The Doctor's Cowboy

Chloe lifted her package of cupcakes. “On that note, my new best friends and I are headed to the break room.”

She’d just sat down and ripped away the plastic wrapping when she heard the siren. Considering one of the hospital’s two ambulances sat outside the ER, this one had to be coming from the rodeo. Leaving her snack behind, she hurried back to the ER just as the paramedics were unloading their patient.

“What have we got?” she asked Dale Marsh, one of the paramedics.

“Male, thirty-one, name Wyatt Kelley. Took a bull horn to the side and the lower abdomen.”

As she got her first look at the cowboy, she noticed his shirt soaked with blood. “Put him in trauma one.”

Chloe started directing the nurses to remove both the cowboy’s protective vest and his shirt so she could assess the seriousness of the guy’s injuries. He’d been out cold when they wheeled him in, but when they lifted him he moaned in agony. As they laid him back, his eyes shot wide open and locked on her.

“Are you trying to kill me?” he asked, his voice breathless and strained.

She smiled, hoping to calm him. “Quite the opposite, handsome. You’ll be good as new before you know it.” A lot of doctors she’d worked with remained detached and clinical when working with patients, but that wasn’t her style. She’d tried, and just couldn’t stick to it. Wanting to help people and caring about them were the reasons she’d become a doctor in the first place. Maybe she’d burn out sooner, but she’d deal with that when the time came.

Chloe squeezed his hand then got back to work flushing his wounds. She pulled out a sliver of horn that had broken off and directed the nurses to start antibiotics so the bacteria from the horn didn’t do the guy in. When she was able to see the wounds better, a deep laceration just below where his safety vest had ended and a puncture wound in his left side, she knew he needed surgery.

She made eye contact with Jenna. “Get Dr. Pierce in here.”

Jenna nodded and hurried out of the trauma area.

“Please tell me Dr. Pierce isn’t in charge of the morgue,” the cowboy said.

Despite the pain he was in, the guy still managed to hang on to his sense of humor. She was pretty sure she’d be howling in agony.

“Not for this little scratch, cowboy.”

“Wyatt.”

She nodded. “Nice to meet you, Wyatt. I’m Dr. Brody.”

He gritted his teeth against a wave of pain. “Gotta say, you’re way prettier than most of the ER docs I’ve seen.”

She shook her head. “See, you’re not hurt too badly if you can flirt.” The reality was his injuries weren’t minor, but she didn’t need him freaking out about how he wasn’t going to be sitting on a bull anytime in the near future. These guys lived pretty spare unless they were in the big money, and Blue Falls hadn’t quite made it to the big-time rodeo circuit yet.

“Hon, there’s always time to flirt until you stop breathing.” As if to contradict himself, he caught his breath as his injuries sent another jolt of pain through his body.

The good thing about Blue Falls being so small, it didn’t take Dr. Pierce, the surgeon, long to reach the hospital.

Chloe took Wyatt’s hand. “We’re going to send you to surgery now and get you fixed up. Dr. Pierce will take good care of you.” She gestured toward where the surgeon was walking by on his way to prep for surgery.

“He’s not as pretty as you,” Wyatt said, drawing a chuckle from Chloe.

When she started to step away, Wyatt squeezed her hand with a surprising grip considering the shape he was in. When her eyes met his, her heart skipped a beat. Damn, he was good-looking, even dirt-and blood-covered and with his face pale from the pain and blood loss. An unexpected heat rushed through her before she grabbed on to some professionalism and gave his hand a quick squeeze before releasing it.

“See you on the other side, cowboy.”

Wyatt gave her a crooked grin. “Promise?”

She just smiled and sent him off to surgery.

“Yep, we definitely need to add you to the pool list,” Lori said. “In fact, I think you just jumped to the top of it.”

“Wyatt and Chloe sitting in a tree,” Sophie said in a singsong voice. “K-i-s-s-i-n-g.”

Chloe made as if she were going to throw one of her used surgical gloves at Sophie, sending the nurse scurrying away with a laugh. “Hard to pair me with someone who doesn’t live here.”

“India’s and Skyler’s husbands didn’t live here, either, when they met them,” Sophie called back.

Jenna deposited her used gloves in the hazardous waste bin. “And they just happened to be hot cowboys, too.”

Chloe rolled her eyes and disposed of her own gloves. After thoroughly washing her hands and arms, she left the ER with a wave to the nurses. “I’m going to go finish my date with a cupcake.”

“Save one for that delicious cowboy,” Sophie called down the corridor.

She wasn’t sure if it was the nurses’ teasing, Wyatt Kelley’s flirting, or the way her heart had stuttered when he’d held her hand and met her eyes, but she kept thinking about him throughout the rest of her shift. The cupcakes didn’t distract her. Neither did dealing with a toddler who’d eaten an electric-lime crayon. When she tried to focus on anything else, her mind kept sliding back to the rugged angle of Wyatt’s square jaw and those blue-gray eyes that had watched her with more interest than anyone with his abdomen ripped open should have been able to muster.

Even after her shift was over, she hung around. She figured the nurses would have a field day with that, but she didn’t care. She kept telling herself it was professional interest, that she wanted to make sure her patient made it through surgery. She was so wrapped up in trying to convince herself she wasn’t interested in Wyatt Kelley for anything other than medical reasons that she nearly ran into Dr. Pierce as he came out of the short corridor that led to surgery.

“You’re still here?” His forehead wrinkled as he glanced at the clock on the wall.

“Yeah. Just checking on a few things before I leave.” She nodded toward the surgical area. “How’s Mr. Kelley?”

“In one piece, though he’s not going to be riding in the foreseeable future. Maybe ever.”

She didn’t know Wyatt, but her heart hurt for him at that bit of news. She’d been around enough cowboys in her life to know they didn’t like having to face hanging it up.

Several long moments after Dr. Pierce left, Chloe continued to stare down the corridor toward the double doors that led to surgery. She’d spent mere minutes with Wyatt, but she didn’t like the image that formed in her mind of the light going out of his beautiful eyes as his future was ripped away. Why she cared so much, she had no idea. But she did.

Chapter Two (#ua7f4d7c8-19a0-54dd-8888-104a706692b3)

Wyatt started to wake when he heard voices. He couldn’t distinguish actual words through the fog in his head, but the conversation nearby was enough to pull him toward the surface. As he listened, he could gradually make out words from the murmuring voices. Surgery. Out. Night. It was like listening to a radio station that was mostly static with only the occasional intelligible word.

He knew there was something he could do to help make sense of what was going on, but damned if he could remember what it was. So he lay still and listened to the voices—two women—and searched his brain for the answer. Then it hit him. He could open his eyes. But when he tried, that simple act proved to be easier thought than done.

What in the world had happened to him to make his body refuse to cooperate with his brain’s commands?

“Dr. Pierce said the surgery went well last night,” one of the voices said. There was something familiar about it, something that made him desperate to open his eyes. “I’m working at the clinic this afternoon, but let me know if anything changes.”

She was leaving. No, she couldn’t leave, not without him seeing the face that went with that voice. He concentrated on that one thought, the absolute necessity of opening his eyes before it was too late. At first, his eyelids did no more than flutter, but he concentrated harder and they finally lifted. The world around him came into focus bit by bit until his gaze fixed on her, the owner of the voice, the doctor who had joked with him in the ER.

“Will do,” the nurse said.

Another nurse stuck her head in through the doorway. “I need help with Mrs. Walker in 221.”

He watched as both nurses left the room without noticing he was awake. The doctor scanned what must be his medical chart. More of the fuzzy feeling in his head receded as he watched her make a notation on the chart then push her chin-length, reddish-brown hair behind her ear. He’d been in a lot of pain when he’d awakened in the ER, but he hadn’t been so far gone that he didn’t notice she was pretty. And now, as he fought his way out of what had to be a medicine-induced haze, he thought her even more so.

The doctor—what was her name? She’d told him, but he couldn’t pull that information from his memory. Maybe he’d sustained another concussion in addition to the nasty lacerations. As she placed the chart at the end of his bed and turned to head for the door, he tried to say something but found his throat was as dry as cardboard. Instead of words, what came out was a strangled squawk. Yeah, that would get the ladies every time.