“Would you take your shirt off, please?”
Under other circumstances—and from just about any other woman—Daniel Galvez might have been tempted to take those words as a rather enticing request.
From Dr. Lauren Maxwell, he knew all too well she meant nothing suggestive—as much as he might wish otherwise.
He sighed, detesting this whole ordeal, even as he knew he had no choice but to comply. His right hand went to the buttons of his uniform and he wrestled them free, uncomfortably aware of her watching him out of those intense blue eyes that seemed to miss nothing.
He had to work hard to hide a wince as he shrugged out of his shirt, mentally bracing himself for the moment she would touch him with those cool fingers.
The pain didn’t worry him. He had coped with much worse than a little scratch on the arm. Handling Lauren and the feelings she always stirred up in him was another matter entirely.
She watched him take off his shirt, her eyes veiled as they always seemed to be in his presence, and he wondered what she saw. The dirt-poor Mexican kid on the school bus in the fraying, too-small jeans and the threadbare coat? Or the harsh, hard-as-nails cop she must hate?
Those cool, lovely features didn’t reveal even a hint of whatever she might think of him. Just as well, he thought. He had a feeling he was better off not knowing.
“Sorry to come in so late,” he said as he pulled his blood-soaked shirt away. “I wouldn’t have stopped if I hadn’t seen the lights on as I was driving past.”
She raised an eyebrow, though her attention remained fixed on his reason for being in her examination room of the Moose Springs Medical Clinic. “That’s quite a nasty laceration you’ve got there, Sheriff. What were you going to do about it, if you weren’t going to stop here? Stitch it up yourself?”
If he were capable of such a feat, he probably would have tried rather than finding himself in this uncomfortable position. “I figured I would catch a minute to run into the emergency clinic in Park City later.”
That was still his preferred option. But since he was missing two deputies this weekend in a department that was already understaffed, he didn’t have that luxury.
This was his third night of double shifts and he just couldn’t spare the personal leave to drive the half hour to Park City, sit in the emergency clinic there while he waited his turn for a couple hours among all the banged-up skiers and tourists with altitude sickness, then drive a half hour back to Moose Springs.
With the ski season in full swing, Park City in January was crazy anyway—throw in an independent film festival that drew thousands of Hollywood types and their entourages, and he would just about rather chew tire spikes then spend time there if he didn’t have to.
Even if that meant baring his chest for Lauren Maxwell.
“You know I’m always on call for you and your deputies if you need me,” she said. Though her voice was low and polite, he still felt a pinch of reprimand.
She stepped forward, close enough that he could smell the subtle, intoxicating scent of jasmine and vanilla that always seemed to cling to her. She didn’t touch him yet, just continued to study the jagged three-inch cut on his upper arm that was beginning to throb like hell.
“How did you say you were injured?”
“Bar fight down at Mickey’s. Some joker from out of town got mad when Johnny Baldwin kept playing ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ on the jukebox.”
“Uh-oh. He and Carol are fighting again?”
“Apparently. By about the sixth go-around, the tourist had had enough of Billy Ray and tried to physically prevent Johnny from putting in another quarter.”
“I hope you didn’t arrest him for that. Sounds like justifiable assault to me.”
A muscle twitched in his cheek at her dry tone, though it was taking most of his concentration to keep his mind on the story and away from how incredible it felt to have Lauren Maxwell’s hands on him, even in a clinical setting.
“Most of the bar probably would have backed the guy up at first. But of course he had to go and push his luck. He went just a bit too far and insulted both Johnny and any woman stupid enough to go out with him in the first place. And of course three of Carol’s brothers happened to be sitting at the other end of the bar and they didn’t take too kindly to that. By the time I got there, everybody in the place was having a good old time throwing punches and smashing chairs. I was trying to take the tourist into custody, mostly for his own protection, when his buddy came after me with the business end of a broken beer bottle.”
“I’m sorry.”
He lifted his uninjured shoulder. “Hazard of the job.”
“Should I be expecting more casualties?”
“From what I could tell, the damage seemed to be mostly bloody noses and a couple of black eyes. The paramedics showed up just in case but I appeared to get the worst of it.”
“I imagine Mickey’s not too crazy about having his bar ripped apart.”
“You know Mickey. He was right in the middle of it all.”
She probed the edge of his wound and he couldn’t hide a grimace.
“Sorry,” she murmured, stepping away. “I’m going to have to clean it up a little before I can put in any stitches. Sit tight while I grab a suture kit and some antiseptic.”
“No problem.”
The moment she left the room, he huffed out the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. Okay, so this hadn’t been one of his better ideas. He should have just accepted his fate and driven into Park City, to hell with the jam it would put in his schedule.
Being here alone in the medical clinic with Lauren after hours was far too intimate, much too dangerous for his peace of mind.
He sighed, frustrated once again at this tension that always simmered between them.
It hadn’t always been this way, but the events of five years earlier had changed everything. Lauren was still cordial, unfailingly polite, but she didn’t treat him with the same warmth she gave everyone else. Every interaction between them seemed awkward and tense.
Though they grew up a few blocks away from each other, they may as well have been on different planets when they were kids. For one thing, she was three years younger. At thirty and thirty-three, now that didn’t seem to make much difference. But when he was thirteen and trying his best to find his place in the world, a ten-year-old girl held about as much interest to him as learning the fox-trot.
Beyond that, they had been worlds apart demographically. She had been the smart and beautiful daughter of the town mayor—his dad’s boss—and he had been the son of Mexican immigrants who never had enough of anything to go around but love.
He had tried to cross that social divide only once, the year he finished out his football scholarship and graduated from college. He had come home to work construction at her father’s company for the summer before starting his police-officer training in the fall and he suddenly couldn’t help noticing smart, pretty little Lauren Maxwell had grown into a beautiful college freshman, home for the summer between terms.
One night she had stopped by her father’s office at the same time he dropped in after a job to pick up his paycheck. They had talked a little, flirted a little—though in retrospect, that had been one-sided on his part—and he had ended up asking her to dinner.
She had refused him firmly and decisively, almost horror-stricken, leaving him no room at all to maneuver around his abruptly deflated ego.
He could survive a little rejection. Hell, it had probably been good for him, a college jock far too full of himself.
If that had been the end of it, he imagined they could have salvaged at least a casual friendship over the years, especially after they both returned to settle in Moose Springs. She was the town’s only doctor and he was the sheriff, so they were bound to interact sometimes.
But what came after had effectively destroyed any chance he had of claiming even that.
There was too much history between them, too many secrets, for anything but this awkwardness.
He wasn’t sure how much she knew. Enough, obviously, for her to simmer about it. If she knew the whole truth, she would despise him even more. Somehow that knowledge did nothing to squash the attraction that always seethed under his skin, the edginess he couldn’t seem to shake.
The door opened suddenly and she returned carrying a tray of bandages and suture supplies. He must have done a credible job of hiding his thoughts. She gave him a smile that almost looked genuine—until he saw the murkiness in her blue eyes.
“You’ll have to sit down so I can reach your arm. You can rest it on this table.”
He hesitated only a moment before he sat down where she indicated and thrust out his arm. The cut was jagged and ugly and still stung like hell, but he knew it looked worse than it really was.
Still, he winced when she pulled out a needle to numb the area. He would far rather face a dozen broken beer bottles than a needle. She caught his expression and gave him a reassuring smile. “It will only sting for a minute, I promise.”
Feeling foolish and itchy at her nearness, he stoically endured the shot, then the gentle brush of her hands as she washed off the blood with Betadine and went to work stitching him up. He finally had to focus on a painting on the wall of two children on a beach eating ice cream and couldn’t help wishing for a little cold refreshment to offset the heat of her fingers touching his skin.
“You’re very good at that.”
She didn’t look up from her careful suturing. “Thanks. I considered a surgical specialty when I was in med school but I decided I wanted to see more of my patients than their insides.”
“Lucky for us, I guess.”
She didn’t answer and the silence stretched between them. He scrambled around for another topic of conversation and grabbed the first one that came to him. “How’s your mother?”
This time her gaze did flash to his, her expression unreadable. “Good. The warm St. George climate agrees with her. She’s become quite a rabid golfer now that she can play all year.”
He tried to picture soft and prim Janine Maxwell ripping up the golf course and couldn’t quite get a handle on it. But then he never would have pictured Lauren Maxwell choosing to practice in quiet Moose Springs, when she could have gone anywhere else in the world.
Oddly, she seemed to follow his train of thought. “Mom wants me to sell the clinic and open up another one in southern Utah.”
He didn’t like the sudden panic spurting through him at the thought of her leaving. “Will you?”
Her hair brushed his arm as she shook her head. “Not a chance,” she said firmly. “Moose Springs is my home and I’m not going anywhere.”
He didn’t miss the defiance in her voice and he fully understood the reason for it. Things couldn’t always be easy for her here—he knew there were some in town who would rather drive the thirty-five minutes to Park City for their medical care than walk through the doors of any clinic run by the daughter of the town’s biggest crook.
The good people of Moose Springs hadn’t taken R. J. Maxwell’s embezzlement of more than a million dollars of their hard-earned money very kindly. Even five years after his death, there were those who still carried a pretty hefty grudge.
Most people in town didn’t blame the daughter for the father’s sins, but he had heard enough whispers and veiled innuendos to know most didn’t mean all. A certain percentage of the population wasn’t as fair-minded.
If the full story ever emerged, he knew that percentage would probably increase dramatically.
Lauren’s own mother had been quick to escape Moose Springs after the scandal broke. He couldn’t understand why Lauren seemed determined to remain in town despite the ugly blotches on her family’s laundry.
“That should do it,” she said after a moment, affixing a bandage to the spot. “I’ll write you a prescription for a painkiller and an antibiotic, just to be on the safe side.”
“Just the antibiotic,” he said, shrugging back into his ruined uniform shirt.
“That’s a nasty laceration. You might be surprised at the residual pain tomorrow.”
“I’ll take an aspirin if it gets too bad.”
She rolled her eyes but before she could speak, his communicator buzzed with static and a moment later he heard his dispatcher’s voice.
“Chief, I’ve got Dale Richins on the line,” Peggy Wardell said. “Says he was driving home from his sister’s in Park City and blew a tire.”
“He need help with it?”
“Not with the tire. But when he went in the back to get the spare, he found a girl hiding in the camper shell of his pickup.”
He blinked at that unexpected bit of information. “A girl?”
“Right. She’s beat up pretty good, Dale says, and tried to escape when he found her but she collapsed before she could get far. She only hablas the español, apparently. Thought I’d better let you know.”
He grabbed for his blood-soaked coat, sudden dread congealing in his gut. One of the hazards of working in a small town was the fear every time a call like this came in, he didn’t know who he might find at the scene.
He knew just about everyone in the growing Latino community around Moose Springs and hated the possibility that someone he knew—someone’s hija or hermana— might have been attacked.
“Thanks, Peg. Tell Dale I can be there in five minutes or so.”
“Right.”
He headed for the door, then stopped short when he realized Lauren was right on his heels, passing a medical kit from hand to hand as she shoved the opposite hand into her parka.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.
“I’m coming with you,” she said, that Lauren stubbornness in her voice. “Sounds like you’ve got a victim who will need medical care and if I go with you, I can be on scene faster than the volunteer paramedics.”
He didn’t want to take the time to argue with her—not when a few seconds consideration convinced him the idea was a good one. Lauren was more qualified to offer better medical care than anything the volunteer medics could provide.
“Let’s go then,” he said, leading the way out into the drizzling snow.
Daniel drove through the slushy roads with his lights flashing but his siren quiet, at a speed that had her hanging on to her medical kit with both hands.
She gritted her teeth as he hit one of the town’s famous potholes and her head slammed against the headrest.
“Sorry,” he said, though he barely looked at her.
Nothing new there. Daniel seldom looked at her, not if he could help himself. She was glad for it, she told herself. She didn’t want him looking too closely at her. He already knew too much about her, more than just about anyone else in town—she didn’t want him aiming those piercing brown eyes too far into her psyche.
She gripped her bag more tightly as he drove toward the scene, trying not to notice how big and hard and dangerous he seemed under these conditions.
Sheriff Daniel Galvez was not a man any sane person would want to mess with. He was six feet three inches and two hundred and ten pounds of pure muscle. Not that she made note of his vital statistics during the rare times she had treated him or anything—it was just hard to miss a man so big who was still as tough and physically imposing as the college football player he’d been a decade earlier.
Beside him, she always felt small and fragile, a feeling she wasn’t particularly crazy about. She wasn’t small, she was a respectable five feet six inches tall and a healthy one hundred and fifteen pounds. It was only his size that dwarfed her. And she wasn’t fragile, either. She had survived med school, a grueling residency and, just a few months later, crippling shock and disbelief at the chaos her father left in his wake.
She shoved away thoughts of her father as Daniel pulled the department’s Tahoe to a stop behind a battered old pickup she recognized as belonging to Dale Richins. The old rancher stood behind his camper shell, all but wringing his hands.
He hurried to them the moment Daniel shut off the engine. “The little girl is inside the camper shell of my truck. I had a horse blanket in there. I guess that’s what she was hiding under. Looks like you brought medical help. Good. From what I can see, she’s beat up something terrible.”
He looked at Lauren with a little less suspicion than normal, but she didn’t have time to be grateful as she headed for the back of the pickup. Daniel was right behind her and he didn’t wait for her to ask for help—he just lifted her up and over the tailgate and into the truck bed.
He aimed the heavy beam of his flashlight inside as she made her careful way to the still form lying motionless under a grimy blanket that smelled of livestock and heaven knows what else.
She pulled out her flashlight, barely able to make out the battered features of a Latina girl.
“She’s so young,” Lauren exclaimed as she immediately went to work examining her. Though it was hard to be sure with all the damage, she didn’t think the girl was much older than fourteen or fifteen.
“Do you know her?” Daniel asked, leaning in and taking a closer look.
“I don’t think so. You?”
“She doesn’t look familiar. I don’t think she’s from around here.”
“Whoever she is, she’s going to need transport to the hospital. This is beyond what I can handle at the clinic.”
“How urgent?” Daniel asked from outside the pickup. “Ambulance or LifeFlight to the University of Utah?”
She considered the situation. “Her vitals are stable and nothing seems life-threatening at this point. Send for an ambulance,” she decided.
She lifted the girl’s thin T-shirt, trying to look for anything unusual in the dim light. She certainly found it.
“Sheriff, she’s pregnant,” she exclaimed.
He leaned inside, his expression clearly shocked. “Pregnant?”
“I’d guess about five or six months along.”
She moved her stethoscope and was relieved to hear a steady fetal heartbeat. She started to palpate the girl’s abdomen when suddenly her patient’s eyes flickered open. Even in the dim light inside the camper shell, Lauren could see panic chase across those battered features. The girl cried out and flailed at Lauren as she tried to scramble up and away from her.
“Easy, sweetheart. Easy,” Lauren murmured. Her skills at Spanish were limited but she tried her best. “I’m not going to hurt you. I’m here to help you and your baby.”
The girl’s breathing was harsh and labored, but her frantic efforts to fight Lauren off seemed to ease and she watched her warily.
“I’m Lauren. I’m a doctor,” she repeated in Spanish, holding up her stethoscope. “What’s your name?”
Through swollen, discolored eyes, the girl looked disoriented and suspicious, and didn’t answer for several seconds.
“Rosa,” she finally said, her voice raspy and strained. “Rosa Vallejo.”
Lauren smiled as calmly as if they were meeting for brunch. It was a skill she’d learned early in medical school—pretend you were calm and in control and your patients will assume you are. “Hello, Rosa Vallejo. I’m sorry you’re hurt but an ambulance is on the way for you, okay? We’re going to get you to the hospital.”
“No! No hospital. Please!”
The fear in the girl’s voice seemed to hitch up a notch and she tried to sit up again. Lauren touched her arm, for comfort and reassurance as much as to hold her in place. “You’ve been hurt. You need help. You need to make sure your baby is all right.”
“No. No. I’m fine. I must go.”
She lunged to climb out of the truck bed but Daniel stood blocking the way, looking huge and imposing, his badge glinting in the dim light. The girl froze, a whimper in her throat and a look of abject terror in her eyes. “No policía. No policía!”
She seemed incoherent with fear, struggling hysterically to break free of Lauren’s hold. Daniel finally reached in to help, which only seemed to upset the girl more.
“Hold her while I find something in my kit to calm her,” Lauren ordered. “She’s going to injure herself more if I don’t.”
A moment later, she found what she was looking for. Daniel held the girl while Lauren injected her with a sedative safe for pregnant women. A moment later, the medicine started to work its calming effect on her panicked patient and she sagged back against the horse blankets just as the wail of the ambulance sounded outside.
Lauren let out a sigh of relief and started to climb out of the truck bed. When Daniel reached to lift her out, she suddenly remembered his injury. She ignored his help and climbed out on her own.
“You’re going to break open all those lovely stitches if you don’t take it easy.”
“I’m fine,” he said firmly, just as the volunteer paramedics hurried over, medical bags slung over their shoulders.
“Hey, Mike, Pete,” Lauren greeted them with a smile.
“You trying to take over our business now, Doc?” Pete asked her with a wink.
“No way. You guys are the experts at triage here. I happened to be stitching up the sheriff at the clinic after the big brawl at Mickey’s bar. When he received this call, I rode along to see if I could help.”
“Busy night for all of us. What have we got?”
Daniel stepped closer to hear her report and Lauren tried not to react to his overwhelming physical presence.
She gave them Rosa’s vitals. “I have a young patient who appears to be approximately twenty weeks pregnant. It was tough to do a full assessment under these conditions, but she looks like she’s suffering multiple contusions and lacerations, probably the result of a beating. She appears to be suffering from exposure. I have no idea how long she’s been in the back of Dale’s pickup. Maybe an hour, maybe more. Whether that contributed to her hysteria, I can’t say, but I do know she’s not very crazy about authority figures right now. Seeing the sheriff set her off, so we may have to use restraints in the ambulance on our way to Salt Lake City.”
“You riding along?” Mike Halling asked.
“If I won’t be in the way.”
“You know we’ve always got room for you, Doc.”
She stood back while he and Pete Zabrisky quickly transferred the girl to the stretcher then lifted it into the ambulance.
“I’m guessing she must have climbed in the back of the truck in Park City, or wherever Dale might have stopped on the way. Though I’m pretty sure the attack didn’t happen here, I’m going to put one of my deputies to work processing the scene,” Daniel told her while they waited in the stinging sleet for the paramedics to finish loading Rosa into the bus.
“All right,” she answered.
“I won’t be far behind you. I’d like to question her once she’s been treated.” He paused. “I can give you a ride back to town when we’re done, if you need it.”
She nodded and climbed in after Mike and Pete. Maybe she had a problem with authority figures, too. That must be why her stomach fluttered and her heartbeat accelerated at the prospect of more time in the company of the unnerving Daniel Galvez.