AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Only if the doctor says so.” Gary helped Josh to Luke’s truck. “I think he should have that ankle x-rayed.”
Katie nodded. “We will.”
“Where’s the car?” Josh asked as he slowly climbed into the bench seat of Luke’s truck.
“It’s a long story.”
“Don’t tell me. It broke down again.”
Katie’s head was beginning to throb. She didn’t want to think about what else might go wrong. First the convertible had broken down, then she’d heard the devastating news that Dave had died, and now Josh was hobbling, his ankle twice its normal size. “Yep, the car conked out again.”
“I thought Uncle Jarrod was gonna fix it—Ooh!” Josh sucked in his breath as he shifted and tried to slide across the seat.
“He did. Sort of. Come on, let’s get you to a doctor.” She squeezed on to the seat with her son and slammed the pickup door shut.
“I’ll call you later and see how he is,” the coach said and reached through the open window to rumple Josh’s sweat-soaked hair. “It was a great practice until you and Tom got into it.”
Luke took his place behind the wheel. “Where to?”
“Cawthorne Acres, I suppose.” Katie was already thinking ahead “My mom’s probably there, and we can borrow her car.”
Luke twisted the key in the ignition. “That’s clear out of town.”
“I know, but—”
“Isn’t there an emergency-care place around here somewhere where we can get that ankle looked at?”
“About half a mile that way,” she said, pointing up the street. “But I hate to bother you—”
“No bother at all,” he insisted and rammed the truck into gear. There was no reason to argue with him, so Katie guided him to the small clinic and felt pretty useless as Luke carried Josh into the emergency area. She’d been here before, not long ago, when John Cawthorne had collapsed and her mother had been worried that he’d suffered a second heart attack. Fortunately his condition had been diagnosed as heat stroke and he’d survived.
Josh’s injury wasn’t life threatening. The worst that would happen was that he’d be in a cast for a few weeks. Yet she hated the thought of him being in any kind of pain or laid up. Katie wiped her hands on the front of her shorts.
“Look, you can go now,” she said to Luke, once the paperwork was finished and a nurse had come with a wheelchair to whisk Josh to the X-ray lab. “I’ll call Bliss or Tiffany or Mom or someone to come get me.”
“No reason.”
“But it could be a while. He might have to see a specialist.”
Luke eyed her. “Why bother someone else,” he drawled, “when I’m here already?”
“You probably have better things to do.”
He lifted a shoulder as if his own life were of no concern. “If there was something pressing, I’d let you know.”
She was too worried to argue, and while Luke sat on one of the plastic couches and thumbed through a sports magazine that was several months old, she fidgeted, paced and tried not to worry. A jillion thoughts rattled through her head, most of them mixed up with Luke, Josh and Dave Sorenson. How could Dave have died and she not have heard about it? It was true that he and his folks had moved away over ten years before and they had little contact with anyone in Bittersweet, but they’d still owned the ranch next to Isaac Wells’s place. Usually, bad news had a way of filtering back to a small town. Katie’s heart ached, and her head pounded with an overwhelming and desperate grief. What could she tell Josh?
For years she’d kept the name of her child’s father a secret. Only she and her mother knew the truth. Even her twin half brothers, Nathan and Trevor, who had known Dave in high school, had been spared the bitter fact that one of their friends had done a love-‘em-and-leave-‘em number on their half sister. Her hands felt suddenly clammy, her heart as cold as the bottom of the ocean.
“Josh is gonna be all right,” Luke said as she passed by him for the thirtieth time. He gestured toward her anxious pacing. “You know, if you’re not careful you’re gonna wear a patch right through the floor.”
He smiled, but it seemed guarded somehow, and she wondered about him. From the minute he’d blown into town he’d been a mystery, a man without a past—a tall, lanky Texan with a sexy drawl and, seemingly, no ties. She’d fantasized that he’d held some deep, dark secret that she, as the local reporter with her ear to the ground, would uncover. Instead, he’d dropped a bomb that threw her life into unexpected and unwanted turmoil.
Luke studied her over the top of his magazine. “Can I get you something? A cup of coffee?”
“The last thing I need is caffeine.”
“Decaf then.”
