Cowboy's Caress. Victoria Pade

she was near the table and chairs where her suitcases were, she pulled the free chair out from under the table and sat on it.

      Both the pencil Carly had used in her own hair earlier and her brush were close at hand so she motioned Evie Lee to stand in front of her.

      Evie Lee came on a twirl of delight, stopping with her back to Carly.

      It took only a few swipes of the brush to pull the silky tendrils off the child’s neck. Then Carly twisted Evie Lee’s hair into a loose knot at the crown and stuck the writing implement through it.

      “There you go,” Carly said when she’d finished.

      Evie Lee ran for the same mirror Carly had used moments before to check her own appearance and preened before it.

      “Oh, that’s so cute!” the little girl said.

      Carly laughed again, enjoying Evie Lee’s enthusiasm.

      “What do you say?” Bax prompted his daughter.

      “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” the child gushed.

      Bax sighed out another breath as if he were glad to have that over with and said, “Okay, now for more important things than pencils as hair doohickeys.”

      That drew Carly’s attention back to him.

      Until that moment she hadn’t noticed he’d brought with him a black medical bag much like the one her father had carried. He set it on the floor by her feet, then hunkered down on his heels in front of her. Opening the bag, he took a fresh bandage from it as Carly hiked up her pant leg just to mid-calf, exposing an ankle swollen to triple normal size and turned a variegated shade of midnight-and-blueberry blue.

      “You did a number on this, didn’t you?” Bax observed, studying the results of her fall. “So, what was your diagnosis?”

      “Sprained ankle with torn ligaments and strained tendons. But no broken bones,” Carly recited.

      “How did it happen?” he asked, still surveying it with only his eyes.

      Carly explained the chain of events that had landed her sprawled on the floor at her going-away party.

      “Well, at least you can say it happened in an attempt to do a good deed,” Bax said when she’d finished the story, barely suppressing a laugh at her recounting. “Let’s get it wrapped again for you. It’ll feel better.”

      And with that he cupped her heel in the palm of his hand and raised it to rest on the thick, hard ledge of his thigh.

      There wasn’t anything the slightest bit unprofessional or improper or out of the ordinary about what he did. Yet that was all it took for the whole array of sensations to kick in again, adding streaks of lightning to the list as they shot from her ankle all the way up her leg when he began to wrap the bandage expertly around her foot.

      No doubt about it, having him touch her was not a good idea.

      She didn’t know how hands that big could be so warm and gentle when they looked as if they belonged on the reins of a horse instead. But gentle they were. Exquisitely, enticingly gentle.

      And worse than all the sensations going through her again was the intense desire to feel the touch of those hands on other places. Much more intimate places…

      He was explaining to her how to wrap the bandage, but she only realized it belatedly. When she did, she yanked her thoughts out of the instant reverie his touch had elicited and tried to concentrate so she could perform this task for herself.

      “We can soak this a couple of times a day and keep it elevated as much as possible,” he was saying. “But mainly with an injury like this you just have to wait it out.”

      “Too bad. I’d do just about anything to speed up the healing process,” she heard herself say all the while she was thinking, Anything to speed up the healing process and get me out of town and away from everything being near you does to me.

      He didn’t seem aware of the internal turmoil he was causing with his ministrations, though, which was one thing to be grateful for, Carly thought. Still, it would have been nice to be able to turn off the turmoil altogether.

      When he’d finished with the bandage, her ankle was wrapped perfectly. He lowered her heel to the floor much the way he’d raised it to his thigh before and Carly suffered pangs of disappointment that the whole thing was over even as she silently screamed at herself to stop the insanity that seemed to overcome her every time she was around this guy.

      Bax closed the bag and took it with him as he stood. “Done,” he announced.

      Carly only wished her response to him was done, too.

      But even though it wasn’t, she pretended it was, got to her good foot and hopped to where her crutches waited against the wall not far away.

      “Thanks,” she said, not sounding genuinely grateful and regretting the flippancy in her tone. After all, it wasn’t his fault she’d turned into a sack of mush over him. He didn’t even know what was going on with her. So, feeling guilty, she added, “I really appreciate this.”

      “Glad to do it,” he assured. But as he watched her wiggle around for the right position on the crutches, wobble, then right herself, his expression turned dubious. “Maybe we should drive to the medical center rather than walk,” he suggested.

      The idea of being in an enclosed car with him was too dangerous at that point. Carly would have crawled to the medical building rather than that.

      “It’s only across the way. I’d have to walk farther to get out to the car than to get where we’re going. There’s a path from the backyard over to the Molner Mansion.”

      “The Molner Mansion?” he repeated as Carly led the way to the door. He still managed to get there enough ahead of her to open it for her.

      She explained that the three-story redbrick building had belonged to one of the founding families of Elk Creek and had been donated to the town as the medical building. She also told Bax and Evie Lee that it contained what would be Bax’s office, examining rooms, the emergency center, the dental office, outpatient surgery facilities and two rooms that acted as hospital rooms when the necessity arose.

      By then they’d reached the mansion and again Bax held the door open for her and Evie Lee to enter before him.

      “Do you want a tour of the place?” she offered.

      “How about tomorrow? Afternoon naps always leave Evie hungry, so I thought maybe we’d just visit our patients and then go home and I’d whip up some supper for the three of us. Which reminds me, thanks for stocking the refrigerator. That was really thoughtful.”

      Carly could feel her face flush. Doing a good deed was one thing, but it embarrassed her to have it mentioned.

      “It was nothing,” she said as she pushed the button for the single elevator that had been installed in the building to accommodate moving patients from one floor to the other.

      Carly had ridden the elevator more times than she could begin to count, but never had it seemed so small.

      Or smelled so good.

      She breathed in the same scent that had come out of the bathroom with Bax when she’d met him in the hall of the main house, enjoying the second helping of it more than she wanted to. She was glad the trip to the second floor was quick.

      But she was also slightly disappointed again when it was over and she had to leave the confines that allowed her the heady indulgence.

      Maybe the fall that had sprained her ankle had knocked something loose in her brain, she thought, and left her a little nuts.

      It didn’t take much to tell which room her sister was in because that was where the voices and laughter were coming from when they got off the elevator, so Carly led Bax and Evie Lee there, too.

      One step inside the room changed the tone of things