by Laurie Paige
Glancing at the clock, she saw it was time to go down. Quickly slipping into beige slacks, a striped blouse and espadrilles, she headed for the patio.
It occurred to her that her mother was often at the main house of late. Since the ignominious collapse onstage, in fact. Divorced for many years, her parents seemed to have formed an alliance against her.
On further reflection, she realized that Kate, although keeping a condo in Houston, had mostly lived at the ranch for the past couple of years—since returning to Mission Creek to oversee her own mother’s move into the senior care facility in town.
Her father had insisted on remodeling a cottage on the place and having Kate stay there “to be near your mother and closer to the children,” he’d said when Kate had at first refused.
Since Justin was sheriff and had his own place and Rose was now married to a Carson and lived at Matt’s home, that left only Susan as the child at home. Permanently at home?
No, she refused to feel sorry for herself. She wasn’t a coward, no matter what Michael thought of her. Life was what it was. She’d figure out a way to live with no problem. Or die trying. On this sardonic note, she went outside.
“Hello,” she called, brightly cheerful as she breezed over to the table to join the others. “Michael, how nice that you could join us.” There, that put him firmly in the friends-of-the-family category and not that of her doctor.
After taking her place, she glanced at her father. His face had the closed look he got when he was upset. Her mother’s was in its determined mode.
“You and your mother favor each other,” Michael murmured to her while her parents were distracted by Esperanza’s appearance with a lovely vase of pink roses.
“Yes, we have the same stubborn look, I’ve been told,” she said coolly, with just the right tinge of humor.
“True.”
She suppressed the jab of irritation with his easy agreement. She’d be calm if it killed her!
Her father deferred to his former wife when the housekeeper asked where the flowers were to go. After suggesting a side table, Kate turned back to the group. “Dr. O’Day, can you give us a report on Susan?”
“Please, call me Michael,” he requested.
He took in the scene with his quick intelligence, Susan noted. Had she not been the topic of discussion, she would have enjoyed him being put on the spot by her mother.
Michael began. “You are both aware that Susan has a small heart.”
Archy nodded. “And she had another dizzy spell this morning and fell off a horse.”
She hadn’t fallen from a horse since she’d been eight and tried to ride a mean stallion on a dare from her brother. This morning, one of the hands had been the first to reach her. He’d quickly examined her for injury, then put her in his pickup and taken her back to the house against her protests. Naturally her father had called her mother, one thing led to another, and now here they were.
“Do I have your permission to give them the results of your tests?” Michael asked.
Reluctantly she nodded.
“Her heart is failing—”
Her mother gasped and pressed trembling fingers to trembling lips. “Easy, Katie,” her father said gently.
“When the heart has to continuously work so hard to pump blood, whether from high blood pressure or another reason, it starts breaking down. This is known as congestive heart failure. There’s no question Susan will have to have a new one,” Michael continued. “She hasn’t yet consented to be placed on the list for a donor heart.”
“To give up that which works, no matter how imperfectly, for that which might not, seems foolish to me,” Susan told him. “What kind of choice is that?”
“A hard one, but necessary.”
“Listen to the doctor,” Archy ordered, sharing a glance with the younger man.
There was an obvious rapport between the two men. Her father was much older than the doctor, yet the men seemed to be cast from the same steely mold and to communicate on the same level of some masculine code that eluded her.
“How can we convince her this is the right thing to do?” her mother asked.
“I’m on vacation for the next few days. I’ll talk to her.” Michael shot a grin at Susan. “Will you listen?” he asked, tossing the question at her like a fastball to first base, hoping to surprise the runner there.
With the others watching, what could she say?
“Of course,” she managed to get out without throwing a glass of water in the handsome face observing her with wry amusement in his eyes.
He knew he had her at his mercy. She wouldn’t be too awfully rude in front of her family. But when she got him alone… The thought brought up a whole list of other things they could do. Furious with her willful mind, she stared at the fields until her heart calmed again.
Esperanza broke the tension by serving a salad topped by bay shrimp. She placed a tray of small crystal pitchers filled with various salad dressings in the middle of the table, along with a basket of fresh bark bread covered with poppy and sesame seeds. Her oldest daughter, Carmel, pushed a drink trolley onto the patio. The housekeeper served regular or raspberry-flavored iced tea. There was also a carafe of coffee, which could be served hot or cold.
“After lunch, Susan, perhaps you would take Michael on a tour of the grounds,” her mother suggested. “The mint along the creek smells wonderful.”
Susan tried to think of something compelling she had to do. Nothing came to mind. She could claim stiffness due to the fall. No, that would make her parents worry—
Michael burst out laughing.
Startled, she glanced up and saw everyone watching her. Her parents looked a bit disapproving. Michael, the big ape, was still chuckling. Esperanza and Carmel were smiling.
Heat rushed to her face as she realized they all knew exactly what she was thinking. “I’d be delighted to show Dr. O’Day the mint beds at the creek,” she said demurely.
“Michael,” he corrected softly.
“The pride of the ranch,” Susan said, indicating a herd grazing in the nearest pasture. “Our best brood cows.”
“How many head of cattle can you run on a fifteen-thousand-acre ranch?”
“Truthfully, I’m not sure. You’d have to ask my father. This is natural rangeland. My grandmother says there used to be grass as far as the eye could see, but overgrazing destroyed most of it. Mesquite, creosote bushes and cactus replaced the native grasses.”
“Then settlers brought in citrus and cotton,” Michael added. “From the air, you can see miles of groves and fields of white when the cotton is ripe. Did you notice when we flew in?”
“Yes.” Since this sounded like a shared bond and she was determined to keep her distance, she walked faster. “This way.”
He strolled alongside her as she turned onto the path that skirted the arroyo once filled by Mission Creek, a small stream that flowed down to the Rio Grande. That was before the Carson ancestors had talked the city fathers into damming the creek, thus forming the lake that had cut off the water supply to the Wainwright ranch.
“The creek was the source of the feud between your family and the Carsons, right?” Michael asked, holding a thorny mesquite limb out of their way.
“Part of it. A betrayed love and a suicide started it. Then my great-grandfather shot the Carson great-grandfather. It was tit for tat after that, conniving to outsmart each other and cattle rustling between them.”
“So where does the water come from?” He indicated the cheerful flow in the rocky creek bottom.
“Not to be outdone, my grandfather built a diversion line to bring it back. He piped the water into a series of lakes formed by putting rocks and soil across the original creek bed at strategic points. This is the overflow. Since we get forty to fifty inches of rain a year, we have plenty of water for our operations.”
“That must have been expensive.”
“But worth it.” She heard the pride in her voice and laughed ruefully. “O
ne-upmanship over the Carsons has been a rule in my family for as long as I remember.”
“Grandchildren often bring families together. Matt and Rose’s baby may end the feud.”
Susan’s spirits perked up. “I can’t wait for it to get here. I’m determined to spoil it dreadfully, then tell Rose she isn’t raising the baby right. She was always telling me not to be so reckless when I was young.”
When they reached one of her favorite spots, a place where the creek cascaded down a series of huge rock slabs, she settled on a convenient boulder in the shade of several mesquites and leaned back on another.
Her thoughts lingered on her sister’s coming child, then drifted to the children she would never have. She suddenly missed them, as if they were real and had been taken away.
“I’ve never thought much about having children,” she said, giving voice to her musing. “It was always something in the vague future, sandwiched in between ballet seasons.”
“And now?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. It suddenly seems more important than it did. Why do we always want that which is denied to us?”
“Human nature.” He leaned back against a tree limb after making sure it didn’t contain any thorny surprises. “Since Flynt and Josie married, I find myself thinking more about a family. My friends’ lives are changing. I wonder if I should reconsider, too.”
“Benedict, the married man,” she teased, recalling the Shakespeare play from school days and taking perverse delight in imagining him with maybe five squalling kids, all keeping him awake at night.
He smiled and half closed his eyes.
“What about your family? Are your parents still living?” she asked.
“They both died while I was in my residency. My brother handled all the arrangements.”
“You have a brother?” She didn’t know why she was surprised by this news. “In Houston?”
“Hawaii. He was stationed there while in the army and married a local girl.”
“Do they have children?”
“A daughter. My niece is nineteen—”
“Nineteen?” Susan interrupted in surprise. “He must have married awfully young.”
“Not really. Jim’s twenty years my senior. We’ve never been what you might call close. I was a change-of-life surprise for my parents. They were almost fifty when I came along.”
“Was that hard, having older parents?”
“The other kids thought it was a little strange, but there were advantages. My parents forgot I was a kid most of the time. They treated me as one of their contemporaries, just a bit shorter and with less gray hair than the rest.”
Susan burst into laughter at this humorous picture of his childhood, delivered in a droll voice. “Yes, I can see you and your father puffing on your pipes after dinner, discussing the madness of the younger generation.”
“You got it.”
His laughter was low and deep, like the river in full spring flow. There was a…richness about him, reminding her of the black loam sometimes found on the bottom land next to the river, where farmers grew their best crops.
She stared at him, at his mouth and the shape of it and thought of the kisses they had shared, at the shiny darkness of his hair and thought of the times she’d run her fingers through it, at the length and breadth of his hands and thought of the caresses he’d bestowed.
With a little start, she realized he was watching her study him. A tiny smile played about the corners of his mouth. She smiled, too, and couldn’t look away.
“I’ve heard of this,” he murmured, “but I’ve never experienced it. Until now.”
“Experienced what?”
“This.” His gesture took in the two of them.
It was silly to pretend innocence of what he meant. “I know. It’s so at odds with my usual…” She couldn’t think of a descriptive word. “I really don’t have a usual mode of operation with the opposite sex.”
“Haven’t you ever been involved with your dance partners? I’d have sworn you were in love when I saw you in some doomed love story ballet one time.”
She shook her head, then pushed an escaped tendril behind her ear. “All ballerinas fall in love with their first choreographer. Once over that, it’s rare for them to become involved. Too much ego, I think.”
“Did you fall in love with yours?”
“Yes, but he was seventy and his wife was the company stage director. She stuck pretty close to him.”
Michael laughed with her, but he wondered who she might have loved and why they hadn’t married. The answer was simple, he realized. Susan was as dedicated to her career as he’d been to his.
In fact, he’d been ruthless during his years and years of training not to get deeply involved. He’d known he’d had too little of himself left to give a woman, much less children. He wouldn’t be the kind of absentminded parent to his kids that he’d had as a child.
Not that he hadn’t loved his parents. He had. But he’d also known there were other families in which the father tossed a ball to his son, gave him pointers on how to swing a bat and coached the games.
His own father had had a heart condition by the time he came along and had retired by the time he was ten. Which probably explained his interest in medicine and especially in heart surgery.
“Tell me about your childhood. Did you come here often?” he asked.
“Every summer and every holiday. Luckily my mom’s parents and sister lived in the county, too, so she visited with them while we kids stayed with my father. We ran back and forth from the ranch to my grandmother’s house in those days. I thought it was fun.”
“You were a hellion?”
“Well, a daredevil. My brother would taunt his friends for cowardice, then show them that his little sister, a girl, would try anything.”
She pulled a sprig of mint and rolled it between her palms, producing a cloud of fragrance around them. He liked being in this peaceful place with her. Not that he was entirely relaxed. There was too much awareness between them for that. But it was a good tension, filled with pleasurable anticipation.
He knew they were going to kiss sooner or later.
At the moment, Susan was staring at the cascading water and idly pulling leaves off the mint plant. Her eyes flicked back to him, then away again.
She was still trying to be circumspect, but he wasn’t bothering to fight it. Neither of them could take their eyes off each other, and he didn’t pretend otherwise.
“I’m going to have to kiss you,” he told her, giving fair warning, although he didn’t move. Yet.
She heaved a sigh. “I know. It’s in your eyes.”
“Are you going to resist?” he asked lazily. “A token struggle can add a bit of spice to the moment.”
He watched the pulse beating at the side of her neck as her heart sped up. His own had picked up, too. He wanted to make love to her, carefully but thoroughly.
Reaching for her, intending to cuddle her in his lap while they enjoyed their feast of each other, he was surprised when she came to him and, tossing a leg over his thighs, straddled him.
This put their faces on the same level. An equal opportunity position, he realized, and very like the independent little rebel he knew her to be.
“Nice,” he whispered.
It was, Susan thought as a mist clouded her thinking. More than nice. Necessary. She had to have more of him.
He wore a long-sleeved shirt, the cuffs rolled up. She unfastened it impatiently and pushed it aside. “Off,” she commanded.
Gazing intently into her eyes, he complied, then did the same with her blouse. Her bra followed, then he wrapped her in a tight embrace and brought them together.
She gasped at the wonder of this magical touching. Wine seemed to flow through her veins. “You make me feel sparkly and light inside.”
“Like champagne,” he agreed, knowing exactly what she meant. “It’s the same for me.”
“Is it?” She pushed away from him and
ran her hands all over his lean, muscular torso. “You have a tan.”
“I swim often.” He cupped her breasts, liking the way the nipple pushed impudently into his palms, then let his fingers glide down her streamlined body to her thighs. “Your muscles are like steel clad in velvet.”
“It’s the dancing.” Her breath caught when he caressed intimately closer to her body.
Through his slacks, she could feel the rigid length of his erection. Breathing raggedly, she tried to tell herself they should back off from this, that it wasn’t wise.
It didn’t work.
Leaning close, she rubbed against him. His hand slid between them, finding her most intimate spot. She moaned as pleasure danced up her spine.
Michael took her lips again, holding her head in position with one hand while he explored her through the layers of cloth that separated flesh from flesh.
“Open,” he growled.
She opened her lips and let him delve into the sweet heat there. She’d be just as sweet, just as hot, in other places. He knew that, too, and nearly exploded at the thought.
But part of him was monitoring her from moment to moment. He at last drew back and let them breathe. Her face was flushed with passion with no paleness around the mouth.
“Good,” he murmured.
“Yes,” she panted, rubbing as sensuously as a cat, with no hint of shyness about her hunger for him.
He smiled and gazed into her eyes as he caressed her small, exquisite breasts, giving them both time to come down from the heights a bit.
She smiled back, then writhed against him.
“Vixen,” he said on a gasp.
“I need you,” she said, loving his heat and the way he caressed her, so urgent and yet so gentle. “You have magic hands.” She closed her eyes and let her hands roam over him, learning his body through her touch.
Michael winced. Her words wrung a groan of frustration from him, reminding him of his responsibilities. His hands were a large part of his skill as a surgeon, and he was tentatively her doctor. He caught her roaming hands, now exploring at his waistband.
“Easy,” he whispered, although it pained him to stop.
She opened her eyes and watched him, a dreamy invitation in those verdant depths. He noted the rapid rise of her chest, the visible flurry of the pulse in her neck.
