A Cold Creek Baby. RaeAnne Thayne

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СКАЧАТЬ tried to sit up and because he wore no shirt she saw every muscle of his abdomen go taut—from pain or effort, she didn’t know. That tattoo on his forearm rippled with the effort.

      “Can’t,” he mumbled. “Too many questions.”

      In that moment, she hated him for doing this to her again. For coming home and dredging up all these feelings, for completely screwing up the sanity and reason she was trying so desperately to bring to her world.

      For making her feel all these crazy, wonderful, terrible things again.

      “I’m calling Jake,” she repeated, her voice harsh as she reached for her cell phone. “I don’t have time to deal with a baby and a corpse at the same time.”

      “I’m not dying.” He raked a hand through his hair. “S’just a little poke.”

      “A poke?”

      “Knife. Bar fight. I’ve had worse,” he said in what she assumed he meant as some sort of twisted comfort to her.

      What kind of crazy life was he tangled in down there? For the last decade, her policy had basically been don’t ask, don’t tell. She hated him for that, too.

      She narrowed her eyes. “Well, your little bar fight poke appears to be bleeding again and is most likely infected, hence your three-thousand-degree temperature. But that’s just a guess. I’m calling Jake to be sure, so you’d better come up with a better cover story than a bar fight. I have a feeling he’s not as gullible as I am.”

      He looked disgruntled, but didn’t appear to have the energy to argue with her. “Where’s Belle?”

      She refused to be touched by his concern for the child. “Sleeping in the nursery next door. Guess I’ll have to wake her to come with us. Look, do I need to call an ambulance or can you make it down the stairs and to my pickup?”

      He released a heavy sigh. “I can walk,” he muttered.

      She had serious doubts about the wisdom of that, but knowing how stubborn he was, she was pretty sure he would manage it somehow.

      His shirt hung on the slat-backed chair by the bed and she reached for it and handed it to him. He slid his arms in the sleeve only after great exertion. After she watched him struggle for a few more moments with the buttons, she sighed and stepped closer, doing her best to ignore the heat and pheromones radiating from him.

      Just his fever, she assured herself. So what if he smelled so yummy she just wanted to stand here and inhale. She had more important things to worry about right now, like how in the heck she was going to move a hundred seventy pounds of delirious male down sixteen steps and outside without both of them falling down the stairs.

      By the time he was dressed, Cisco wasn’t the only one sweating. She felt like she had just roped a steer singlehandedly in the dark.

      “Do you want to tell me again how you managed to drive all the way here from Salt Lake City?” she asked as he took an unsteady step toward the door.

      “Wasn’t that hard. Took I-15 to Idaho Falls and then turned right.”

      She glared at him, even as she leaned in closer to support most of his weight. “I’m glad you find this amusing. I don’t. What if you had passed out? You could have driven off the road and killed both you and that darling little girl.”

      He made a face she assumed was supposed to look repentant. “Sorry, Easton. Shouldn’t have come home. Not your problem.”

      He had made it her problem. As she contemplated the logistics of loading him to the rental car—better than her pickup, so she could put the carseat in the back, she had realized—she thought about how simple her life had seemed this morning when all she had to worry about were falling beef prices, rising feed costs, taking her cow-calf pairs up in the mountains, the creek near one of the haysheds that was about to overflow its banks and the capricious eastern Idaho weather.

      Chapter Three

      “A bar fight? That’s really what you’re going with here, Cisco?” Maggiee Dalton pulled the thermometer away and shook her head at the numbers there.

      He could only imagine. He was on fire, burning up from the inside out. Another half hour of this and all that would be left of him on the exam room table at the Pine Gulch Medical Clinic would be a little pile of charred ashes.

      He couldn’t remember when he had ever felt so lousy.

      Okay, maybe a few times came to mind if he jostled his recall. There had been that gunshot wound in Honduras when a stupid, spooked sixteen-year-old sentry had forgotten the password to the rebel camp he’d been infiltrating at the time and had mistaken Cisco for a hostile combatant. Okay he had been a hostile combatant, true enough, but the kid had no way of knowing that when he fired on him with—unfortunately for Cisco—better aim than his normal efforts.

      And there was the time he had enjoyed a few delightful hours of torture from a particularly zealous arms dealer/terrorism financier in Panama after Cisco’s cover had been blown, before his support team could stage a rescue.

      This was right up there among his least enjoyable moments. He was so damn tired, he just wanted to tell Maggiee to go away so he could curl up on the floor and sleep for a couple of weeks.

      He couldn’t seem to shake this woozy, out-of-body feeling, the weird sense of disconnect.

      “Yeah,” he grunted, after a too-long pause while he tried to collect his disjointed thoughts, for what they were worth. “Little dump outside Barranquilla. Drunk thought I was making eyes at his señorita.”

      “Were you?”

      He might have been, if there indeed had been a bar and a drunk with a knife instead of a brutal mid-level drug dealer with more vicious machismo than brains.

      “Don’t remember,” he lied. “I’m sure she couldn’t have been as pretty as you.”

      Maggiee rolled her eyes and yanked the blood pressure cuff tight enough that he winced.

      Despite her current overzealous efforts to check his vital stats, he liked Maggiee. Always had. She’d been a couple years older than him, but he had known her a little from school, back when she had been plain Magdalena Cruz. Pine Gulch was a small town after all, and her family’s ranch had been on the same bus route as theirs.

      He had been sorry to hear what happened to her in Afghanistan, especially when she had only been trying to provide medical care. Funny thing about that. He had been going through a rough patch of his own and had been on the brink of walking away from his complicated web of lies when Jo had told him Maggiee had been grievously injured in a terrorist explosion while she’d been deployed.

      The news had shot new determination through him like pure-grade heroin gushing through his veins and he’d stuck it out a little longer.

      Seemed a lifetime ago. She seemed to be getting around pretty well on a prosthetic leg, he was happy to see.

      Or he would have been happy if he could manage to think through the pain and the slick nausea curling through his gut.

      “You СКАЧАТЬ