Laying Down The Law (#4, Cowboy Way) (The Cowboy Way)

by Becky McGraw

  Laying Down The Law

  The Cowboy Way, Book 4

  Brock’s Story

  Becky McGraw

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  LAYING DOWN THE LAW, Copyright © 2016, Becky McGraw.

  ISBN-10: 1-943188-05-X

  ISBN-13: 978-1-943188-05-5

  All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the author.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  “What do you mean you found her walking down Porter Street naked?!? Was this in the daytime?” Melanie Fox demanded, fighting to keep her voice down so the nurse at the station and the patients in the treatment rooms didn’t hear her.

  Why she was surprised, Melanie didn’t know, because her mother was definitely a few chips short of a cookie and always had been. And now it sounded like that cookie was crumbling at fifty-four years old. Dealing with this was the last thing she needed.

  “Dr. Fox, the patient in bed three is having, um, some respiratory issues,” the duty nurse in the ER informed meekly as she stepped up beside her.

  With this nurse giving a report, that could mean the man who had multiple cracked ribs from a tractor accident could have a punctured lung or just a stuffy nose from the wailing he’d done in the treatment room until Mel ordered pain meds.

  Some respiratory issues was not a description from which she could make that decision, but Melanie knew it was as specific as this self-doubting nurse would get. Brittany Jones, a former cheerleader, and Texas beauty queen, now floor nurse in the Emergency Department, was much too timid and inexperienced to ever have the confidence to make that call.

  Mel had to demonstrate to her how to put a freaking Band-aid on a cut one night, the first night she was on duty, which pretty much set the tone for their relationship in the two months since. The charge nurse was going to know too, as soon as Mel could catch up with her. This time, the absentee supervisor better do something, like put Ms. Congeniality in the med-check clinic where she could treat runny noses and hand out suckers. One thing was for sure, she definitely did not belong in trauma medicine.

  And wouldn’t you know, on a night with a full moon she’d be the only nurse on duty tonight with Melanie? The second nurse called in sick. All the crazies were pouring into her emergency room and her sole help was Nurse Goodbody.

  Well, all of the crazies except for her mother were there. She was cooling her heels at the police station in Sunny Glen, Georgia, the most dismal backwoods town on the planet, inhabited by five hundred of the oddest hillbillies on earth. Her hometown’s only claim to fame was being located in the same county where the movie Deliverance was filmed.

  Melanie had thankfully been delivered from there twelve years ago and had no plans of ever going back. Especially just to deal with another of her mother’s antics. Her Aunt June, who was only half as crazy as her sister, could deal with her. Or maybe her equally psychotic beauty queen sister Maddie could come down from her ivory tower in Atlanta where she lived with her gazillionaire husband, whom she married at nineteen after she won Miss Georgia.

  “We picked her up after dark near the woods a couple of hours ago and yeah, she was, um, unclothed but I gave her the blanket from the trunk of my cruiser. The reason I’m calling is that she said some things that troubled the sheriff. We’re going to take her home now, but he thinks you might want to give her a call later.”

  “Fine, I’ll call her,” Melanie replied, just to get the man off the phone.

  “Dr. Fox?” Brittany drawled when Mel didn’t answer.

  Taking three deep breaths, Melanie tried to grab hold of her agitation and anger, but it was on a very short leash as she turned to face the nurse.

  “What is his oxygen saturation level, Brittany? Respirations per minute? Did you check his blood pressure? Did you listen to his breath sounds with that hot pink decoration hanging around your neck?” Which is what any competent nurse would have done, before she came to find the doctor.

  “Uh—ah—no, ma’am,” she replied, her face turning bright red. “He just said it hurt when he drew a deep breath, so I, ah—”

  “We have a chest x-ray, Brittany. The man has cracked ribs. People with cracked ribs often have pained respirations because their rib cages expand when they freaking breathe!”

  With a huffed breath, Mel snatched the chart from her and strode down the hall to exam room number three. When she pushed through the door, the man’s wife stood. “I think that pain medication finally kicked in Dr. Fox. He’s resting now,” she informed as if Melanie couldn’t tell that from the man’s loud snores.

  “I’m going to check him out one more time and then we’ll let you take him home, Mrs. Franklin. As I told you, the x-ray didn’t show displacement and there was only one visible fracture. I just kept him a few more hours to make sure he was stable before we discharged him.”

  Mel snatched her stethoscope from her neck, leaned over him to listen to his lung sounds and found them normal. She felt around his chest and found no deformities, ran her fingers down both sides of his ribcage then palpated his abdomen and pelvis. After checking his vitals and finding them normal, she stood and faced the wife.

  “Looks like he’s going home,” she said with a forced smile. “Ice every few hours will help with the pain as will the prescription I’ll write for him. If he lies on his left side to sleep, his injured side, that will help him breathe deeper and easier. Call in immediately if his condition worsens, if not, take him to see your family doctor in a week.”

  The woman’s relief was visible on her face as she walked around the bed. Before Melanie could protest, she threw her arms around her and squeezed. “Oh, I’m so thankful he’s going to be okay,” she said, with a choked sob. Melanie stood stiffly in her embrace until the woman finally pulled away.

  “He needs to stay in bed for the week—no work at least until he sees his doctor.”

  She knew men like him and no matter how hurt they were, they were out in the field riding horses, baling hay, planting crops—logging like her father had done—because no matter what a doctor said, they were real men and their injury wasn’t going to slow them down. That usually meant they ended up right back in the ER…or dead, in her father’s case.

  “I’ll tie him to the bed if I have to,” Mrs. Franklin avowed, her eyes narrowing.

  Mel glanced at the sleeping man and laughed at the mental picture of this small, tired-looking woman tying her jumbo-sized husband to the bed. “Whatever it takes, Mrs. Franklin. Just make sure he doesn’t do too much. I’ll have Brittany bring in a wheelchair and help you get him dressed.” Since that’s all she’s capable of, Mel thought, as she picked up the chart off the end of the bed and walked out.

  She met Brittany in the hallway and shoved the chart into her chest. �
�Help him get dressed and get them a wheelchair,” she said.

  Brittany took the file folder from her and straightened the papers inside, which was much more important to her than patient care evidently. An office job might be good for her. Answering phones and filing seemed to be her calling.

  But, please God, not in a doctor’s office.

  At three in the morning, after treating a two-year-old with a high fever and ear infection, two migraines, a broken arm, a heart arrhythmia, and a couple of hypochondriacs she knew by first name, Melanie pushed out of treatment room four and made the mistake of glancing down the long hall. Two people stood at the admit desk, one a man with a blood-soaked towel wrapped around his hand and the other his harried looking wife or girlfriend.

  They would make ten patients in the waiting room.

  She got off at seven, and there was no way she’d clear them out before she left. Her relief would have two nurses, probably competent ones, to help him so he could deal with the leftovers because Melanie wasn’t a machine. If she didn’t get coffee and a power bar soon, she might very well pass out since she hadn’t even had time to eat dinner.

  On the way to the doctor’s lounge she passed Brittany, and out of the corner of her eye she cringed when she saw her spin around to follow her.

  “Dr. Fox,” she said—twice—but Mel didn’t stop until she stopped at the coffee cup dispenser and jerked one out of the tube.

  “What do you need, Brittany?” she replied as she poured the cup two-thirds full then sat it down to shake sugar, and then cream into it.

  “I have a couple of messages for you…I, ah, didn’t want to bother you in the exam room,” she said, as she shoved a couple of pink slips in front of Melanie.

  “Go give release orders to the kid in room four with the ear infection. I wrote a couple of prescriptions.”

  “Why do you hate me?” Brittany asked with a short sob.

  Because you remind me of my airhead sister. Guilt tried to blossom inside of Melanie, but she shoved it away. She turned and leaned a hip on the counter.

  “This has nothing to do with my personal feelings for you, Brittany.” Which Melanie would definitely keep to herself, because she had a feeling they were directly related to the fact she was blonde and reminded her of her sister. “When you put on that nametag that says you’re a medical professional, these patients expect you to be confident and competent. If you screw up, they can die. It’s not just a job—it’s people’s lives. You’re not here to hand out bedpans and answer call buttons.”

  “I know that,” Brittany replied, lifting her chin an inch. “I was third in my class—”

  “Third isn’t good enough,” Melanie interrupted. “If you don’t care enough about your profession to be first, then you don’t belong in the medical field.” And even if you were first, you don’t belong. You just don’t have the drive to be the best or bust your ass like I did for eight years to get there.

  “Okay, how do I do that? I’m out of school,” Brittany asked, seeming genuinely interested as she rested a hip on the counter and folded her arms under her breasts.

  “Come in on your off hours to observe some of the more experienced nurses and up your game or you’re not going to last.” Mel didn’t hold out a lot of hope it would help, but she had to offer the suggestion.

  Brittany’s eyes widened and she smiled as she unfolded her arms. “I’ll try that, thank you, Dr. Fox. I’ll get the treatment rooms cleaned and restocked.” Huffing a breath, she turned and walked out.

  Melanie opened the cabinet, pulled down a couple of power bars and shoved them into the pocket of her lab coat, then reached for the pink slips on the counter. Both messages were from the sheriff in Sunny Glen, one two hours ago, and the last thirty minutes ago. Stuffing the slips into her pocket, she pulled out a power bar and zipped off the end of the wrapper. She’d just taken a bite when Brittany appeared in the doorway again.

  “It’s that sheriff again, Dr. Fox. He says he’s not hanging up this time until he talks to you. What do you want me to tell him?”

  That he could handle her mother’s craziness or call her sister?

  “I’ll take it in here. Finish getting the rooms cleaned and fill them up again. I’ll be there shortly.” Melanie rubbed her forehead, which was starting to throb, as she walked to the table in the corner of the room and picked up the receiver.

  “This is Dr. Fox,” Melanie said shortly.

  “Well, it’s about damned time, Hooty!” the man growled. “Maybe you should get here to doctor your damned mother instead of shoving her off on everyone else.”

  Who looks like an owl? Who always has her nose in a book? Who thinks she’s smarter than everyone else? Who’s the girl least likely to ever find a date?

  Yes, that’s what she was voted in her high school yearbook. It was done as a joke according to her sister, but Melanie did not think it was funny.

  Melanie pushed back the old anger and feelings of worthlessness that tried to take hold inside of her and swallowed them. Overreaction at hearing this man, whoever he was, call her by the old nickname that every child in Sunny Glen had pinned on her in grade school, and then caught on with her family, wasn’t a part of her makeup anymore.

  She was a bigger and better person now. She no longer wore inch thick glasses, her hair was sleek and thick from her thrice yearly straighteners, and the thirty extra pounds she’d carried all the way through high school were gone, along with twenty more. She was Dr. Melanie Fox now, Foxy to most who worked with her, and that wasn’t because she was sly. California had been good to her. At this moment, she wished she were back there.

  “I happen to be treating patients, sheriff. I don’t have time for this so I suggest you call my sister Madeline in Atlanta,” Melanie said shortly.

  “I would if she wasn’t in the Willows Clinic there being treated for a nervous breakdown after finding out her husband was cheating,” the sheriff shot back.

  A surge of happiness at hearing the karma train had finally pulled into Maddie’s station coursed through her, but Melanie reminded herself even though she had no use for Madeline, she was still her sister. Being happy about her present troubles wasn’t right.

  “Aunt June then, call her.” Her mother’s sister lived the street over from her mother, so that should’ve been this man’s first call. Again, it wasn’t that she didn’t care about her mother, she just had a lifetime of her antics during the eighteen years she spent in her household.

  “She’s in the hospital too,” he replied heaving a breath. “I called her after we found your mother on Porter Street earlier and she went to the house. At midnight, they were both on the roof and June tried to stop your mother from falling, but fell off too.” He huffed another tired breath. “According to the medics who transported them to Mountain Ridge, your mother likely has a broken leg and concussion, and your aunt a broken arm.”

  Why did this man’s rich voice, his intonations, sound so familiar to her? And why did he sound as if he knew her family so well? He’d called her Hooty, so he wasn’t new to town.

  “You’re new aren’t you? What happened to Sheriff Jones?” she asked. Melanie added the twelve years she’d been gone to the twenty-five the former sheriff had been in office and knew he was too old now to still be in that job.

  “C’mon, Hooty—I don’t have time for chit chat. This is Brock Cooper and you need to get your ass here to handle your mother.”

  Melanie’s blood turned to ice water in her veins at hearing that name. Like a time warp, she was sucked back fourteen years to be engulfed by the same mortification she’d felt when her sister discovered her secret by reading her journal. Maddie passed that information on to her then boyfriend, who’d laughed in her face and whose friends had teased her about it unmercifully after that.

  Bad boy Brock Cooper was now the sheriff in Sunny Glen?

  Now, she had even less desire to go back there, but it didn’t look like she had much choice. “I’ll be there tomorrow
night.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “They let her out that quick?” Rowdy asked, as he sat down in the chair across from Brock’s desk. He laughed, and Brock finally looked at him. “I’d have thought they’d have at least kept her for a seventy-two-hour psych hold. That woman’s got some screws loose.”

  “Well they evidently didn’t want to be the ones tightening them,” Brock replied, still unable to believe the reasons Merry Fox gave him for being at the edge of the woods naked, and then again on her roof at midnight. “Either that or she didn’t tell them how she and her sister came to fall off of her roof at midnight.”

  The hospital staff probably just turned her loose to her daughter the doctor, and purveyor of enough attitude for them to want to get rid of all three of the crazy Fox women—four counting Maddie who was presently in a mental hospital—as quickly as possible.

  Crazy it seemed ran very deep in the Fox family. Brock had definitely dodged a bullet when he broke up with Maddie Fox before he left for college. They’d only dated a year, and he’d seen glimpses of her crazy, but nothing compared to her mother. Maybe that level of insanity took years to germinate and she was just now getting there.

  Other than her uncaring and abrasive attitude on the phone when he talked to her about her mother, Melanie seemed relatively sane. But she was a year younger than Maddie, so she could still be cultivating her crazy. He didn’t know her that well though—only through Maddie. She’d always seemed a little disconnected, didn’t have many friends, and kept to herself with her nose in a book most of the time. Of course, that could be because the kids teased the hell out of her to the point that Brock felt damned sorry for her sometimes.

  A mental image of frizzy dark hair, pop-bottle thick glasses and breasts large enough to eclipse the sun floated into his mind and he shivered. She was certainly smart enough to become a doctor, but Hooty Fox was nothing like Hotty Fox her trophy-wife sister.