea who shot your dog?”

She shook her head. “I’ve got no idea. He just wandered up to my porch already shot. I never saw the dog before last night.”

“Kind of you to go to all that trouble to help him,” Wes murmured.

Was that skepticism in his voice, or was she just being paranoid? She shrugged and waited in resignation for this travesty to proceed.

On cue, Craig spoke quietly. “Miss Grant, I’d like you to tell Sheriff Colton what you told me on Friday.”

She blinked, startled. “You mean about the Walsh Oil Drilling accounts?”

He nodded.

Okay. She didn’t see what that had to do with her getting fired, but she’d play along. She turned to Wes. “Mr. Warner asked me to do an internal audit of the financial records of Walsh Oil Drilling Corporation for the past several years. Walsh Oil Drilling is a wholly owned subsidiary of Walsh Enterprises so we have legal purview over—”

Wes waved a hand to cut her off. “I’m not interested in the legal ins and outs of corporate structure. I’m confident that Craig is operating within the law to do the audit.”

She adjusted her line of thought and continued. “Yes, well, I looked at last year’s records first. I compared the original receipts, billing documents and logged work hours against the financial reports. And I found several major discrepancies. Based on that, I started going back further and looking at previous years.”

“And what did you find, Miss Grant?” Wes asked.

“More of the same. Somebody’s been skimming funds from this company over at least a fifteen-year period. Maybe since the founding of the company itself seventeen years ago.”

Wes definitely looked interested now. “How much money are we talking?”

“Millions. As much as two million dollars the year the company made a major oil strike and had a windfall income spike.”

Wes whistled low between his teeth. “Any way to tell who was taking the cash and cooking the books?”

She shrugged. “Mark Walsh himself signed off on the earliest financial reports. If he wasn’t taking the initial money himself, he was certainly aware of who was and how much he was taking. After his first death …” The phrase was weird enough to say that it hung her up for a moment. But then she pressed on: “… somebody kept taking it. I can’t read the handwriting of whoever was signing off on the financial documents, but it appears to have been the same signature for the past fifteen years.”

Wes glanced over at Warner. “You weren’t kidding when you said I’d want to hear this.” To Rachel he said, “Who else knows about this?”

“Nobody. Just me and Mr. Warner.”

Wes nodded, thinking. “I’d like to keep it that way for a while. This may be just the break we’re looking for.”

She frowned. “Huh?”

“In the Walsh murder investigation.”

“You think whoever killed Mark was helping him skim money from his companies and killed him over it?” she asked in surprise.

Wes shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to speculate. I just know that Mark Walsh was damned secretive, and it’s been nearly impossible to learn much about his life over the past fifteen years. If nothing else, you may have just answered how he was able to pay for his ongoing existence without his family knowing anything about it. Can you give me a complete rundown of how much money went missing and when, Rachel?”

He was using her first name now? Was that a good sign? “Uhh, sure. I can have it for you in a day or so. I’ve got a few more years’ worth of records to review and then I’ll be able to compile a report.”