CHAPTER 4
Geez, couldn’t a guy get any sleep around here?
Through the thick fist of nausea and pain that had him in a chokehold, Gage blinked awake to the sound of girlish giggles carried through the window screen on the warm breeze.
They sounded like a couple of miniature laughing hyenas out there. Charlotte must have one of her obnoxious little friends over again. Did they have to titter and cackle right outside his window?
He was sick. Really sick. He couldn’t remember when he’d ever felt so lousy. Was he dying? He figured he had to be pretty badly off or he wouldn’t be stretched out here in bed in the middle of the day with pain racking his whole body.
Mom really ought to put her foot down and make the little brats play on the other side of the house so he could go back to sleep. He opened his mouth to call to her but couldn’t manage to force the words through the sandpaper lining his throat.
Man, his legs hurt. He tried to remember what had happened to them. Did he crash on his bike or something? Maybe Wyatt tackled him when they were playing football in the backyard earlier. Why did everything seem so hazy and weird? You’d think a guy could remember why his legs felt like they’d been run over by the family station wagon.
He blinked as some fragment of memory came to him, but he couldn’t move fast enough to pin it down. Before he could try to puzzle it out, Charlotte and her friend giggled again. A soft voice that didn’t sound like his mother warned them to be quiet so they didn’t wake Mr. McKinnon.
Mr. McKinnon. That was him. Weird. No. It wouldn’t be Charlotte out there. He tried to clear the fuzz out of his brain. Couldn’t be her. Charley was gone, had been gone for years.
Everybody was gone. Mom, Wyatt. Everybody.
So who was playing outside his window?
He’d have to figure that out another time, when he wasn’t so damn tired.
* * *
The next time he awoke it was to a cool, dim room and the musical murmur of women speaking softly.
“I gave him a pain pill as soon as he arrived, about four hours ago. I offered him two but he only took one.”
The voice was low, sexy, and he thought he could lie here in this dreamlike state and listen to it forever. He recognized it in some dim corner of his mind, but he was too hazy from the pain pill she was talking about to do anything about pulling the memory out.
“He’s been sleeping since then,” she went on. “I think he might have surfaced a few times but never all the way and never for very long.”
“You ask me, the man’s a damn fool to leave the hospital four days after breaking both legs.”
The second voice wasn’t nearly as sexy as the first. This one was honey-coated barb wire. “What’s he trying to prove? I mean, come on. It’s always the macho, good-lookin’ ones, honey. They make the worst patients and the worst husbands. Believe me, I’m married to one and have nursed more than my share of the other.”
The first woman laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind, Estelle.”
“You do that. You do that.”
Still not sure he wanted to let these women, whoever they were, know he was conscious, he peeked under his lashes and saw that Estelle was a sturdy woman who looked about fifty. She had skin the color of warm caramel and dozens of rainbow-colored beads in her swinging cornrows.
He wondered who she might be and what she was doing in his bedroom, until he saw the bright pattern of her nursing scrubs and the stethoscope around her neck. Ah. The nurse from the home health company. Who was she talking to?
The other woman stood just out of the range of his vision unless he twisted around, something he wasn’t sure he could do, even if he wanted to. Again, he thought he recognized the voice but couldn’t quite place it.
“I really hate to do this,” Estelle went on, “but I’m gonna need to check his vitals. That’s why they pay me the big bucks, to take care of stubborn cusses like this one who belong in the hospital but are too pigheaded to stay put.”
“I’ve been doing visual checks about every half hour while he sleeps. I’ve recorded all that for you.”
He managed to turn his head just enough to finally figure out who else was in the room—his very attractive next-door neighbor. Why had she been watching him while he slept? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know, or that he wanted to delve too deeply into why that idea made him forget all about the ache in his legs.
“Something tells me you’re no stranger to a sickroom,” Estelle said. “You seem to know your way around pretty well.”
If he hadn’t been watching her so closely, he would have missed the way his neighbor’s face froze for a moment—a funny, almost frightened look flashing through her eyes before those delicate features became a blank mask. “I’ve had a little experience.”
“Good. I think you’re gonna need it with this one. He’s gonna keep you hopping. Hate to do it but to check his temp and blood pressure I’ll have to wake him up. You want to do the honors?”
After a moment’s hesitation, his neighbor nodded and stepped forward, her arm outstretched as if to shake him.
“I’m awake,” he growled. He didn’t want either of them poking at him or prodding him, not when he had suddenly discovered a much bigger problem than a couple of women who talked about him when he was supposed to be sleeping.
He needed to use the bathroom.
Severely.
Somehow he would have to figure out a way to heft himself into that wheelchair and maneuver through that narrow doorway while preserving whatever shreds of his dignity might be left to a man as helpless as a blasted kitten.
No way on God’s green earth was he going to ask these two for help.
He sat up, ignoring the way the room whirled and spun. That’s it, he decided fiercely. No more pain pills for him.
Right now he would have given just about anything he owned for a few moments alone in a room with that bastard Lyle Juber. Gritting his teeth, he managed to find the control to the bed and lowered it so he was on the same level as the wheelchair. He pulled himself to a sitting position then inhaled sharply as several dozen knives sliced at him.
“Hold on there, cowboy,” Estelle said briskly. “Where do you think you’re going in such a hurry.”
“Bathroom,” he growled. “You got a problem with that?”
The nurse laughed. “Only if you fall and break your arms to go with that matched set of casts on your legs. Let me give you a hand, there.”
She quickly showed him the transfer board tucked next to the bed and instructed him on the easiest way to get from the bed to the chair.
“Lucky you’ve got all these muscles in your arms here,” she said. “You’re gonna need ’em the next few weeks while you can’t use your legs.”
He made some noncommittal sound, then wheeled into the bathroom. Once more he found himself grateful to his landlady for installing grab bars that hadn’t been there a week ago. She’d thought of everything, he thought. Or maybe she’d had help from his neighbor.
“We’ll leave the door open in case you need any help in there,” the nurse called out.
“The hell you will,” he snapped, slamming it shut behind him and driving the bolt home.
Everything took about three times as long from a wheelchair, he was discovering. By the time he finished what he needed to do and managed to maneuver close enough to the sink and could run some water to wash his hands and splash on his face, he felt a little more human. He was weak as a baby, though, both from the pills and from his injuries. Just that small amount of effort tired him out.
When he unlocked the bathroom and wheeled back into the bedroom, both women were waiting just where he left them. The nurse wore an I-told-you-so expression on her face but Lisa Connors just looked worried about him. He didn’t want to analyze why that soft concern in her eyes warmed him far more than it should.
He wanted to protest when the two women both stepped forward to help him transfer back from the wheelchair to the bed but he decided it wasn’t worth the headache. To his chagrin, he was too relieved to be back in bed to work up much of a fuss.
While the nurse checked his vital signs, he couldn’t keep his gaze from straying to Lisa Connors. She stood silently, taking notes as the nurse recited numbers to her. She looked cool and lovely, her eyes huge behind those wire-rim glasses. He couldn’t quite place a finger on what it was about her that attracted him so much. Really, with that choppy short brown hair, most people would probably consider her on the plain side. But there was a delicateness, a fragility, about her that appealed to some deep place inside of him.
“Everything looks normal so far.” The nurse set down the blood pressure cuff. “But you’re gonna have to do a better job of staying on top of the pain. Take my advice and don’t let it get out of control. You need to swallow two pills every four hours.”
“No. No more pills.”
Estelle stepped back and placed her hands on her ample hips. “Oh, you are just gonna be a joy to work with, aren’t you?”
“Look, lady, I’m not a junkie. I don’t like being out of it and I don’t want any more pills. I can tough it out with aspirin.”
Estelle and his pretty neighbor shared a look, then the home-care nurse shrugged. “You want to be in misery, knock yourself out, sugar. We’ll see how big and tough you feel in the morning after the pain has kept you up all night.”
“What do you need me to do?” Lisa Connors asked.
“Just make sure you stick close enough to pick up the pieces. You sleeping over?”
“Oh, no!”
Did she have to protest so vehemently? he wondered, annoyed for some strange reason.
“I live in the house just next door,” she went on. “His landlady and I rigged up a system so I can hear what’s happening over here even when I’m at home. It’s just a baby monitor, really, but our houses are so close that it works just fine. All he has to do is call out and I can be here in a second.”
“A baby monitor?” He couldn’t keep his disgust out of his voice. As if he needed something else to make him feel helpless and infantile.
She gave him a lopsided smile. “Sorry. It was the best we could come up with on short notice, without installing a whole intercom system.”
“It’s a little invasive, don’t you think? What if I don’t want you spying on me twenty-four hours a day?”
Estelle snorted. “Then you should have stayed in the hospital where you belong, at least for a few more days.”
Since he couldn’t come up with any response to that, he opted to keep his mouth shut.
Into the silence Lisa Connors spoke again. “Once you can get along a little better on your own, we won’t need to keep the monitor turned on. I have to admit, I feel more comfortable knowing I can keep tabs on you. What if you fell while you were trying to transfer to the wheelchair for a middle-of-the-night trip to the bathroom? I wouldn’t have any way of knowing you needed me until the morning.”
“That would be my problem, wouldn’t it?”
“No. It would be my problem. I was hired to take care of you and I intend to do that. It’s either the baby monitor or my girls and I can sleep in your spare bedroom for the next few nights. Which would you prefer?”
Definitely not the spare bedroom idea. The whole reason he fought so hard to come home was for privacy. He had lived alone since he moved out of his dad’s place in Las Vegas for college. He was a solitary man, and that’s just the way he liked things.
Besides, pain pills or not, he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep a bit knowing this woman, with her violet scent and her big blue eyes, was just in the next room.
When he didn’t answer, Lisa Connors smiled. “Not in the mood for a sleepover? I’ll confess, I prefer my own bed, too. So the baby monitor can stay?”
“I guess,” he muttered. He hated the idea but this was another battle he couldn’t quite summon the energy to fight.
“Good,” Estelle said briskly. “Now I’m gonna leave my pager number. Lisa, you check those vitals every four hours or so. You notice any bleeding or anything that might indicate circulation trouble, one of you needs to give me a buzz right away. Doesn’t matter which one. Otherwise I’ll check in with you tomorrow, cowboy. Don’t you go out dancing, now, you hear me?”
“Ha-ha,” he muttered. “You’re a real barrel of laughs.”
Estelle’s raspy chuckle hung in the air behind her for several moments after she left, leaving him alone with Lisa Connors.
“Are you hungry?” she asked after a moment. “You didn’t eat lunch. I can heat up some soup for you or make a sandwich if you feel up to some solids.”
Nothing sounded appealing to him but he knew one of the reasons that single pain pill had knocked him for a loop was his lack of appetite. He needed to keep food in his stomach, whether it sounded good to him or not.
“A sandwich would work.”
“Ham and cheese okay?”
He nodded.
“It will just take me a minute to throw something together. If you’d like to watch TV, I’ve hooked the remote to a cord tethered to the side of the bed there so you can always find it and there are some magazines here, too. I wasn’t sure of your interests but I picked up several that my…my husband used to enjoy reading.”
He only looked at her, but suddenly she colored up like a sugar maple leaf in October. Odd for such a dark-haired woman to show color so clearly. He hadn’t met too many women in his lifetime who could actually blush but the few he had met had been blond.
What had her so edgy? Maybe she didn’t like this situation any better than he did. It was an interesting thought. He knew if he were in her shoes, he sure wouldn’t enjoy baby-sitting a grumpy stranger for a few weeks.
For some reason the thought that she might actually be as uncomfortable with this as he was made him feel a little better about the whole thing.
* * *
After a quick peek into the living room to check on the girls, still engrossed in one of their favorite videos, Allie hurried to the kitchen. She closed the door and blew out the breath she’d been holding, then pressed a hand to her fluttering stomach.
What was it about Gage McKinnon that sent her hormones into a tailspin? The man was lethal. Even stiff and bad-tempered from the pain, he had a raw, masculine appeal.
A wounded, grumpy soldier. He was obviously miserable and in considerable pain but he was standing firm on not taking the narcotics his doctors prescribed. She had a feeling despite Estelle Montgomery’s predictions to the contrary, he wasn’t going to bend on his objections to the drugs. He seemed mulish and hardheaded enough to stick with his convictions.
She couldn’t really blame him for that, Allie thought as she buttered bread for his sandwich. A few times in her life she’d had to take pain medication and she had despised that out-of-control feeling.
He wasn’t going to be an easy patient. Despite the sudden conviction, she had to admit that all her nurturing instincts kicked in whenever she saw him lying so dark and masculine on that bed. She wanted to take care of him. To smooth down that lock of hair mussed by sleep and adjust his pillows and distract him from the pain.
Something in his eyes called to her. He seemed lonely, somehow. Lost. As if he’d been wandering alone for a long time and needed somewhere safe and warm to rest for a while….
She heard her own thoughts and rolled her eyes. Right. The man was a tough, hardened FBI agent. Maybe she was projecting her own problems onto him.
What was the matter with her? She had a job to do here and it didn’t include mooning over her patient. This was a good opportunity to make a little extra cash to add to her precious escape fund and she couldn’t blow it just because Gage McKinnon left her all soft and tingly.
She would do her job and do it well, Allie chided herself sternly. She would make the poor man as comfortable as possible given the circumstances. That didn’t include letting him unsettle her.
Keeping a tight rein on her thoughts, she finished fixing the sandwich and arranged it on a plate along with some carrot sticks and potato chips. After she added a glass of milk and one of the low-sugar oatmeal cookies she had made earlier in the day, she carried the tray down the hall to his bedroom.
She paused in the doorway when she spied her daughters standing by Gage McKinnon’s bed, Gaby in the lead and Anna hovering just behind her sister.
“Hey, mister, we colored you a picture,” Gaby was saying, holding out a page ripped from a coloring book like it was a sacred pictograph. “It’s Big Bird and a rainbow. I did Big Bird and Anna did the rainbow. She doesn’t stay inside the lines very well but she’s only three. Hey, mister, what happened to your legs?”
Without bothering to wait for any kind of response, in typical Gaby fashion, her oldest chattered on. “Do they hurt? I bet they do. My friend Gina at my old house broke her arm falling off the swings, and she had to wear a cast. She said it hurt a lot. She still used it to whack her little brother, Nicky. He was a brat. My mama called him a little pill. That’s funny, huh? Hey, mister, where do you want us to put our picture? I bet my mama could find some tape.”
Something about the hard set of his expression warned Allie he didn’t appreciate the company.
She stepped forward quickly, hoping to head off the abrupt answer she sensed brewing. “Girls, it’s very nice of you to try making Mr. McKinnon feel better with a picture. I think the best thing for him right now is to rest. Why don’t you go color a little more? I’m almost finished here and then we’ll be going back to our house for the evening.”
Faced with her no-arguments tone, the girls didn’t quibble. Gaby skipped out of the room, followed by her Anna shadow.
When she and Gage were alone, she set the tray down on the rolling bedside table Ruth had procured and pulled it toward him.
“Sorry about that,” she finally said to break the suddenly awkward silence. “Gabriella can be a little overwhelming sometimes. She means well but I’m afraid she hasn’t learned when to turn it off.”
A muscle tightened in his jaw. “Don’t you have anywhere else for them to go? A sitter or something?”
The sudden attack took her completely by surprise and for a few moments she could only blink at him. “I…no. Not really,” she finally said. “I’m sort of between care providers at the moment. They’re both usually very well-behaved. I…Mrs. Jensen and I didn’t think you would mind them being here.”
“You were both wrong.”
She stiffened at his blunt tone. Well, that was plain enough. He disliked her daughters. How could anybody not adore her daughters? They were sweet and kind. Funny. Completely adorable!
Any warm feelings she might have been crazy enough to entertain for Gage McKinnon fluttered out the window on the breeze. The man wasn’t a wounded soldier. He was grumpy and stubborn and mean tempered.
“I’m sorry,” she said tersely. “I didn’t realize you would object to the girls. I’ll do my best to keep them out of your way.”
“You do that, Ms. Connors.”
She swallowed her sharp retort and nodded. He had a right to his solitude. A couple of preschoolers underfoot probably weren’t the best medicine for someone recovering from a traumatic injury.
She would just have to do her best to keep them quietly occupied for the next few weeks. She could do that. Just as she could control her own unwilling attraction for her cranky patient.