A Child for Christmas

by ALLISON LEIGH,

  “Are you experiencing dizziness again?”

  “No,” his voice was steady and low and far too intimate. “I said I can’t sleep.”

  “So you called me in the middle of the night to tell me?”

  “No, I called to tell you I want to see you tomorrow.”

  If her heart rate didn’t settle she was going to pass out. “I have some open time midmorning.”

  “Not for an appointment.”

  “I... Excuse me?”

  “I’ll meet you for lunch. What time?”

  “Captain Clay, I don’t think—”

  “I asked you not to call me that.”

  She swallowed. Moistened her lips and pushed her hair out of her eyes again. “I’m not available for lunch.”

  “Supper.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  She drew up her knees restlessly. “You’re my patient. It, uh, wouldn’t be ethical.”

  “To sit across from me in a restaurant? I’m assuming, of course, that one of those places in town serves supper.”

  “Of course they do. This isn’t the back of beyond.”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  There. That was the man she remembered. In between comments that she’d once thought had indicated fondness for this town he came from had been the ones that said he wasn’t fond of it at all. It was one of the reasons she’d thought it would be safe. That knowledge that Sawyer Clay never planned to live his life in Wyoming.

  He’d preferred the rest of the world.

  “The next day, then.”

  She pressed her forehead to her knees. He might have amnesia, but he was still the same man, she reminded herself. “No. If you need medical care, please say so. Otherwise, I’ll say good-night now.”

  “What time tomorrow?”

  “For what?”

  “An appointment.”

  She switched hands on the receiver. Oh, to be a secretary. A data-entry operator. Anything but the only physician for a hundred miles. “Eleven.”

  “Done. Good night.”

  She held the phone out and looked at it when he hung up. “Damn you, Sawyer Clay,” she whispered to the buzz of the dial tone. “I won’t let you destroy my life again. Or my son’s.”

  Chapter Two

  After hanging up with Rebecca, Sawyer managed a few hours’ restless sleep before he rose around dawn. Perhaps it was his habit to rise early, since he’d been doing it “ever since he could remember.”

  What was that now? Two weeks? He took a rapid shower, feeling no inclination to linger under the hot spray despite the relief it brought to his aching muscles. He hoped that ache would go away. Assumed it was all attributable to the accident. Maybe it was partially because of his age. Jefferson had told him he was the oldest of the Clay brothers. Forty-three.

  A good decade older than Rebecca Morehouse, if her smooth skin was any indication.

  The thought of seeing her again gave him something to look forward to. Even if it was only inhaling her fragrance, taking some insane measure of comfort in its familianty. Or trying to figure out if her cool manner was reserved strictly for him, or for all of her patients.

  He raked his wet hair back with his fingers, eschewed the razor, replaced his bandages with fresh ones, then dressed in jeans that could have been two years old or twenty, for all he knew. He yanked on a thick black cable-knit sweater and headed upstairs to the coffee he could already smell.

  Matthew, the brother with the short-cropped blond hair and the ice-blue eyes, was drinking a cup at the table, his attention on a pile of mail he was methodically working his way through. He looked up when Sawyer entered the kitchen. “Morning.”

  “Looks like night to me.” Sawyer reached for one of the plain no-frills mugs hanging from a mug tree on the counter and filled it to brimming with the piping-hot brew. He pulled out one of the chairs and sat down, squinting over the steam as he sipped gingerly from the mug. Matthew watched him for a moment, then turned back to the envelope in his hand. “Okay, what did I do different?”

  Matthew shook his head and gave a brief glance to the contents of the letter, then tossed it aside to one of the piles. “How you feeling?”

  “Well, just dandy, Matthew. How are you feeling today?”

  Matthew sighed and dropped the mail. “Okay. Dumb question. Sorry.”

  Sawyer set his mug down and scrubbed his hands down his face, feeling the bandage on his jaw. The bristles from two-days’ growth of beard. “No,” he said abruptly. “I’m the one who is sorry.” He stared at his mug, circling his hand around it “Tell me something, Matt. Anything.”

  “I thought we were supposed to let things come to you in their own good time.”

  “I’m not asking for the secrets to world peace,” he snapped. “Just something!” Sawyer could tell from his brother’s hesitation that he’d been warned not to feed him too much information about his past. The doctors in Maryland had sternly warned Jefferson, who had obviously dutifully passed the warning on to the rest of his family, that Sawyer’s mind needed to assimilate the memories as they came naturally. Forcing them or feeding them might only cause more harm than good.

  “Well,” Matthew considered slowly, “you always were a crabby S.O.B. in the mornings. That doesn’t appear to have changed.”

  He knew he deserved that. Didn’t even take offense at it. He lifted the mug and sipped. Blew on it. Sipped.

  “You used to sit in that chair there,” Matthew added after a moment.

  Sawyer looked at the chair across from the one he’d taken.

  “And you drank your coffee from the saucer, like Squire.”

  “What?”

  Matthew rose and opened one of the cupboard doors, pulling out a flat china saucer. Then he grabbed Sawyer’s mug and tipped coffee into the saucer. “You drank it this way.”

  “Like a damn cat.”

  “I didn’t say you lapped at it, idiot. I said you drank it.” He carefully lifted the saucer, showing what he meant.

  Sawyer snorted. “What for?”

  Matthew set the saucer beside Sawyer’s elbow and returned to his chair and his own coffee. “Squire drinks it that way, too. Probably because it’s the fastest way to inhale hot coffee when you’re in a rush to get somewhere. You didn’t do it that way everywhere or every time I ever saw you drink coffee, but it’s what you did around here. You wanted something? That’s what you’re getting.”

  His brother gathered up one of the piles of mail and dumped it into the trash beneath the sink. “You want to come out with me this morning?”

  “To do what? It must be colder than a witch’s—”

  “It is. Which is why I need to make sure the water hasn’t frozen over for the stock. You don’t want to, that’s fine. I just thought since you were hunting for—”

  “Did I do it in the past?”

  Matthew grinned. “Not if you could help it.”

  “Hated it?”

  “Pretty much.”

  Sawyer rose, mug in hand. He left the saucer untouched where it sat on the table and followed his brother into the mudroom that connected to the kitchen. “Sounds like a good enough reason to me. But I want to be back in time to get to Weaver by eleven. I’m seeing Rebecca then.”

  Matthew paused while shrugging into his heavy coat. “You up to this, then?”

  “I’m starting to creak with the aches in my muscles,” Sawyer admitted grumpily. “But I’m not seeing Rebecca because of my aching muscles or feeble mind.”

  “Then why?”

  Sawyer reached for his own coat. “Because I want to know why her perfume smells so damned familiar.”

  Matthew chuckled. “She’s a nice woman, Sawyer. She’s treated all of us at one time or another since she came to Weaver a couple of years ago. But if you’re thinking you’re gonna get beyond her professionalism too far, you might want to rethink it. From what I hear, ‘just friends’ is her favorite phrase.”

  Since Sawyer didn�
��t remember who his “friends” were, that didn’t bother him too much.

  Matthew opened the storm door and stepped out into the frigid air. Sawyer gritted his teeth against the cold rush and pulled his collar up around his neck, yanking on the gloves Matthew shoved at him. He grabbed his coffee mug for one last slug, feeling it burn all the way down. It was little comfort against the icy wind that blew relentlessly into his face as he followed his brother into the darkness.

  Rebecca was painfully aware of the clock ticking inexorably toward eleven. The morning should not have dragged. She saw four patients. Set one broken wrist and put off Bennett Ludlow, the only attorney in the area, who’d apparently set his sights on her and couldn’t get it through his thick skull that she wasn’t interested. She had more success keeping Bennett from dropping by her office, as he insisted he wanted to do, though, than keeping Ryan occupied when he grew impatient with the inclement weather and wanted to put aside his math books.

  “Mo-om.”

  It was interesting the way her son could make the term a two-syllable word. “Ye-es?”

  “Let me walk to Eric’s.”

  Since he’d asked that question three times already, he knew the answer. Rebecca finished writing her notes on the broken wrist and added the file to her growing pile on the desk. Soon, she promised herself, she’d take care of that bulging stack. “It’s snowing.”

  “Not that hard.”

  “Too hard for you to walk by yourself, young man.”

  Ryan rolled his eyes and slumped back on the waiting-room chair, one long leg slung over the side. Rebecca noted that his jeans were getting short again and hid a smile. Her son was growing by leaps and bounds this year; making up with a vengeance for being the shortest kid in his class, even if he was a year younger.

  “If it’s snowing so hard, how come you got patients coming in?”

  Good point. Rebecca set down her pen and fixed her gaze on her son. “Go back to our apartment and eat the lunch I left for you. After my next patient, I’ll drive you over to Eric’s. Okay?”

  “What time?”

  That was Ryan. Always wanting more details. More specifics. Perhaps that’s why he excelled in mathematics. She’d learned what she’d had to learn to pass her studies. Ryan learned what he wanted to learn in math because he chose to.

  But even Ryan drew the line at studying all morning during his winter vacation. He was in the fifth grade, having skipped the third, and he took math classes at the high school with kids nearly twice his age.

  He was thriving here in Weaver. No longer getting into trouble with a group of friends, older and looking for millions of mischievous ways to gain attention.

  “Mo-om!”

  “Eleven-thirty. Good enough?”

  “Yep.” Ryan hopped off the chair, tucking his thick calculus book under one arm and an electronic game in his other hand, and bounded through the door that led to their private apartment.

  The associates she’d had in New York would have been shocked at Rebecca’s setup—Delaney included. And it might have been a little unorthodox, considering that one end of her property was a motel, complete with six rooms that she still rented out; the rooms she’d fashioned into the comfortable apartment that she and Ryan now called home; along with her medical office and small surgical clinic. But it worked for them.

  She’d never really planned on being a hotel magnate. The slim business the motel did was just fine with her. She’d refurbished the rooms simply because she couldn’t abide the sixties-style decor, and since the town offered no other overnight accommodations, she’d left the remaining rooms available.

  It wasn’t as if she needed the motel income. Tom had left her financially set Ryan’s college fund was already well established. Rebecca wasn’t rich by any standards. But she and her son would never starve, either.

  Her immediate paperwork completed, she rose from the desk and wandered over to the window overlooking the small parking lot. The snow was still falling, though not as heavily as it had been earlier. Perhaps he wouldn’t drive into town in this weather.

  She could only hope.

  Ten minutes later, she knew it was a vain hope, because she recognized the truck that wheeled into her parking lot. Maybe one of his brothers had driven him in. Rebecca was pretty sure that old brown Blazer was Matthew’s.

  But only one man climbed from the vehicle, and he had no cowboy hat on his head. Rebecca was also reasonably sure that Matthew didn’t go anywhere without his hat and that he hadn’t dyed his blond hair dark, with silver streaks at the temples.

  She returned to the desk, brushing her palms down the sides of her lab coat. When Sawyer pulled open the door, she was busy with the supply order form she’d hastily dragged onto the desk. Cold air whipped into the room with him and she slowly looked up, proud of the cool smile she knew she had pinned on her face. “You’re early.”

  “Five minutes.” He shrugged out of his jacket, hanging it on the brass coat-tree near the door and brushed the snowflakes from his hair as he approached the desk. “Were you raised in snow country?”

  Rebecca nearly snapped the pencil she held in two. “I beg your pardon?”

  “No one would choose to live in this stuff unless they’d grown up in it.”

  She set her pencil precisely in the center of her order form and rose. “I’ve lived in an assortment of locations,” she said, deliberately revealing nothing of import. It was none of his business that she’d grown up all around the world, following her missionary parents where they went until it had been time for her to start junior high. Then she’d been in a series of boarding schools in the United States. “And I did choose to live here.” She lifted his medical file from the hot file where she’d placed it that morning and headed back to an exam room. “I find the snow beautiful. Very fitting for the Christmas season.”

  “Oh, yes. Christmas.” Sawyer smiled, though it didn’t reach his dark blue eyes. “And I even remember the reason for celebrating it. Santa Claus, right?”

  Rebecca eyed him.

  “A joke, Bec. A joke. I remember my old Sunday-school lessons. Don’t remember ever going to Sunday school, though.”

  Bec. Good heavens. Rebecca set the file on the counter in the exam room and turned to face him, her arms crossed as she leaned casually against the counter. As soon as she found the time to do the remodeling that would add the third exam room she needed, she’d be sure to make the rooms larger. This one seemed far too close for some reason. “What can I do for you today, Captain?”

  He shook his head, his lips twisting. “Aside from ditching the rank?”

  Rebecca couldn’t very well tell him that it would be a cold day before his name passed her lips again. “You requested an appointment. You must have some reason. Have your stitches become inflamed? Are you dizzy? Headache plaguing you more than usual? What?” She’d poured over the reports that he’d brought with him from the hospital, spoken with his doctors in Maryland and had spent hours more poring over her medical journals. Purely from a professional standpoint, of course. When she’d learned that his only visitors in the hospital had been his commanding officer, then later Jefferson, who’d thoroughly ignored the wishes of the patient and the rules of the hospital to get in to see him, she hadn’t felt her heart squeeze at the lonely life that suggested. She hadn’t. If Sawyer hadn’t had a parade of people concerned for him, it was because he wanted it that way.

  “There is something plaguing me.”

  She waited, carefully containing her impatience to get out of this small room and farther than five feet away from him.

  “Your scent.”

  She felt her cheeks grow cold as the blood drained from her head. If she’d been alone, she would have stuck her head between her knees until the dizziness passed.

  If she’d been alone, she wouldn’t be dizzy in the first place.

  “That is hardly an appropriate comment for your physician, Captain Clay.” She smiled as she deliberately used his title
. Reminding herself that everything in his life had taken second place to his one and only love.

  “Blame it on my murky mind. Appropriate comments and behavior are out of my control just now.”

  “Murky mind?”

  “Yes.” He leaned his own hip against the exam table, mirroring her crossed-arm pose. “Murky. As in gloomy. Cloudy. Dark.”

  “Dismal,” Rebecca added. “Yes, I know what the word means. And it’s natural that you’d be feeling some depression over your—”

  “I’m not depressed, Bec.” He dropped his arms, and approached her. Rebecca stiffened and he stopped a few steps away. “I’m pissed,” he said in his clipped, raspy voice. “If you’ll forgive the term. Thoroughly and royally aggravated. And quite frankly, punching my fist through a wall sounds like a mighty fine idea—”

  “Daniel punches walls.”

  “Except the muscles in my shoulders and arms are so damned stiff and sore that... What did you say?”

  Rebecca brushed a lock of hair out of her face and eyed the small-print wallpaper border that circled the room at chair-rail height. “Daniel punches walls.”

  “Daniel. My brother, Daniel.”

  “Yes. He’s broken a few bones while he was at it. I don’t recommend it as a source of dealing with aggravation, however. Daniel hung a punching bag in his basement, I believe.” She tucked her hands in her pockets. “Perhaps he’d let you use it.”

  “Why was he punching walls?”

  “Well, only one wall since I’ve known him. I believe you’d do well to ask him that”

  “Is he unhappy?”

  “Daniel? No, actually, I believe your brother is over the moon these days. He got married less than a month ago, you know. Maggie is lovely and her little girl, J.D. is a sweet child. Plus they are adopting Angeline, too, I believe.”

  “So I hear. I’m told I was involved in some case, or I suppose I’d have been here for the wedding. Are you seeing someone?”

  Rebecca’s eyebrows rose at the abrupt change of topic. “I don’t really think that’s important here.”