Texas Healer

by Jean Brashear

  Pride. He didn’t give himself credit for all he’d overcome. Didn’t allow imperfection in himself.

  He placed the baby in Mariela’s arms, then returned to deliver the placenta. “Hand me that blue bowl.” He gestured to the pottery nestled inside a box in the bag he’d brought with him.

  Frowning, she handed it to him, watching as he slid the placenta into the bowl. “Shouldn’t you be clamping off the umbilical cord?”

  “Let it stop pulsing first. Pass me the string and scissors, please.”

  She complied, her gaze darting from the blue bowl to the family so absorbed in their little miracle.

  Rafe’s gaze followed hers. “It is our custom to bury the placenta, to feed back to the earth so that the cycle will not die.”

  She detected a slight stiffness in the set of his shoulders, as if he expected her to argue or poke fun. But she was still wrapped in the spell of holding that tiny head, of watching a new life begin. She caught his gaze. “I think that’s lovely. We’ve drifted far away, haven’t we, in the modern world?” She grappled for the right words. “In a hospital, it’s just…waste. Or research material. But here…”

  His eyes softened. “Here, we must be closer to the earth. To the past.” His mouth quirked. “But not so far that I don’t check the Apgar scale. He’s a perfect ten, would you agree?”

  Diana scrambled to remember the Apgar scale. Points were given for breathing, for color, for movement, but—She smiled. “I think so, but I’d admit to being a little rusty on it.”

  Rafe recited the scale for her.

  “Delivered a lot of babies in the military, did you?” she teased.

  Something sad ghosted across his face. “A few,” he admitted. “But seldom so healthy. And never in peace.” He turned away before she could ask more.

  With efficiency, he tied off the cord and handed scissors to Ramón, who bowed his head, held Mariela’s hand and prayed, then cut the cord. Giving the scissors back to Rafe, he settled again on the bed, this time beside his wife. She handed him the baby, and the expression on Ramón’s face made Diana’s eyes sting.

  “Diego,” Ramón said, glancing at Mariela, who nodded. Then he regarded Diana. “The same first letter, at least, the closest we can come to Diana for a boy’s name.”

  Her jaw dropped. “But—” She tried again. “What about Rafe?”

  “Already done. Our second is named after mi compadre here.”

  “But, I—”

  A look from Rafe warned her.

  Diana stopped long enough for it to sink in. To realize how much it mattered. “Thank you,” she managed. “I’m very honored.”

  “Good, then. It’s settled.” Ramón rose. “Come with me, hijo. Let’s get you cleaned up before you start yelling for food.”

  Rafe clapped his friend on the back. “I’ll follow you.”

  Which left Diana alone with Mariela, not sure what to do. “Can I—would you like to clean up some?”

  Hair matted with sweat, face drained with the effort, the new mother smiled. “It’s all right. Don’t worry about it. I can wait until Evita comes. I’m sure your hospital has others to do such things.”

  Of course it did. But she wasn’t at Mercy, and if she were in this woman’s position, she’d want to change her gown and have clean sheets and all that. “Just tell me where the linens are and point me toward the bathroom.”

  Mariela nodded. “To the right in the hall. Thank you.”

  Diana headed for the door.

  “Doctora,” Mariela said. “I’m glad you were here.”

  Diana stopped. The wonder of it all rose within her again. She smiled at the woman whose face glowed with a tired happiness. “Me, too.”

  And realized that she really meant it.

  Chapter Nine

  “I’ll drop you off at the cabin before I head back,” Rafe said an hour later, after they’d celebrated with the new parents and been toasted by the extended family, who were still arriving in droves.

  “Go back where?”

  “I have to finish hanging the sheetrock. Get some of it taped and floated, too, if I’m lucky.” The high of the delivery and celebration were fading. Reality crowded in, exhaustion close on its heels.

  Diana studied him. “Aren’t you worn-out?”

  He shrugged. It didn’t matter if he was.

  “Why don’t you ask them for help?” She indicated the house behind them. “They’d give you anything right now.”

  “I know they would.”

  Her unflinching regard made him shift on the seat. “You’re like Lobo,” she said softly. “But I don’t understand why. Everyone here loves you. Practically worships the ground you walk on.”

  He glanced away. “I—that’s not—” He gave up. Trying to explain ventured onto paths he didn’t want to tread.

  Her considering gaze didn’t abate. “Why?”

  He cursed inwardly, willing her to drop the subject. “Why what?”

  “Why does that bother you?”

  Rafe’s fingers stilled on the ignition key. “It doesn’t matter.”

  She was silent for a moment. “You’re lying.”

  He whipped his head around. “You don’t—” He looked forward again, jaw clenched. Putting the truck in gear, he began to drive.

  One hand touched his arm softly. The feel of it burned his skin. “What happened when you were injured?”

  Rafe closed his eyes. Wished she would go away. “It’s not something I talk about.”

  Her hand drew back, taking its warmth with her. “All right.”

  The slight tremor in her voice made him feel like a jerk. He exhaled in a gust. “I don’t need my head shrunk. Things happened, that’s all. Things I wish—” His throat tightened.

  “I’ve made mistakes, too, you know.” Her voice almost convinced him that she could understand. “There was this woman who should have lived to be ninety. She was barely fifty, had a husband who adored her and kids and grandkids. I’d lost cases before, but never one this personal.” She looked at him then, and the misery in her eyes told the tale. “She gave me a chance when I was green. Chose me over a colleague with more experience. She trusted me with her life and—” Diana averted her face. “He might have saved her. Probably would have. Instead, I had to walk out there and tell her family that what should have been a simple surgery hadn’t worked. I’d told her—told them all—that it was a no-brainer, and instead she died on the table.”

  That the loss still dug spurs into her was evident. “Medicine isn’t a perfect science, Diana.”

  She lifted agonized eyes to his. “I know.” Her stare didn’t waver. “But it doesn’t make it hurt less. People depend on us, and sometimes we don’t measure up.”

  The arrow, however unintended, hit its mark.

  He pulled to a stop in front of her cabin. The vision that never fully left him bloomed again: Townsend’s eyes begging Rafe to save him, even though his femoral artery had been severed, his right leg turned to hamburger.

  “Rafe.” Diana’s voice jerked him out of memory. “Talk to me. I’ve seen things no one should have to. Maybe others here wouldn’t understand, but I do.”

  And finally, after three years, he couldn’t jam the door closed any longer.

  “The mission where I was—” He gestured toward his bad hip. “It was bad.”

  She waited for him to continue. When he didn’t, she prompted. “You lost men?”

  After a long pause, he nodded. “Two.” Bitter regret rose again. “Two out of six, goddamn it.” Rage shot past it, stronger for being forced from the light for so long. “Townsend was just a kid, the new guy on the squad. His wife was pregnant with their first child—” He stared straight ahead, swallowing hard. “The squad depended on me to patch them up, send them all home in one piece. I always managed it. Sometimes by the skin of my teeth, but every one of them had made it home before. Every single time. Until Afghanistan.”

  “So what happened?” Her voice was soft but
intent, as though she wouldn’t stop until she’d drawn off the poison.

  Rafe felt the rising of something black and malignant, something he wanted to bury so deep that maybe one day it would quit scoring him with merciless claws. “It doesn’t matter,” he snapped.

  He thought she’d take the easy way out. He was offering her what she’d said she wanted: no involvement with any of them, the acknowledgment that she was only here for a short time.

  Instead, she rose to her knees on the seat, hands on her thighs, facing him. “You might be able to fool the others, but you can’t fool me. I’ve watched people die in my care. I know how it feels.” She touched one fist to her heart. “I haven’t been in combat, but I understand that every single life you lose takes something away that you never get back. It doesn’t even have to be your fault. A healer is a fighter. We don’t want to lose—and every time we do, it kills something inside us.”

  A malevolent pressure crowded his chest, pushed so hard he couldn’t breathe. He grabbed the door handle and burst out of the truck, head swiveling from side to side like an animal seeking refuge when survival was at stake.

  Diana rounded the cab of the pickup, placing herself in his path. “Talk to me,” she urged, one hand pressing against the center of his chest, where fury and misery and heartache slammed together until he thought he would explode.

  “No,” he shouted. “Leave me the hell alone.” He whirled away and started to run, but his hip chose that moment to collapse. He fell to his knees on the ground.

  His body bowed beneath the weight of anger and sorrow and the pain that never left him. He dug his fingers into his hair, and pain burst forth like razors flaying his skin.

  Diana’s arms slid around his shoulders.

  He resisted. Fighting what he needed too much. What he didn’t deserve.

  One hand pressed his head into her breasts, and she murmured into his ears words he couldn’t make out, but the sound of them soothed him, reached out to him through the tearing pain, the roaring maelstrom.

  He’d never expected a lifeline, not from this too-thin woman living on nerves. She comforted him as he would never have allowed his family to do. Somehow knowing that she’d been in that position, that she understood how it felt to have another human being’s life in her hands and be unable to save him, reached down inside where he’d been alone for so long.

  “We shouldn’t have been there,” he confessed. “It was my fault. I was worried about a group of children. I wanted to make sure they were safe. My team wouldn’t let me go alone. It turned out to be a setup. An extremist group didn’t want Muslim kids tainted by contact with The Great Satan.”

  “You didn’t know.”

  “But I had no business trying to be anyone’s savior. My team trusted me. They—” His voice faltered. “They teased me about being a romantic, always checking out the local healing traditions. Whatever country we were in, they’d bring things back to me—plants, stories…”

  He shoved away. Rose unsteadily. “I got them killed—Townsend and Martin. I almost got everyone killed.”

  She touched his shoulder. “You nearly died, too.”

  He shrugged off her hand. Whirled toward her. “You think that helps?”

  She stood her ground. “Nothing helps but time—and forgiving yourself for surviving.” She cocked her head. “Clinging to the pain is easy, Rafe. It’s going on that’s hard. You feel guilty that you’re alive and they’re not, but—”

  “Get out—” he raged. “Get away from me. Just—”

  “No.” Into the darkness swallowing him, she stepped, a pale flame. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  “Damn you—” He grabbed for her, hating that he’d bared his soul to her, stripped himself down to the bone. Desperate to stop her from looking so deep inside him, he dug his fingers into her hair and dragged her against him, seizing her mouth in a kiss meant to distract. To defend.

  He didn’t know what response he’d expected. Maybe she’d slap him. Maybe she’d draw back, remind him that she was a hotshot surgeon and he was some sort of mongrel. Less.

  Instead she cradled his cheek tenderly and let herself go, turning to fire in his arms. Answering his fury as if she needed him as much as, right then, he needed her.

  When she trembled, he murmured, “I won’t hurt you.”

  “You will. You can’t help it,” she said with certainty. “But right now I don’t care.”

  He couldn’t think straight enough to argue. “If you don’t want me to take you on this hard ground, you’d better walk away now.” What he wouldn’t give to sweep her up in his arms the way he once would have done with ease.

  Somehow they made it to her porch, Rafe half-carrying her, Diana’s fingers ranging over his body, clawing and digging in…stroking and petting until he thought he’d lose his mind.

  He’d been careful for so long. Afraid to let the beast loose for fear of whom he would hurt. Once more he grasped for a leash to jerk it back.

  Diana wouldn’t let him. She all but crawled up his body on her front porch.

  “Diana, don’t—”

  She actually growled at him. Then her fingers fumbled at the buttons on his shirt. “I want to see you,” she muttered. “I have to touch you.” She held her head back, eyes filled with challenge. “I want those hands on me. God, I love your hands. They’re the sexiest things I’ve ever seen.”

  “I’ve got scars,” he warned. “Terrible ones.”

  “You’re talking to a person who makes scars for a living.” She smiled, and his heart dropped out of his chest. “They don’t scare me. You afraid of me, Rafe?”

  Incredible. Somehow, she’d transformed his shame and agony into a dare. He searched for the place in his chest that had been filled with darkness for three years and couldn’t find it.

  Yet part of him clung to the guilt that had been his constant companion.

  “Are you?” She challenged him again.

  It couldn’t be this easy to let go. He still had to pay, all his life he would pay for—

  Diana wrapped one leg around his thigh and rocked her pelvis against him—

  Every last thought in his head vanished.

  Rafe dove into her, gripping her hair in one hand, wrapping her so tightly in his arms that he wasn’t sure either one of them would ever breathe again. He expected her to protest—

  Instead, she laughed, the raunchiest, most seductive laugh he’d ever heard from a woman.

  And in that moment, he wanted to laugh, too. The relief of it broke past all the barriers he’d carefully constructed to protect everyone he loved from the darkness that had swallowed him whole.

  “That’s it,” he muttered, backing her toward the cabin door.

  “God, I hope so,” she sighed, her mouth curving against his lips. When he would have urged her toward the bedroom, instead she drew him down to the floor.

  Then she rose over him and pressed her lips to the opening of his shirt, licking the spot above his collarbone and making the hair rise on his arms.

  “We should—” he gasped.

  Diana settled herself over him, wiggling to maximum effect. “I don’t take orders well, Rafe. Anyone at Mercy could tell you that I’m used to being the one who hands them out.” She brushed against him again and smiled. “Why don’t you just relax and forget that you’re used to giving them, too.”

  For a moment, he could only lie there and stare at her, green eyes alight with mischief and humor, devoid of all the anger and sorrow they’d held since the first day she’d ordered the caretaker to grab her bags. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” he asked.

  She smiled. “I’d like most anything that got you naked. I’ve been thinking about you without your clothes.”

  He gritted his teeth. “Don’t say that.” He closed his eyes. “I haven’t been with a woman since—”

  Her eyes widened. Her smile followed. “Well…I’m a little rusty myself, but it hasn’t been three years. You should definitely l
et me take the lead.” She winked at him. “Just until you get the hang of it.”

  Rafe laughed out loud, and the sound of it was odd to his own ears. When was the last time he’d laughed, belly deep?

  She was amazing, this woman who straddled him now, wiggling until he feared he’d explode.

  Faster than she could react, he flipped them. Eyes wide in shock, she opened her mouth but nothing came out.

  He laughed again but heard the roughness in his throat. He wasn’t going to last long this time.

  This time. With that, Rafe acknowledged that there would be a next time, insane as it was to even consider such a thing.

  Then Diana slid her tongue around her lips in a slow sweep so carnal it shot his pulse into the danger zone—

  Then she followed it up by using her good hand to unbuckle his belt and work at the button on the top of his jeans.

  “Sweet—” He all but leaped off her. “Stop that.”

  “No,” said the woman who’d battled the big boys and won, who knows how many times.

  “Don’t.” He grabbed her hands and stilled them as his heart raced. “I can’t—” He swallowed hard. “I’m too ready. We have to slow down.”

  A protest sprang to her lips until she looked into his eyes. She glanced away, and he realized that for all her bluster, she was as uncertain as he was.

  Two damaged bodies. Two tenuous hearts.

  A premonition shook Rafe to his marrow. Something was different this time. With this woman. His heart would not escape without harm; somehow he sensed it.

  Would she feel it? Did she already? Was that why she pushed to make it physical and quick?

  “Diana,” he began. “This is important.”

  She shook her head and refused to meet his gaze. “It’s just sex.”

  “You’re wrong.” He knew too little about her and might not like what he learned. She would definitely not like what she learned about him.

  But she was still wrong.

  Her head shook slowly from side to side. He clasped her jaw and tilted her face toward him.

  Tear-bright eyes greeted his. “It can’t be important,” she whispered. “I have to leave soon.”