Cowboy's Caress

“Anyway,” she said, “I’d really appreciate it if you could bring my suitcases down. That would be great.”

“Why don’t you show me which room is yours and I’ll get them,” he said.

Carly pointed with a nod of her chin to the end of the hall. “It’s that one.”

“Can I go with Carly to visit her sister in the hospital?” Evie Lee said then.

Carly explained what the child was talking about as she followed Bax into her room.

“So I have two patients already,” he said as he put Carly’s carry-on bag under one arm, picked up the smaller of the other two to tote in one hand and then hoisted the largest in the opposite hand.

“I don’t think there were any complications or anything,” she answered, trying not to watch the flex and swell of his muscles in the process. “Tallie Shanahan—she’s our nurse and midwife—delivered the baby, and when I called from Cheyenne, she said everything was fine. So I don’t know if you’d call Hope and the baby your patients.”

“I should still look in on them. How about if we all go together? You can show us the way.”

“Sure. That would be fine,” Carly said, feeling anything but fine.

She hated that just being near this man could reduce her to some kind of bumbling schoolgirl.

She took a deep breath to try to get control over herself. “I’d like to shower first, though,” she added.

“Need help?”

“No!” she said in too much of a hurry before being sure if he was teasing her, flirting with her, or if he was offering medical aid.

But the glint in his green eyes and the hint-of-the-devil smile that brought out his dimples made her inclined to think he was teasing. And flirting.

“Like I said,” she continued, “the shower is equipped for people who aren’t at their best. Besides, they told me at the hospital that I could unwrap my ankle to bathe and then just wrap it again, so I shouldn’t be too handicapped.”

“Did they show you how to wrap it again afterward?”

“No, but I’m sure it won’t be too hard.”

“You might be surprised. If you wrap it too loose, it won’t do any good and too tight will do damage. Why don’t you leave it unwrapped and I’ll do that for you before we go over to the hospital? At least I can teach you how to do it right so you can take care of it yourself from here on out.”

There was no mistaking his more professional tone.

“Well, okay,” Carly agreed without enthusiasm. Somehow just the thought of his touching her—even only her ankle—made flutters of something she didn’t understand go off in the pit of her stomach.

“Let’s get you back downstairs then,” he suggested.

Carly did an ungraceful about-face on the crutches and headed for the stairs again.

At the top of them she hesitated, unsure how best to make the descent.

“You probably ought to go down on your rear end,” came the advice from behind her in a deep, baritone voice edged with amusement once more.

There was no way she was going to sit and slide down those stairs while he watched!

Carly ignored his recommendation, handed Evie Lee the crutches again and bounced on her good foot from step to step much the way she’d gone up.

Granted, it wasn’t an improvement in the grace or aplomb department, but at least it was quick and didn’t involve her rear end.

Once she was at the bottom she held her head high, accepted the crutches from her tiny assistant, and led the way through the house, back to the cottage with Bax and Evie Lee both following behind.

Only when she was in the middle of the cottage again did she turn to find that Bax McDermot was trying to hide a laugh. At her.

“Are you always this headstrong?” he asked.

“I got here, didn’t I?”

He just chuckled and raised her bags. “Where shall I put these?”

“Set the big one on the table, the carry-on on one of the chairs beside it and the smaller bag in the corner,” she instructed. “If you wouldn’t mind,” she added to soften the command.

The cottage had never felt as small to Carly as it did then. Bax was a big man and he seemed to fill the space with a heady masculinity that seeped through Carly’s pores and made her almost dizzy.

She couldn’t keep from watching as he did as she’d told him. Her gaze was glued to his bare back where it widened from his narrow waist to the expanse of his shoulders in smooth-skinned glory. No doctor should have a body like that, she decided. It put too many other men to shame.

And she had to fight the itch in her palms to reach out and run them over the hills and valleys of honed muscle.

Then he turned to face her once more and tearing her eyes off his chest again became a battle she almost lost until she reminded herself that the last thing in the world she wanted was to be attracted to a man right now. Any man.

But it still took a force of will to yank her gaze up to his face.

Too bad that didn’t allow her any relief. Because the chiseled planes of his ruggedly perfect features only made her feel dizzy all over again.

“Need me for anything else?” he asked.

Needs were just what were churning inside her, but none he could meet in front of his daughter.

Or anywhere else, for that matter, without disrupting Carly’s plans more than they’d already been disrupted.

And she wasn’t going to let that happen.

“No, thanks. But thanks for helping me get my stuff down here.”

“How long shall I give you before I come back to wrap your ankle?”

“Half an hour?”

“Perfect.”

Yes, he was. Damn him, anyway.

“Come on, Evie, let’s do something with your hair,” he said to his daughter then.

The little girl skipped out ahead of him, clearly oblivious to her father’s effect on Carly. As was Bax, Carly hoped.

But only after they’d both left and closed the door behind them did Carly breathe freely again.

The trouble was, this time she couldn’t blame her response to Bax McDermot on lack of sleep. She had to admit that it was purely a reaction to something about the man himself.

But she had too much at stake to let it get beyond goose bumps and weak knees and itchy palms and dizziness and flutters in her stomach. She likened her reaction to sneezing when she got anywhere near ragweed—inevitable, inescapable, and over as soon as she got away from the ragweed or took her antihistamine.

She just needed to get away from Bax McDermot.

Which was exactly what she would be doing in just a few days.

In the meantime, she’d simply have to grit it out and keep reminding herself that she didn’t want anything to foul up her plans any more than they already had been.

Because unfortunately she didn’t think her antihistamine would be of any help with this particular reaction.

Chapter Three

Carly took the fastest shower of her life. Not an easy task when she had to do it standing on one foot like a flamingo lawn ornament. But there was absolutely, positively no way she was going to come face-to-face with Bax McDermot for the third time without being presentable.

With that in mind—actually with Bax in mind—she gelled her hair to give it body and let it air dry while she slipped into a pair of flowing rayon overalls in a red- and cream-colored batik print over a tight-fitting short-sleeve T-shirt.

She applied just enough blush to give her high cheekbones a healthy glow, mascara enough to accentuate every single eyelash and a pale gloss that guaranteed kissable lips.

Of course that kissable part didn’t matter, she assured herself, ignoring a second eruption of those stomach flutters at the thought.

By then her hair was dry, so she brushed it and pulled it to the top of her head in an elastic scrunchee and let the slight bit of natural wave on the ends have its way.

A scant splash of perfume was the final touch. Even though she knew there was no call for it, she couldn’t resist. She just rejected any thought that her desire to smell sweet and sexy and alluring had anything to do with the new town doctor.

She was in the midst of stashing the perfume bottle back in her carry-on bag when the knock on the cottage door came.

She took one quick look at herself in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, approved of the improvement, and called “Come in,” in a voice she hardly recognized because it sounded so giddy and unlike her.

Bax only poked his handsome head through the door. “Are you ready for us?”

“Sure,” she answered after clearing her throat, this time sounding as calm as if she hadn’t just hopped around the place like a rabbit in fast-forward mode.

“You look ready,” he said, stepping inside and giving her the once-over as he did. Then he dimpled up with an appreciative smile that made her crazed hop worth it.

At least it would have if she’d been admitting to herself that she cared.

Behind him came Evie Lee, closing the door and turning to Carly, too. “Daddy wouldn’t put a pencil in my hair,” the little girl complained rather than saying hello.

Carly didn’t mind the omission. She was grateful for the distraction from Bax’s dimples and lowered her gaze to the child.

Evie Lee’s hair no longer stood up or was matted on one side. It was combed smooth all over, but merely left to fall loosely around her thin shoulders.

“Could you put the pencil in it now and maybe another time we could use a barrette?” Evie Lee persisted.

Carly looked to Bax for permission. “Do you mind?”

He rolled his eyes, shook his head and answered so slowly it was clear he’d been exasperated with the subject before ever getting to the cottage. “If she wants a pencil in her hair and you’re willing to put a pencil in her hair, then be my guest and put a pencil in her hair.”

“I’m willing,” Carly said with a laugh at his controlled loss of patience.

Since she was near the table and chairs where her suitcases were, she pulled the free chair out from under the table and sat on it.

Both the pencil Carly had used in her own hair earlier and her brush were close at hand so she motioned Evie Lee to stand in front of her.

Evie Lee came on a twirl of delight, stopping with her back to Carly.

It took only a few swipes of the brush to pull the silky tendrils off the child’s neck. Then Carly twisted Evie Lee’s hair into a loose knot at the crown and stuck the writing implement through it.

“There you go,” Carly said when she’d finished.

Evie Lee ran for the same mirror Carly had used moments before to check her own appearance and preened before it.

“Oh, that’s so cute!” the little girl said.

Carly laughed again, enjoying Evie Lee’s enthusiasm.

“What do you say?” Bax prompted his daughter.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” the child gushed.

Bax sighed out another breath as if he were glad to have that over with and said, “Okay, now for more important things than pencils as hair doohickeys.”

That drew Carly’s attention back to him.

Until that moment she hadn’t noticed he’d brought with him a black medical bag much like the one her father had carried. He set it on the floor by her feet, then hunkered down on his heels in front of her. Opening the bag, he took a fresh bandage from it as Carly hiked up her pant leg just to mid-calf, exposing an ankle swollen to triple normal size and turned a variegated shade of midnight-and-blueberry blue.

“You did a number on this, didn’t you?” Bax observed, studying the results of her fall. “So, what was your diagnosis?”

“Sprained ankle with torn ligaments and strained tendons. But no broken bones,” Carly recited.

“How did it happen?” he asked, still surveying it with only his eyes.

Carly explained the chain of events that had landed her sprawled on the floor at her going-away party.

“Well, at least you can say it happened in an attempt to do a good deed,” Bax said when she’d finished the story, barely suppressing a laugh at her recounting. “Let’s get it wrapped again for you. It’ll feel better.”

And with that he cupped her heel in the palm of his hand and raised it to rest on the thick, hard ledge of his thigh.

There wasn’t anything the slightest bit unprofessional or improper or out of the ordinary about what he did. Yet that was all it took for the whole array of sensations to kick in again, adding streaks of lightning to the list as they shot from her ankle all the way up her leg when he began to wrap the bandage expertly around her foot.

No doubt about it, having him touch her was not a good idea.

She didn’t know how hands that big could be so warm and gentle when they looked as if they belonged on the reins of a horse instead. But gentle they were. Exquisitely, enticingly gentle.

And worse than all the sensations going through her again was the intense desire to feel the touch of those hands on other places. Much more intimate places…

He was explaining to her how to wrap the bandage, but she only realized it belatedly. When she did, she yanked her thoughts out of the instant reverie his touch had elicited and tried to concentrate so she could perform this task for herself.

“We can soak this a couple of times a day and keep it elevated as much as possible,” he was saying. “But mainly with an injury like this you just have to wait it out.”

“Too bad. I’d do just about anything to speed up the healing process,” she heard herself say all the while she was thinking, Anything to speed up the healing process and get me out of town and away from everything being near you does to me.

He didn’t seem aware of the internal turmoil he was causing with his ministrations, though, which was one thing to be grateful for, Carly thought. Still, it would have been nice to be able to turn off the turmoil altogether.

When he’d finished with the bandage, her ankle was wrapped perfectly. He lowered her heel to the floor much the way he’d raised it to his thigh before and Carly suffered pangs of disappointment that the whole thing was over even as she silently screamed at herself to stop the insanity that seemed to overcome her every time she was around this guy.

Bax closed the bag and took it with him as he stood. “Done,” he announced.

Carly only wished her response to him was done, too.

But even though it wasn’t, she pretended it was, got to her good foot and hopped to where her crutches waited against the wall not far away.

“Thanks,” she said, not sounding genuinely grateful and regretting the flippancy in her tone. After all, it wasn’t his fault she’d turned into a sack of mush over him. He didn’t even know what was going on with her. So, feeling guilty, she added, “I really appreciate this.”

“Glad to do it,” he assured. But as he watched her wiggle around for the right position on the crutches, wobble, then right herself, his expression turned dubious. “Maybe we should drive to the medical center rather than walk,” he suggested.

The idea of being in an enclosed car with him was too dangerous at that point. Carly would have crawled to the medical building rather than that.

“It’s only across the way. I’d have to walk farther to get out to the car than to get where we’re going. There’s a path from the backyard over to the Molner Mansion.”

“The Molner Mansion?” he repeated as Carly led the way to the door. He still managed to get there enough ahead of her to open it for her.

She explained that the three-story redbrick building had belonged to one of the founding families of Elk Creek and had been donated to the town as the medical building. She also told Bax and Evie Lee that it contained what would be Bax’s office, examining rooms, the emergency center, the dental office, outpatient surgery facilities and two rooms that acted as hospital rooms when the necessity arose.

By then they’d reached the mansion and again Bax held the door open for her and Evie Lee to enter before him.

“Do you want a tour of the place?” she offered.

“How about tomorrow? Afternoon naps always leave Evie hungry, so I thought maybe we’d just visit our patients and then go home and I’d whip up some supper for the three of us. Which reminds me, thanks for stocking the refrigerator. That was really thoughtful.”

Carly could feel her face flush. Doing a good deed was one thing, but it embarrassed her to have it mentioned.

“It was nothing,” she said as she pushed the button for the single elevator that had been installed in the building to accommodate moving patients from one floor to the other.

Carly had ridden the elevator more times than she could begin to count, but never had it seemed so small.

Or smelled so good.

She breathed in the same scent that had come out of the bathroom with Bax when she’d met him in the hall of the main house, enjoying the second helping of it more than she wanted to. She was glad the trip to the second floor was quick.

But she was also slightly disappointed again when it was over and she had to leave the confines that allowed her the heady indulgence.

Maybe the fall that had sprained her ankle had knocked something loose in her brain, she thought, and left her a little nuts.

It didn’t take much to tell which room her sister was in because that was where the voices and laughter were coming from when they got off the elevator, so Carly led Bax and Evie Lee there, too.

One step inside the room changed the tone of things for Carly. The room was full of people visiting Hope and the baby, people who gathered around Carly to ask about her ankle, people who were interested in meeting the new town doctor and his daughter, people—Hope’s in-laws—who wanted to show off the most recent addition to Hope’s family.

The good thing about the whole situation, Carly thought, was that it gave her a break from Bax and diffused his effect on her. And at that point she was glad for any small favors.

They spent until nearly eight o’clock visiting with everyone before Bax finally cleared the room to examine Hope and the baby. When he had, he, Evie Lee and Carly headed for home again, leaving Hope with her company.

By then Carly had had a long while to lecture herself about how silly she was being over Bax McDermot, and she was convinced she could stop her vulnerability to him if she just put her mind to it.

But putting her mind to it was a whole lot easier when he was at a distance and they were both surrounded by other people than it was when she was sitting at the table in the kitchen of her family home, watching him make mile-high sandwiches for their dinner.

“Nice people,” he was saying about the townsfolk he’d just encountered. “I’ll bet this whole place is filled with more like them.”

“It is,” she confirmed, trying not to stare at the best rear end she’d ever seen as he stood at the counter.

“Your sister and the baby are doing well. I told her she could go home tomorrow.”

Carly laughed. “She’d probably rather not. There are three more boys waiting for her there, so her rest will be over.”

“True enough,” Bax agreed, laughing with her in a deep, rich chuckle that sluiced over the surface of her skin like warm honey.

He brought three plates to the table, complete with sandwiches, chips, pickles and olives, then hollered for Evie Lee to join them as he poured milk for his daughter and iced tea for himself and Carly.

Evie Lee must have been on her way to the kitchen even before the bellow because she popped through the swinging door right then.

“Know what?” she asked her father, her tone full of excitement. “There’s a bedroom way up high with pictures all over the walls of castles and mountains and all kinds of stuff. Could it be my room instead of that other one?”

Bax looked to Carly, questioning her with his expression.

“It was my room up until a year or so ago,” she explained. “It’s in the attic. There’s travel posters on the walls.”

“Ah,” Bax said, nodding. “Is it off-limits?”

“No. Evie Lee can use it if she wants. And if you don’t mind having her that far away from you.”

“It’s not far away,” Evie Lee countered. “If I leave the door open, you could still hear me if I called you.”

“If it’s all right with Carly, it’s all right with me.”

“Oh goody! Can I eat my dinner up there now? It’ll be like a picnic.”

“Okay, but you’ll have to be careful with your milk. Come on, you carry your plate and I’ll take the glass,” he instructed before excusing himself from Carly for a moment.

She spent the time he was gone working on her self-control yet again, looking around the warm, familiar country kitchen awash in blue and white, trying to get her bearings. To ground herself.

But then Bax came back and sat across from her at the round mahogany table.

And that was all it took for her to notice the color of his eyes as if for the first time, turning her to mush once more.

“That room is nearly wallpapered in posters,” he said, referring to her old bedroom as he settled in to eat. “Are any of those places where you’re headed?”

Carly swallowed a bite of sandwich she’d taken to camouflage her latest response to him. “All of them, with any luck.”

“Looks like you’ve been planning it for a long time.”

“It seems like forever. Since I wasn’t much older than Evie Lee.”

“And just when you were about to leave, this happens.” He nodded in the direction of her ankle.

“It’s only a minor setback.”

They both ate some sandwich before Carly picked up the conversational ball and got it rolling again. “Have you traveled at all?”

His eyebrows arched and he nodded as he finished his bite. Then he said, “Some. My brothers and I did a summer-long trip through Europe after I graduated college. I saw most of what you have posters of upstairs and then some. Then I came back here, went to medical school and did a stint in the Peace Corps afterward. Saw Africa that way.”

“Wow. And now you want to be in Elk Creek?”

He laughed again. “Don’t sound so shocked. I’ve seen enough to know a small town like this one is still the best place to put down roots, to raise a family. But it’s good to go out into the world and have a look at it all before you make that decision if you’ve a mind to. Helps you to know what’s right for you and what’s not.”

Okay, it was ridiculous, but there was a part of Carly that wasn’t happy that he was so in favor of her leaving. She couldn’t help feeling as if he were trying to get rid of her.

Or maybe she just would have preferred him trying to convince her to stay.

One way or the other, this whole day since she’d met him had been the strangest of her life.

And she was more than ready to put an end to it.

She’d finished her sandwich, so she pushed the plate away. “I should get going,” she announced, even though it seemed as if they’d just started to actually talk to each other and she was cutting that short.

But Bax merely nodded, putting no effort into stopping her from leaving the house, either.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right out in the cottage?” he asked.

“I’ll be fine,” she answered. “Better that than those stairs.”

“So, we’ll just leave the back door open and you can come and go as you need to use the kitchen—is that how we’re doing this?”

“That’ll work fine. I shouldn’t need anything else—especially upstairs—so you won’t have to worry about my being in the hallway when you come out of the shower the way I was today.”

He grinned at her, dimpling up again. “That wasn’t any big deal. With a daughter in the house I have to be careful about how I walk around anyway.”

“Still…” she said, remembering all too vividly the sight of his naked chest and feeling all over again what she’d felt then.

Carly pushed herself to her good foot and put a crutch under each arm.

“So, tomorrow you’ll show me my office?” he asked, confirming what they’d mentioned at the medical building when he’d declined the tour of the place.