Dr. Colton’s High-Stakes Fiancée

by Cindy Dees

  Damien frowned. “Maisie took a picture of you there in the clinic with the snazzy digital camera she’d bought that day. She showed it to Finn.”

  Rachel frowned. How could that be? She thought back to the spring of her sophomore year in high school. That was right about when her mother was first diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Her mom had only been in her mid-forties and the diagnosis had taken the doctors a while to make. They’d told the family that early-onset Alzheimer’s had a tendency to be inherited and had offered Rachel genetic testing—

  And then it clicked in her mind.

  “Of course. That must have been the day we went to the pregnancy counseling center in Bozeman to get me genetically tested for early-onset Alzhemier’s. My mother has that, you know. I had a fifty percent chance of having it, too. And I wanted to know…for my own peace of mind and because of Finn…didn’t want to saddle him with me if I was going to lose my memory young…but I don’t have the gene and everything was okay…” She trailed off.

  Damien stared at her. “So there was no abortion?”

  “No.”

  Eventually he murmured, “Accused of something you didn’t do. Been there, done that. It sucks.”

  “Ya think?” she retorted. Panic was starting to build somewhere deep inside her. Finn had believed all these years that she’d had an abortion? And then the other shoe dropped in her mind. She and Finn had never slept together. They’d agreed to wait until she felt ready. But if he thought she’d had an abortion, he also thought she’d slept with some other guy!

  “How could he think that of me?” she exclaimed.

  Damien shrugged. “If a woman were carrying my baby and got rid of it without even talking to me, I’d be pretty pissed off.”

  No kidding. “Not to mention he thinks I slept with someone else. I loved him with every bit of my being. I was dead sure he was my soul mate! Heck, I told him so over and over. How could he possibly think I would have betrayed him?”

  “You’d have to ask him that.”

  Her gaze narrowed. “I will. He’s at the hospital?”

  “Yeah,” Damien answered cautiously. “Should I call him and warn him you’re coming down to kill him?”

  “Nah,” she retorted sarcastically. “It’ll be more fun if I surprise him when I do the deed.” She spun and headed for the exit with long, angry strides.

  Finn frowned at his cell phone as he put it away. That had been a rather strange phone call from Damien. His brother had mentioned in a weird enough tone of voice that Rachel was coming over to the hospital to talk to him that it almost sounded like a warning. And then Damien had dropped that random comment about listening to people with an open mind. What the hell had that been all about?

  As if that wasn’t enough, Damien had ended the phone call with some cryptic remark about how he felt a storm coming. A big one. Had the guy been talking about the weather or Rachel? Finn couldn’t tell.

  He glanced out the window. The sunny day had gone an ominous color outside. He stepped closer to the glass to peer out. Thunder clouds roiled on the horizon, black and menacing. They blocked enough sunlight that the day had taken on a premature twilight cast, but not the cast indicating the serene ending of a day sinking into night. Rather, this greenish twilight presaged violence. Chaos. Storms, indeed.

  Everything was big in Montana, including the weather. And it did, indeed, appear that they were in for a severe late-season thunderstorm. He went over to the nurse’s station. “If we lose power, I’ll need you to check Mr. Warner’s ventilator immediately to make sure it switched to the backup power source.”

  The nurse glanced toward the windows across the waiting area and nodded. “Looks like we’re in for a bad one.”

  Rachel was furious and growing more so by the second. She kept having to take her foot off the accelerator as her speed crept up again and again on her way down the mountain. Oh, yes. She was going to kill Finn. Slowly. And painfully.

  The sky overhead grew darker and darker until she was forced to turn on her headlights to see the road. Bizarre. It was still late afternoon. She glanced up at the sky and gasped at the ugly mass of clouds overhead. It was a sickly counterclockwise swirl of purple and yellow, like a spinning bruise. Not good. Her gut told her to get down off this mountain fast and seek shelter before the full fury of this storm broke. As the road straightened out close to town, she stepped on the accelerator. Trash blew in front of her as the sky grew even darker and more ominous. Branches whipped and the trees swayed, groaning, as she entered Honey Creek. People scurried here and there, securing awnings and bringing in outdoor furniture. Leave it to Montana to have snow and then turn around a few days later and have a violent springlike thunderstorm in October.

  She parked in the hospital parking lot and ran for the building. It wasn’t raining, but the wind was lashing her hair against her face so hard it stung. She ducked into the front lobby. The relative calm was a relief after the violence of the coming storm. She headed for the ICU, where she was bound to find Craig…and Finn.

  Finn was at Craig’s bedside when she arrived, and she spotted him through the glass wall immediately. Glaring daggers at him, she parked herself next to the nurse’s station to wait for him. One of the nurse’s cell phones rang behind her.

  Then the nurse announced, “My husband says they just issued a tornado warning for Honey Creek. Somebody turn on the local news.”

  The low drone of the television mounted high in the corner of the waiting area was turned up and tuned in to a Bozeman television station. The meteorologist was speaking with contained urgency: “…take cover immediately. Doppler radar indicates rotation in this cloud five miles west of Honey Creek. A weather watcher reports seeing a funnel cloud forming moments ago. Even if a tornado does not fully form, residents of Honey Creek should expect damaging wind gusts of up to seventy miles per hour and tennis ball-sized hail. The storm is moving east at fifty miles per hour and should reach Honey Creek in the next five to seven minutes. Residents are urged to take cover inside a sturdy building and stay away from windows and doors.”

  Rachel glanced outside in alarm. The daylight had taken on a strange, green-yellow cast she’d never seen before. A phone rang behind her, and a few seconds later a nurse announced, “All nonessential personnel are to take shelter in the basement.”

  A nurse beside Rachel grunted. “We’re all essential personnel.”

  Finn’s voice spoke up from behind her. “Rachel. What are you doing here? You need to get out of here. Head home and take cover.”

  “I don’t think there’s time for that, Dr. Colton,” the nurse beside her replied. “Look.”

  Rachel looked where the woman pointed outside and gasped in dismay. A thick column of spinning cloud snaked down toward the ground no more than a mile away. That window faced west. The storm was moving east. Crap. That tornado was coming straight at them.

  Finn ordered sharply, “Get Mr. Warner ready to move. Get all the ambulatory patients down to the basement. Get the nonmobile patients away from the windows and into an interior hall. Cover them with blankets so they don’t get hit by flying glass. Move!”

  Rachel ran after the nearest nurse. “What can I do to help?”

  “Take these blankets. Wrap the patients in rooms two and four in them and pull their beds out into the hall. Hurry!”

  Rachel took the pile of blankets the woman thrust at her and scrambled to do as ordered. One of the patients was either sedated or unconscious and wasn’t difficult to wrap up and roll out into the hall. But the other patient, an elderly woman, didn’t seem to understand what was happening and kept pulling the blanket off herself. Rachel dragged the heavy hospital bed out into the hall.

  The lights flickered and went out and the hall plunged into darkness. Only the faintest light came from the window in the waiting area down the hall. An emergency floodlight came on somewhere in the other direction, sending enough light toward them to see, but not much more.

  “Rachel, get
the hell out of here!” Finn snapped as he helped her drag the bed across the hall.

  “Too late. The storm’s almost here, and you guys need the extra hands.”

  She darted off to help a swearing nurse who was having trouble getting a bed through a door. They wrestled the bed into the hallway and tucked blankets over the frightened man’s head.

  Rachel noticed Jolene Walsh farther down the hallway tucking more blankets around Craig Warner with all the tender concern of a mother for a child—or a woman for her lover. No doubt about it. Those two were in love. Good for them.

  She took a step toward Jolene to help her, but then she heard it. A roaring, tearing sound. Huh. The twister really did sound like a freight train. Coming down a set of tracks straight at her at high speed. She glanced out a window as she ran past an open door and gasped. The entire window was filled with a whirling mass of debris, barely on the other side of the hospital parking lot. Shocked into frozen awe, she stared at the monster coming for her.

  And then something big and hard and heavy slammed into her.

  “Get moving,” Finn barked. “Come with me.” He dragged her along by the arm until she started to run under her own power. They raced behind the nurse’s station and he shoved her down under the tall desk that formed the front of the station.

  He wrapped his arms around her as she spread the last blanket she had around them. He grabbed one end of it and tucked it beneath his hip. The other end he wrapped tightly around them both and over their heads. It was hot and stuffy under the blanket. This was surreal. She was not about to face death, not with Finn Colton’s arms tight around her and his cheek pressed against her hair.

  “Are we going to die?” she asked blankly.

  “Not if I can help it!” he shouted over the roaring wind. “Hang on to me with all your strength!”

  That was not a hard command to follow. Her terror was beyond anything she’d ever experienced. But then, as glass shattered nearby, a strange thing happened to her. A calm came over her at all odds with the violence erupting around them. If this were it, so be it. Living or dying was out of her control now. It was up to Fate or God or whatever force controlled such things in the universe. And in the meantime, she couldn’t think of another person in the whole world she’d rather spend her last few moments on Earth with.

  She might be furious with Finn for believing the worst of her and never giving her a chance to defend herself, but as debris struck her back through the blanket and Finn wrapped his entire body around her protectively, a single stark fact came into crystal-clear focus. She loved Finn Colton. No matter what he’d done in the past. Against all reason, against her better judgment—heck, against her burning desire not to do so—she loved him.

  The roaring got louder and the building shook around her. More glass shattered and the wind shrieked its fury, yanking at her with a violence that was stunning. Her eardrums felt like someone was trying to suck them out of her head. She pressed her right ear against Finn’s chest and hung on for dear life as the tornado did its damnedest to tear them apart. And wasn’t that just the story of their lives? Everyone and everything around them trying to keep them from each other.

  Finn squeezed her suffocatingly tight against his chest. All hell broke loose then. Crashes and ripping sounds joined the banshee wail of the tornado as the hospital was literally torn apart around them. The screams of the wind were so fierce she thought the sound alone might kill them. The blanket tore away from them. She clung to Finn with all her strength in the madness, as desks and chairs and computer monitors flew past.

  Something hit Finn’s shoulder and he grunted in pain. She’d have spoken to ask him if he were okay, but all the air had been sucked out of her lungs. She tried as hard as she could to pull in a breath, but she couldn’t manage it. She couldn’t breathe! Panic hit her. She started to struggle, but Finn’s crushing embrace held her still. Something about him conveyed an assurance that he would take care of her. That she would be all right. That he was in control of this madness and would see her through it safely. Her heart opened even more as the love she’d held at bay all these years flooded through her.

  All in all, it wasn’t a bad way to die. In the arms of the one man she’d ever loved wholly and without reservation.

  The moment passed and she dragged in a lungful of air. The noise was still horrific, but mostly paper, leaves and light debris were flying around now. And then even that settled. The roaring faded as the tornado passed, and a strange stillness settled around them. And then, as quickly as the silence had come, it shattered with nurses yelling for help and doctors yelling back instructions and patients moaning and crying. Someone screamed, but the noise cut off abruptly.

  Finn looked down at her like he was as surprised as she was that they were still alive. “You okay?”

  “Shockingly, yes. You? Something hit you.”

  “It was nothing. I’ve taken worse hits in a football game.” He looked around them and then back to her. “Gotta go do the doctor thing now.”

  “We need to talk—” she started.

  Finn jumped to his feet and held a hand down for her. For an instant his gaze met hers, naked and unguarded, and maybe a touch shell-shocked. The tornado had been a profound moment for him, too, apparently. “Later,” he bit out. “I think I’m going to be busy for a while.”

  She took one look down the hallway at the mess and knew that for the understatement of the century that it was. She prayed that the residents of Honey Creek had heeded the tornado warnings and taken cover and that no one had been seriously hurt or killed. But if the destruction here was any indication, the town probably wouldn’t be so lucky.

  She pulled out her cell phone, but it had no signal. The tornado must’ve wiped out the cell phone towers. Scouring the corners beneath a blizzard of paper, she spotted a desk phone and plugged its cord into an outlet she found low on a wall where a desk used to stand. Miraculously, the thing still worked. Quickly, she dialed the nursing home. It was on the other side of town. She hoped it had been completely out of the path of the twister.

  “Hello?” someone answered in a completely distracted voice.

  “Hi, this is Rachel Grant. I’m just calling to check on my mother. Are you folks okay?”

  “Yes, we’re fine. We hear the hospital got hit, though.”

  “It did. I’m there now. The building’s standing, but there’s a lot of damage and debris inside.”

  “Well, we’ve got our hands full over here calming down the residents and assessing the damage.”

  Rachel wished the woman luck and hung up, so relieved she was faintly ill. She stumbled into the hallway and asked the first nurse she saw what she could do to help. For the next hour she moved robotlike through the motions of helping to clean up the worst of the debris and helping see to the most immediate nonmedical needs of the patients. Carrying her telephone from room to room, she made a number of phone calls for patients so they could reassure their families.

  All the while, she felt like she was wading through syrup. Maybe was in a little shock. But then, she’d just lived through a tornado, both the physical and emotional kinds.

  Eventually, a horde of medics and firemen, volunteers from several nearby towns, descended upon the hospital and her services were no longer needed. Someone suggested she go home and get some rest and make sure her place was okay. And that was when memory of leaving Brownie out on the back porch broke over her in a wash of horror.

  She raced outside into the parking lot and stared in dismay at the flattened remains of her car. It was upside down on its roof and stood no more than two feet tall. No time to stand around mourning the remains of her little clunker, though. She had to get home. Make sure Brownie was okay. She took off jogging toward her place, but even that was a slow proposition as she dodged fallen trees and a variety of mangled debris ranging from entire trees to furniture to giant slabs of roof.

  The swath of destruction was neither long nor wide, but within it, the
mess was breathtaking. She supposed people would say Honey Creek had been lucky, but it was hard to believe as she wended her way home through the main path of the storm.

  She turned onto her street and breathed a massive sigh of relief to see that her house was still standing. A tree in the next door neighbor’s yard had fallen over and lay mostly in her backyard, and trash littered her front lawn. It looked like she’d lost some roof shingles, and the bathroom window next to where the tree had fallen had taken a stray branch and was broken. But that looked to be the worst of it.

  She made her way around the tree, discovering as she did so that it had wiped out the three-foot-tall hurricane fence along one side of her backyard. Annoying, but not particularly expensive or difficult to repair.

  She picked her way through the broken branches to the back porch and looked around. Where was Brownie? The porch didn’t look bad. Her lawn furniture and grill were still there. Even Brownie’s blanket was still in its original spot. But the dog was definitely missing.

  “Brownie!” she called. “Here, boy!”

  But he was not forthcoming. She knelt down to see if he was hiding under the porch perchance. No luck. A frisson of panic started to vibrate low in her gut. She stepped out into the backyard and shouted again. Nothing. Where was he?

  Had he made a run for it after the fence came down? He couldn’t have gone far on his bum leg. He’d been limping around on his cast a little better last night and hadn’t been whimpering every time he put weight on the leg, but still. He couldn’t exactly have headed for the hills on it.

  He was still taking antibiotics and painkillers, and he needed both. She had to find him. She set off down the street, yelling for him as she went. But before long she got sidetracked into helping her neighbors as they called out to her. Harry Redfeather’s herb shed had been blown over and he was picking through it, trying to recover what supplies he could. He was too old and frail to be climbing all over the unsteady pile of broken wood, and she shooed him away from the remains of the shed and took over the job. But all the while, she kept an eye out for a flash of brown fur.