Cowboy on Call

by Leigh Riker

  “I know you do, but the adults here need to make certain you’re ready for that. You wouldn’t want to ride and get hurt again, would you? Or hurt Hero?” The image of Olivia’s horse flashed through his mind. “I know you wouldn’t mean to, but when you’re on him you need to be feeling your best. In control.”

  Nick’s deep blue eyes looked huge. “I’m not going to die, am I?”

  With a start, Sawyer sat back on the bed. A sudden vision of Khalil had run through his mind. “No, of course not. Have you been worried about that?” Nick gave a small nod. “You don’t need to, Nick.” If only he’d been able to reassure Khalil like this. “You’re going to be all right. Just take time to rest, to let yourself heal. I realize that can seem frustrating at times—it’s hard not to be able to do what you want to do—but try to be patient.”

  Nick considered that. “How long?”

  Sawyer fought a smile. “I can’t tell you. But if you push too hard and ride Hero before your body is all better, you could get into more trouble. Then you’d have to wait even longer to ride again.”

  Nick reached for the new bear on his pillows. “I need more superpowers,” he said, burying his face in the animal’s fur.

  “Well, that’s what this guy is for. Never doubt Superman.”

  Gathering up the rest of the stuffed animals, Nick scrambled off the bed to put them back in the closet. His voice was muffled. “Is there really a toy orphanage?”

  “What do you think?” It was the same question that during his training, Sawyer had asked kids who wondered if Santa Claus was real.

  “No.” Nick emerged from the closet. “But if there was, I wouldn’t let them go there. I’ll keep them in my room—even when I don’t play with them anymore.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Sawyer said, trying again to suppress his smile.

  Nick looked him up and down with a critical eye. Nothing wrong with his vision. He gave Sawyer a thorough once-over before he said, “You’re a good doctor.” Then he took the bear and left the room.

  Sawyer sat there, thinking, Out of the mouths of babes. Wondering. Wishing that were true.

  He might be a wizard with the toy bears and Curious George.

  Beyond that...not so much.

  * * *

  “SO, UM...” Olivia took another sip of lemonade, the ultimate soother on such a hot summer night, yet she still felt edgy. She set the glass on the end table, wondering what to say to Sawyer.

  Much of her conversation these days was with her seven-year-old. She’d put Nick to bed a few minutes ago but didn’t linger to read another story with him as she usually did. Sawyer had been waiting in the other room.

  He sat across from her, making the space feel even smaller, looking as uncomfortable as Olivia felt. She didn’t date much—not that this was a date!—and she hadn’t seen Clint in weeks, but here she was with another very handsome man in her house, which Olivia rarely allowed. She always met Clint for dinner or a movie in town, or occasionally in Kansas City. But since Nick’s fall, Clint still hadn’t so much as phoned to ask about her son. She guessed their relationship was over. She should miss that more, but she didn’t and she had Nick to consider.

  Maybe now Sawyer wished he’d left before Nick went to bed. Whatever they’d spoken about in his room was between them, but by leaving sooner he could have avoided this awkward time with Olivia. She would have been spared, too.

  But Sawyer had taken the time to come by. He’d been surprisingly gentle, even humorous, with Nick, so he probably didn’t dislike children in general, as she’d first thought. And his coolness before had more to do with what had happened in Kedar.

  “Thank you for being so good with Nick tonight.”

  He frowned. “Meaning I wasn’t good with him before.”

  Olivia couldn’t argue with that. Still. Instead of resenting Sawyer or wondering what else he held so deep inside, maybe she should focus on how much he appealed to her: his dark hair and deep blue eyes and the way he fit his body and how he almost seemed to read her mind at times. As if that could be any safer.

  “I talked to Logan last night,” Sawyer said at last. “And from what he said and you told me the night Nick fell, you’re thinking of moving away from Barren.”

  Olivia silently groaned. “That idea didn’t thrill Nick—or Logan.” Then, before she could stop herself, she explained about Ted Anderson’s shop and her meeting with Barney Caldwell. “I don’t know what else to do,” she finished. “I’ll explore other avenues for financing, but Barney had a point. I did value my business too highly. I’ll have to get more creative, adjust my numbers...because I don’t want to give up.”

  “The next county, Logan says. Would you sell your store here, then?”

  “No, but going back and forth between Main Street and Ted’s shop could get old pretty fast. If I let Nick stay in school here, let’s say he gets sick, which happens every term, or there’s a snow day—I’d have to drive all the way back here to get him. I could cut my commute in half by living between the two shops.”

  Sawyer gazed at her over his lemonade. “But if Nick doesn’t want to relocate, why do it? He’s been through a lot lately...” His eyes darkened. “Oh, wait. Does the move have something to do with your feelings about the Circle H? Getting stuck there in that flood with a sick child must have been difficult—”

  “I don’t blame Logan for that—now—but I don’t like to stir up those memories,” she admitted. Or another of Jasmine, years ago, that still made her sad...and made her blame Sawyer.

  He must have known what she meant. “I guess Nick having his horse there makes that tougher. For you.”

  Olivia couldn’t disagree. Though she welcomed Sawyer’s input about her business in theory, he’d made her feel selfish about Nick. She leaned forward. “I would do anything to make Nick happy. I know how he feels about Hero, about Ava, about all his other friends here but—”

  To her surprise, Sawyer half smiled. “You forgot to mention his stuffed toys.”

  Olivia couldn’t manage to smile back.

  She stiffened. “So you’re taking Nick’s side—and Logan’s—when the move is my decision to make. Just as you made your choice years ago.”

  Now this conversation wasn’t only awkward, it was coming close to a more personal issue for her with Sawyer. She didn’t need to think about his attractiveness.

  Sawyer glanced toward the hallway. “You mean because I didn’t stay here? I couldn’t. I had to finish med school—”

  “Then move more than halfway around the world?”

  “The clinic is my job, Olivia. It’s my business just as Wilson Antiques is yours. It’s what I do. The difference is that I don’t have a kid to think about.”

  But he did have a family. People who cared about him. Missed him. Pointing that out would only reveal how she’d felt about him leaving, though.

  Instead, she said, “That was your job, until your patient didn’t survive.” He paled and she regretted having been so abrupt just to protect herself. “Sorry, that was...unfair, Sawyer.”

  He was on his feet before she said his name. He carried his glass to the kitchen, where she heard him rinse it at the sink, then put it in the dishwasher. He came back to the living room and stopped in the doorway. His eyes looked indigo blue.

  “Olivia. I’d hoped you understood why I kept my distance with Nick.”

  “But I still don’t know what really happened over there. Sawyer, please. Tell me more. I do want to understand.” She let out a breath of frustration. “What exactly was so bad that you don’t think you deserve to be a doctor now? I mean, I understand that people die, even kids sometimes.” Olivia fought back a shudder. “That can be inevitable.” As it might have been when Nick fell.

  Sawyer only shook his head. “It wasn’t inevitable, and that’s on me.
Good night, Olivia. Tell Nick I’ll keep an eye on Hero for him.”

  “Sawyer,” she said. “I didn’t mean to bring it up like that—”

  “Good luck with your business.”

  He was out the door before she could say anything more. Sawyer carried a huge burden, and she’d made it worse.

  “Thanks for the house call,” she murmured to the empty room.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LIZA PACED THE vast living room of the high-rise condominium she shared with Everett in the heart of Dallas. Her steps had worn a path through the thick white carpet. The fading late-afternoon sun filtered through the gauzy curtains across the windows but she scarcely noticed the soft slant of red-gold light, and although she was already dressed for the evening’s charity event, her thoughts were far away.

  Wilson Cattle wasn’t her home, yet she wanted it to be so she could feel like a part of Everett’s family when she knew she wasn’t. Leaving Barren, leaving little Nick behind had left a huge hole in her heart. She wouldn’t count on Olivia or Grey coming around—though she had certainly tried to win them over—but Nick...she couldn’t get the image of him, delighted with the Lego set she and Everett had given him, out of her mind.

  He was such a darling, and after a lonely childhood spent in her family’s mansion with only servants for company much of the time, she had so much love to give away. If only...

  “Liza.” Dressed in his tuxedo and fussing with his bow tie, which he never got right, Everett stepped into the room and her pulse quickened. “We’ll need to buy new rugs if you keep going.”

  She knotted her hands at her waist. “Is it so obvious? I’m afraid I’m not in the mood tonight for a party. Dinner, which is always the same filet of beef or chicken, so many people crowding in—” She now preferred the space and big sky in Kansas, a change in her outlook that had surprised her.

  Everett covered her hands with his. Warm and solid, he had a tendency to calm her with his very presence. “We can stay home if you want.”

  “No, we have to go.” During the winter season that would begin all too soon, there would be dozens of such events to dress for, socialites to smile at and various causes to write checks for, all of which were worthy, of course. For too long, these events had been the largest part of her life. As a teenager, she’d made her debut, a rite of passage into society that had cost her parents thousands for her dress alone. “Sometimes I wonder if we made a mistake. Selling my house in The Woodlands, moving here.”

  Liza came from big money. She’d inherited her parents’ place, redone it several times without ever thinking of it as her own, then met Everett—and for the first time, fell instantly in love.

  Their age difference didn’t trouble her at all. No, not that. For a man in his midfifties with two grown children, he looked remarkably youthful and fit. His brown hair had a few streaks of distinguished gray and his earnest blue-green eyes could have belonged to his thirty-year-old son. And actually, they did.

  Everett’s years of running Wilson Cattle before he turned the ranch over to Grey had guaranteed the still-hard muscle in his arms, the flatness of his stomach. He remained a vigorous man, and tonight he was wearing cowboy boots with his tux.

  My, look at you, she thought with another rush of warmth inside. You can take the cowboy out of the ranch, but you can’t take the ranch out of the cowboy. Of course, he wouldn’t be the only man in boots tonight—the hall would be full of oilmen. It astonished her how Everett had fit right into the world she’d known before him.

  He drew her to the windows. They took in the sweeping sight of skyscrapers, the faraway rush of heavy bumper-to-bumper traffic on the many freeways that snaked through the area and the first wink of city lights coming on. “Look at that view. This whole town is ours, Liza. I thought you were happy here.”

  They’d bought the condo a year ago to celebrate their first wedding anniversary. He and Liza had picked out every paint color, each piece of furniture and all the accessories and still...for her, like her family’s mansion, it wasn’t truly a home. Always, something seemed to be missing. At least here she had Everett.

  “I didn’t say I’m not happy.”

  He put an arm around her. “You don’t look happy even in that spectacular dress. What’s the color called?”

  “Seafoam green—or blue, whichever you prefer. You like it?”

  “I do,” he said. “I love anything you wear.” His voice turned thick. “You always look amazing, and I think what a lucky man I am. After all those years with the wrong woman, I finally found the right one. Needle in a haystack,” he murmured, bending his head to kiss the curve of her neck.

  Liza moved closer to him. “Now see what you’ve done. You’ve managed to sweet-talk me out of a bad mood.” She reached up to redo his bow tie, which had been hanging lopsided on his snow-white pleated shirt.

  “And you’ve managed to turn me from a lowly rancher into a high-society guy. Good thing I like it.”

  “Not lowly,” she said, patting the tie. She was in awe of his quick adjustment to Dallas; Liza hadn’t had the same opportunity in Barren. “Wilson Cattle is a wonderful place. I enjoyed our stay there for Logan and Blossom’s wedding—despite the stress of Nick’s accident.” She paused before admitting, “I hated to leave.”

  He moved back to study her face. Liza didn’t meet his eyes, but she could sense his thorough scrutiny. “What’s this? My bride—the woman I love with all my heart, the toast of Dallas’s elite who has turned this cowboy into a city slicker—is yearning for the ranch?”

  “I wouldn’t say yearning...” Aching, perhaps. “I miss Nick, especially. After all, he’s my best chance to be a...grandmother.”

  Everett laughed. “Most women your age wouldn’t be as eager for someone to call them Granny.”

  She frowned. “Nick doesn’t call me anything at all, but he makes me smile just to see him.”

  He took another step back, letting his arms drop. “So. You’re homesick.”

  Yes, she thought. I am. Not only for Wilson Cattle, or even Nick. She’d meant Olivia and Grey, too.

  And, of course, there was something else she yearned for, but she couldn’t tell Everett. She tried not to even think about it.

  Instead, she tucked her arm through his. “I’ll be fine. How could I not feel simply grand tonight with such a handsome man to escort me? I’m ready now,” she said, determined not to dwell on something she could never have. “Fly me to the moon—or at least through all the maddening traffic to the Hyatt Regency.”

  Although they’d been married just a few years, Everett read her like a favorite book. “Guess tomorrow we’ll have to plan another visit to Barren.”

  * * *

  “DOES UNCLE SAWYER live at the Circle H?” Nick asked Olivia.

  In her room, making one of his morning visits, he sat on her bed, feet swinging. He’d been bombarding her with questions ever since Sawyer’s surprise visit.

  Two weeks later, he hadn’t paid another “house call” to Nick, yet his presence seemed to linger, teasing Olivia’s senses every day with the faint scent of his aftershave, the sound of his murmured voice floating to her from Nick’s room as it had the night he came. Nick seemed to have acquired what Olivia feared could become—for her—an unwise interest in the uncle he barely knew. In her mind, they were both better off without that.

  “For now, he does.”

  Nick paused to rub his temple and Olivia’s maternal alarm system went off again. She could see his progress every day, and he could play in the backyard now, if not on his swing set, while she watched from the kitchen window. His balance had improved, but she didn’t trust him to stay safe. Were his headaches worse than he let on? For a second, she felt tempted to phone Sawyer, then suppressed the urge.

  She didn’t want him here again, didn’t really wan
t him around her child, but Nick’s initial distrust of his uncle had changed since their talk in his room that night. In Logan’s absence, maybe Nick was looking for a surrogate father. Certainly Sawyer looked much the same, but the last thing she wanted was to get close to him. She had nothing to gain from that, and Nick risked getting hurt if—or when—Sawyer left.

  Nick frowned. “Why doesn’t he stay all the time?”

  “You’d have to ask him. Your uncle lives in a faraway place,” she said. “He’ll probably go back soon.” A prospect that both eased Olivia’s mind and tempted her to already miss him.

  Nick’s gaze stayed steady on hers. “How do you know?”

  “Because that’s where his job is.” And the source of the pain she saw in Sawyer’s eyes whenever he let down his guard. Most recently, she’d been the cause of that pain in her own living room after she’d put Nick to bed. Olivia still felt bad about that.

  Nick stayed silent for a moment while Olivia checked her cell phone again. Earlier, Ted Anderson had finally called with his counteroffer to her second bid on his shop. Even the sound of his voice had perked up her spirits. She wanted this deal, badly, but then the newest numbers he’d quoted had stunned her.

  Ted had rushed to complete his inventory, and his stock was worth more than he’d thought. She could barely afford what she’d already offered him, and after her disappointing meeting with Barney Caldwell, she didn’t have the option to up her game. Olivia wouldn’t go on a date with Barney to help her cause, but she felt half inclined to speak to Barney’s mother as he’d jokingly suggested. Her deep pockets might be just what Olivia needed—assuming Mrs. Caldwell actually wanted to do business with her. And vice versa.

  “Does Uncle Sawyer ride horses?”

  A loaded question. She should have known. “Nick,” she said, guessing what would come next. A day didn’t pass without him finding some way to bring up Hero. Because of Jasmine, she could understand how much he missed his gray gelding, but that didn’t mean she was going to let him ride yet.