The Doctor's Surprise Family

His gaze zeroed in on the large cabin in the trees across Kaitlin’s backyard. Last night, Dane had observed lights in two windows. A second guest? He didn’t care, as long as they kept to their side of the property and left him alone.

Without making a sound, he got to his feet—and waited. The rustling had stopped. Creeping down the steps, he went around to the side facing the wooded hill. His eyes narrowed against the forest’s obscurity.

Someone panted softly.

Dane stepped into the block of light shining from the window of the eating nook.

“Holy crap,” a boy’s voice muttered, before the kid scrambled like a wild animal back up the slope.

Dane leaped toward the escapee, entering the trees like a predatory animal, silent, quick. Without a word, he sprang over moldering logs, and ducked grasping branches. Ten feet ahead the kid dodged right and left. Suddenly, he turned and scrambled farther up the hill, and then—abruptly—twenty feet ahead, Dane saw arms, legs and branches whip like miniature windmills. Thunk.

“Ow!” the boy yelped. Gasping and wheezing and clutching his leg, he writhed on a wet bed of leaves.

Dane approached slowly.

“Please,” the boy whispered. “I didn’t mean it.”

“Easy, son.” Dane frowned at the slashed denim along the boy’s left leg. Crouching on one knee, he shrugged from his jacket and laid the garment across the boy’s chest. “Got a name?”

“Y-Yes sir. Blake.” The winded words came out Yea seer bake.

Kaitlin’s son?

The wheezing accelerated. Blake’s face altered, faded, and for an instant Zaakir stared up at Dane.

He swiped a hand across his eyes. He was losing it, and this kid was showing every sign of an asthma attack. “Where’s your inhaler, son?”

“Home.”

Sure, it was. Damn kid, creeping through the woods in the dark and forgetting his lifeline. Dane squashed the urge to give Blake a good shaking. Instead, he scooped the boy into his arms. “Hang on.” Careful of wayward limbs, he trotted through the trees, crossed Kaitlin’s back deck and, while the boy clung to his neck, yanked open the mudroom door.

“Inhaler,” he hollered, storming into the kitchen with Blake wheezing against his chest. “Now.”

Kat didn’t have time to think or ask questions.

The second Dane set her son next to the plate of hard-boiled eggs she’d been slicing for the spinach salad on her big worktable, Kat ran to the dining cabinet and grabbed the emergency inhaler.

“Darn it, Blake,” she said, shoving the tool into his hands. “What have I told you about keeping this with you at all times?” Heart pounding, she forced herself to watch calmly as he tilted back his head and put the instrument to his mouth. Still, she couldn’t help advising, “Breathe deep.”

He rolled his eyes.

She released a shaky sigh. Okay. Not as bad as she’d first thought when Dane banged into her house. Already the first healing puff had altered her child’s skin from pale and sweaty to pink and dry as added oxygen rushed into his blood.

Relieved, she turned to Dane. He stood in a white T-shirt, dog tags dangling from his neck, gloved hands clutching the end corners of the worktable. His dark eyes were fastened on Blake, his expression harsh. Kat’s stomach looped at the man’s scrutiny. Had she misread him after all? “What happened?”

“It was my fault,” Blake interjected before her guest could reply. “I was trying to look into Mr. Rainhart’s window and—and he caught me, and then I ran into the woods and fell and…” When he straightened his leg, she noticed the bloody damage for the first time.

Kat’s pulse bounced. “Oh, baby.” She bent over the torn skin. Deep and raw, the gash measured about four inches along her son’s bony shin.

Removing the desert jacket from Blake, Dane said, “He needs stitches. If you have gauze to wrap the wound, I can ready him for transport to the clinic.”

Ready him for transport? Disregarding the odd turn of phrase, Kat hurried to the cupboard with its stored First Aid supplies. Had Blake told her the truth, or had Dane Rainhart hurt her son somehow, perhaps frightened him into lying?

She nearly dropped the kit when she heard her son whimper. She hurried back as Dane gently straightened Blake’s leg. “Looks like that tree root did quite a number on you,” he said, inspecting the gash.

From what Kat could see “the tree root” had gouged the flesh just below the knee. Blake puffed his cheeks at the sight of his blood-soaked jeans. “I think I’m gonna be sick.”

Dane placed a gloved hand on the back of her son’s neck. “Lower your head down toward your knees. That’s it.” He waited a few moments. “Feeling better?”

“A little.” Blake raised his head. “I—I didn’t m-mean to spy on you. Honest.”

“That what you were doing?” Dane hauled the knife off his belt and Kat’s heart lurched—until she saw that he meant to trim away the jagged edges of denim from her son’s wound.

Blake gaped while Dane deftly cut a neat rectangular hole. “Kaitlin,” he said, “we’ll need some warm water, a pinch of mild soap and a washcloth.”

She rushed to get the materials. Behind her, Blake murmured, “I—I just wanna be a soldier when I grow up.” She couldn’t catch Dane’s response.

Moments later, she watched as he cleaned Blake’s wound with the gentlest of motions, dipping the cloth into the water and touching it around the torn flesh. When it came time to dress the gash he directed her to cut the gauze—not that way—bind it around the gash—to the left—snip the gossamer ends, and knot them correctly.

If he knew first aid, why wouldn’t he remove his gloves and do the procedure himself?

Shoving him from her mind, she hunted down her stash of Children’s Tylenol.

“Bring your car to the front door,” Dane told Kat after she observed her son swallow the painkiller. “I’ll carry the boy outside.”

“I can walk,” Blake assured. He jumped off the worktable onto his good leg and limped from the kitchen.

Two minutes later, Kat locked up the house. Driving down the lane, she caught sight of Dane in the Honda’s side mirror. Arms crossed, he stood on the bottom step of her veranda, a formidable, forbidding man watching her leave the property.

What do you really know about him, Kat?

He’d had medical training, that was a given. Had he become the military doctor her sister Lee alluded to years ago? Given the desert fatigues he wore, Dane Rainhart had clearly served his country in some capacity.

That being the case, the sadness, the aloofness, the loner attitude seemed to resemble post traumatic stress disorder. Last winter, Lee had pondered the symptoms during her brief relationship with Col. Oliver Coleman before he was killed in action in Iraq.

“You mad at Mr. Rainhart, Mom?” Blake’s question from the rear seat jerked Kat away from the memory.

“Not at all. Why?”

Worried brown eyes filled the rearview mirror. “I was scared at first, but then I realized he was only trying to help. He wasn’t mean or anything.”

“You shouldn’t have spied on him, Blake. Looking through people’s windows is an invasion of privacy and very wrong. You know better. What on earth made you do such a thing?”

“I dunno.” He hung his head; dark hair fell over his smooth brow. “I’m sorry.”

Kat turned out of their wooded lane and onto Shore Road leading into the village of Burnt Bend. “It’s Mr. Rainhart you need to apologize to.”

“I will,” the boy murmured.

The promise did nothing to loosen the knot in Kat’s stomach. Her son had never peered into the windows of her guests’ cabins. Why did he do so now?

She wondered what Dane thought of Blake. She wondered what he thought of her parenting skills. Then she wondered why his opinion was important enough for her to contemplate. The man was part of her past, not her future. Right now, she needed to concentrate on getting her son medical attention. Beyond that, nothing else mattered.

Yet, the feeling Dane Rainhart wasn’t finished with her continued to hover over Kat’s shoulder.

He sat on the cabin steps, watching for her headlights to play peek-a-boo through the lane’s trees, to tell him she had returned home with the boy. The moment her car disappeared, he’d gone for a hard, fast hike through the hilly forest behind her property.

The kid’s chest hadn’t been crushed under the weight of metal. The wheezing was the result of asthma.

The knowledge had punctuated Dane’s every step. Guided by the flashlight, he’d climbed across mossy stones, through thick undergrowth and dodged gnarly tree limbs until his chest heaved, and the whistling sound of her son’s condition subsided.

Now he waited. Without light or warmth from the cabin.

He heard the grumble of a motor before headlights trickled through the forest. Seconds later, she pulled into the carport. Doors slammed. Voices, hers and the boy’s, drifted softly on the night.

A brick of tension dropped from his body. They were home. The boy was okay. Still, he waited. Waited until the big house lay in darkness, except for an upstairs window.

Suddenly, the narrow, rectangular pane beside the mudroom door lit behind its lacy curtain.

Dane rose from the chair when he heard a latch click. Footsteps crossed the deck. Kaitlin? Or the boy, sneaking out again?

He went down the flagstone path.

She stood on the edge of the deck, wrapped in a pale shawl. Damn, she was lovely, like an elf come out to play under the stars.

“Kaitlin?” he queried softly and saw her body jerk.

“Good heavens, you’re a quiet one.”

He hadn’t meant to startle her. Keeping to the delta of the path, he asked, “How’s the boy?”

“Eight stitches. The doctor says he can go to school tomorrow, just no roughhousing on the playground.”

Dane nodded.

A handful of seconds passed. She asked, “Are you a military doctor?”

“Not anymore.”

“A doctor here, then? You seemed to know exactly what to do with Blake’s injury.”

He hesitated. “I was a trauma surgeon in Iraq. Served there since we went in. Left a year-and-a-half ago.” He’d been in the Middle East almost six years. Too damned long to work in a place where you never knew if your next breath would be your last.

She remained silent, studying him as he studied her. Finally, she said, “I was coming to see you, but your lights were off.”

“I like sitting on the porch in the dark. It’s peaceful.”

“I understand.”

He imagined she did. She would need the peace following her husband’s death.

She said, “I want to apologize for my son’s behavior. It won’t happen again.”

“He’s a typical kid. Don’t worry about it.”

“Being a kid is no excuse. He’ll apologize after school tomorrow.”

“All right.”

As she turned to go, she paused. “Would you like to join us for dinner tomorrow? As a thank-you for helping Blake tonight.”

“Help?” The way I helped Zaakir? Dane bit hard on his tongue to sever the memory. “It was my fault he got hurt,” he murmured. “If I hadn’t chased him—”

“We’re all a little to blame,” she replied reasonably. “However, if you’d rather not…”

“I’m surprised you’d trust me after tonight.”

“Why wouldn’t I?” She stepped off the deck and crossed to him. “Dane, I don’t know your past, or what’s eating you. That’s your business. But from what I’ve seen so far, from what I remember, you’re all right. So if you like roast chicken with stuffing, dinner will be at six tomorrow.”

He could smell her on the night air, caught himself lifting his chin an inch to better draw in the scent. “You’d be wise to stay away from me,” he said.

She smiled. “Perhaps. Except I don’t scare easily.”

The night trapped them, a thick swathe of darkness in which he could imagine the heat of flesh slipping along flesh. His gaze seized her, beckoned her, told her a thousand stories.

“Be careful, Kaitlin. I’m not the man you remember.” Turning on his heel, he walked back into the shroud of night.

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