by Linda Turner
Luke had little use for that kind of irresponsibility. The whole bunch was too used to doing what they damn well pleased. They flew in to the ranch when they wanted to play cowboy and flew out again when they grew bored with the game. From what he could see, they’d never done a hard day’s work in their life.
Reaching the examining room where Rachel waited, he pushed the door open and soundlessly stepped inside to find her standing with her back to him, examining his diploma from medical school, which was framed and hanging on the far wall. Determined to keep this short and sweet, he said, “Ms. Fortune? I understand you wanted to talk to me—”
That was as far as he got. She turned then, a smile of welcome flirting with the edges of her mouth, and he felt the impact clear across the room. Stopping dead in his tracks, he would have sworn she knocked him out of his shoes. This was Rachel Fortune?
He’d expected her to be attractive—money and good looks just seemed to go hand in hand—and her grandmother had started one of the most successful cosmetic companies in the world. With good bone structure and skin, not to mention the right makeup, any woman could be reasonably pretty.
Pretty didn’t even begin to describe the woman before him, however. With her sculptured cheeks, slanting brows and large dark brown eyes, she could have stopped traffic in any city in the world, but here in Clear Springs, where the harsh winters dried the skin and added years to a woman’s face, she was as breathtaking and unexpected as a rose in the snow. And he couldn’t stop staring. Tall and slim, she was dressed for business in a somber black wool suit and stark white blouse, but the effect was ruined by the way the fit of the skirt emphasized her slender waist and the impossibly long length of her legs. And then there was her hair. Wine red, it fell in a soft, sweeping curve to her angled jaw, just begging for a man’s touch.
He’d always been a sucker for red hair.
The thought slipped up on him like a craving in the night, easing into his blood in a sudden flash of heat that caught him totally off guard. Stunned, he stiffened, guilt and resentment twisting in his gut. He hadn’t looked twice at a woman in the two years since Jan had died, and he didn’t plan to start now with someone like Lady Fortune here, who had the world at her feet. He only had to see the amusement glinting in those big brown eyes of hers to know that not only was she aware of the effect she had on men, she expected it. If that was what she was here for, she’d made a wasted trip.
“I’m Dr. Greywolf,” he said coolly. “What can I do for you, Ms. Fortune?”
Caught in his intense dark brown eyes, Rocky hesitated, her smile wavering and her heart, for no reason that she could understand, suddenly jumping crazily in her breast. Okay, she acknowledged, he was a good-looking man, if you liked the stony type. She didn’t. She liked a man who laughed easily, at himself and the world. That did not in any way, shape or form appear to describe Luke Greywolf.
There was no glint of humor in his nearly black eyes, no smile to relieve the lean, chiseled features of his square face. Tall and broad-shouldered in a white lab coat, his straight, inky-black hair cut conservatively short, he stood like a pine in the forest that didn’t bend, his proud Shoshone heritage stamped all over him. It was there in the width of his brow, the granite-hard set of his jaw, his blade of a nose. And it was there in his eyes. Never taking his gaze from her, he watched her like a wary hawk that just dared her to make a wrong move.
It wasn’t, Rocky decided, swallowing to ease the sudden dryness in her throat, a look she particularly cared for. Her nerve endings bristling, she reminded herself that she didn’t have to like the man to do business with him, then gave him a smile that had, in the past, left more than one un-suspecting male panting. “Please…call me Rocky.”
Far from impressed, he arched a disbelieving brow. “Rocky Fortune? I thought your name was Rachel.”
“It is,” she said. “But I earned the nickname when I gave my brother a black eye when I was ten, and it just sort of stuck.” Crossing the room to him, she held out her hand and grinned. “I’ve still got a wicked left, but I haven’t punched anybody out in years. It’s nice to meet you, Doc. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Most people, upon hearing the story about her nickname, wanted to know what her brother had done to her to provoke her into punching his lights out, but Luke Greywolf only stared at her hand before reluctantly taking it in a quick shake that was over almost before it had begun. “I understand you wanted to talk to me,” he said curtly. “If this is about a contribution to one of the local charities—”
He hadn’t so much as moved, but Rocky could feel him mentally pushing her toward the door. “It isn’t,” she said quickly. “Actually, I have a business proposition for you.”
Luke couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d said she wanted to buy him a Ferrari. Stepping farther into the room, he shut the door behind him, closing out the noise rolling down the hall from the waiting room. In the sudden silence, his brown eyes, dark with suspicion, met hers. “Is this some kind of joke? You can probably buy and sell me a hundred times over, Ms. Fortune. What kind of business could we possibly have in common?”
“You have an airfield that no one’s using,” she replied promptly. “I’d like to buy it.”
“Why?”
“Because I need it,” she said simply. “My grandmother left me a small fleet of planes and a helicopter, and I want to use them to start a flying service here in Clear Springs. You know, fly in hunters and skiers, that kind of thing. There’s not anything like that in this area. Everyone goes to Jackson, which is nearly a hundred miles away, not to mention on the other side of the mountains. That’s not only inconvenient, it’s a loss of revenue for the city. So surely you can see that there’s a need…”
Luke kept his gaze shuttered. He saw, all right. What he saw was that she needed his landing strip to fly in her rich friends to hunt and party. They’d throw their money around town, look down their noses at everyone, tear up the woods and the roads, then take home trophy elk and deer as if it were their God-given right.
Not if he had anything to say about it, he thought grimly. The muscles in his jaw bunching at the thought, he turned his back on her and opened the door to the hall. “The airfield’s not for sale. If that’s all you wanted to discuss, I have patients…”
Dismissing her as easily as if she were a door-to-door salesman, he patiently waited for her to precede him into the hall. Caught off guard, Rocky stood right where she was. He was turning her down! she thought in disbelief. No one had ever turned her down without doing her the courtesy of considering her offer, and she found, to her irritation, that she didn’t like it. She didn’t like it one damn bit!
“Can’t we at least talk this out?” she persisted stubbornly. “I could come back at the end of the day.”
“What’s there to talk about?” His face as hard as the Rockies, he stood at the open doorway, clearly impatient for her to leave. “You want my airstrip to fly your rich friends in for the hunting season so they can all play big white hunter. Sorry, but I’m not interested.”
“Big white hunter?” she echoed in confusion. “You make it sound like I’m planning some kind of Jungle Jim party thing.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No! Oh, sure, I plan to hire out to hunters or anyone else who needs my services, but I have a lot more to offer than tour-guide services. I’m a licensed EMT, Dr. Greywolf,” she said proudly. “I’ve trained with one of the best search-and-rescue teams in the country and logged hundreds of hours flying in the mountains. This community needs that kind of emergency service. And I need an airfield.”
“Isn’t there one at your grandmother’s ranch?”
“That belongs to my cousin Kyle now. I want a place of my own.”
“Then you’ll have to find one somewhere else. Mine’s not for sale.”
He was so adamant, Rocky wanted to shake him. It wasn’t as if he were using the airstrip, she thought resentfully as the temper she’d inherited
along with her red hair from her grandmother started to simmer. It was just sitting there going to pot. It would serve him right if she told him to just forget it. She could buy some land and build what she needed from scratch—but that would take time, dammit, and she wanted to get started now!
“All right,” she said abruptly, knowing when she was beating a dead horse. “You don’t want to sell. I can respect that. How about leasing it, then? Don’t say no,” she said quickly, before he could turn her down flat again. “Just think about it for now. The landing strip’s just sitting there, not earning you a penny. Maybe you don’t need the money personally, but you could always use it to make improvements here at the clinic.”
She saw resentment flicker in his eyes and wasn’t surprised. He was a proud man, but facts were facts. She’d had more than enough time to look around the place while she waited to talk to him, and it was obvious he was running the place on a shoestring. It was spotlessly clean, but the old building really needed some cosmetic work, work that could easily be paid for with the generous lease she was willing to pay.
Grabbing a piece of paper from her purse, she hurriedly jotted down her telephone number and address, then pushed it into his hand. “If you change your mind, just give me a call.”
She didn’t give him time to tell her hell would freeze over before he made that call. Stepping around him, her bearing as regal as a queen’s, she walked down the hall and turned the corner into the reception area. Staring after her, Luke crushed the slip of paper with her phone number in his fist and swore. “Brat,” he muttered, tossing the note into a nearby trash can. “Who the hell does she think she is? She’s got all the money in the world, and all she can think about is her damn airfield. If she thinks she’s got problems, let her talk to Michael Hawk. Or Abigail Wilson. They’re the ones who could use her money—”
“Which is why you should have at least considered what she had to say,” Mary retorted from the supply closet, which was conveniently located right next to examining room one. Making no apologies for the fact that she had blatantly eavesdropped, not only on his conversation with himself but also on his meeting with Rocky Fortune, she frowned at him disapprovingly. “It’s not like you’re using that airstrip. And the money you’d make on a lease would go a long way toward financing Michael Hawk’s operation.”
“His father won’t accept help, remember?”
“A handout, no. But Rocky was right—this place could use some work. You could hire Mr. Hawk to do it. That would save his pride, and Michael would still get his surgery.”
She had a point, Luke grudgingly admitted, one he hadn’t even considered. Damn! What the hell was wrong with him? He should have thought of Michael himself, but he’d been so busy drooling over the lady he couldn’t think straight. And then there was the money. She had it in spades, so she was used to getting what she wanted because she wanted it. And that had rubbed him the wrong way. So he’d cut off his nose to spite his face, just to bring her down a peg or two. Idiot!
“I’ll talk to her,” he said stiffly. “Later.”
“And you’ll apologize?”
He rolled his eyes, his lips twitching. Trust Mary to insist on a pound of flesh. “All right, I’ll apologize for being rude and obnoxious. Now can we get back to work? In case you’ve forgotten, we still got patients to see.”
“In a minute,” she said, and stepped into the first waiting room to retrieve the crumpled slip of paper he’d tossed in the trash. When she placed it in his hand and closed his fingers around it, she was grinning. “You can’t call her if you haven’t got her number.” Chuckling, she turned away to retrieve Christie Eagle’s chart.
The small fifty-year-old wood-frame house was showing serious signs of age. Even in the dark shadows of the night, Luke could see the peeling paint, the slightly uneven steps of the porch, the shutters that probably hadn’t hung straight in decades. Surprised, he braked to a stop at the curb and grabbed the wrinkled scrap of paper he’d tossed on the dash when he left the clinic a few minutes earlier. A quick glance at the address Rocky had scrawled there four hours earlier assured him he’d made no mistake. This was it—the place where Kate Fortune’s granddaughter was living.
It made no sense, he told himself as he approached the front steps. He didn’t know anything about the details of the old lady’s will, apart from what Rocky had told him, but it was a given that she wasn’t strapped for funds. She could, no doubt, afford the best that Clear Springs had to offer. So what was she doing living here?
Bothered more than he should have been by the question, he knocked briskly on the door, determined not to get caught up in the intriguing diversity that was Rocky Fortune. The lady had her quirks and the money to indulge them. He didn’t care what she did as long as she agreed to pay him a decent lease on the airfield.
Knocking again, he frowned when there was no answer. Someone was obviously home—he could see the lights through the covered windows, and the walls were practically vibrating from the country-and-western song being belted out on a radio inside. “What the hell?” he muttered, and tried the knob. It opened without a sound. Surprised, he scowled. Crazy girl, didn’t she know better than to leave her door unlocked at night? Clear Springs might not be much of a metropolis, but just like anywhere else, it had its fair share of crime.
Giving the door a slight nudge, he stepped cautiously inside and found himself in a small entrance hall. On the radio, a whiskey-voiced man was singing about a honky-tonk woman, but Luke hardly noticed. Through the arched doors that led to the living room he caught sight of Rocky, and he could do nothing but stare. This was, he knew, the same woman who’d come sashaying into his clinic earlier that afternoon, dressed to kill and flashing her money around. The expensive business suit, however, had been traded for paint-spattered jeans and a ragtag cotton shirt, her high heels for a pair of tennis shoes that looked as if they’d been through a war. Standing with her back to him, her wild red hair covered with a blue bandanna, she was painting the living room and singing her heart out, while her slim hips kept heart-stopping time to the beat of the music. Feeling like he’d been struck by lightning on a clear day, Luke stood as if turned to stone, while deep inside a hot pulse kept time with every sway of her hips.
Belting out the current number one country hit, Rocky turned to add paint to her dry roller pan—and nearly dropped it, stunned when she saw Luke Greywolf standing in the doorway. She should have laughed—she was a mess, with white paint in her hair and on her clothes and even under her fingernails, and her singing had often been compared to a cat’s screeching. But there was something in his eyes that wasn’t the least bit funny, and suddenly her chest seemed tight and breathing wasn’t nearly as easy as it had been before she spied him in the doorway.
Flustered, she hit the power switch to the radio. “Well, this is a surprise,” she said, too loudly, shattering the sudden silence. “I wasn’t expecting to see you this evening.”
“I knocked,” he said stiffly. “But the radio—”
“Was blaring,” she finished for him, grinning. “I have to crank it up to max when I sing, or I’d have every dog in the neighborhood howling at the moon.”
For a moment, she thought she saw a smile start to curl up the corners of his mouth, and she found herself waiting expectantly, her gaze fastened on his lips. But then his eyes fell to the roller and pan at her feet, the paint on her arms and clothes, and a confused anger hardened his face. Scowling at her, he growled, “Tell me something, lady. Just what the hell kind of game are you playing, anyway?”
Taken aback by the unexpected attack, Rocky blinked. “Game? What are you talking about?”
“This handyman routine,” he retorted, waving at the drop sheets and painting paraphernalia that littered the living room. “I didn’t think you people cut up your own meat, let alone knew how to yield a paintbrush.”
Outraged, Rocky gasped, her brown eyes narrowing dangerously. “Cut up our own meat?”
It was
the wrong thing to say. Luke knew it the second the words left his mouth, and he wanted to kick himself. What was it about this woman that knocked him off kilter so easily? He’d never had a problem communicating with women before—he liked them, dammit! But there was something about Rocky Fortune that just seemed to rub him the wrong way.
Heat climbing up his throat, he quickly back-pedaled. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. It’s just that your family is rolling in dough, and you’re probably not used to doing things for yourself—”
“Like tying my own shoelaces?”
Luke winced at the sweetly purred gibe. “You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?”
“Not on your life,” she retorted, beginning to enjoy herself. “So what can I do for you, Doc? You didn’t show up here just to insult me.”
She knew, dammit, why he was there—he could see the anticipation dancing in her eyes. And she was going to make him squirm. Amused in spite of himself, he swallowed his pride and admitted, “I’ve given it some thought and realized I may have rejected your offer to lease the airstrip too quickly. I thought maybe we could discuss terms.”
“Terms, huh?” she echoed, grinning. “I think I can manage that.” Whisking off the sheets covering the furniture, she motioned to him to take a seat in an overstuffed chair, then settled opposite him on a faded brocade coach. “Okay, Doc, the ball’s in your court. It’s your serve. Give it your best shot.”
He named a sum that he thought was more than fair, only to have her gasp as if he’d just insulted her. “You’ve got to be kidding! That’s highway robbery. Have you looked at the runway recently? And the hangar?”
She threw out a figure that was half the one he’d named, he countered, and the game began. With a skill Luke couldn’t help but admire, she held her ground and bartered like a horse trader, making no attempt to hide the fact that she was in her element. Later, it would bother him that he’d enjoyed himself so much, but when he rose to leave nearly an hour after he arrived, they had a deal.
