To Love A Cowboy Read online

  Something in the kid’s hand caught Rafe’s eye. He pulled the cover down slightly to reveal a photograph one of the nurses must have given him to hold. Rafe slipped it out of the boy’s small hand and stared at it in the dim light. Carly, the boy and a blond-haired, slightly built man smiled back at him. They were standing on the deck of a sailboat. One of those thirty-five-foot jobs that slept six and could sail to a tropical paradise on a moment’s notice.

  Impressive. But not altogether surprising. He’s always known Carly would land on her feet. In money.

  The boy in the picture was holding up his prize catch—a fat six-inch fish, still wriggling on its hook.

  Rafe’s gaze traveled back to the man in the picture—and the protective embrace he had around Carly and the boy. They were a family. Any fool could see that. The kid belonged to this stranger to whom Rafe had once lost Carly. Not to him.

  Definitely not to him.

  A strange kind of disappointment disguised as relief skittered through him. Not that he’d really wanted to believe the boy was his. More than that, he would never have believed Carly capable of keeping such a thing as his own child from him.

  Rafe slammed his eyes shut. He had never wanted to believe she’d left him for another man, either.

  Carly had even denied it. But a woman didn’t just run out on a man she claimed to love—or a man who loved her—without a damn good reason. Well, he thought bitterly, looking at her child, some reasons are better than others. She’d wasted no time marrying that law professor of hers and starting a family. The family she’d said she wanted with him. As he looked at the flesh-and-blood evidence of Carly’s union with another man, the hurt cut more deeply than Rafe had expected. Not for the first time, he wondered how different his life would have turned out if he hadn’t been so shortsighted.

  He stared at the child, transfixed, feeling more acutely aware of the impassable rift that had grown between him and Carty than he had in all the years that had passed. The boy made everything somehow more concrete. Final.

  He turned to Rawlins. “What’s his name?”

  “He said it was Evan,” she answered. “That’s about all we could get out of him.” Rawlins smoothed the blanket at the foot of the boy’s bed. “Shall I wake him?”

  Rafe tore his gaze from the kid and started for the door. “No. I want to see his mother first.”

  A herd of horses was stampeding through her head.

  That was the only explanation that made any sense to Carly’s muddled brain. Eyes closed tightly against the thundering pain, she risked a slight movement of her head, toward the sound that had brought her up from that dark abyss of blessed nothingness.

  The Voice.

  More specifically, the man’s voice. She couldn’t make out any real words. Only the soothing baritone that seemed as familiar as the heartbeat thudding inside her head. Instinctively she leaned toward the sound.

  Instantly she regretted the movement. Pain exploded through her head, as if some very large monster were rattling the bars of its cage. Nausea crept up her throat, and fear pumped through her like a stab of cold air.

  Blackness threatened the hint of light behind her lids once more. It ebbed and flowed with the current of pain, like the slow sweep of a raven’s wing. Darkness had always scared her, yet she fought it off now, only for the sake of that voice....

  Open your eyes.

  Had the thought been her own, or had the Voice demanded it? Her thought process rebelled. Too muddled to think... But it seemed a reasonable request. Her eyes refused to cooperate. Why? Something heavy was...pressing on her. If only she could shift out from under it—

  A chill of sweat broke out on her skin. Big mistake, she thought, swallowing hard and stilling instantly. The burning pain, she realized, was definitely in, but not limited to, her aching head. It was, in point of fact, everywhere. She felt broken, like a china doll.

  Some high-pitched metronome echoed the rapid tripping of her heart.

  Okay. Okay. Don’t move. Just...just lie here.

  But where’s here?

  Frankly, my dear, I don’t—

  “Open your eyes, Carly. You can hear me. I know you can,” came the Voice again, clearly this time. Something prickled her foggy mind. It sounded familiar, like the voice that had haunted her dreams for years.

  Dreams.

  Relief poured through her. That was it! It was all a dream, she reasoned. If she opened her eyes, she’d wake up and see it was all an illusion—the pain, the voice, the darkness.

  “Carty—”

  Do it! she told herself. She’d never been a coward—except, she amended, maybe once. Pushing back the darkness, she forced her eyes open.

  She found herself flat on her back in a...bed. Not her bed, she noted with a frown. Not even her bedroom. The partially curtained-off room—awash with shadowy shapes—seemed dimly lit and stark, the dimness relieved only by the daylight spilling from a nearby window. Sunlight glinted off some steel contraption above her.... What was the word? Pulleys.

  Below that, her leg—swathed in white—hung like an ungainly ballast on a scale. Her ankle throbbed.

  Broken?

  She tried to wiggle her toes, then sucked in a sharp breath. Definitely. Swallowing down a wave of nausea, she sent up a silent prayer that all this was still just a dream. But on a scale of one to ten, this open-eyed dream had the other one beat hands down.

  The shadowy figure of a man swam into focus as he got to his feet beside her. At first, he wasn’t much more than a blob of darkness against the light behind him. He mumbled something that sounded like a prayer as the blotchy shadows fell away from him.

  Her heartbeat stalled in her chest. Now she knew she was dreaming. Rafe Kellard was ancient history and wishful thinking all rolled into one. Despite her best attempts to banish him from her subconscious, he’d inhabited her dreams for years now. It shouldn’t surprise her that he was here in this one. Only he seemed...real...standing beside her here—wherever the heck here was.

  A crooked, familiar smile lifted one side of his mouth. “Welcome back.”

  She stared at him for a long moment, half expecting the apparition to vanish. It didn’t.

  “Rafe?” The word came out in a croaking whisper.

  His expression grew guarded even as she watched it. “Hi, Carly.”

  She sucked in a breath. Rafe. Dear God, he was real. She drank in the sight of him for a long, confused moment. He looked bigger than she remembered. Stronger. The years had honed his already muscular frame like a fine weapon, forged by flame to steely perfection. His broad shoulders strained the seams of his denim workshirt. A day’s growth and then some of dark beard stubbled his chin, highlighting a thin white scar along his jawline. She didn’t remember that being there before.

  Silver threaded the coal-black hair that cut carelessly across his eyes. She remembered those the most—the bluest eyes she’d ever seen on a human being, they could be cool as the deepest ice, or warm as a sun-baked Colorado sky. Now, they seemed hooded by some emotion she couldn’t name.

  Her voice sounded hoarse when she mumbled, “I don’t understand.”

  A small breath of laughter escaped his lips. “Hey, that makes two of us, darlin’.”

  Carly squinted at the room. “Where...where am I?”

  “In a hospital. In Reno. ICU, to be specific.”

  The room revolved in a slow, sickening spin. “Hospital?”

  “You had a car accident near here. Do you remember?” She stared blankly at him, trying to get a grip. Accident? If she’d had an accident, surely she’d remember. Wouldn’t she? She tried hard to clear her thoughts...to think. Her head ached.

  “Not really. I remember...driving,” she began haltingly. “And...the snow...” Her mind went blank. Nothing. Think. Think!

  Then, images flashed through her mind: snow, swirling and driving against the vanishing blacktop; suitcases crammed in beside an overgrown ficus tree and Evan’s Super-Nintendo in the back se
at of her Accord.

  Oh, my God! She lunged up off the pillow.

  “Evan!” Pain knifed through her as Rafe’s strong hands pressed her back against the pillow.

  “Take it easy, Carly.”

  “My son—”

  “He’s doing fine. He’s sleeping right down the stairs.”

  “Where?” she demanded. “I—I have to see him—I have to make sure—”

  “Calm down. Just settle on down. He’s fine. I swear, I saw him with my own eyes. He’s sleeping. Got a few bumps and bruises, nothing serious.”

  Shock settled her against the pillow. “Y-you saw him?”

  “Yeah. Just a little while ago.”

  “Are-are you sure?”

  “Yeah, I’m sure.”

  She moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. “But...y-you don’t even know him. You could be wrong.”

  Rafe’s eyes grew dark, and an odd smile lifted his mouth. “Nobody had to tell me who he belonged to. I recognized him the minute I saw him.”

  Her breath froze in her throat, and she watched Rafe, hardly daring to breathe. “You did?”

  “Yeah. He looks just like you, Carly.”

  A terrible mixture of relief and guilt sapped what little strength she’d mustered. She sank back into the pillow. People had told her Evan looked like her. He had her color eyes, her color hair. But she’d always thought him a perfect little clone of his father.

  The ache in Carly’s head grew worse, and she reached up to find a bandage protecting the left side of her forehead and a tender swelling around her left eye and cheek.

  Rafe’s hand covered hers, pulling her probing fingers away from the bandage. His hands felt rougher, stronger than they had nine years ago, the last time she shared a touch with him. There was no disguising the way he made her heartbeat jump. The monitor beside her bed announced it unrepentantly.

  Withdrawing his hand, he kindly ignored the erratic beep. “You banged yourself up pretty good. They said you were wearing your seat belt. That was lucky. You’re gonna be okay now. It could have been a lot worse.”

  Her whole body hurt, her ankle throbbed, and her head felt like an overripe melon. But he was right. Evan was safe. Nothing else really mattered. She looked back at Rafe. “How long have I been here?”

  “Since last night.” His eyes left hers and trailed down to her jacked-up ankle. “You’ve been out all this time. What in the devil were you doing driving in that storm, Carly?”

  Something hovered below the surface of his even expression—frustration, maybe anger—but she was too exhausted to sort it out. Raw emotions tumbled through her, and she tamped them down. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself in front of him. Not now. Not after all these years.

  “Carly?”

  “I—” She closed her eyes to push back the throbbing ache. She felt what little strength she’d mustered seeping out of her. Trying to remember what he’d just asked her seemed to take all her concentration. “The motel had overbooked because of the storm. I...had to keep going. I don’t remember much else.” Her eyes widened with sudden alarm. “Oh, Rafe, was anyone else hurt in the accident?”

  Rafe’s expression softened for only a moment. “No. Drunks have this miraculous habit of coming out without a scratch and turning other people’s lives upside down.”

  He didn’t say “including mine,” but the words hung between them anyway. A drunk driver. Anger seeped past the sheer relief of being alive. Damn whoever it was for risking her life and her son’s with their carelessness. She had been lucky. It could have been worse. Much, much worse.

  A chubby nurse garbed in green scrubs cruised into Carly’s line of vision with a smile on her face.

  “Ah, we’re finally awake, are we?” She pressed the backs of her fingers quickly to Carly’s forehead and cheeks, then felt the pulse at her wrist.

  “Is she lucid?” the woman asked Rafe, as if Carly weren’t even in the room.

  “My name is Cara Lynn Jamison,” she replied testily before he could answer, “and Bill Clinton currently occupies the White House. Except for a headache the size of the Rock of Gibraltar, a sore ankle, and a few unaccounted-for minutes, I’m quite all here, thank you.”

  The nurse gave Carly a quick smile, checked the tape on the heart monitor and wrote something down on a metal chart. Apparently, cranky patients were nothing new to her.

  She looked at Rafe. “It’s important not to tire her just now. You have three minutes. Then you’ll have to go.”

  Rafe nodded as the nurse glided away, then rubbed a hand down his face, erasing all trace of emotion. “Look, they, uh...they said your phone was disconnected down in L.A. Nobody knows you’re here, except me. Is there somebody I can call for you? A friend?” He paused. “Your husband?”

  She stared at him for a moment, then shook her head.

  Rafe frowned. He wanted to press her, find out if that meant no, she didn’t want him to call the guy, or no, she wasn’t married anymore. And why had she kept her maiden name? But all at once she seemed pale and terribly fragile. He walked to the window and pushed aside the thin green drape. Sunlight poured through the glass, but the cold seeped through the barrier as surely as it did into his heart.

  She wasn’t the girl she’d been all those years ago. She’d grown into a woman. Gone was the glorious mane of long hair that had been her trademark. In its stead, a short cap of silver-blond framed her face and made her look every inch the professional he suspected she was. She was still slender as a willow, but from what he could see, she’d filled out some, in all the right places. Places his gaze deliberately avoided. Places once as familiar to him as his own hand. A curse slid silently past his lips.

  “Rafe?”

  Carly’s voice made him jump. He turned back to her.

  “Yeah?”

  “Why are you here?”

  Hell if I know, he wanted to say. But he didn’t. The truth was, he’d asked himself that same question a hundred times since getting on the plane in Durango. He still had no answer for it, except that he’d had no choice. Halfway across Nevada, he’d stopped kidding himself that he was coming for the kid’s sake alone. He’d come for her. For some kind of resolution with Carly, whatever that meant. A finish to what they’d once had. In truth, he’d come as much for himself as for her.

  Now, staring at her in the half-light of morning, with bruises darkening her cheek and jaw, her leg swathed in plaster and her eyes dark with fear, he wondered at the wisdom of that choice. Seeing her like this made him want to protect her from all of it. Some foolish impulse told him to hold her in his arms until she stopped looking so scared and that erratic little blip on the heart monitor beside her bed grew slow and steady and calm.

  His hand curled into a fist at his side. He might be an idiot for coming, but he wasn’t a fool. He wasn’t going to be suckered into that trap one more time. She needed help, and for the sake of her son, he’d help until she could handle things on her own. Then he’d be outa here so fast she’d have to look twice to see his dust.

  “Rafe?” she repeated. “I have to know. Why did you come?”

  He walked over to her side and straightened the blanket beneath her arm. “Don’t worry about any of that now, okay? We’ll talk about it later. Right now, you need to get some rest.”

  Her hand found his. Despite the exhaustion that drained her, she held on tight. “Evan—my son—he must be scared.”

  “I’ll take care of him.”

  She stared at him, her eyes glassy and bright. “But why? You’re not—I mean, we’re not...your problem, Rafe.”

  He gave a little snort of laughter. “In a perfect world, you’d be right. But life’s far from perfect, ain’t it, darlin’?” Disengaging her hand from his, he reached for the sheepskin coat he’d draped over the foot of her bed. “So don’t worry about it. Try to get some sleep. I’ll try to get Evan in to see you later.” Fitting his Stetson on his head, he made for the door.

  “Rafe?”
r />   “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  “Sure.”

  The ICU door closed silently behind him.

  Chapter 2

  The child sat Indian-style amid the tangle of sheets on the bed, ignoring both the Saturday-morning cartoons blaring from the ceiling-hung television and the woman who stood by the window, dressed in a severe navy blue suit. Instead, the boy stared wide-eyed at Rafe as he came through the door. Enormous brown eyes, fringed by thick, dark lashes, met Rafe’s surprised gaze, and he stopped two strides into the room.

  Once more, the boy’s uncanny likeness to Carly hitched some emotion deep in Rafe’s chest. The kid’s chin went up with a defiant tilt, but there was no disguising the fear etched on his face. Rafe’s heart went out to him, remembering all the times he’d been confronted with strangers as Evan was about to be now. All the times an imperfect system had set him up for yet another disappointment.

  The stiff-backed woman looked Rafe up and down through Coke-bottle-thick glasses before walking toward him with her hand extended. She put him immediately in mind of Gunga Din.

  “Mr. Kellard?”

  “Miss—?”

  “Blackwell. Rosalind Blackwell, child services. I was beginning to wonder if you were really here.” She glanced at her watch. “Evan and I have been having a nice little chat, haven’t we, Evan?” The boy nodded his head barely, but looked like a scared, bridle-shy foal about to bolt.

  “He’s a little nervous,” Blackwell went on.

  “That’s understandable. Many of our children, when they come to us, are—”

  Rafe cut in. “Excuse me, but I doubt Evan’s mother would take kindly to your calling her son one of your children.”

  “I was hoping, Mr. Kellard,” Blackwell continued tightly, “that we could talk about—”

  Rafe looked at Evan, who sat frozen to his spot on the bed. “Miss Blackwell,” Rafe said, “I’d rather we postpone this discussion for a few minutes. I’d like a chance to talk to the boy. Alone.”