Stella Bagwell - Taming a Dark Horse

“Very much,” she answered. “I like helping people.”

“Is your mother a nurse?”

His question must have surprised her because she looked up from her task and frowned.

“Heavens no. Mom would run off screaming if she had to change a bandage or a bedpan.”

“What does she do?”

Nevada’s gaze slipped back to the job of cutting through the bandage and then she shrugged. “She works as a barmaid. In a tavern over in Bloomfield.”

“Oh.”

He didn’t think there had been any note of disgust in his one word, but she must have thought so. She looked up again and this time her lips were set in a grim line.

“Yeah. Oh. Her job is not something I approve of. But she seems to like it. She says the tips are good.” With a heavy sigh, she went back to cutting the last of the gauze away from his arm. “Believe me, Linc, my mother wasn’t always—well, let’s just say in the past years she’s allowed her standards to fall.”

Linc didn’t know why he’d even questioned her about her mother. He’d thought that maybe she’d gotten her personality from the woman. But apparently mother and daughter weren’t on the same wavelength.

“Why is that?”

She kept her gaze focused on her job. “She became—well, I guess you could call it disillusioned with a lot of things. She just gave up on ever having any sort of decent life. You know, a husband, a home, a good job.”

“Your parents are divorced?”

She nodded. “For a long time now. Dad liked women. I couldn’t count all the affairs he had before the two of them finally ended their marriage.”

Linc started to ask her if that was why she hadn’t yet married. But he stopped himself. He didn’t talk about marriage with any woman. Even in a passing way. And he certainly didn’t want this glamour girl to think he had any sort of matrimonial thoughts in his mind.

“That’s too bad,” was all he could say.

“Yes. Very bad,” she said in a resigned voice. “Because of my dad, my mother stopped taking care of herself. She began having affairs just to spite him. And after that everything went downhill.”

She looked up at him and he could see shame and sadness in her brown eyes. “I don’t really know why I told you all that. It’s not something I go around discussing with anyone.”

“I never repeat things told to me in confidence,” he said, just in case she was worrying he would tell others about her family.

Shaking her head, she said, “I wasn’t worried that you would. It’s just not something I talk about.”

Linc understood what she meant. Darla, his own mother, was never discussed by him or his cousins. Years ago, her name was brought up from time to time, but now there didn’t seem any point to it. None of them really knew if the woman was still alive. And apparently she didn’t care enough to let them know.

He noticed Nevada was beginning to peel away the layers of gauze away from his arm and he was relieved by the distraction. He didn’t want to think about mothers or parents or ruined marriages. All of which were very unpleasant subjects to Linc.

“Good lord, that arm looks like the skin of a baby mouse,” Linc exclaimed as she pulled the gauze completely away from his arm and then carefully rested his elbow on a clean towel.

“That’s good. It’s pink. It means it’s alive and getting good blood flow.”

It should be getting plenty of blood flow, Linc thought grimly. Each time the woman got near him he could feel his heart thump into overdrive. A silly reaction and one he’d certainly never experienced before.

He glanced down at his arm and tried not to feel deflated. The new skin was so thin it was practically transparent. All the hair was gone and in places he could see blue blood veins running just below the surface.

“I guess it is healing,” he had to concede.

“It is and very nicely, too. That’s the way we want to keep things going.” With her hand on his upper arm, she carefully twisted his arm back and forth so that she could inspect the top and underneath. “Boy, you really did a number on this one. Is the other arm like this one?” she asked.

“Pretty much.”

She glanced up at him and he could feel the touch of her brown eyes as it slipped all over his face.

“Victoria tells me that you were a hero. She said if it hadn’t been for you several of the horses would have burned to death.”

He grimaced. “Victoria is biased. She thinks of herself as my sister. She’d never say anything bad about me.”

Nevada shot him a faint smile. “Do you think of yourself as her brother?”

Linc had never had such a question put to him and for a moment it took him aback. All these years he’d thought of himself as the cousin, the one standing just on the outside. And it wasn’t because Ross or Seth or Victoria had tried to make him feel that way. In reality it had been quite the opposite. Tucker’s children had treated him as though he’d been one of Tucker’s offspring, too. But there was no escaping facts. He wasn’t one of them. And yet he loved them just as much or more than if they had truly been his siblings.

“Yeah. I guess I do,” he murmured.

“I’m glad. Because she thinks you’re just about the next best thing to pajamas.”

Glancing away from her, he said, “I didn’t do anything special. Anyone would have gone in after those horses. I just happened to be the first one at the barn.”

That wasn’t the way Nevada had heard it. Victoria had told her that several of the ranch hands had been at the barn and they’d tried to hold Linc and keep him from running back into the burning building. They had not been able to stop him, and by the time Linc had emerged from the flames, the entire group had begun to think he was dead.

“Well, I’m sure your horses are happy about it. But I’ll bet they miss you.”

“Dr. Olstead won’t let me go near them. Bacteria, he reasons,” Linc muttered. “Hell, they’re cleaner than I am. The stalled ones get a bath every day.”

Nevada smiled with understanding. “Dr. Olstead is right. You don’t want to risk getting any sort of infection. It’s not that he thinks the horses are unclean, but there’s other things around a barn that might harbor bacteria. Like flies and things like that.”

“Yeah. I understand. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“No. You don’t have to like it,” she agreed.

Reaching for the scissors, she began to cut away the bandages on his hands. This task took longer, but Linc didn’t mind. In spite of all his protests it was more than nice to have this lovely woman touching him so gently, touching him as though she really cared about his health and well being.

Don’t start thinking along those lines, Linc. Just because a woman acts sweet and gentle on the outside doesn’t mean she’s all goodness on the inside.

His hands had been burned even worse than his arms and Nevada clicked her tongue with misgivings as she unwrapped each finger. “God, this must have been painful. Does any of it still hurt you?” she asked. “If it does, just let me know. I have painkillers in my bag.”

“No. None of it hurts. In fact, it mostly doesn’t have any feeling at all,” he told her. “If I touched your arm, I doubt I’d feel it.” At least not in his fingertips, Linc thought. But the rest of his body darn sure would.

She nodded soberly. “The nerve endings in your skin were burned.”

“Will it always be that way?”

Her brows pulled together as she gave her head a little shake. “I’m not sure about that, Linc. I think that problem will get better in time, but I can’t make you any promises. I’m just an RN not a doctor.”

She proceeded to clean his hand and arm and then slather it with the yellow goo. Once she had every spot of his limb covered with the stuff, she began to wind clean gauze around his arm.

“I guess there’ll be plenty of scars once the skin heals,” he mused aloud. “What about the hair on my forearms? Will it ever come back?”

She looked up at him and gently smiled. “I’m not totally certain about that either. I’d say probably. At least part of it. But who cares whether you have hair on your forearms? You can always wear long sleeves. They look more masculine to me, anyway.”

He drew in a deep breath and pushed it out. “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”

She shot him an annoyed look, then laughed softly. “Look, Linc, I’m going to be honest with you. A few scars or a lack of hair is nothing to what you could have had. It’s a miracle you’re alive. So you’d better be thankful.”

He glowered at her. “You think I need your preaching to tell me that?”

“You haven’t heard preaching from me—yet,” she warned.

“Hmmph,” he snorted. “For someone so little you’re sure full of sass.”

“That’s to make up for my size,” she reasoned pleasantly.

As far as Linc was concerned, he didn’t see a thing wrong with her size. Everything was put together perfectly. Too perfectly for his peace of mind.

“Can I wiggle my fingers?” he asked as he forced himself to focus on anything but her.

She raised up from ministering to his arm. “Sure. Wiggle all you want.”

Linc attempted to flex his bare fingers, which still looked like sticks of watermelon to him. “All the time I was in the hospital, I kept thinking how good it would feel to bend my fingers. But it—well,” he grimaced as he tried to close them into his fist. “It doesn’t feel all that good. They’re stiff.”

“That will soon change,” she promised. “I’m going to bandage each finger lightly so you can move them around and maybe use them just a little. But I mean very little.”

He looked at her with surprise. “You mean I don’t have to go around with my hands plastered against boards?”

She gave him a happy smile. “Nope. Now, isn’t that good news? And aren’t you sorry about all this whining and griping?”

The expression that stole over his face was mostly sheepish, but the upward curve of the corner of his lips told her he was definitely pleased.

“Maybe I have been a little cranky,” he admitted.

She couldn’t help but laugh. “Is that normally your nature?”

He frowned. “Why do you ask that?”

Nevada made a palms up gesture. “Because I don’t know you, Linc Ketchum. I don’t know if you’re usually grouchy or cheerful or sweet or mean or what.”

“You’re not here to analyze my personality,” he reasoned. “And you don’t need to know any of those things just to doctor my hands.”

Nevada was going to be doing more than doctoring his hands, she wanted to point out, but she didn’t say that to him. She could see that it was disturbing to this man to have her here in the house. So far she’d tried to keep everything as light and playful as she could. And she hoped she could keep their time together on that same track. It wouldn’t do for both of them to get serious.

“Well, I guess I’ll learn for myself,” she said as she picked up a roll of gauze and started one end of it around his thumb. “Do you think you can tell me what you like to eat? Or is that a secret, too?”

“You don’t need to worry yourself about that either,” he told her. “Marina will be bringing up supper from the big house each evening.”

This was news to Nevada. Victoria really hadn’t had time yesterday to discuss some of the details about her stay here or her duties to Linc. She’d expected to be preparing some sort of meals for him and herself.

“That’s nice. But I hope she’ll allow me to do breakfast and lunch.”