Be My Texas Valentine

by Jodi Thomas

  “Don’t look so fretful,” he teased. “I still have my bachelor status and it’s almost sundown, although I’m not sure if it can survive everybody’s matchmaking efforts. Mrs. Lassiter can be quite persistent when she sets her mind to something.”

  “Is that why she didn’t bring Gabby home when she found her here? She was playing matchmaker?” JoEmma smiled at the two lovebirds. Amigo was a cutie and the pair looked so sweet together.

  Noah exhaled a deep breath, then laughed. “Remember that you said it. I didn’t.” He picked up the cage and started to unlatch its door, but JoEmma reached out to stop him.

  “I wouldn’t. At least unless you lock your front door and make sure there is no window open. Gabby might try to escape again.”

  “You think so?” Noah stood and moved to lock the office door. “I don’t usually keep that locked. Amigo doesn’t seem to want to explore anywhere but here. Still, I’m not sure my bedroom window isn’t open. I’ll check. Or if you’d like to go with me, you can see if I need to move anything out of the hallway to give you access to the kitchen, where I keep their food and trays. I’ll be just a minute with the window.”

  JoEmma eyed the birds to make sure that the cage was soundly stationed on the table before she swung her chair around and rolled after him. She got a great look at his lanky height and broad shoulders, admiring his solid stride and easy movement. Noah Brown was a man at his physical best and that made him more attractive to her than all his degrees hanging on the wall above her. He was a smart, healthy man full of life and kind spirit. Seeing such virility made her wish that her heart were stronger, her legs more stable. That she could be a helpmate to him and something much more.

  He went through a closed door at the end of the hall. Just as she reached the kitchen, she heard a window slam shut. When he appeared behind her, he gave her a quick inventory of what he kept for the birds and where, how he shared the excess with a neighborhood cat, and that, after tonight, he would start hanging the birdcage in his bedroom.

  “It’s the only room that people other than me won’t be going in and out of,” Noah explained, “so I think that’s the wisest place to put Gabby to get her comfortable here, don’t you? At least until she feels at home and doesn’t want to escape.”

  His private quarters? The thought sent all kinds of images racing through JoEmma’s mind, and she hoped her cheeks weren’t as red hot above the skin as they felt below. Images of her and Noah in each other’s arms, their legs tangled together. Of his hair all mussed and those broad shoulders lending her a warm place to cuddle, just as Amigo had cuddled underneath Gabby’s wing.

  “Will the bed be any trouble for me?” she asked, trying to put her thoughts back into a more proper frame. That didn’t come out the way she meant it! “I mean, will I fit? My wheelchair. Will my wheelchair fit?”

  “No problem. I don’t have much in there but an armoire and a bed. I’d show you it now, but it’s not presentable at the moment. How about you let me look at those hands for the time being?”

  JoEmma allowed him to roll her to his examination room, where he stopped long enough to light a lamp to help with the waning daylight. “They’ll be okay. I have some liniment at home that your father gave me.”

  “My father? Does he still see you as a patient?”

  She heard some emotion in Noah’s voice but couldn’t quite discern what it was. Hannah occasionally mentioned that the two Powell men were having some kind of battle of wills, but she never really discussed more than her frustration at them both. JoEmma didn’t know why father and son were angry with each other. “Since he took care of me during my scarlet fever scare, he’s always made a point to look in on me. I think he’s really using his visits more as an excuse to spend time with Hannah. The two of them should marry, don’t you think?”

  “He would be a lucky man if they did.”

  Noah took her palms and turned them over to examine them closely. “Why don’t you wear gloves when you’re using your chair?”

  JoEmma shrugged. “They get in my way. I like my hands in the dirt when I pot plants. I like the way the quill feels between my fingers when I write. I like to touch the way things really are. Like this ...”

  She took his hand and ran a finger down the length of several of his. “Your fingers are warm and smooth and strong and I can feel your heartbeat. A doctor’s hand, not a muleskinner’s. Oh ... your pulse sped up.” Her eyes met his and held. “You can’t feel all of that with gloves on. And it’s worth a little pain to feel life, don’t you think?”

  A profound silence filled the space that separated them, ending any words between them. Noah’s lips lowered to press gently over hers, stirring her every sense and sending the exotic taste of temptation blazing through JoEmma. Her arms lifted of their own accord and wrapped themselves around his neck, allowing her to rise gently from her chair so he could deepen the kiss.

  She had dreamed of him kissing her for so long that she had imagined it in a hundred different ways. But that had been a ten-year-old girl’s limited imagination. She was a woman now and the kiss Noah bestowed upon her stirred such wild yearnings within JoEmma that she knew it would take a thousand moons to send them back to their resting place.

  She returned his kiss with the same ardor until, finally, she needed more breath, which demanded she end the exquisite longing.

  “You’re standing,” he whispered.

  JoEmma looked down and saw that she was, and the only weakness she’d felt was that her heart might melt from sheer delight.

  “We’re going to do this again,” Noah whispered, pressing a gentle kiss against her forehead now. “As many times as it takes to make you stronger. If you have the strength to stand, even for a few minutes, even during a kiss, we can build on that.”

  “Don’t tease me, Noah.” She moved away, sliding back down into the wheelchair. “Not about this.”

  “I’m not.” Noah curved a knuckle under her chin and lifted it so she couldn’t look away. “I mean for you to get stronger and you just proved to me that you can. I plan to help you do just that in repayment to you for helping me with Gabby and Amigo.”

  JoEmma felt crushed. That’s exactly what she didn’t want—help with a lost cause. It was hopeless and she’d tried so long she’d given up and accepted her fate. She wanted a friend’s care to become something more. Something she’d dreamed of since she was a little girl. She wanted to be loved by Noah.

  She wished now that she never knew his kiss. Never knew its depth and scope. Never knew what would haunt her now for all the days of her life that remained. All she wanted to do was get away from him. Away from what couldn’t be. She wished she had Gabby’s wings and could fly away. He was too much of a gentleman to let her go home in the dark without him. She must find a way to force him to take her now ... before she started crying her eyes out. “And how will you repay my sister for her help with the birds?” Her tongue struck a wicked blow.

  It wasn’t like her to be cruel and she didn’t know she had it within her to be so mean. But the suggestion had its effect. He gave no answer to her question and became all business, grabbing the salve and working it into her palms and wrapping them with fresh linen bandages.

  He dropped the jar of salve into her lap. “I’m sending the rest home with you. Use it for a few days and your hands won’t hurt so much. And use some gloves when you’re traveling about town, at least. Across your floors at home aren’t so damaging, but these roadways are.”

  When he took the bars of her wheelchair to spin her around, she braced herself, thinking that his anger might make the roll home a wild ride. But to her surprise, he was amazingly gentle in pushing the chair.

  He allowed her a moment with Gabby, as he’d promised, but JoEmma was so upset about the kiss that she barely allowed herself any emotion in telling her pet good-bye.

  Maybe it was because she knew she could see Gabby tomorrow if she liked. Maybe it was because she knew if she got weepy-eyed over Funny Fea
thers, then she just might break down and cry for all the things she would never be and had ever missed since becoming ill. Maybe it was because she was scared Noah was right.

  She might possibly become strong enough to stand on her two feet again.

  Could she accept that his kiss was meant as nothing more than a remedy to make her well?

  Fly away home, little bird, she told herself. Before more than your wings get broken.

  Chapter 7

  The silence between them as he took JoEmma home gave Noah plenty of time to ask himself what had compelled him to kiss her. Her hand touching his? The look in her eyes? The sense that if he didn’t kiss her, he would somehow miss something that might alter his life forever?

  He thought of every moment he’d ever spent with JoEmma Brown. Nothing fancy. Just walking home from school and talking. Sharing a pew in church. Laughing at their toes getting pinched at Crawdad Creek as they sat side by side. All were small slices of life that seemed ordinary to most, but to a boy who had lost his mother and a son whose father rarely talked to him, those slices teemed with a simple sharing that had meant everything to him. There was nothing false about JoEmma. No manipulations. No game playing. Just pure, gentle enjoyment for the true value of life and what it offered.

  Noah thought his interest in her had merely been that she touched the doctor of medicine part of him, who valued anyone who valued life. But the urge to kiss her had risen from something other than her expressive words. She had stirred some need within the part of him that was nothing but raw pulsating maleness, a need that had been restrained behind convention for too long. A wish to know how her lips tasted could no longer be held at bay. The desire to breathe in her essence and fill himself with its fragrance had unleashed his arms and drawn her into his embrace when her arms had encircled him. To resist was no longer a choice or within his command to halt. He could do nothing else but draw her even closer than the wheelchair allowed.

  “I really think we should talk.” JoEmma broke into his thoughts as he rolled her chair up the wooden ramp that provided entry to her home.

  “I won’t say I’m sorry that I kissed you.” He didn’t care if it made her angrier to speak his true feelings. He wasn’t sorry. He would never be.

  “Neither am I,” she said, “but it can’t happen again.”

  He wished he could see her eyes. Wished he could read what was not being said in their hazel depths. But all he could see was the back of her head and the rigid set of her shoulders. “It won’t unless you ask me to.”

  He meant the promise he’d just made. He would not take that liberty again though he would spend the rest of the night and many hereafter, Noah suspected, dreaming of their kiss. JoEmma Brown did not know what she had set into motion this afternoon. Not only did he now have the goal to see her up and out of the chair but he meant to find a way to make her unable to live without another of his kisses. A thousand more of his kisses.

  Maybe enlisting her sister’s help would be a way to start.

  When her chair reached the Browns’ front door, the door swung open and Hannah Lassiter’s four-foot-two frame sailed out to meet them. She took one look at the bandages on JoEmma’s hands and demanded to know what had happened, how badly she was hurt, and didn’t he have any better sense than keeping her out in the night wind so late.

  “Don’t be hard on him.” JoEmma held her hands up to ward off her housekeeper’s attack on Noah. “He didn’t do anything but find me and get me home.”

  She explained all that had happened and that she had been the one who demanded the delay with stopping at his office on the way back. She mentioned nothing of the kiss, and her anger at him seemed gone. As if the kiss had never happened.

  Noah wasn’t sure if he liked that fact or not.

  “Angie’s bustle is all in a wad because she’s reheated the tea at least three times. I’ve got supper waiting on you, too.”

  “I’m sorry, Hannah. You should have gone ahead and eaten without me.”

  “What, and miss all that lovely gossip about the bloomer brigade and them meeting at the doctor’s office?” She stepped aside and let them in. “I’ve heard her version of the story. Now I want to hear what Dr. Powell has to say about it all. You will be staying for supper, won’t you?”

  Mrs. Lassiter’s invitation was not a question, though she’d tried to be nice enough to offer it as one. She gave him that “young man” expression that meant she was only being nice and he’d better do what she said or he’d hear a tirade the next time she came to clean. She was intent about this matchmaking business.

  “I’d love to, thank you.” Noah decided he could work this to his advantage. He probably would have just caught a bite to eat over at the hotel diner anyway, so this would just give him more time to set his plan for JoEmma into motion. “Is there somewhere I can wash up?”

  “Will you show him, Hannah? I’d like to freshen up myself.” JoEmma seemed eager to be alone.

  “After you wash your hands, I’ll wrap some new bandages around them,” Noah offered.

  “I can manage.” She held up the salve. “I’ve had plenty of practice before.”

  When JoEmma rolled into another room, Hannah didn’t budge and looked like she might block him from going another step forward. Her pudgy fists knotted on her broad hips. “What have you done to her?”

  “What do you mean?” Noah pretended she meant the condition of JoEmma’s hands, but he knew she was asking something else. “Her hands were hurting from rolling the chair down the roadway. I merely offered some salve and bandages.”

  “Waste spit on someone you don’t like.” One of Hannah’s fingers rose to shake at him as she scolded, “That poor kitten rolled in here looking like she’d had all the sand punched out of her. Now I’m asking you again and I expect a reasonable answer.”

  She asked for it, so he gave her the truth. “I kissed her.”

  The finger stopped in midshake.

  “Goodgawdalmighty,” she whispered and ran up to him. “Bend down here, young man.”

  Noah bent and braced himself for the slap that he had initially expected from JoEmma back at his office.

  Mrs. Lassiter cupped his cheeks in both of her pudgy palms, gave them a quick squeeze, then planted a kiss right on his mouth. “You finally did something totally right. You are my hero, Noah Powell! I’m so proud of you.”

  Noah started chuckling, a deep-throated eruption of pure unadulterated amusement. “And you, Hannah Lassiter, make no sense to me whatsoever, but I adore you, too.”

  She laughed with him, her cheeks stained with a blush that made her look like a plump raspberry and all the more endearing.

  “I take it this means I’m not going to be massacred in my sleep before I wake up tomorrow morning for kissing one of your precious kittens?”

  “Not since you kissed the right one.” Her chins lifted indignantly. “I wanted you to prove yourself worthy of figuring out which one of the Browns would be best for you. My intuition proved true, that’s all.”

  “Your intuition?” Noah ignored her indignation and focused on reminding her that he knew her about as well as she knew him. “Intuition is wishful thinking. I’ve never seen you be wishful about anything, madam. You’ve always set your mind to having your way, and by jasper, it’s going to be that way or else.”

  “Are you sassing me?” She flashed him a dimpled grin, unable to keep her face stern.

  “Yeah,” he teased back. “What are you going to do about it?”

  She took that same finger that had scolded him moments before and motioned him to go with her. “I’m going to feed you some supper, that’s what I’m going to do, and see if we can’t get something stirring between those two in there. A little competition always helps to make a heart quit hiding and speak up for what it wants. A little cat fight might just be the call to order here.”

  Noah linked his arm through hers and let her guide him to the dining room. “You’re devious, Hannah Lassiter.”
>
  She sighed. “You don’t even know the half of it. Just wait till you see what I have in store for your father.”

  JoEmma sat across the table from Hannah, with Noah to her left and Angelina next to him. There had been no end to the discussion about what had transpired at the doctor’s off ice. One thing was clear. Noah was very much aware of what the women had been plotting. He’d taken it well in stride, if she said so herself, not letting it go to his head like some men might have. She was glad he found humor in it.

  She had expected Angelina to be mad about his knowing he was being wooed, but her sister had not won her reputation lightly. Angie acted as if she thought the whole matter quite as humorous as they did.

  “Can you imagine anyone being that desperate for an escort?” Angelina reached for her napkin and accidentally touched Noah’s hand. “Oh, excuse me.”

  Puhhleease, JoEmma thought. Why don’t you just reach out and play patty fingers with him?

  “Have either of you girls decided who you’re going with?” Hannah cut her roast beef, her eyes focused on the effort rather than on either sister.

  Angelina raised her napkin to her mouth and mumbled something incomprehensible.

  JoEmma looked at her sister then at Noah. “Uh ... I ... uh ... haven’t decided if I’m going to the dance.”

  “What about you, Dr. Powell?” Angelina asked. “Have all of our matchmaking attempts frightened you off?”

  Noah shared a glance with their housekeeper, then shook his head. “Not at all, ladies. In fact, I may very well go. The only way I won’t is if a patient requires my services that evening and forces me to be away from town.”

  “All the babies that were due are born. No one I know is on their deathbed.” Hope shone brightly in Angelina’s eyes. “Maybe cupid’s arrow is pointed in your direction this year. Do we know the lucky woman you have in mind to share hearts with?”

  “No,” he announced. Angelina’s lips lowered into a definite pout to take a sip from her goblet, making him add further, “I mean, I assumed I’d be like every other man there and take the heart that’s drawn out of the bowl for me.”