Dr. Colton’s High-Stakes Fiancée

by Cindy Dees

  Wes glanced over at Warner. “You weren’t kidding when you said I’d want to hear this.” To Rachel he said, “Who else knows about this?”

  “Nobody. Just me and Mr. Warner.”

  Wes nodded, thinking. “I’d like to keep it that way for a while. This may be just the break we’re looking for.”

  She frowned. “Huh?”

  “In the Walsh murder investigation.”

  “You think whoever killed Mark was helping him skim money from his companies and killed him over it?” she asked in surprise.

  Wes shrugged. “I wouldn’t want to speculate. I just know that Mark Walsh was damned secretive, and it’s been nearly impossible to learn much about his life over the past fifteen years. If nothing else, you may have just answered how he was able to pay for his ongoing existence without his family knowing anything about it. Can you give me a complete rundown of how much money went missing and when, Rachel?”

  He was using her first name now? Was that a good sign? “Uhh, sure. I can have it for you in a day or so. I’ve got a few more years’ worth of records to review and then I’ll be able to compile a report.”

  “That would be great. And, Craig, thanks for calling me.”

  The two men shook hands and Wes turned and left. Craig sat down quickly, mopped his forehead with a tissue and then tossed the tissue in the trash. He didn’t look good. His skin was pale and pasty and he had that uncomfortable look of someone who was contemplating upchucking.

  “Can I get you a glass of water, sir?” she asked in concern.

  “Yes, thank you.”

  She went over to the wet bar on the far side of the room and poured him a glass of water. She carried it to his desk. “Are you feeling all right, Mr. Warner?”

  “It’ll pass. I’ve been having these spells for a couple of weeks.” He smiled wanly at her. “I’m a tough old bird. I’m not about to go anywhere.”

  She smiled back at him.

  “What’s this about a shot dog?” he asked.

  Likely he was just looking to distract himself from throwing up. She told him briefly about Brownie and his injuries and Finn coming over to perform surgery on him. She left out the part about Finn’s bitter anger toward her.

  “You’ve got a good heart, Miss Grant.”

  She smiled at her boss. It was a rare moment when anyone in this town said something nice to her. She savored it.

  “As soon as you’re done with those last financial reports, why don’t you take the rest of the day off and go look after your four-legged houseguest?”

  She nodded, touched by his kindness. “Thank you, sir.”

  He waved her out of the office. She suspected he was losing the battle with his stomach and wanted a little privacy to get sick into his trash can. Poor man. She hoped he felt better soon.

  Finn helped Damien string barbed wire all day. The hard labor felt good and helped him burn off a little bit of the residual stress from last night. He still wasn’t entirely recovered from that panicked call from Rachel Grant. The woman had about given him a heart attack. Good thing she’d agreed to stay the hell away from him forever. He couldn’t take much more of that from her.

  “Anything on your mind?” Damien finally asked late in the afternoon.

  Finn looked up surprised. “Why do you ask?”

  “You’re working like a man with a chip on his shoulder.”

  “What? I can’t come out here and help string a fence out of the goodness of my heart?”

  Damien cracked a rare smile at that. “Not buying it.”

  “When did you get so perceptive?” Finn grumbled.

  Damien shrugged. “Prison’s a tough place. Gotta be good at reading people if you want to stay out of trouble.”

  Finn was startled. To date, Damien hadn’t said more than a few words about his time in jail. “Does it feel strange to be out?” he ventured to ask.

  Damien shrugged. He pounded in a metal stake and screwed the fasteners onto it before he finally answered. “It’s surreal being back home. Didn’t think I’d ever see big open spaces like this again. I missed the sky. It goes on forever out here.”

  Finn looked up at the brilliant blue sky overhead. Yeah, he might go crazy if he never got to see that. “How’d you do it? How did you keep from losing your mind?”

  “Who says I didn’t lose it?” Damien retorted.

  Finn didn’t say anything. He just waited. And sure enough, after two more posts, Damien commented, “About a year in, I beat the shit out of guy who chose the wrong day to cross me. Growing up with all you punks for brothers served me well. I knew how to handle myself in a fight.”

  Finn grinned and passed Damien another fastener while he started in on the next post.

  Damien continued reflectively. “I got thirty days in solitary. A month in a box broke something in me. It was like I lost a piece of myself. The fight went out of me. It became about just surviving from one day to the next. I played a game with myself. How long could I live in there without losing it again? I made it 4,609 days. And that was when I got word that Walsh had been found dead for real this time and I was going to be released.”

  Finn shuddered. “God, I’m sorry—”

  Damien cut him off with a sharp gesture. “What’s done is done. If I learned nothing else in the joint, I learned to keep moving forward. Don’t look back. I live my life one day at a time. No apologies. No regrets. It’s over.”

  Finn nodded. His brother was a better man than he. No way could he be so philosophical about a miscarriage of justice costing him fifteen of the best years of his life.

  They knocked off when the sun started going down. It got cold fast, and by the time they got up to the main house, he was glad for the fleece-lined coat his brother had tossed him across the cab of the truck.

  As beautiful as the log mansion their father had built was, Finn was restless tonight. The heavy walls felt confining and the massive, beamed ceilings felt like they were closing in on him. Hell, Honey Creek was closing in on him.

  If his old football coach hadn’t extracted a promise out of him to stay for the big homecoming dance this coming Saturday night, he’d be on his way back to Bozeman already. But Coach Meyer was losing his battle with cancer, and he’d asked all his players to come back for one last reunion. It was damned hard to say no to a dying man’s last request.

  He had to get out of the house. He grabbed his coat and a set of keys and stormed out. As he stomped through the mud room intent on escape, Maisie’s voice drifted out of the kitchen. “What’s his problem?”

  Damien’s voice floated to him as he opened the back door. “Woman trouble.”

  Finn slammed the door shut so hard it rattled in the frame. Woman trouble? Ha!

  Rachel raced home from the office to check on Brownie. He seemed more alert and had a little more appetite. He even gave several thumps of his thick, long tail whenever she walked into the kitchen. After both of them had eaten, she signed onto the Internet to do some research about care of injured animals. She browsed various veterinary advice sites for an hour or so and then, following the recommendation of several of them, went into the kitchen to check the color of Brownie’s gums. Supposedly, pink was healthy and dark red or pale white was bad.

  Gingerly, she took hold of his lip and raised it to take a peek. He pulled his head away weakly but not before she glimpsed pasty white gums. She laid her hands on his side and he definitely felt hot to the touch. Oh, no. Finn had warned her that infection and fever were a major risk to Brownie’s survival.

  She headed for the phone and dialed the same veterinarian from the night before. “Hi, this is Rachel Grant. I called last night.”

  “Ahh, yes. The injured dog. How’s he doing?”

  “I think he’s developing a fever.”

  “If you want to bring him up to Bozeman, I’ll meet you at my office.”

  She winced. The dog had to weigh seventy pounds, even in his emaciated state, and even if she could lift him herself, s
he doubted Brownie would cooperate with getting into her compact car. At least not without doing even more damage to his injured leg. “I don’t think I can get him up to Bozemen by myself.”

  “You can try giving him some acetaminophen for the fever,” the vet suggested.

  She forced the suggested medication down Brownie’s throat and hovered nervously over him for the next hour. He was getting worse quickly. He stopped wagging his tail at her, and then his eyes went dull and finally he couldn’t even raise his head anymore. She eyed the heavy bandage wrapping his leg. Should she take it off and check the wound? Or would that introduce even more chance of infection? If only she knew more about caring for a wound like this!

  But she knew someone who did. Small problem: She’d promised never to cross his path again.

  Over the next hour, Brownie’s breath grew raspy and shallow. She was losing him. What the heck. Finn could get over it. She dialed the Colton phone number. The good news was that Duke answered the phone and was reasonably pleasant with her. The bad news was that Finn wasn’t home and Duke didn’t know where he was. But he did give her his missing brother’s cell phone number. Finn was going to have a fit when he found out Duke had done that.

  She hung up and dialed Finn’s cell phone.

  “Yeah?” he shouted. From the noise in the background, it sounded like he was at a party. Or maybe a bar.

  “It’s me. Brownie’s got a bad fever and he’s struggling to breathe.”

  “Tough shit.”

  Rachel gasped. “Do you torture small children, too, Doctor?” she asked sharply. “This dog has never done anything to hurt you, and you’d turn your back on him?”

  “He’s just some mutt.”

  “Oh, and he’s not worthy unless he’s a purebred? Kind of like being a Colton or a Kelley or a Walsh in this town? The rest of us are lesser life forms to you purebreds? Is that it? You know, I’m glad whatever happened between us happened. You really are a bastard.”

  She slammed her phone down and took deep satisfaction in doing so. What a jerk. She glanced down at the dog suffering in the corner. “I’m sorry, boy. I may have just driven away your best chance at pulling through.” There had to be something she could do. This was the kind of stuff her mother had always been able to handle. Think, Rachel. What would Mom do?

  Her mother probably would have trotted down the street to visit old Harry Redfeather. He was some sort of medicine man among the local Lakota Sioux. As soon as the idea occurred to her, Rachel knew it to be a good one. If nothing else, the man had a lot more life experience than she did. Maybe he knew of some remedy for a fever.

  She grabbed her down ski jacket and gave Brownie a last pat. “Hang in there, buddy. We don’t need any nasty old Coltons anyway.”

  She jogged three houses down to Harry’s place and banged on the front door. He was known to be a little hard of hearing. After a minute, his front door opened.

  “Rachel, come in and be warm by my fire. Old Man Winter’s blowing in tonight. Snow before morning.”

  She frowned. “I don’t think any is in the forecast.”

  He smiled serenely and said nothing.

  “Harry, a dog showed up on my back porch last night. He was starving and shot and half dead. Finn Colton operated on his hind leg to remove the bullet, but tonight the dog’s got a terrible fever. Do you know of anything I can do to bring his temperature down? He’s burning up. I’m worried that he’s got an infection.”

  Harry nodded. “Come. You can help get my herbs.”

  He led her to a disreputable-looking wooden shed out behind his house. She ducked inside the low door after Harry and was surprised to find it stuffed with dried plants hanging in bundles from the nearly every square inch of the walls and rafters.

  “Get me a sprig of that one over there.” Harry pointed at a bundle on the wall. She did as he instructed, pulling various branches and bundles of herbs down for him. “And one stalk only of that one with the purple flowers.”

  “What is it?” she asked as she handed him the stem of dried flowers.

  “Wolfsbane,” Harry muttered as he ground leaves together.

  She frowned. “Isn’t that poisonous?”

  “Yes. But a little of it will strengthen the spirit of your dog.” In a few minutes, Harry handed her a plastic bag full of ground herbs. “Steep a spoonful of this in warm water and pour the tea down his throat every hour until his fever breaks. And burn this smudge stick around him to help cleanse his spirit. Do you know how to do that?”

  Rachel nodded. Ever since she’d been a little girl, she’d seen Harry light up the tightly tied bundles of herbs and waft the smoke around with his free hand. She took the medicines and headed back to Brownie. Over the next several hours she dutifully fed the dog the healing tea. He didn’t seem to get any better, but he didn’t get any worse, either.

  As the hour grew late, the wind began to howl outside, sweeping down out of the high Rockies. She set an alarm for herself and laid down on the couch under a quilt to rest until it was time for Brownie’s next dose. It certainly did feel like snow in the air.

  She’d dozed off and was warm and cozy when a loud pounding noise dragged her unwillingly from her nap. She glanced at her watch. Not time for the next dose. She rolled over to go back to sleep when the pounding started up again. And this time it was accompanied by shouting. What the heck?

  She stumbled upright and headed for her front door. She pulled back the lace curtain to peer through the glass. Her jaw dropped. She had to be hallucinating.

  A massive eighteen-wheeler was just pulling away from the curb in front of her house, and a man was standing at her door. Stunned, she opened the front door on a gust of frigid air and icy particles that stung her skin, and the storm blew Finn Colton into her living room.

  Chapter 5

  Finn didn’t know what the hell he was doing standing here, freezing his butt off. But he’d been drinking and chewing on Rachel’s phone call ever since he’d gotten it. Despite his tough words to the contrary, he really was worried about that damned dog of hers. He always had had a big soft spot for animals. Truth be told, he’d wanted to be a veterinarian and not a human doctor. But when Damien went to jail, his father got all obsessive about redeeming the Colton name and had pushed him mercilessly to become a physician.

  Finn was royally pissed when Rachel called him. She’d broken her promise, and after a few more beers that had ticked him off worse than the fact that she’d called him. Not to mention she’d accused him of being cruel to animals and small children. He was a doctor, for God’s sake. A healer.

  One thing had led to another, and he’d moved on to slamming down shots of whiskey. Somehow a trucker at the Timber Bar had volunteered to drive him over to Rachel’s place, and he’d actually taken the guy up on the offer. The last time a woman had driven him to drunkenness at the bottom of a bottle, it had been Rachel, too. At least he was fairly sure he was drunk. Why else was his head swimming and his feet not attached to his body?

  “What on Earth?” Rachel exclaimed. “Where’s your coat?”

  “What? My…I dunno.” He’d remembered to grab his medical bag out of his truck but apparently not his coat. Must be drunker than he’d realized.

  “Oh, get in here before you freeze to death.” She closed the front door behind him.

  With the amount of alcohol in his blood, he doubted any part of him would be freezing anytime soon.

  “What are you doing here, Finn?”

  He squinted at her, trying to make out her facial features in the dark. “The dog. Came to see the dog. I don’t torture little kids, you know.”

  She frowned for a moment. “Are you fit to see a patient?”

  He gave her a bleary glare. “I can do a fever in my sleep. I think I have treated ’em in my sleep.” He strode past her toward the back of the house. “Where’s my hairy patient?”

  As toasted as he was, something made him pause in the kitchen door and proceed more quietly. He mov
ed slowly over to the corner and knelt down beside the motionless dog. “Hey, old man,” he murmured. “I hear you’re feeling a little under the weather.” He stroked the dog’s thick fur gently and came away with a handful of dry, coarse hair. The dog was burning up. It didn’t take a fancy medical degree, human or otherwise, to know that this animal was in big trouble.

  “Get me a bunch of towels and fill your sink up with cold water.” He dug in his medical bag and came up with a vial and a syringe. Doing the math on a dosage started a faint headache throbbing at the back of his skull. He did the math a second time to be sure and pulled the antibiotic into the syringe. The dog’s skin was dry and pinched as he injected the medication into his unprotesting hip.

  “Here they are,” Rachel panted. She sounded out of breath like she’d sprinted full out for the towels. The girl sure did seem attached to this mongrel for only having known him a day. Almost made a guy a little jealous.

  “Soak those in the sink and then lay them over the dog. Keep his bandage dry.”

  Rachel followed his directions, bending over so close to him he could smell her vanilla perfume. He remembered the scent well and drew in an appreciative sniff of it. Nothing and no one else in the world smelled quite like that intoxicating combination of homey sweetness and Rachel.

  In a matter of seconds the towel was warm to the touch. He passed it up to her and took the next one. They worked for close to an hour in silence. The edge of his buzz was wearing off and he moved automatically in fatigue. And then the dog started to feel a little cooler.

  “The fever’s breaking,” Finn murmured.

  Rachel sagged, supporting herself against the edge of the sink. He thought he spied tears tracking down her face.