James Bravo's Shotgun Bride

Addie gave the old man an aspirin. “Put it under your tongue and let it dissolve there.” Levi grumbled out a few curse words, but he did what Addie told him to do. Addie shot another glance at James. “I mean it. Go on and get out of here.”

Again, he ignored her. Not that he blamed her for wanting him to go, after all that had happened. But no way was he leaving her alone right now. What if Levi didn’t make it? James would never forgive himself for running off and deserting them at a time like this, with Addie scared to death and Levi just lying there, sweating and moaning and clutching his chest as he tried to answer the questions that Addie relayed to him from the dispatcher.

At the last minute, as the ambulance siren wailed in the yard, James glanced up at the hole in the ceiling. He looked down at the rope abandoned on the rug at the base of the chair and the shotgun that had landed in front of the TV. All that was going to look pretty strange.

He couldn’t do much about the hole, but he did grab the shotgun. He ejected the remaining shells and gathered them up, including the spent casing, which he found right out in the open in front of the sofa. He put the gun and the shells in the closet under the stairs and tossed the rope in there, too. The straight chair, he moved to a spot against the wall.

“Thank you,” Addie said. He glanced over and saw she was watching him.

He shrugged. “There’s still the hole in the ceiling. But don’t worry. It’ll be fine.”

“Hope so.”

“Just a little accident, that’s all.”

She pressed those fine lips together, her eyes full of fear for her grandpa. “Would you go up and show them down here?”

“You bet.” He ran up the stairs and greeted the med techs. “Roberta,” he said. “Sal.” They were local people and he’d known them all his life.

Sal asked, “Where is he?”

“In the basement. This way...”

Roberta and Sal were pros. In no time, they had Levi on a stretcher, an oxygen mask on his face and an IV in his arm. James helped them get Levi up the stairs. As they put him in the ambulance, Addie ran back inside to grab her purse and lock up. Her sweet-natured chocolate Labrador retriever, Moose, followed after her, whining with concern. Addie told the dog to stay. With another worried whine, Moose trotted to the porch and dropped to his haunches. Addie climbed in the back of the ambulance with her grandfather and Roberta.

Sal went around and got in behind the wheel. James trailed after him.

“Who blew the hole in the kitchen floor?” Sal asked out the open driver’s window as he started the engine.

“Levi was cleaning his shotgun.”

Sal just shook his head. “You’ve got blood on your collar.”

“It’s nothing. You taking him to Justice Creek General?”

With a nod, Sal put it in gear.

A moment later, James stood there alone in the dirt yard a few feet from Levi’s pre-WWII green Ford pickup, which had no doubt been used to kidnap him. Overhead, the sun beamed down. Not a cloud in the sky. It wasn’t at all the kind of day a man expected to be kidnapped on. Gently, he probed the goose egg on the back of his head. It was going to be fine. He was going to be fine.

Levi, though?

Hard to say.

And what about Addie, all on her own at Justice Creek General, waiting to hear if her granddad would make it or not? At a time like this, a woman should have family around her. Her half sister, Carmen, would come from Wyoming. But how long would it take for Carmen to arrive?

He just didn’t like to think of Addie sitting in a hospital waiting room all alone.

As the ambulance disappeared around the first turn in the long driveway that led to the road, James took off toward the barn.

A couple of the horses Addie boarded watched him with mild interest as he jumped the fence into the horse pasture and ran until he got to the fence on the far side. He jumped that, too, and kept on running. Fifteen minutes after leaving Addie’s front yard, he reached his quad cab, which was parked in front of his nearly finished new house. He had a bad cramp in his side and he had to walk in circles catching his breath, now and then bending over, sucking in air like a drowning man.

There was blood on his tan boots—not much, just a few drops. He pictured old Levi, hitting him on the head and then dragging him to that green Ford truck of his—and not only to the truck, but then out of the truck, into the house at Red Hill and down to the basement. No wonder the old fool had a heart attack.

As soon as his breath evened out a little, James dug his keys from his pocket and got in his quad cab. He checked his shirt collar in the sunscreen mirror. The blood wasn’t that bad and the bump hardly hurt at all anymore.

He started the pickup and peeled out of there.

* * *

Addie needed to throw up. She needed to do that way too much lately. Right now, however, was not a convenient time. She sat in the molded plastic chair in the ER waiting room and pressed her hands over her mouth as she resolutely willed the contents of her stomach to stay down.

She had James’s phone in her purse. In her frantic scramble to get in the ambulance with Levi, she hadn’t thought to give the phone back. And then she’d clutched it like a lifeline all the way to the hospital. She’d only stuck it in her purse to free her hands when the reception clerk had given her all those forms to fill out.

Addie sucked in a slow breath and let it out even slower. Oh, dear Lord, please. Let PawPaw pull through this and let me not throw up now. Everything had happened way too fast. Her mind—and her poor stomach—was still struggling to catch up.

Her own cell phone was in her purse, too. She’d barely remembered to grab it off the front hall table before racing out the door. She needed to get it out and call Carmen in Laramie. But the nurse had said Levi wouldn’t be in the ER for long. They would evaluate his condition and move him over to cardiac care for the next step. Addie was kind of waiting to find out what, exactly, the next step might be so that she could share it with her sister when she broke the terrifying news.

A door opened across the room. The doctor she’d talked to earlier emerged and came toward her.

Addie jumped to her feet, swallowed hard to keep from vomiting all over her boots and demanded, “My grandfather. Is he...?” Somehow she couldn’t quite make herself ask the whole dangerous question.

“He’s all right for now.” The doctor, a tall, thin woman with straight brown hair, spoke to her soothingly. “We’ve done a series of X-rays and given him medications to stabilize him.”

“Stabilize him,” Addie repeated idiotically. “Is that good? That’s good, right?”

“Yes. But his X-rays show that he’s got more than one artery blocked. He’s going to need emergency open-heart surgery. We want to airlift him to Denver, to St. Anne’s Memorial. It’s a Level-One trauma center and they will be fully equipped to give him the specialized care that he needs.”

Her head spun. Denver. Open-heart surgery. How could this be happening? From the moment she’d caught sight of James Bravo tied to a chair in the basement at Red Hill, nothing had seemed real. “But...he’s never been sick a day in his life.”

The doctor spoke gently, “It happens like this sometimes. That’s why they call heart disease the silent killer. Too often, you only know you’ve got a problem when you have a heart attack—but I promise we’re doing everything we can to get him the best care there is. You got him here quickly and that’s a large part of the battle. His chances are good.”

Good. His chances were good. Was the doctor just saying that or was it really true? Addie sucked in air slowly and ordered her queasy stomach to settle down. “Can I see my grandfather, please?”

“Of course you can. This way.”

* * *

In the curtained-off cubicle, Addie kissed Levi’s pale, wrinkled cheek and smoothed his wiry white hair and whispered, as much to reassure herself as to comfort him, “PawPaw, I promise you, everything is going to be fine. You’ll be on the mend before you know it.”

Levi only groaned and demanded in a rough whisper, “Where’s James?”

That made her long to start yelling at him again. But he looked so small and shrunken lying there, hooked up to an IV and a bunch of machines that monitored every breath he took, every beat of his overstressed heart. Yelling at him would have to wait until he was better.

Because he would get better. He had to get better. The alternative was simply unthinkable.

Right now nothing could be allowed to upset him. So she lied through her teeth. “James is out in front waiting to hear how you’re doing.”

“Good.” Levi barely mouthed the word. “Good...” And then, with a long, tired sigh, he shut his eyes.

Addie bent close to him. “I love you, PawPaw.” She kissed him and had to close her mind against the flood of tender images. Her mom had died having her and she’d never known her dad. All her memories of growing up, he was there for her, and for Carmen. He was their mom and their dad, all rolled into one cantankerous, dependable, annoyingly lovable package.

She could not—would not—lose him now.

A nurse pushed back the curtain and announced, “The critical-care helicopter has arrived. We need to get your grandfather on his way now.”

“Can I ride with him?”

The nurse explained gently that there just wasn’t room.

About then, Addie realized her pickup was back at the ranch. She’d have to call someone to give her a ride home so she could get herself to Denver. And what about the horses? She had to find someone to look after them at least until tomorrow. And she still really needed to call Carmen immediately.

She thanked the nurse, kissed her grandpa one more time and hustled back out to the waiting room, where the clerk had more paperwork waiting for her to fill out. She took the clipboard the clerk passed her through the reception window, reclaimed her seat and got to work filling in the blanks and signing her name repeatedly, simultaneously praying that Levi was going to pull through.

At least they had the best health coverage money could buy now. Brandon had seen to that months ago. When she agreed to have the baby, he’d set up a fund that would pay thirty years’ worth of premiums for her and the child. At the time, she’d argued that she had Affordable Care and that would be plenty. But he’d insisted that she should have the very best—and that the fund would be set up to cover Levi, too, and any children she ever had.

“Everybody gets sick at some point,” Brandon had reminded her softly, a hard truth that he knew all too intimately. “Everybody needs health care at some point. When that happens for you, for the baby or for Levi, you don’t need to be worrying about how to pay your share of the hospital bill.”

Thank God for Brandon.

Tears searing the back of her throat, Addie signed the last form, got up and passed the clipboard through the window to the clerk. The clerk handed back a couple of forms and her insurance card. She jammed all that in her purse and was pulling out her phone to call her half sister when James Bravo pushed through the emergency room doors.

He came right for her, so big and solid and capable-looking, still wearing the same jeans and chambray shirt with blood on the collar that he’d been wearing when she found him tied up in the basement an hour before. Those blue eyes with the dark rims around the iris were full of concern. “How’re you holding up?”

She wanted to lean on him, to have him put his big arms around her and promise her that everything would work out fine. But what gave her the right to go leaning on him? She didn’t get it. It was...something he did to her. As if he were a magnet and she were a paper clip. Every time she saw the guy, she felt like just...falling into him, plastering herself against him. She didn’t understand it, felt nothing but suspicious of it, of her own powerful attraction to him.

And what made it all even worse was that she seemed to feel he was magnetized to her, too.

Addie didn’t have time for indulging in the feelings he stirred in her. She completely distrusted feelings like those and she knew she was right to distrust them. Really, why shouldn’t she reject all that craziness that happened between men and women?

Her dad ran off, vanished before she was born, never to be seen or heard from again, just as her sister’s dad had done before that, leaving their mother single, pregnant and brokenhearted both times—or so her grandpa always said. Addie had never been able to ask her mom about it. Hannah Kenwright had died giving her life.

So yeah, Addie was cynical about romantic love. And every time she’d tried it, she’d grown only more cynical. Yes, all right. Love had worked out fine for her sister. Still, Addie didn’t trust it. To her, romance and all that just seemed like a really stupid and dangerous thing.

And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t given it her best shot. Three times. In high school and then again when she was twenty-one and finally with a bull rider she’d met at the county rodeo. Her high school love had married someone else and her second forever guy had dumped her flat. The bull rider had dumped her, too, the morning after their first night together. For her, same as for her mother, love had not lasted.

And now she had a baby on the way. And her grandfather to care for. And Red Hill and her horses and a side business she loved. It was enough. She didn’t need the human magnet that was James Bravo, thank you very much.

He asked again if she was okay.

“I’m fine,” she lied and plastered on a smile. “It’s all taken care of. Before he died, Brandon saw to it that we have the kind of insurance that covers everything, no deductibles and no co-pays. So money is no worry. Everything is going to be okay.”

He didn’t buy that lie. She could see that in those gorgeous eyes of his. But he didn’t call her on it. He only asked, “How’s Levi?”

“They have him stabilized, they said, and they’re flying him to St. Anne’s Memorial in Denver for surgery.” She dropped her phone in her purse yet again and pulled his out. It was one of those fancy android phones with all the bells and whistles. “I’m sorry. I forgot to give this back to you.” She shoved it at him.

He took it. “No problem.”

“Thank you. For everything, up to and including not having my granddad thrown in jail.”

A smile twitched at the corner of his handsome mouth. “You’re welcome.”

She was just trying to figure out how to tell him gently to get lost, when he continued, “So you need to get to Denver? Come on, I’ll drive you.”

And then, with no warning, he touched her.

He wrapped his big, warm fingers around her bare arm right below the short sleeve of her T-shirt, causing a sudden hot havoc of sensation, like little fireworks exploding in a line, up to her shoulder, across to the base of her throat and then straight down to the center of her.

She stood stock-still, gaping up at him, thinking, Just tell him that you’ll manage. Just tell him to let go and leave.

“Let me drive you.” He said it low. Intensely. As if he knew what she was thinking and wouldn’t give up until he’d gone and changed her mind.

She demanded, “Don’t you have to be in court or something?”

He looked kind of amused—but in a serious and determined way. “Not today. Let me take you to Denver.”

She longed to refuse again. But the truth was she needed to get to St. Anne’s, and she needed to get there fast. As soon as PawPaw was safely through his surgery, she could figure out the rest.

James watched her face. He still held her arm and he smelled way too good. A little dusty, a little sweaty, with a faint hint of some manly aftershave still lingering even after all her grandpa had put him through. He demanded, “Have you called Carmen?”

“Not yet.”

“So it’s best to let me take you. You can make all the calls you need to make while we’re on the road.”

* * *

Ten minutes later, they were flying along the state highway on the way to I-25. She called Carmen.

At the sound of her sister’s voice, the damn tears started spurting again. “Carm?” she squeaked, all tight and wobbly, both at once.

And Carmen knew instantly that something was wrong. “Omigod, honey, what’s happened?”

James reached over in front of her and dropped open the glove box. He pulled out a box of tissues. Was there anything the man wasn’t ready for? She whipped out a tissue and dabbed at her eyes. He put the box back and withdrew his big, hard arm.

“Addie Anne. Honey, are you still there?”

“I’m here. I’m okay. It’s PawPaw.”

“Oh, no. Is he—”

“He had a heart attack, but he’s still alive.” At least, he was half an hour ago. She explained about the helicopter to St. Anne’s and the emergency surgery that would happen there.

“But...a heart attack? How...?”

Addie squeezed her eyes shut as she pictured James tied to that chair, Levi yelling and waving his shotgun, the hole he’d blown in the basement ceiling. “Long story.” Dear Lord. Was it ever! And Carmen didn’t know about the baby yet, either. “I’ll fill you in on everything later, promise. But...do you think you can come?”

“Of course I’ll come.”

Relief flooded through Addie. Times like this, a girl needed her big sister’s hand to hold. “I’m so glad.”

“I’ll be there as soon as I can. St. Anne’s, you said?”

“Yeah. I’ve got nothing but the name of the hospital at this point.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll find you. I can get family leave from work and figure it all out with Devin, see if his mom can come and stay with the kids.” Devin’s mother had moved to Laramie after her husband died. She’d wanted to be closer to her grandkids. “I’ll get everything arranged as fast as I can and then meet you there. Call my cell if...” Carmen faltered and then finished weakly, “If there’s any other news.”

“I will. Love you, Carm.”

“Love you, too...”

They said goodbye. Addie disconnected the call and sagged against the passenger window. Too much was happening. Losing Brandon followed by constant morning sickness had been more than enough for her to handle. She had simply not been prepared to deal with her crazy grandpa kidnapping James Bravo and then having a heart attack on top of the rest. Pressing a hand against her roiling belly, she dabbed at her eyes and willed James’s fancy quad cab to get there superfast.

* * *

At the hospital, they were sent straight to the surgery wing, where her grandpa was being prepped for bypass surgery. Addie dealt with yet more forms. James took a seat in the waiting room and Addie went in with the surgeon to look at images of Levi’s heart and listen to a description of the surgery to come.

James was waiting when she emerged. She knew the sweetest rush of gratitude, just to have him there. He was practically a stranger—or at least, no more than a casual friend—and she needed to remember that. Still, it meant so much to have someone waiting when she left the surgeon and his pictures of her grandpa’s blocked-up arteries. It meant the world to her not to have to do this alone.

At the sight of her, he got up and came for her. “Addie,” he said. “You’re dead white. You need to sit down.”

“I can’t... I don’t...” What was wrong with her words? Why wouldn’t they organize themselves into actual sentences?

“Come on now.” He reached out and drew her close, into his height and hardness and warmth. “It’s going to be all right.” She let herself sag against his solid strength. It felt way too good there, pressed tight to his side, his big arm banded around her.

But then her poor stomach started churning again. And this time, she couldn’t swallow hard enough or breathe slowly enough to settle it down. With a sharp cry, she pushed James away and ran for the ladies’ room.

At least it wasn’t far, a quick sprint across the waiting room. She shoved through the door and made for the first stall, knocking the stall door inward with the flat of her hand, flinging back the seat and bracing her palms on her thighs just in time. Everything started coming up as her long hair fell forward, getting in the way. She grabbed for it, trying to shove it back and keep her purse from dropping off her shoulder and spilling all over the floor, too.

And then, suddenly, there was James again, right there in the stall with her, gently gathering her hair and smoothing it back out of the way. God. How humiliating. And this was the ladies’ room. He shouldn’t even be in here.

“It’s okay, take it easy. You’re okay, okay...” He kept saying that, “You’re okay,” over and over in that deep, velvety voice of his. She didn’t feel okay, not in the least. But she was in no position to argue the point, with all her attention focused on the grim job of ejecting what was left of her lunch.

She gagged for what seemed like such a long, awful time. But then, finally, when there was nothing left inside her poor belly, the retching slowed and stopped. Panting, trying to even out her breathing, she waited to make sure there would be no surprises.

“Better?” he asked, still in that low, gentle, comforting voice.

Addie groaned and nodded. “Would you...?” Sentences. Whole sentences. “Go. I’ll be all right. Just...go on out. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah. Uh, thank you. I’m sure.” She flushed away the mess and straightened with care, clutching her shoulder bag closer, physically unable to face him right then.

She felt him back from the stall, the warmth and size of him retreating. He said, “I’ll be right outside, if you need anything.”

“Thank you.” She stared, unblinking, at the tan wall above the toilet, willing him to go.

And at last, he did. She heard the door open and shut and instantly released the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding.

Slowly, with another long sigh, she turned to confront the empty space behind her. On rubbery legs, she went to the sink and rinsed her face and her mouth. At least there were Tic Tacs in her purse. She ate four of them, sucking on them madly, grateful beyond measure for their sharp, minty taste. She brushed her hair and checked her T-shirt for spills. Really, she looked terrible, hollow-eyed and pasty-faced. But at least her stomach had stopped churning now that it was empty.

Note to self: Never eat again—and get out there and tell poor James that you are fine and he can go.

Smoothing her hair one last time and settling her purse strap firmly on her shoulder, she returned to the waiting room.

He was sitting across the room in the row of padded chairs, busy on his fancy phone. She got maybe two steps in his direction before he glanced up and saw her. He jumped to his feet, his handsome, square-jawed face so serious, his beautiful eyes darkened with concern.

For her.

Okay, he really was a good person. And he shouldn’t be so concerned about her. He should find himself a nice woman, one who didn’t have all her issues, one who believed in true love and forever. Clearly, the guy deserved a woman like that.

She marched right up to him and aimed her chin high. “You have been...amazing. I can’t thank you enough for everything. And my sister will be here before you know it, so there isn’t any need for you to—”

“Stop.” He actually put up a hand. And then he took her by the arm again, causing all those strange, heated sensations to pulse along her skin. “Sit down before you fall down.” He took her other arm, too, and then he turned her and carefully guided her down into the chair where he’d been sitting. The chair was warm from his body, and that felt both enormously comforting—and way too intimate, somehow.

Once he had her in the chair, he just stayed there, bent over her, his big hands gripping the chair arms, kind of holding her there, his face with its manly sprouting of five-o’clock shadow so close she could see the faint, white ridge of an old scar on the underside of his chin. It was a tiny scar, and she wondered where he might have gotten it.