Daddy By Decision. Lindsay Longford

they let someone in for five minutes, but don’t expect much. I think they have him doped up. Hank and Mama are in the waiting room. Callie and Jilly are coming up later. They’re switching off with the kids and looking after the ranch. Everybody’s staying there until we find out what’s going on. You going to come on out and bunk with us?”

      “Don’t think so.”

      Watching the red lights blink at each stop, they rode up to the seventh floor in silence. Jamming his hands into his pockets, Buck turned off his whirling thoughts, let himself exist in the cocoon of metal and piped-in music. He found himself closing his fist around the miniature car he’d stuffed into his pocket at the last minute. Fingering its smooth surface like a prayer stone, he traced its unseen shape over and over.

      In the intensive care waiting room, his mother sat waiting, her hands folded tightly together, her face gray-white. “I’m glad T.J. got hold of you. Hank’s with Hoyt. We brought him in ourselves. The ambulance would have taken too long.” Her voice was steady, her smile a brave slash of pink, but she didn’t unclasp her trembling hands.

      Hugging her and covering her hands with his much larger ones, Buck held her close to him. He didn’t expect her to collapse in tears. Bea Tyler wouldn’t. She did her crying in private. But her clasped hands trembled with a fine vibration that belied her outward calm and he felt helpless to comfort her. He folded himself into a sitting position next to her. “What happened?”

      As his mother talked, sorting through her thoughts, her words slow and halting, Buck greeted Hank, his younger brother, with a nod. Stricken, all his sunshine good humor vanished, Hank seemed suddenly years older than he had the day before, reminding Buck of T.J. when he heard about his infant son’s diabetes.

      A word here, a question there, thoughts sputtering into speech and trailing off, they finally abandoned the attempt and sat in silence, together but alone, while the clock moved sluggishly through the unending minutes until it was Buck’s turn to visit.

      Entering the quiet room filled with the electrical whirring of IV pumps and flashing green monitors, Buck stopped. Tubes went down Hoyt’s mouth, nose, draped across the bed. Two bags of packed cells for blood transfusion hung on a pole beside the bed. As Buck stayed at the entrance, his hand on the curtain, Hoyt opened his eyes and glanced around.

      Walking around the foot of the bed, Buck smiled. “Hey, Daddy. You gave us a hell of a scare.”

      Hoyt’s gaze lit briefly on Buck before his eyelids drooped shut, closing Buck out.

      Buck felt as though he’d been punched in the gut. He’d heard what his mama and brothers had told him, but even so, they hadn’t prepared him. Reality transcended words.

      The only father he’d ever known had looked at him and not recognized him. Loss, enormous and incomprehensible, swamped him.

      With his hand gripping Hoyt’s, Buck swallowed. Cast adrift, he clung to the weathered, rough hand of the man who’d raised him, who’d taught him everything, and it-was the longest, loneliest five minutes of his life.

      Five minutes at a time, the day crept into late afternoon.

      Buck felt the walls of the waiting room closing in on him, imprisoning him with each passing moment until he thought he’d throw something at the picture on the wall.

      He’d volunteered to come back and spend the night at the hospital so that the others could go back to the ranch. Callie Jo and Jilly were coming for the evening, but then they would return home so that everyone could rest and regroup while he stayed guard. He convinced everyone that was the best plan. They all had family responsibilities. He didn’t.

      In the meantime, it was going to be another three hours before he could see Hoyt again, and he seriously didn’t think he could take three more minutes penned up in the waiting room. He jerked to his feet. “I need a change of scenery. Some fresh air. Maybe a walk.”

      Hank, T.J. and their mother looked up at him, their eyes as dazed as his must be. Maybe it was the way they all stared at him with the same blue-green gaze, maybe it was the restlessness that had settled in his bones some time past, but he felt like a kid on the other side of a fence. “I’m going down for coffee. Y’all want some? A sandwich? Mama, can’t I get you something?”

      One after the other, like dominoes falling, they shook their heads. Once more he was struck by his brothers’ similarities to their mother and to Hoyt. And today more than ever before, Buck felt like the cuckoo in the robin’s nest.

      He passed up the cafeteria, opting for the more private vending machine lounge. Leaning his arm against the cold drink machine, he rested his forehead on his arm, staring uncomprehendingly at the selections. The machine ka-chunked as he pressed the round red button. A can of cola rolled to the bottom. All he could see was Hoyt’s blank gaze staring at him and looking away.

      Hoyt was only sixty-one. In the prime of life, he could still ride and rope with the best of them. Buck shut his eyes. Anger and frustration boiling up in him, he wanted to slam his fist into the machine.

      He wanted to grab Hoyt out of that bed, rip all the tubes and machines off him and run hell-for-leather out of the damned hospital. Get Hoyt out into the fresh air at the ranch where he belonged.

      But for the second time in his life, he was helpless.

      And so he stayed there, breathing deeply, trying to block out all the anger and fury ripping through him. He wasn’t used to being helpless, and he didn’t like it one damned bit.

      It was a faint, elusive scent that alerted him, a hint of cinnamon underlying flowers.

      He lifted his head and stared straight into eyes as bright blue as his own, eyes that widened before going carefully blank behind round glasses that slipped down her narrow nose.

      The black-and-white reflection in the Palmetto Mart monitor had been way, way off the mark—only a shadow of the real woman. In living color, her wide mouth didn’t need bright lipstick. Rosy pink and full, her lips curved deeply into small creases at the corners, a mouth made for laughing, for kissing. Falling to her shoulders in a mass of gold and brown, curls twisted into small corkscrews and tendrils.

      She was wearing some kind of loose green-blue dress with tiny, silly straps over a sleeveless white T-shirt, and the light ocean-colored material swirled around her bare legs as she stepped sideways, away from him. The dollar bill fluttered in her hand as she moved.

      “We meet again, Miz McDonald.” Pushing away from the drink machine, he scooped up his can of cola and nodded once to her. He gestured with the can toward her dollar and watched those curves around her lips tighten as pink tinged the edges of apple cheeks. “Flush—and flushed today, I see.”

      Her fingers clutching her dollar, her wallet-on-a-string drooping down her arm, Jessie wondered how fate could be so wicked. “Hmm,” she said and turned, walking steadily to the coffee machine, Jonas Buckminster Riley’s long shadow covering her as he followed.

      “What brings you to Tarpon City Memorial Hospital?” His drawl curled around the question, putting a slight spin on it that made her wary.

      “Now why would I tell you?” Jessie smiled sweetly at him and marched toward the coffee machine, her heart thumping sickeningly. She knew how Jonas could move panther-smooth from one unimportant question into a killing pounce.

      “Ah, answering a question with a question. You’re either Irish or a lawyer.”

      She didn’t stumble, didn’t stop, didn’t flinch. “And you can’t stop fishing, can you? Maybe the cowboy getup,” she said, gesturing toward his jeans and shirt, “is only camouflage, and you’re the lawyer?” She pleated her dollar. Had she gone too far? Drat her tongue.

      “You didn’t answer my question.” He braced himself against the soup vending machine.

      “No, I didn’t, did I?” Again Jessie managed her teeth-onedge-sweet smile. “How perceptive of you. To catch that. Oooh, I’m so impressed.” She batted her eyelashes mockingly.