The Long Way Back

by JoAnn Ross

Caine grinned, then flinched when it hurt his split lip. “Chickens.”

  Dana didn’t deny it. “Cluck, cluck,” he said instead. “Don’t be too rough on him, Nora. Those Olsons have always fought dirty.”

  “Kirk hit Caine on the back of the head with a whiskey bottle when he was shaking hands with Harmon,” Tom added.

  “I suppose that explains why you smell like a distillery,” Nora said, wrinkling her nose with obvious distaste.

  “Take good care of him, sis,” Dana said when Caine didn’t answer.

  Tom seconded the request and then they were gone, leaving Nora and Caine alone in a room that suddenly seemed too small for comfort.

  “Well, I suppose we may as well get this over with,” Nora said with a decided lack of enthusiasm. “Wait here while I get some ice for that eye.”

  “I’d rather have a cold pack like the one you gave Dana.”

  “Tough. We had a run on cold packs today. That was my last one.”

  She left the room, expecting Caine to remain where he was. Instead, he followed her to the kitchen where, in the old days, he and Tom and Dana and sometimes a young, bespectacled Nora—who’d usually had her nose stuck in a book—had sat around the table, eating cookies and drinking milk from Blossom, Anna Anderson’s black-and-white cow.

  Rosy red strawberries still bloomed on the cream wallpaper, shiny copper pans continued to hang from a wrought-iron rack over the island butcher-block table.

  The long pine trestle table was the same, although now, instead of plates of cookies and glasses of milk, its scarred and nicked surface was covered with medical books, suggesting that Nora still read while she ate. The ladder-back chairs that he remembered being dark blue had been repainted a bright apple green; one was missing.

  “I can almost smell bread and cookies baking,” he said.

  “Things change,” Nora replied as she filled an ice pack with cubes from the double-door refrigerator-freezer.

  “Tell me about it,” he muttered. “I was honestly sorry when I got the letter from Dana telling me about your grandmother’s stroke. She was a terrific lady. I liked her a lot.”

  “Gram always liked you, too.” Her curt tone indicated that she couldn’t imagine why.

  “Dana also said something about your parents having got the travelling bug.”

  “The day after Dad retired and turned the mill over to Tom, he came home with a motor home. Two weeks later, he and Mom hit the road.

  “That was a year ago and they haven’t settled down anywhere for more than six weeks. In fact, I got a call from them last week from someplace called Tortilla Flats, Arizona. They were on their way to Yellowstone Park through Monument Valley.”

  “I guess they’re making up for lost time. I can’t remember your dad ever taking a day off, let alone a vacation.” Caine rubbed his chin, dark with the stubble of several days’ growth of beard, thoughtfully. “Except for the day Dylan was born.” And the day he’d died, Caine recalled grimly.

  It was bad enough having Caine back in Tribulation. She damn well didn’t want to discuss her child with the man.

  “Here.” Nora shoved the ice pack at him. “If you’re finished strolling down memory lane, I’d like to examine you.”

  Caine followed her, with uncharacteristic meekness, back down the hall to what had been her grandmother’s front parlor.

  Now designed for efficiency, rather than comfort, the formerly cozy room was dominated by an examining table, covered with fresh paper from a continuous roll. There was a short, wheeled, dark brown upholstered stool, a white pedestal sink and a small writing table. Beside the table was the ladder-back chair missing from the kitchen.

  Instead of the fragrant potpourri Anna Anderson had made from the colorful blooms in her backyard rose garden, the room smelled vaguely of disinfectant and rubbing alcohol.

  Beside the writing table, Anna’s oak china cabinet, handmade by her husband, Oscar, had been turned into a supply cabinet. Behind the glass doors, the old crabapple-decorated plates had been replaced with boxes of dressings, plastic gloves, hypodermic syringes and shiny stainless-steel instruments.

  A window looked out on Anna’s rose garden and the woods; between the slats of the unfamiliar mini-blinds, Caine saw a family of deer grazing, their brown and gray coats almost blending into the foliage behind them.

  “Nora, look.”

  Surprised by his soft tone, she turned and glanced out the window. Her lips curved into a gentle, unconscious smile.

  “They come every day about this time. Last Friday was the first day they brought the babies.”

  Caine squinted. “Where? I don’t see any fawns.”

  “There are two of them. Beside that hemlock.”

  When Nora pointed, her fingers brushed against the rock-hard muscle of his upper arm. She pulled her hand back, as if burned.

  Caine observed the telling gesture and decided not to comment on it. “I see them now.” The creamy spots, nature’s clever camouflage, had done their job well. “God, I’ve missed this,” he said on a long deep sigh.

  She glanced up at him, clearly surprised. “If you actually mean that, I’d better check out your head injury. All you ever used to talk about was how baseball was going to be your way out of Tribulation.”

  “I guess I did say that,” Caine agreed reluctantly.

  Trust Nora to remember that. He ran his hand through his hair and sighed again.

  “But I don’t know, when everything started falling apart, I found myself drawn back home. As if somehow, I’d find the answers I’ve been looking for here.”

  “Answers to what questions?”

  “That’s the hell of it. I don’t know.” He gave her a faint embarrassed smile. “I sound like Dorothy, don’t I? ‘Please, Almighty Wizard of Oz, I just want to go back home, to Kansas,’” he mimicked in a falsetto.

  “Hell, maybe instead of driving the Ferrari back from New York, I just should have clicked my heels together and said, ‘There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.’”

  “If you could’ve gotten home by clicking your heels, there wouldn’t have been any reason for the Olson boys to beat you up,” Nora added briskly. “Which brings me to your examination.”

  She washed her hands at the sink, then dried them with a paper towel. “So where does it hurt?”

  “Everywhere,” he answered promptly, holding the ice pack against his eye. “But I guess my chest and the back of my head feel the worst.”

  Cool, measuring eyes flicked over him. “Take off your shirt and jeans and get onto the table,” she instructed. “Then we’ll see how much damage you’ve done this time.”

  “It was Harmon and Kirk who did the damage,” Caine felt obliged to say. “I offered to pay for any damage to Harmon’s rig, but he wasn’t having it.”

  “Perhaps that’ll teach you that you can’t buy everything you want,” Nora suggested dryly. “Call me when you’re undressed.” She left the room, closing the door with a decided click.

  Caine unbuttoned the bloodstained denim shirt and shrugged out of it, grimacing when the gesture caused a sharp pain in his chest. He managed, with difficulty, to pull off his boots, then his jeans.

  Finally, clad solely in white cotton briefs and crew socks, wincing and swearing under his breath, he pulled himself up onto the examination table.

  “Ready,” he called out in the direction of the shut door.

  Although the papers were reporting that Caine O’Halloran had reached the end of his playing days, Nora’s first thought, when she returned to the room, was that her ex-husband’s body was definitely not that of a man past his prime. He was exactly as Nora remembered him: all lean muscle and taut sinew.

  He was also, for a fleeting moment, more than a little appealing. Pressing her lips together, she blocked that thought.

  “You look as if you’ve been kicked by a mule.”

  Actually, he felt as if he’d been run over by an entire mule train, but Caine would have di
ed before admitting that. “A mule probably would have been preferable to the Olson boys.”

  Reminding herself that she was a physician and this near-naked man was merely her patient, Nora began her examination with his head. The whiskey bottle had broken, causing a jagged laceration.

  “You’re going to need stitches.”

  “Why do I get the impression you’re just looking for an excuse to stick a sharp instrument into my flesh?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. Although infected scalp wounds are admittedly rare, when they do occur they’re a real mess. Medically and cosmetically.”

  She gave him a dry, feigned smile. “And I’m sure you wouldn’t want to permanently mess up that pretty head.”

  “You’re the doctor,” Caine said.

  Despite the pain, which was considerable, all the beer he’d drunk during the afternoon had created a pleasant buzz that made this meeting with Nora less stressful than he’d expected.

  “If you say I need stitches, who am I to argue?”

  Who indeed? She couldn’t remember a time when she and Caine hadn’t argued. About everything. Well, perhaps not everything. The sex, once they’d abandoned her fought-for celibacy agreement, had admittedly been good. Better than good. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been able to spend all their lives in bed.

  She pulled her penlight out of the pocket of her lab coat. “Keep your head straight and follow the beam with your eyes.”

  His dark blue eyes moved to the left, then to the right, then up and down as she checked his pupillary reactions. Although she had to lift the lid of the swollen eye to examine it, Nora found no interior damage.

  Pocketing the light, she placed a hand on the back of his neck and ran her fingers over the series of bumps making up the cervical spine before going on to his chest.

  “You’re going to have some ugly body bruising.”

  So why didn’t she tell him something he didn’t know? “You should see the other guy.”

  Frowning at his flippant attitude, Nora put the bell of her stethoscope against his battered chest. The whooshing breathing sounds were a good sign that a rib hadn’t punctured a lung, which was a possibility, considering the strength of the Olson boys.

  “Tell me if anything hurts.” She pressed his left shoulder with her fingertips, but received no response. She moved her fingers over his left nipple and pressed.

  Her hands were pale and slender, her fingers long and tapered, her nails neat and unpolished. Caine remembered a time when those soft hands had moved with butterfly softness against his chest; now, her touch remained strictly professional as it probed for injuries.

  When her fingers moved over his ribs, she hit a hot spot, causing Caine to suck in a quick breath. She pressed again.

  “Does this hurt?”

  Sadist. He decided she was probably gouging her fingers into him just to make him suffer. “It’s not exactly a love pat, sweetheart,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “We’ll need to take an X-ray. It’s probably just a cracked rib, but I don’t want to take a chance on it being broken and puncturing a lung.”

  “I don’t really feel up to driving to Port Angeles, Nora.”

  “You don’t have to. Last month I would have called an ambulance, but you’re in luck, O’Halloran. My new portable X-ray machine arrived last week.”

  “I’m impressed.”

  Although he had no idea what such a piece of medical equipment cost, Caine suspected that it wasn’t cheap. If she’d made such a major investment, she was obviously planning to stay in Tribulation.

  Which, Caine decided, probably wasn’t all that surprising. Nora had always loved it here on the peninsula; he’d been the one anxious to move on to bigger and better—meaning more exciting—things.

  “I figured it would come in handy for broken arms, cracked ribs, the sort of occupational and recreational injuries I get a lot of,” Nora said. “But I guess everyone’s been extra careful, because not one patient has come in with a proper excuse for me to use it.”

  “Then I suppose that makes this all worthwhile,” he declared. He brushed his hair away from his brow; as always, it fell untidily back again. “Anything to oblige a lady.”

  His voice was a low sexy drawl, with a hint of mockery. His eyes, dark and knowing, roamed her face with the intimate impact of a caress.

  Nora’s hand was still on his chest; she could feel his strong steady heartbeat beneath her fingertips. An unexpected, unbidden awareness fluttered between them. A lull fell as they studied each other.

  Her hair, which he remembered her wearing in a long braid that hung down her back like a thick piece of pale rope, had been cut to a length that just brushed her shoulders, curving inward to frame her face. The naturally blond strands glistened like sunshine on fresh snow.

  Nora Anderson’s eyes, unlike those of the rest of her family, whose eyes were the expected Scandinavian blue, were a soft doe brown. One of her few concessions to vanity was to darken the double layer of thick blond lashes surrounding them.

  Caine’s gaze drifted down to the delicately molded lips that she was still forgetting to color. Although he knew it was ridiculous, he imagined that he could taste those soft lips, even now.

  Desire spread, then curled tightly, like a fist in his gut, as Caine remembered those long-ago nights, when Nora’s body, rounded with child, had moved like quicksilver beneath his. He remembered her mouth—warm, soft, avid—and the way she’d murmur his name—like a prayer—after their passion had finally been spent.

  As Caine silently studied her, Nora tried not to be affected by the way an unruly lock of sun-streaked sandy brown hair fell across his forehead, contrasting vividly with his dark tan. A purple bruise as dark as a pansy bloomed on his lower jaw; his square chin possessed a stubborn masculine pride that bordered on belligerence. His arms were strong, with rigid, defined tendons, his shoulders were broad, his battered chest well muscled.

  His washboard-flat stomach suggested that all the drinking and carousing she’d been reading about in the papers lately was a newly acquired bad habit. Knowing how hard Caine had worked to mold his naturally athletic body to this ideal of masculine perfection, she couldn’t imagine her ex-husband ever succumbing to a beer gut.

  Her gaze followed the arrow of curly hair that disappeared below the waistband of his white cotton briefs with an interest that was distressingly undoctorlike.

  Although she knew it was dangerous, and warned herself against it, for a long humming moment Nora, too, was remembering the fever that had once burned between them.

  His head wound began to bleed again. She jammed a sterile dressing on it. “Hold this steady,” she directed. “And lie down.”

  She continued examining him with more force than necessary, making him flinch again. “You did that on purpose.”

  “So file a complaint with the State Medical Board,” she snapped. “I think you’re going to live,” she decided after more probing and poking. “Let’s take some pictures of that rib.”

  He accompanied her into the adjoining room, where she donned a lead apron. “Stand with your chest against this plate. Hands out to your sides.”

  “I’ll have to let go of the bandage.”

  “I realize that. But that wound is far from fatal.” She made an adjustment to the bulky machine. “Now, when I tell you, take a deep breath and hold it.”

  They both knew taking such a breath was bound to be painful. “I don’t remember you being so sadistic.”

  “That’s funny—” she took hold of his shoulders and straightened his torso “—I could swear that, just a little while ago, I heard you say that you were a man who remembered everything… . Don’t move.”

  She made another adjustment, then checked her controls. “Okay, hold absolutely still. I’m ready to shoot.”

  “Nora?”

  “What now?”

  “Do you think you could use another word? That particular one doesn’t give me a great deal of confidence.�
��

  When a reluctant smile crossed her lips, Nora pressed them together. Hard.

  “Shut up, O’Halloran. And don’t you dare move.” She stepped just outside the open doorway. “Take a deep breath. That’s it. Now hold.” The X-ray machine whirred, then clicked.

  “Go on back to the examining room,” she said briskly after she’d taken two more views. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  Caine wanted to ask Nora if she’d ever thought of using the word please, decided that there wasn’t any point in aggravating her further, and did as instructed.

  He sat on the edge of the examining table, legs dangling over the side, and gazed around the room.

  The walls were a soft pale green reminiscent of new fir needles in the spring. The ceiling was the color of freshly churned cream. Diplomas, framed in oak, attested to her professional competence.

  It did not escape Caine’s notice that the name calligraphically inscribed on all those diplomas was Dr. Nora Anderson. Not that he was surprised; neither of them had ever really thought of her as Mrs. Caine O’Halloran.

  “All right,” she said as she returned to the room. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  She snapped the X-ray film onto a light box. When she flicked on the switch, the film went from all black to shades of gray. “Just as I thought.” Nora nodded with satisfaction. “You’ve got a cracked rib.”

  “You don’t have to sound so pleased.”

  “I’m far from pleased when I get a patient who risks his health—not to mention his life—due to stupidity,” she flared. “If Harmon had broken that rib instead of merely cracking it, it could have punctured a lung.”

  “He attacked me, Nora,” Caine reminded her. “I really didn’t have any choice.”

  “You made your choice when you decided to play chicken with him on the highway,” she pointed out. “That was an idiotic, childish thing to do.”

  Caine shrugged, then wished he hadn’t when a lightning bolt zigzagged through his chest. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  “If you keep up these adolescent acts of derring-do, Caine O’Halloran, you’re going to end up in the morgue.”

  “Nice bedside manner you’ve got there, Dr. Anderson.”