James Bravo's Shotgun Bride

She had James’s phone in her purse. In her frantic scramble to get in the ambulance with Levi, she hadn’t thought to give the phone back. And then she’d clutched it like a lifeline all the way to the hospital. She’d only stuck it in her purse to free her hands when the reception clerk had given her all those forms to fill out.

Addie sucked in a slow breath and let it out even slower. Oh, dear Lord, please. Let PawPaw pull through this and let me not throw up now. Everything had happened way too fast. Her mind—and her poor stomach—was still struggling to catch up.

Her own cell phone was in her purse, too. She’d barely remembered to grab it off the front hall table before racing out the door. She needed to get it out and call Carmen in Laramie. But the nurse had said Levi wouldn’t be in the ER for long. They would evaluate his condition and move him over to cardiac care for the next step. Addie was kind of waiting to find out what, exactly, the next step might be so that she could share it with her sister when she broke the terrifying news.

A door opened across the room. The doctor she’d talked to earlier emerged and came toward her.

Addie jumped to her feet, swallowed hard to keep from vomiting all over her boots and demanded, “My grandfather. Is he...?” Somehow she couldn’t quite make herself ask the whole dangerous question.

“He’s all right for now.” The doctor, a tall, thin woman with straight brown hair, spoke to her soothingly. “We’ve done a series of X-rays and given him medications to stabilize him.”

“Stabilize him,” Addie repeated idiotically. “Is that good? That’s good, right?”

“Yes. But his X-rays show that he’s got more than one artery blocked. He’s going to need emergency open-heart surgery. We want to airlift him to Denver, to St. Anne’s Memorial. It’s a Level-One trauma center and they will be fully equipped to give him the specialized care that he needs.”

Her head spun. Denver. Open-heart surgery. How could this be happening? From the moment she’d caught sight of James Bravo tied to a chair in the basement at Red Hill, nothing had seemed real. “But...he’s never been sick a day in his life.”

The doctor spoke gently, “It happens like this sometimes. That’s why they call heart disease the silent killer. Too often, you only know you’ve got a problem when you have a heart attack—but I promise we’re doing everything we can to get him the best care there is. You got him here quickly and that’s a large part of the battle. His chances are good.”

Good. His chances were good. Was the doctor just saying that or was it really true? Addie sucked in air slowly and ordered her queasy stomach to settle down. “Can I see my grandfather, please?”

“Of course you can. This way.”

* * *

In the curtained-off cubicle, Addie kissed Levi’s pale, wrinkled cheek and smoothed his wiry white hair and whispered, as much to reassure herself as to comfort him, “PawPaw, I promise you, everything is going to be fine. You’ll be on the mend before you know it.”

Levi only groaned and demanded in a rough whisper, “Where’s James?”

That made her long to start yelling at him again. But he looked so small and shrunken lying there, hooked up to an IV and a bunch of machines that monitored every breath he took, every beat of his overstressed heart. Yelling at him would have to wait until he was better.

Because he would get better. He had to get better. The alternative was simply unthinkable.

Right now nothing could be allowed to upset him. So she lied through her teeth. “James is out in front waiting to hear how you’re doing.”

“Good.” Levi barely mouthed the word. “Good...” And then, with a long, tired sigh, he shut his eyes.

Addie bent close to him. “I love you, PawPaw.” She kissed him and had to close her mind against the flood of tender images. Her mom had died having her and she’d never known her dad. All her memories of growing up, he was there for her, and for Carmen. He was their mom and their dad, all rolled into one cantankerous, dependable, annoyingly lovable package.

She could not—would not—lose him now.

A nurse pushed back the curtain and announced, “The critical-care helicopter has arrived. We need to get your grandfather on his way now.”

“Can I ride with him?”

The nurse explained gently that there just wasn’t room.

About then, Addie realized her pickup was back at the ranch. She’d have to call someone to give her a ride home so she could get herself to Denver. And what about the horses? She had to find someone to look after them at least until tomorrow. And she still really needed to call Carmen immediately.

She thanked the nurse, kissed her grandpa one more time and hustled back out to the waiting room, where the clerk had more paperwork waiting for her to fill out. She took the clipboard the clerk passed her through the reception window, reclaimed her seat and got to work filling in the blanks and signing her name repeatedly, simultaneously praying that Levi was going to pull through.

At least they had the best health coverage money could buy now. Brandon had seen to that months ago. When she agreed to have the baby, he’d set up a fund that would pay thirty years’ worth of premiums for her and the child. At the time, she’d argued that she had Affordable Care and that would be plenty. But he’d insisted that she should have the very best—and that the fund would be set up to cover Levi, too, and any children she ever had.

“Everybody gets sick at some point,” Brandon had reminded her softly, a hard truth that he knew all too intimately. “Everybody needs health care at some point. When that happens for you, for the baby or for Levi, you don’t need to be worrying about how to pay your share of the hospital bill.”

Thank God for Brandon.

Tears searing the back of her throat, Addie signed the last form, got up and passed the clipboard through the window to the clerk. The clerk handed back a couple of forms and her insurance card. She jammed all that in her purse and was pulling out her phone to call her half sister when James Bravo pushed through the emergency room doors.

He came right for her, so big and solid and capable-looking, still wearing the same jeans and chambray shirt with blood on the collar that he’d been wearing when she found him tied up in the basement an hour before. Those blue eyes with the dark rims around the iris were full of concern. “How’re you holding up?”

She wanted to lean on him, to have him put his big arms around her and promise her that everything would work out fine. But what gave her the right to go leaning on him? She didn’t get it. It was...something he did to her. As if he were a magnet and she were a paper clip. Every time she saw the guy, she felt like just...falling into him, plastering herself against him. She didn’t understand it, felt nothing but suspicious of it, of her own powerful attraction to him.

And what made it all even worse was that she seemed to feel he was magnetized to her, too.

Addie didn’t have time for indulging in the feelings he stirred in her. She completely distrusted feelings like those and she knew she was right to distrust them. Really, why shouldn’t she reject all that craziness that happened between men and women?

Her dad ran off, vanished before she was born, never to be seen or heard from again, just as her sister’s dad had done before that, leaving their mother single, pregnant and brokenhearted both times—or so her grandpa always said. Addie had never been able to ask her mom about it. Hannah Kenwright had died giving her life.

So yeah, Addie was cynical about romantic love. And every time she’d tried it, she’d grown only more cynical. Yes, all right. Love had worked out fine for her sister. Still, Addie didn’t trust it. To her, romance and all that just seemed like a really stupid and dangerous thing.

And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t given it her best shot. Three times. In high school and then again when she was twenty-one and finally with a bull rider she’d met at the county rodeo. Her high school love had married someone else and her second forever guy had dumped her flat. The bull rider had dumped her, too, the morning after their first night together. For her, same as for her mother, love had not lasted.

And now she had a baby on the way. And her grandfather to care for. And Red Hill and her horses and a side business she loved. It was enough. She didn’t need the human magnet that was James Bravo, thank you very much.

He asked again if she was okay.

“I’m fine,” she lied and plastered on a smile. “It’s all taken care of. Before he died, Brandon saw to it that we have the kind of insurance that covers everything, no deductibles and no co-pays. So money is no worry. Everything is going to be okay.”

He didn’t buy that lie. She could see that in those gorgeous eyes of his. But he didn’t call her on it. He only asked, “How’s Levi?”

“They have him stabilized, they said, and they’re flying him to St. Anne’s Memorial in Denver for surgery.” She dropped her phone in her purse yet again and pulled his out. It was one of those fancy android phones with all the bells and whistles. “I’m sorry. I forgot to give this back to you.” She shoved it at him.

He took it. “No problem.”

“Thank you. For everything, up to and including not having my granddad thrown in jail.”

A smile twitched at the corner of his handsome mouth. “You’re welcome.”

She was just trying to figure out how to tell him gently to get lost, when he continued, “So you need to get to Denver? Come on, I’ll drive you.”

And then, with no warning, he touched her.

He wrapped his big, warm fingers around her bare arm right below the short sleeve of her T-shirt, causing a sudden hot havoc of sensation, like little fireworks exploding in a line, up to her shoulder, across to the base of her throat and then straight down to the center of her.

She stood stock-still, gaping up at him, thinking, Just tell him that you’ll manage. Just tell him to let go and leave.

“Let me drive you.” He said it low. Intensely. As if he knew what she was thinking and wouldn’t give up until he’d gone and changed her mind.