Million Dollar Baby. Lisa Jackson

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       CHAPTER THREE

      SAM WAS WAITING for Chandra. As she opened the door, he jumped up, yipping excitedly, his tail wagging with unbridled enthusiasm. “Oh, come off it,” Chandra said, smiling despite the yawn that crept up on her. “I wasn’t gone that long.”

      But the big dog couldn’t get enough attention. He bounded back and forth from his empty dish to her as she started for the stairs. “Don’t get too anxious, Sam. Breakfast isn’t for another three hours.” In the loft, she nudged off one boot with the toe of the other. “What a night! Do you believe it? The police and even the doctor seem to think I had something to do with stealing the baby or kidnapping the kid or God only knows what! And that Dr. O’Rourke, you should meet him…” She shook her head, as if she could physically shake out her own thoughts of the doctor. Handsome, arrogant and sexy, he was a man to steer well clear of. But she couldn’t. Not if she wanted to see the baby again. “Believe me, this is one mess,” she told the dog, who was still pacing in the kitchen.

      She thought about checking the barn one last time, but was too exhausted. Tossing off her jacket, she dropped onto the unmade bed, discarded her jeans and sought solace under the eiderdown quilt she’d inherited from her grandmother.

      With a disgruntled sigh, Sam swept up the stairs and parked in his favorite spot on the floor near the end of the bed. Chandra heard his toes click on the old pine boards as he circled three times before dropping to the floor. She sighed to herself and hoped sleep would quickly overcome her weary body as it seemed to have done for the old dog.

      Three days after moving into this place a couple of years before, Chandra had discovered Sam, so thin his ribs showed beneath his matted, dusty coat, his eyes without spark and a wound that stretched from one end of his belly to the other. He’d snarled at her approach, his white teeth flashing defensively as she’d tried to touch him. But she’d brought him water and food, and the listless dog had slowly begun to trust her. She’d eventually cleaned the wound, the mark of a cornered wild animal, she’d guessed, and brought Sam into the house. He’d been with her ever since, a permanent and loving fixture in her life.

      But a far cry from a man or a child.

      She smiled sadly and pulled the covers closer around her neck. Just because she’d found an abandoned infant was no reason to start dreaming old dreams that she’d discarded long ago. But though her body was fatigued, her mind was spinning with images of the wailing, red-faced infant, the sterile hospital room and the unsettling visage of Dr. Dallas O’Rourke. Even with her eyes closed, she could picture him—jet black hair, eyes as blue as a mountain lake and lips that could thin in anger or gentle into the hint of a smile.

      Good Lord, what was wrong with her? In frustration, she pounded her pillow with her fist. In less than four hours, she had to get up and lead a white-water expedition of inexperienced rafters down the south fork of the Rattlesnake River. She didn’t have time for complications, especially complications involving a man.

      She glared at the clock one more second before squeezing her eyes closed and thinking how she would dearly love someday to have a baby of her very own.

      * * *

      DALLAS WASHED THE GRIT from his eyes and let the spray of the shower pour over him. He leaned one arm against the slippery tiles of the stall and closed his eyes as the jets of hot water soothed the ache of overly tired muscles.

      The past thirty-six hours had been rough, one case after another. A twelve-year-old with a broken arm, a messy automobile accident with one fatality and two critically injured passengers flown by helicopter to Denver, a drug overdose, two severe strep cases, an elderly woman who had fallen and not only broken her hip, but fractured her pelvis, and, of course, the abandoned baby.

      And it was the thoughts of the infant and the woman who’d found him that continued to rattle around in Dallas’s tired mind. Probably because he was overworked. Overly tired. His emotions already strung tight because of the phone call….

      He twisted off the faucets and pulled down a towel from the top of the glass shower doors, rubbing his body dry, hoping to infuse a little energy through his bloodstream.

      He should eat, but he couldn’t face an empty refrigerator. The joys of being a bachelor, he thought fatalistically, because he knew, from the experience of a brief, painful marriage, that he would never tie himself down to one woman again. No, medicine was his mistress, and a demanding mistress she was. She exacted far more attention than any woman would. Even the woman to whom he’d been married, Jennifer Smythe O’Rourke Duncan.

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