The Surgeon and the Cowgirl

“You taste the same. How could you taste the same?” Payson asked softly, not pulling away.

“Hmm.” She tried to get her brain working again. “The same toothpaste?”

He chuckled low and deep, holding her against him. “That could be.” His mouth covered hers again, exploring her thoroughly. When he finally leaned back, he whispered, “Only you could make toothpaste sexy, Jessie.” His hand roamed to the curve of her waist and the slight flare of her hips. “How can you be so soft? When I watch you walk, all I can think about is touching you. Will touching you now make me forget that?”

“Touch me,” Jessie breathed. She used her mouth to explore his lips and spoke softly against his cheek, so he could feel her breath moving across his skin, “God, Payson, why would we want to forget this?”

“Jessie,” he said, and let her go. She wrapped one long leg around the back of his knees to pull him back to her. He resisted for one second, then his fingers skimmed along her back as his mouth tasted her lips, her neck and her cheek.

When she thought she’d never take a full breath again and knew next they would be getting naked, she made herself take one step backward. They stood looking at each other, and she waited a moment for the space between them to cool.

She hoped when her brain—instead of her other parts—worked again, she’d figure out a way to see Payson every day and not remember this kiss, not remember that he tasted even better than on their long, slow wedding night. Jessie didn’t need to be a genius like Payson to know that the kiss was the stupidest idea she’d ever had. Even worse than asking for Payson’s help in the first place. She already craved his touch again. And, now, for the first time, she wondered why she’d filed for divorce when she still felt this sexual connection. Dang.

“So, what do you think?” Payson asked and then cleared his throat. His voice had been thick and deep. “Did our experiment work?”

She tried to get her thoughts into a coherent string. “It might not seem like it now,” she said, and stepped back to put more distance between them, “but can’t you feel that, um, we didn’t really have the same connection?”

“You’re right,” he said. “It was different.”

“Yep. Totally different,” she continued to lie. “Maybe we should call it a night. We proved our point.”

Chapter Five

Jessie savored the quiet of the morning, needing to figure out how to respond to last night’s “experiment.” She’d been pushing back her first impulse to get mean and go on the attack, to hurt Payson before he hurt her. She knew he didn’t deserve getting guff for agreeing to kiss her. She considered pretending that they hadn’t kissed. As tempting as that was, pretending wasn’t going to make the feelings go away. After exhausting every possibility while she tossed and turned, she’d accepted that the two of them needed to sit down and talk.

In the years since the divorce, Jessie had considered picking up the phone and calling Payson every so often. She didn’t want to get back together or anything, but she wanted—needed—to apologize for a passel of nasty comments she’d made in those last months of their marriage. She also wanted to say sorry for blaming him for not coming to her right away at the Vegas hospital and that she forgave him—even if she maybe didn’t completely—for not being with her when she needed him most.

The kiss was different.

She feared the memory of that one kiss would stick stubbornly in her brain forever. So what was she going to do? First, make sure that she and Payson weren’t alone together—except she wanted to apologize and wasn’t going to do that in front of an audience. Dang. She refused to call her mama or sister about this. They would tell her what she didn’t want to hear, that she’d been crazy, stupid, idiotic to think the kiss was a good idea.

Jessie stumbled suddenly as a pony head butted her. She turned and with exasperated affection said, “Hey, Molly, how did you get out? I should have called you Houdini. Never knew a pony who was so good at escaping.”

She took the little animal’s halter and led her back to the pen she shared with Bull, a mean-spirited chestnut gelding that Jessie boarded for her brother. Bull was smitten with Molly but pretty much hated the rest of the world. If he was out, too, Jessie’s morning would be really, really crappy—as if it wasn’t already. She didn’t want to wrestle the big horse back into his stall. Even with Molly around, he could be difficult. She hurried, her knee already aching with the thought of getting the cranky horse to cooperate. Maybe her brother should have named him Payson. She chuckled at that.

“You won’t think it’s funny if I let go of his halter,” Payson said.

She clamped down hard on her tongue to stop a screech and said through clenched teeth, “What are you doing here? How did you catch Bull?”

“I wanted to speak with you before this place filled up with people. When I got to the barn, Molly was standing in front of this big guy. I grabbed him and she trotted off. I wasn’t sure where she’d gone. I figured she’d taken off to find apples.”

Jessie was stunned into speechlessness. First, Payson had shown up looking for her after last night, and second, he’d voluntarily dealt with one of the horses, especially a troublesome one like Bull. “Molly was trying to keep Bull in? I figured she was the one trying to escape. She does it all the time when she’s in the big corrals.”

Payson shrugged and Bull leaned down and snuffled his hair. Payson pushed him away. Jessie waited for the horse to take off a finger. Nothing.

“Let me take him, and I’ll get him and Molly back in their stall.”

Jessie stepped forward and Bull immediately backed up, pulling Payson with him. The whites of the gelding’s eyes showed. Jessie stopped moving before Bull got more upset. The horse immediately settled and stepped closer to Payson. “Let me take him,” he said.

Jessie watched her horse-hating ex-husband lead Bull into his stall with Molly trotting after him like the sheepdog she thought she was. Payson gave each animal a hearty pat before he left them in the stall. Jessie stood and watched, speechless again.

“There are a few items we need to discuss,” Payson said into the silence.

“Wait. What was that about?” Jessie said waving her arm in the direction of the stall. “You hate horses. When Candy Cane got out one night, and I asked you to help, you said that there was no way you were losing sleep over a ‘dumb animal.’”

“Jessie, I was in the middle of my residency and had just come off a forty-eight-hour shift. I was exhausted. Plus Candy Cane always came back by morning. You used to say that she must have had tomcat in her because she liked to roam at night.”

“When we lived out near Carefree that was fine. There weren’t any busy roads and people watched for critters. But then we moved to town so you’d have a shorter drive, which meant we were near a ton of major roads, including the 10. She wasn’t used to that and could have gotten hit.”

Payson didn’t speak for a moment. “I’m sorry,” he said, stunning her for a second time this morning. “I didn’t even think about that. You had never worried before when she got out. I thought you were trying to punish me for missing your birthday.”

She’d completely forgotten that. The week before Candy Cane went missing Payson and she had planned a nice evening to celebrate her twenty-fourth birthday. Then at the last minute he’d been called in to cover an extra shift. “I was upset that we didn’t get to go out that night. It had been weeks since we’d spent any time together, but I understood. It wasn’t your fault.”

“That’s not what you said. You said that if I had loved you, I would have said no to the shift. But I couldn’t. The only time you could say no to shifts was if you were in the hospital yourself—in ICU.”

“I said that? I’m sorry. I was being a real witch with a B, as Mama would say. Really, I barely remember the missed dinner,” Jessie said.

“Amazing what sticks with you. We weren’t as good at talking about our problems as we thought.”

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