Date with a Cowboy. Diana Palmer

shoving it into a bookcase with undue savagery. If only he’d realized what the consequences of his fervor for mission work would be …

      She stacked the books she was through sorting and got up. Morris was crying to be fed.

      As she moved into the kitchen, she felt suddenly nauseous, and that pain in her stomach came back full force. She managed to get the sack of dry cat food and poured some of it into his bowl. Then she sat down and groaned. She was so sick she could barely move. It hurt to move, anyway.

      She rested her forehead on her forearm, draped across the scarred little kitchen table where she and Grandad always had meals. She was sweating. It wasn’t that hot in the house. She had a window air conditioner, and it was running full tilt.

      These sick spells were getting closer together. Could she be having the same virus week after week? she wondered. Or could it be something else?

      Her grandmother had suffered from gallbladder disease. She remembered, barely, the old lady being taken to the hospital when Sara was about four years old to have an operation. Doctors had removed it. She recalled that old Mrs. Franklin had complained of terrible pain in her stomach and feeling nauseous.

      But gallbladder problems were in the upper right area of the abdomen. This felt like it was dead-center. Could she possibly have an ulcer?

      It would pass, she told herself. She’d just sit very still and not move around and it would go away, like it always did.

      But it didn’t go away. An hour later, it hurt to walk and nausea washed over her unexpectedly. She barely made it to the bathroom in time to lose her breakfast. The pain was horrible. She’d never felt anything like it. She felt feverish as well. Something was wrong. Something bad.

      She crawled to the phone in the living room and pulled it down on the floor with her. She pressed in 911.

      When the dispatcher answered, she gave her symptoms and then her name and address. The lady told her to stay on the line while she sent the paramedics out.

      Sara leaned back against the wall, so sick she couldn’t bear the thought of being moved. The pain was in her side, her right side. It was so bad that even the lightest touch of her fingers caused her to jump.

      Morris, sensing that something was wrong, came into the living room and rubbed against her, purring. She petted him, but she couldn’t let him get into her lap.

      Fortunately she hadn’t locked up for the night. She’d managed to reach up and turn on the porch light. When the paramedics knocked, she shouted for them to come in.

      One of them was a girl she’d gone to high school with, a brunette with short hair who’d been kind to her when other students hadn’t been.

      “Hi, Lucy,” Sara managed as the woman bent over her with a stethoscope.

      “Hi, Sara. Where does it hurt?”

      Sara showed her. When Lucy pressed her fingers against it, Sara came up off the floor, groaning.

      The three paramedics looked at each other.

      Lucy put the thermometer into Sara’s ear. “A hundred and two,” she remarked. “Any nausea?”

      “Yes,” Sara groaned.

      “Okay, we’re taking you in to the hospital. What do you need us to do?”

      “Get my purse on the sofa and make sure I’ve turned off everything and then lock the door with the key that’s in this side of the dead bolt,” she said weakly.

      “Will do. Curt, can you check the appliances and turn off the lights?”

      “Sure. What about the cat?”

      “He can stay here, he’s been fed and he has a litter box. I’ll get my boss to run out and feed him tomorrow …” She sat back with a sigh. “My goodness, it stopped hurting,” she said, smiling at Lucy. “I may not need to go to the hospital …”

      “Get her loaded, stat!” Lucy said at once, and moved away to speak into the microphone on her shoulder so that Sara couldn’t hear. She nodded as the reply came back. When she turned, Sara was on her way into the ambulance, arguing all the way. She wouldn’t know until hours later that the cessation of pain had been a signal that her appendix had perforated. If she’d argued successfully to stay home, she’d have been dead by morning.

      Four

      It was all a blur to Sara. She was surprised that they’d prepped her for surgery and had her sign a consent form only minutes after she arrived at the hospital.

      Dr. “Copper” Coltrain, the redheaded local surgeon, was already masked and gowned when they wheeled her in.

      “Hi, Dr. Coltrain,” Sara said, her voice drowsy from the preop meds. “Are you going to carve me up?”

      “Only your appendix, Sara,” he replied with a chuckle. “You won’t even miss it, I promise.”

      “But it feels fine now.”

      “I imagine so. That’s a very bad sign. It means it’s perforated.”

      “What’s that?” she asked, while a capped, gowned and masked woman beside her put something in a syringe into the drip that led down to the needle in her arm.

      “It’s something to make you comfortable,” came the reply. “Count backward from a hundred for me, will you?”

      Sara smiled, sleepy. “Sure. One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight, ninety …”

      She came to in the recovery room, dazed and completely confused. She wanted to ask them what they’d done to her, but her lips wouldn’t work.

      A nurse came in and checked her. “Awake, are we?” she asked pleasantly. “Good!”

      “Did Dr. Coltrain take out my appendix?”

      “Yes, dear,” the nurse replied.

      Sara closed her eyes again and went back to sleep.

      One of the great unsolved mysteries of small town life is how quickly word gets around if someone local is injured or killed. The process seems to consist largely of word of mouth. Someone who works at the hospital is related to someone who owns a small business, and phone traffic increases exponentially. Soon after the incident, it’s an open secret.

      Exactly how Jared Cameron found out that Sara’s appendix had gone ballistic was never known. But he showed up about the time they’d moved Sara into a semiprivate room.

      Tony Danzetta came with him and stood quietly outside the hospital room while Jared walked into it. The nurse who was making Sara comfortable and checking her vitals did a double take when she saw him and his companion.

      “Don’t mind Tony,” Jared told her. “He goes everywhere with me.”

      Sara peered at him past the nurse. “Don’t worry about it,” she told the nurse in a still-drowsy tone. “He’s not the only man who carries protection around with him.”

      The nurse burst out laughing. So did Jared.

      Sara closed her eyes and drifted off again.

      The second time she awoke, it was to find Jared lounging in the chair beside her bed. He was wearing working clothes. He looked really good in denim, she considered through a mixture of drugs and pain. He was very handsome. She didn’t realize she’d said it out loud until he raised both eyebrows.

      “Sorry,” she apologized.

      He smiled. “How do you feel?”

      “I’m not sure how to put it into words.” She looked past him at Tony, still standing patiently outside her room. “I seem to have lost my appendix. Do you suppose you could send Tony the Dancer out to look for it?”

      “It’s long gone by now. You’ll improve. While you’re improving, I’m taking