A Cold Creek Baby

“Cisco? Wake up. You’re sick. We need to get you to a doctor.”

He opened his eyes halfway, his lashes as ridiculously long and lush as Isabella’s, then he uttered a long string of melodious words before he closed his eyes again. He had taught her enough gutter Spanish when they were kids that she caught the gist.

“Yeah, right back at you,” she muttered. “Come on, wake up.”

She looked at the bandage around his waist. Was it her imagination or had the red spot spread in just the few moments she had been in here trying to wake him?

She felt frozen with indecision. Should she continue to try rousing him or should she call the volunteer ambulance?

What if he had a gunshot wound? Weren’t the medical authorities required to report those? What if he was tangled up in something illegal?

Drat him for coming here and complicating her world like this, forcing her to make decisions without any information to back them up. She had a deep, fervent wish that Quinn or Brant were here. They would know what to do.

“Cisco, come on,” she pleaded.

Jake Dalton seemed her best bet instead of calling the volunteer paramedics. He ran the medical clinic in Pine Gulch and she knew he would be carefully discreet without breaking any laws. Only trouble was, she had no way to get Cisco into the clinic without a little cooperation on his part.

If she couldn’t rouse him, she was going to have to call for an ambulance and if she had to guess, she figured they would probably opt to take him to the nearest hospital in Idaho Falls, about thirty miles away.

“Come on,” she begged again, her hand on the hot skin of his biceps. “Please wake up, Cisco.”

Those hot cocoa eyes drifted half open again. “Sweet, Easton,” he murmured. “Smell so good. Like spring.”

Some silly part of her wanted to stand here beside the bed and bask in his words like a wildflower opening to the morning sun.

Unfortunately, the rest of her still had to deal with their current predicament.

“Wake up, you idiot, unless you want me to call the paramedics.”

Lines furrowed between his dark brows as if he couldn’t quite make sense of her words. She opened her mouth to urge him a little further to this side of Sleepy Town, but before she could speak, one hard muscled hand snaked out and grabbed her arm.

“Hey!” she exclaimed, just before he tugged her across his chest, wrapped both arms around her and kissed her.

For perhaps a full ten seconds, she couldn’t think beyond absolute shock. Dear heavens. How long had it been? He hadn’t touched her in years, not once since that night after Guff’s funeral. Not so much as a hug or a casual brush of his fingers on her arm or even a lousy handshake.

Finding herself in his arms again, his hard arms surrounding her, his hot, hungry mouth devouring hers, felt a little like jumping into a scorching hot springs after nearly dying of frostbite.

A woman couldn’t be blamed for sighing against him, for kissing him back for just a moment. Right? Especially when it had been so very long.

She moved her mouth over his and her stomach muscles trembled with joy when his tongue dipped into her mouth, when one hand slid down her back to cup her behind and pull her closer.

Stop. The insidious little voice slithered into her brain. He’s only touching you because he’s so out of his head he isn’t thinking straight.

Horrified at herself for losing all sense of self-respect, she wrenched her mouth away from his and scrambled out of his arms. “Cisco, wake up, damn you.”

His brown eyes blinked all the way open. He stared at her for a long moment, his pupils huge. An instant later, he reached under his pillow and yanked something out and her heart stuttered at the sight of him aiming a deadly looking black handgun in fingers that shook with chills.

“S’wrong?” he asked in a dazed voice.

You came back. How’s that for wrong? You came back and you kissed me and stirred everything back up again.

And then you pulled a gun on me, you son of a bitch.

She swallowed the words. “You want to put that away, cowboy?”

He shook his head a little as if to clear it and she saw him glance from her to the gun at the end of his quivering arm. Her heart fluttered with fear that he might accidentally fire on her. Wouldn’t that be a fitting end? He might as well shoot her through the heart since he’d been stomping on it for years.

“East?”

“Put the gun away, Cisco,” she spoke calmly, quietly, just as she would to a spooked horse. “Come on. It’s just me. I’m not here to hurt you.”

He didn’t seem entirely convinced of that, but after a few more beats, he engaged the safety. She breathed a deep sigh of relief when he returned the weapon under his pillow.

“What’s wrong?” he asked again, a little more clearly this time though he still slurred his words.

“You tell me. You’re burning up and you seem to be bleeding. You need a doctor. I’m calling Jake Dalton.”

He tried to sit up and because he wore no shirt she saw every muscle of his abdomen go taut—from pain or effort, she didn’t know. That tattoo on his forearm rippled with the effort.

“Can’t,” he mumbled. “Too many questions.”

In that moment, she hated him for doing this to her again. For coming home and dredging up all these feelings, for completely screwing up the sanity and reason she was trying so desperately to bring to her world.

For making her feel all these crazy, wonderful, terrible things again.

“I’m calling Jake,” she repeated, her voice harsh as she reached for her cell phone. “I don’t have time to deal with a baby and a corpse at the same time.”

“I’m not dying.” He raked a hand through his hair. “S’just a little poke.”

“A poke?”

“Knife. Bar fight. I’ve had worse,” he said in what she assumed he meant as some sort of twisted comfort to her.

What kind of crazy life was he tangled in down there? For the last decade, her policy had basically been don’t ask, don’t tell. She hated him for that, too.

She narrowed her eyes. “Well, your little bar fight poke appears to be bleeding again and is most likely infected, hence your three-thousand-degree temperature. But that’s just a guess. I’m calling Jake to be sure, so you’d better come up with a better cover story than a bar fight. I have a feeling he’s not as gullible as I am.”

He looked disgruntled, but didn’t appear to have the energy to argue with her. “Where’s Belle?”

She refused to be touched by his concern for the child. “Sleeping in the nursery next door. Guess I’ll have to wake her to come with us. Look, do I need to call an ambulance or can you make it down the stairs and to my pickup?”

He released a heavy sigh. “I can walk,” he muttered.

She had serious doubts about the wisdom of that, but knowing how stubborn he was, she was pretty sure he would manage it somehow.

His shirt hung on the slat-backed chair by the bed and she reached for it and handed it to him. He slid his arms in the sleeve only after great exertion. After she watched him struggle for a few more moments with the buttons, she sighed and stepped closer, doing her best to ignore the heat and pheromones radiating from him.

Just his fever, she assured herself. So what if he smelled so yummy she just wanted to stand here and inhale. She had more important things to worry about right now, like how in the heck she was going to move a hundred seventy pounds of delirious male down sixteen steps and outside without both of them falling down the stairs.