The Surgeon and the Cowgirl (Harlequin American Romance)

by Heidi Hormel

  Spence shrugged.

  “You can stay at my place,” Payson said without thinking.

  “Perfect,” Spence said. “See you, bro.” His brother didn’t stop to say anything to Jessie or apologize. His eyes went back to his phone as he strode out of the barn. Had Spence always been like this with Jessie?

  That didn’t matter now. Payson needed to act fast before Jessie got her feet under her and went from stubborn to intractable. Her pale face told him that the shock of the afternoon hadn’t left her. He might have just enough time to get her packed up and off to his house. His gut suddenly tightened and uneasiness settled into his shoulders. “Damn,” Payson said involuntarily.

  “What?”

  “It’s quiet,” he said. She just looked at him. “The repo guys have left and the house has a new set of locks.”

  They stood for a moment, looking at each other, and Payson saw exactly when the lightbulb went on for her. “My clothes are in there. And my wallet.” She hurried toward the house, the usual hitch in her step more pronounced.

  Payson followed her, three steps behind, catching up outside the one-story house. “You can’t go in there. You heard Spence.”

  “What good has he done? They still kicked me out of my house, and they’re going to take my animals.”

  “He’s not a miracle worker. If you had told someone sooner...” He closed his eyes, cursing himself and her. How could she push him into saying such stupid things?

  Jessie glared at him, the brightness of tears glinting in her eyes.

  “It’s a bad situation, Jessie,” he said softly, wanting to reach out and comfort her. But he didn’t have the right, and even if he did, she would push him away.

  “I thought I had it all figured out. With the hospital endorsing the program, I could get an extension on my credit. Then it wouldn’t take me long to make up any payments. It just wasn’t happening fast enough. Everyone took so much time.”

  “I’m sorry.” He surprised himself by meaning it. He certainly hadn’t meant for this to happen.

  She looked surprised, too, then her face settled into determined lines. “I bet I can get in through the back window,” she said.

  “No. You’re not breaking into the house and getting into more trouble. We’ll stop on the way to my house and pick up a few things.”

  “I’ll sleep in the barn. I’ve done it before.”

  “I’m sure you have. But you’re not doing it tonight.”

  “Payson, I am not coming to your house.”

  “Where else are you going to go? You said you won’t call your parents, and you don’t want your brother and sister lying about what’s going on.” He planted his feet, placing himself in her way. “It’s just for a night or two. I have a spare room. No big deal.”

  “No big deal,” she repeated.

  She looked so lost and vulnerable that he wanted to take her to his house, tuck her into bed and feed her soup. He’d feel that way for anyone who was getting kicked to the curb like Jessie was. “Spence really is a good attorney. I bet you’ll end up only staying at my place one night,” he said as cheerily as he could manage, while his gut roiled at the sight of her slumping shoulders.

  “Keep the receipts for the clothes and stuff. I’m going to pay you back.”

  His first impulse was to tell her that she was being ridiculous. He could afford clothing and toiletries. Instead, he said, “Absolutely, and when Hope’s Ride is world famous, you’re taking me out for a steak dinner.”

  Chapter Eight

  As Payson listened to his shower running, he pulled containers from the freezer and stared at them hard so he wouldn’t picture Jessie, down the hall and naked...

  Salad. He had to have salad. Greens were important to have in the diet. He pulled a covered bowl from the fridge and sniffed. Nah. The mix of arugula and endive was way past when anyone should eat it. Memories of the nights that he’d fixed food for the two of them popped into his brain. He’d always liked putting together meals. Good thing, too, because Jessie’s idea of cooking had been eggs. That was it. Anything else came in a cardboard box or a bag from a fast-food place. Of course, in the beginning, food hadn’t been at the top of his priority list for what made a good marriage. At the heart of the relationship, for him and for Jessie—back then—had been what happened in their big fanciful bed.

  He looked up at the condo’s ceiling, the blank whiteness erasing the images that raced through his mind. The water stopped. He froze. She’d be out looking for her dinner in minutes. Time to stop the trip down Memory Lane and concentrate on now. Jessie was just a professional colleague. He’d worked with numerous women and never thought about them in bed.

  Fix the damned dinner.

  He turned back to the chili that Helen had given him in her need to take care of him. That’s right, concentrate on the food.

  Helen treated him like one of her wayward children, which made him smile a little. He rummaged in the cupboard and found a half-filled bag of tortilla chips. That would have to be good enough for tonight. Exactly the kind of meal he’d made when they’d been married. Nope. Not thinking about that again.

  He heard the scuff of bare feet on the hallway tiles and looked up to see a wet-haired Jessie. “Feel better?” he asked, gesturing for her to sit at the bar that separated the small kitchen from the living area.

  She nodded and he looked at her more closely, noting her red eyes. She must have gotten soap in them, he told himself. “Dinner will be ready in a sec.” He handed her a longneck bottle of beer.

  “Can I help? Set the table or anything?”

  “I’ve got it,” he said. “Sit down.”

  Jessie sipped her beer and finally sat when he set the bowls of food on the bar. They ate in silence for a few minutes.

  “Nice place,” she said.

  “It’s a five-minute drive to the hospital.”

  She nodded. They were silent again. Payson wanted to say something, talk about anything, but he wasn’t sure what. Maybe the weather?

  Jessie said, “Thanks again for the clothes and everything. I’ll be out of your hair tomorrow. I’m sure Spence will have the repo guys straightened out by then.”

  Since tomorrow was Saturday, Payson was just as sure nothing would happen, but he kept quiet.

  “Alex is doing well, isn’t he?” Jessie asked, obviously trying to start a conversation.

  Payson thought this might be a safe topic. “He’s been more compliant about his other therapies recently. That’s helping.”

  “Doesn’t he have a new therapist?” She sounded truly interested.

  Payson told her about the woman working with Alex now. From there, they spoke about the other children and by then, the dishes had been put in the dishwasher. He suggested they go out to the patio. He would have suggested watching TV, but the only seating in his living room was the couch. Sitting with Jessie there would be much too intimate.

  He ushered her into the small outdoor space, enclosed by plants and a wooden lattice that made it private and, at night, really, really dark. He’d never been out here at night. He usually sat on the patio in the morning and had his coffee. “I’ll get a candle,” he said.

  “No, it’s fine. There’s plenty of light.”

  He didn’t think so, but she lived out of town where nights were a lot darker. The air was warm, and he could hear the hum of the traffic from the nearby interstate. Payson took a sip of his coffee. He needed the jolt of caffeine so he could do more work after Jessie settled for the night. He told himself firmly to stay focused on “professional colleague.” No remembering her in bed, hair mussed, lips swollen from his kisses.

  “So Spence moved to Texas?” Jessie asked eventually.

  Payson nearly spilled his coffee as he jerked to attention. His mind had wandered again where it sh
ouldn’t have. The dark hid the guilt and embarrassment, but couldn’t stop his voice from cracking with tension when he said, “For about a year, for a big case with his law firm, right after he got married.”

  He could see the vague outline of her head nod. “How is his wife? And how’s their little boy?”

  “He and Missy are divorced.” He was reluctant to say anything about his nephew, Calvin. Spence was his brother, not the parent of a patient, so it wasn’t exactly a doctor-patient confidentiality thing—but Spence had asked Payson’s opinion on the boy’s doctors and their treatments. Seeing Spence try to work out visits and care while his son lived with Missy two hours away had made Payson think hard about what would have happened to him and Jessie. Definitely not the time—or place—to dig up old hurts. Still, he couldn’t stop himself from asking in the anonymity of the dark, “Do you think we would have made it? If you hadn’t lost the baby.” Jessie didn’t say a word or move. He fumbled to fill the quiet.

  The baby...

  “I don’t know why I asked that,” he whispered. “Too much beer?”

  “She was our baby,” she said stiffly.

  “I know,” he said as the agony of loss came back at him in a rush.

  “The doctor told me it was okay to ride. If she’d told me to stop, I would have.”

  “I talked with the hospital’s director of obstetrics. He said there was a risk—”

  “Of course there was a risk, but there was also a risk with driving and a risk walking down the stairs.”

  “Jessie,” he stopped, not sure what else to say. He wanted her to say what? That he was right? How would that make anything better? It wasn’t as if they could bring back their baby or repair their marriage.

  “I’ve gone over everything from that day again and again,” she said into the inky silence. “I’ve tried to understand what could have gone wrong...” She paused for a moment and he heard her swallow. Even in the dimness, he saw the pale blur of her hand swiping at her eyes. “What I could have done to stop it. It’s not so bad now, but right after I got out of the hospital in Vegas, that’s all I could think of.”

  “Why didn’t you say something to me? We could have talked with a doctor to figure out what happened.” Instead, he’d stewed, almost convincing himself—in his blackest moments—that she’d kept riding because she didn’t want the baby.

  “Why would I talk with you about our baby?” Another tense pause and she added thickly, “All you could say was that you told me so.”

  “I never said that,” he said, collapsing back into his chair under the weight of her accusation.

  “You were always telling me what to do, how to improve myself. I never felt like I was good enough,” she said with a catch in her breath.

  “That wasn’t the way it was,” he said. Had he really treated her that badly? He’d loved her. He couldn’t imagine that if he loved her, he would have said things like that. She had been the one who held back. She’d rejected him, rejected his help again and again, always wanting to do things on her own. He never felt like she really needed him. Was it that she hadn’t understood that he was a man and men fixed things, no matter if they were a cowboy or a doctor?

  “You did think I was good enough for one thing...sex. When we got home from Las Vegas, after...all you wanted to do was get me into bed,” she accused. The tears and fury in her voice didn’t need any light to be clear, even to thick-headed him.

  “Not right away, but as soon as the doctor said we could. I wanted to comfort you,” he said, knowing even as he said it that it was lame. But that was what he’d been trying to do, and a small, deep-down part of him had probably thought that replacing the lost baby with another would make them both feel whole again. He hadn’t been thinking straight, and his unintentionally thoughtless actions and words had wounded the woman he loved.

  * * *

  JESSIE DREW IN a breath, trying to slow her racing heart. The pain of remembering the baby, remembering that time, made it hard to breathe. She gasped a little to get enough air, trying to figure out if she wanted to go on or stop right now. She opened her mouth, closed it, drew another shallow breath and said, “When you didn’t come right away, I named our baby Violet. All on my own. I wanted to see her, and you weren’t there to make them let me see her.” She tried to breathe in and couldn’t. The rush of sadness and anger overwhelmed her, just as it had when Payson had finally shown up by her bedside in that sterile, icy-cold hospital room in Vegas. “They kept telling me you were coming and you didn’t. I needed you, and you weren’t there.”

  “I couldn’t just walk away, I was in the middle of holding some boy’s guts together,” he said. He sounded truly upset.

  “You should have. Violet was our baby. She needed you. I needed you.”

  “I got away as fast as I could.”

  “How could I have forgotten that your wife and child were nothing compared to your career? To being a doctor.” She’d finally said it out loud when he could hear it. The dimness of the patio made it easy to talk. “I wasn’t important, and our marriage certainly wasn’t as important as doing some surgery or working an extra shift at the hospital.”

  “We talked about how it would be when I went to med school.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess I didn’t really understand what that meant,” she said, and quickly added, “I don’t mean the missed dinners. I mean that everything came in second to being a doctor. You never asked about how the shows were going or even how I was feeling, what I might be planning for my career. Then when I told you I was pregnant, do you know what you said? ‘Good. You’ll finally stop all of that rodeo crap.’ Not one comment about being happy that we were having a baby.”

  “I said the first stupid thing that came into my head. I was so overwhelmed, and I don’t remember you saying you were happy about the pregnancy, either. I do remember you telling me that there was no way you were giving up riding. You said pioneer women did it all the time.”

  Jessie didn’t answer him right away. She wanted to gather her thoughts and her emotions. She had said all of that—or close enough. Now here she was, sitting across from Payson, the man who’d broken her heart and made her the happiest she’d ever been in her life. It was time. She had to tell him what she’d been bottling up for the past three years.

  “I was freaked out, Payson. Afraid of having a baby and what that would mean for my life, and scared because I knew the baby would be my responsibility. You were never around. I could see that medicine would always be the most important thing in your life. So much in my life was going to change. I couldn’t give up my career, too. I worried about the baby. I did ask the doctor about riding, and I did modify my tricks. I wanted Violet. Even though I knew that you didn’t really want the baby and I didn’t know how I could make everything work, I wanted her.”

  “How could you say that you were alone? We were married.”

  “But did we really have a marriage? I don’t remember sitting down and talking about anything important like having children or how we were saving for retirement. It seemed like we were either arguing about our schedules or in bed making up.”

  Payson sat quietly. Even his chest barely moved with his breathing. Jessie wondered if she’d said too much and he’d decided he’d had enough.

  “We did talk,” he said at last. “I remember talking with you about the amount of time it would take for me to be a doctor. I remember telling you how important it was to me. I remember saying that a piece of me would always be missing if I didn’t become a doctor. It was the only thing I’d ever wanted to do, to be. I found an accelerated program in pediatric surgery. I knew it would mean a lot less time together in the beginning, but the plan was that we’d make up for it later. What about you? You were with the rodeo and never home. When you were home, you were rehearsing or taking care of the animals.”

  Jessi
e clicked her teeth together to stop herself saying a string of nasty words. She wanted to have a different conversation. They’d been sharing new details, but they were having the same argument: my career, my needs are more important than yours. “Thank you for wanting to get through the program quickly, but you should have talked with me about it and been honest about what that would mean for our marriage. You never told me that you would be away from the house for days or that when you got home, you’d be so exhausted that all you would do was sleep or bark at me.”

  “I never imagined it would be as bad as it was. I knew it would be a lot of hours, but there were times that it was insane. I considered quitting once or twice because I knew what it was doing to us.”

  “You never said a word,” she said, astounded by the revelation. “I thought you enjoyed being away, that you were tired of being married to someone like me. You would talk on the phone with other people in the program and you laughed. When we talked, which was almost never, you gave me orders or grunted like a caveman. The only time you wanted to be around me was when we were in the bedroom.”

  “It would have gotten better if you’d just stuck it out.”

  “It wasn’t me who checked out of the marriage. It was you. You stopped loving me. I never stopped loving you,” Jessie said, the words coming from deep inside her, from a place where she’d been so wounded that until that very moment she hadn’t been able to say how she felt.

  “Don’t ever say that,” he whispered. “I would have done anything to stay together. You were the one who divorced me. You walked out on me...on us.”

  “I had to,” she said. “I had a lot of time to think while I lay in the hospital after...Violet. I tried to imagine what the baby’s life would have been like. She would have known you as the guy who dropped in periodically, like an uncle or a repairman. That wasn’t the kind of marriage I wanted, and it certainly wasn’t how I wanted to raise a child. I wanted us both involved.”