Christmas On The Silver Horn Ranch

Ava was still working the emergency room at Tahoe General when her friend and fellow nurse, Paige Winters, entered the sheeted cubicle where Ava was adjusting an IV on an elderly female patient suffering with flu symptoms.

“Are you nearly finished here?” Paige asked.

Ava glanced around at the redheaded nurse dressed in navy-blue scrubs. She was a tall, slender woman with a face dominated by a pair of clear gray eyes. Normally there was a perpetual smile on her face, but at the moment her lips were pressed together in a frustrated line.

“Yes, this patient is being admitted. Why? You need help with something?”

Paige jerked her thumb toward the opposite end of the room. “An unruly male. He slipped on an icy sidewalk and cut his head. He thinks he’s dying and demands the doctor see him this instant.”

“Dr. Sherman is busy with a cardiac incident right now. And Dr. Garza is tending to a toddler with whooping cough. The patient will just have to wait his turn.”

“I wish you’d tell him that.”

“You can’t?” Ava asked her.

Paige cast her a pleading smile. “I’m not nearly as good with a naughty man as you are.”

That was because she didn’t think of them as men. She thought of them as people. Except for the one she’d met this morning, Ava thought. Bowie was so potent she’d not been able to think of him as anything but a tough hunk of man.

“All right. I’ll deal with him.”

After hanging the patient’s chart on the end of the bed, Ava left the cubicle with Paige following close on her heels. When the two of them entered the compartment with the head injury, she found a young man sitting on the side of the narrow examining table holding a huge cotton pad to the side of his head. He was dressed in a sports jacket and tie. The knot at his throat was askew and blood splattered the toes of his wing tips.

“What the hell kind of place is this anyway?” he yelled the moment Ava stepped up to him. “I’m bleeding all over the place and nobody cares!”

Ava glanced over to see Paige rolling her eyes.

“Other than taking his vitals, Mr. Dobson here refused to let me touch him,” Paige explained. “He’d rather keep bleeding.”

“I came here to have my head treated by a doctor!” he practically shouted. “If I’d wanted a nurse to take care of me I’d have driven over to my grandma’s house.”

“Is your grandma a nurse?” Paige asked.

“No. But she’d know a damned sight more than you two. All I’ve seen you two do is carry clipboards around in circles.”

“See,” Paige said to Ava. “He’s a real sweetheart.”

Ava gave him a wide, phony smile. “This is an emergency room, Mr. Dobson. The most critical patients come first. If you don’t want to wait your turn to see the doctor, then perhaps you’d better let your grandma take care of you. Just try not to bleed all over the floor as you leave. I don’t want any of the nurses slipping and falling because of you.”

While the man spluttered with outrage, Ava urged her coworker out of the cubicle. “I hope you wrote intoxicated on his chart,” she said under her breath.

Paige frowned. “I didn’t notice alcohol. But now that you mention it, his eyes are pretty glassy. You don’t think that’s a result of banging his head?”

“Trust me. He’s belted back a few. And he isn’t going anywhere. He’s too much of a wimp.”

“Okay. You’ve been a nurse a lot longer than me. I’ll make a notation on his chart. Thanks, Ava.” She glanced at her wristwatch. “I need to go check on another patient. I’ll see you in the locker room in thirty minutes.”

Ava looked at her with surprise. “Thirty minutes? Is it time for the shift change already?”

Paige grinned. “Time flies when you’re having fun.”

The past nine hours of Ava’s evening shift in the ER had passed in a blur. The half hour she’d spent in Bowie’s bedroom this morning had felt like a whole day and then some. Maybe if she’d gone at the job of treating the firefighter like any other patient, the time with him would’ve spun by. But Bowie Calhoun wasn’t just any other patient. He was not like any man she’d met before.

* * *

A half hour later, in the nurses’ locker room, the two women were changing into street clothes.

“So you want to go get a drink or something to eat?” Paige asked as she slipped on a heavy coat. “I’m starving.”

Sitting on a wooden bench, Ava pulled a pair of knee-high boots over her jeans. “Not tonight. It will be one o’clock before I get home and climb into bed. And I need to be out at the Silver Horn by ten.”

“Oh. I’d forgotten about you taking on that extra job.” The redhead wrapped a long knit scarf around her neck. “Have you taken a look outside? It’s been snowing for the past two hours. You might not be able to drive out to the ranch in the morning.”

That might be a relief, Ava thought. Or would it? If she didn’t see Bowie in the morning, she’d think about him for the rest of the day. On the other hand, everything might be different in the morning, she thought hopefully. She might take one look at the hunky ex-marine and not feel anything at all, except the need to care for a patient.

“If the highways are treacherous, then I’m to call and someone from the ranch will come pick me up in a four-wheel-drive vehicle and drive me out there.”

Paige reached for her purse. “You’re kidding me.”

Ava stood and shrugged on her coat. “No kidding. One way or the other, the family is going to make sure Bowie has his nurse.”

“Hmm. Well, I shouldn’t be surprised. From what I’ve heard, the Calhouns have more money than they know what to do with.”

Ava pulled the pins from her heavy bun and quickly ran a brush through the long tresses. “I never realized that raising cattle could make a family so wealthy.”

“It’s more than cattle, Ava. They sell high-priced cutting and show horses, too. And I hear they have lots of other holdings in mining and the gas and oil business.”

Ava put away the brush and pulled on her gloves while the image of Bowie lying on the king-size bed flashed into her mind. Surprisingly, he’d not come across to her as rich or spoiled. In fact, he’d seemed very down-to-earth. But then, she’d only been there for a half hour. A woman would need weeks, even months to learn the sort of man who lived behind that rugged face and muscled body.

“I wasn’t aware you knew that much about the family,” Ava replied.

“I don’t. But I read things in the paper from time to time. And I remember a few years ago, when old Mr. Calhoun was hospitalized. Some of the nurses were hoping he’d have a longer stay just so they’d get to look at the gorgeous grandsons coming to visit. So which one of them are you treating?”

“The youngest. Bowie. He’s the only one of them that’s still single.” Now, why had she bothered to give Paige that piece of information? His marital status had nothing to do with her job.

Paige chuckled slyly. “Lucky for you.”

Ava forced herself to laugh along with her friend. She might as well. The idea of her and Bowie ever having a relationship of any sort was totally laughable.

Picking up her handbag, she started out of the small locker room. “Sure,” she joked. “Everyone knows what a cougar I am.”

Chapter Three (#ulink_110f3d30-9a47-5753-94a4-339180abefd8)

The next morning the sun was out, but there was a layer of snow covering the patch of yard in front of Ava’s house. Snowplows had already cleared the few side streets she took to reach the main highway, but the last ten miles of graveled road leading to the ranch were another story. After a few incidents of sliding and spinning, she managed to reach the Silver Horn, although the effort left her tense and exhausted.

When she eventually entered the house, Greta instantly began to scold her. “Miss Archer, you should have called the ranch for a ride. The roads are messy today.”

Ava handed her coat and gloves to Tessa, who was kindly waiting to take her things. “They weren’t that bad in town,” she told the cook. “But I must say the rural road leading up here to the ranch was treacherous.”