Читать книгу Blame It On Texas - Cathy Gillen Thacker - Страница 10

“I can’t believe you called my parents,” Lexie fumed.

“What was I supposed to do?” Lewis was glad her anger with him had brought a renewed flush of color to her cheeks. When he had carried her through the automatic glass doors of Laramie Community Hospital, she had been white as a sheet. “Bring you to the hospital and not tell them?” That would have won him some points with her folks!

“You weren’t supposed to bring me to the emergency room at all!” Lexie folded her arms in front of her.

Before Lewis could defend himself, the door to the examining room was opened. His brother Riley, the family doc on call, and Lexie’s parents filed in. Jake and Jenna Remington looked as if they had been awakened from a sound sleep and dressed hastily. Their hair was still tousled. Jake needed a shave. Jenna’s face was pale with worry. They rushed to Lexie’s side and hugged her, being careful not to dislodge the IV taped to her left arm. “Thank you for calling us,” Jenna told Lewis.

“Although what you were doing out with my daughter that time of night is still a question that needs to be answered,” Jake said grimly.

“Don’t blame Lewis, Dad,” Lexie interrupted. “I asked him to take me riding.”

Jake’s gray-brown eyebrows climbed even higher. “In the middle of the night?”

“It’s not as if you were going to let me go if you knew about it,” Lexie challenged.

Riley looked at Lexie sternly. “Your father told me you just got out of the hospital in London, Lexie.”

Lewis did a double take. “Is this true?” he asked her.

Lexie flushed and waved off the concern of all those around her. “It was nothing.”

“It wasn’t nothing,” Jake Remington said gruffly. “You passed out over there, too.”

“So I’m a little run-down.” Lexie shrugged.

“You were having chest pains tonight,” Lewis said, repeating what he had already told the staff upon her admission. “Before you passed out. At least I think you were, the way you were pressing your hand to your chest.”

“Acid reflux,” Riley explained.

“You can give her medication for that, right?” Jenna queried, the picture of motherly concern.

Riley nodded. “But you’re still going to have to lay off the spicy food, caffeine and highly acidic things like tomatoes and citrus until you heal, Lexie. And we still have to deal with your exhaustion. You need lots of rest, no stress. And you need to start eating right.”

Lexie rubbed the back of her neck, looking as if all that sounded impossible to her.

“How long before she’s back on her feet?” Lexie’s father asked.

“Two weeks of R and R ought to do it,” Riley said.

“I want to go riding,” Lexie grumbled.

“Not for at least another week,” Riley cautioned. “We don’t want you passing out in the saddle.”

“So when do I get out of here?” Lexie asked, impatiently.

“As soon as the IV is finished,” Riley said. He wrote out a prescription for her and handed it over. “Provided you promise me you really will take it easy.”

She nodded. “I promise.”

“Okay, I want to see you in my office in one week, for a recheck. Call and make an appointment with my receptionist tomorrow. In the meantime, if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to call.” Riley accepted thanks from everyone, then exited the room.

Jake Remington turned back to his only daughter. “Okay, young lady, you heard the doctor. No more reckless inattention to your health. You’re going home with us, and this time, you’re staying on the ranch.”

“No, I’m not.” Lexie reached out and took Lewis’s hand firmly in hers. “I am going home with Lewis!”

THE SILENCE IN THE examining room was deafening.

All eyes turned to Lewis.

He was used to seeing his brothers in this kind of trouble. Not him. Never him.

“Lexie, you already had one disastrous relationship,” Jake said. “If you think I am going to stand by and watch you rush headlong into another, just to get back at me for never approving of Constantine Romeo—”

“I knew you were going to bring that up!” Lexie interrupted.

“Stop!” Jenna stepped between warring father and daughter. “This is the kind of stress Riley just suggested that Lexie avoid.”

“Well, I’m not letting her go home with someone she barely knows,” Jake protested.

“Well, I’m not going back to the ranch, either. I can’t breathe there!” Lexie glared at her father.

“Then how about staying in the apartment above my shop?” Jenna suggested gently. “It’s small, but private. And right down the street from the hospital, should you feel ill again.”

“Fine,” Lexie said. “Provided Lewis drives me there and you two go on home and get some sleep.”

Jake Remington looked as if he wanted to punch him, Lewis noted uncomfortably. But her father finally agreed and the Remingtons left after bidding Lexie a tense good-night.

Lewis went out in the hall to wait while the nurse helped Lexie get ready to leave the hospital. Riley handed the chart he had been writing on to the medical records clerk and strode over to Lewis. He clapped a brotherly hand on Lewis’s shoulder. “I meant what I said about Lexie needing to limit her stress right now. Especially given the way Jake Remington feels about his daughter seeing anyone.”

“Shutting her up like a princess in an ivory tower is the wrong approach to take with Lexie,” Lewis declared.

His brother frowned. “You’re an authority on her? After what—one-fifth of one clandestine date?”

“She asked me to help her out. I’m going to do that,” Lewis insisted stubbornly.

Riley’s gaze narrowed. “And I’m telling you this—make an enemy of her father, and you’ll regret it.”

LEXIE SAUNTERED OUT to the waiting room. “Thanks for waiting.”

“No problem.” Lewis fell into step beside her.

“But it wasn’t necessary,” she said, leading the way out of the ER. “I could just as easily get a cab.”

“In Laramie? At this time of night?” Lewis teased, as they walked through the automatic glass doors. “You have been away a long time.”

Lexie came to a halt on the sidewalk beneath the portico. “There are still only two cabs in town?”

Lewis put his hand beneath her elbow. “And neither of them run past midnight without prior appointment, unless it is an absolute emergency. And when there’s a medical emergency, an ambulance is summoned.”

Lexie sighed, her frustration evident. “This isn’t an emergency.”

“Maybe not to you.” He guided her toward the parking lot. “You managed to get everyone around you pretty upset.”

Lexie drew away from him as they approached his Yukon. “Including you?”

“I admit you had me worried.”

Lewis held the door for her, then circled around to climb behind the steering wheel. The only thing he regretted about this mission was the short distance to her stepmother’s building on Main Street.

Jenna Lockhart Designs had been a mere storefront—albeit a highly exclusive one—when Lewis moved to Laramie at age eleven. Now, some twenty years later, the famous Texas boutique took up an entire block on Laramie’s Main Street. Women came from all over the country to purchase the one-of-a kind evening gowns and wedding dresses Jenna designed in her shop. Her off-the-rack creations, which carried a much more reasonable price tag, were made in a factory at the edge of town, and sold in department stores everywhere. “Your dad and stepmother, too,” Lewis continued.

Her lips took on a mutinous tilt. “I told them not to worry.”

Lewis drove as slowly as possible. “What happened in London anyway?” He stopped at a traffic light.

Lexie shrugged. “The usual. First I had to deal with my mother.”

When the light turned green, Lewis continued on down the street. “She still lives in Europe, right?”

“Italy. Right.”

“She married some Italian count, didn’t she?” Lewis kept the conversation going as he parked in front of the boutique.

“Riccardo della Gheradesca.” Lexie got a pinched look on her face. She vaulted from the truck, and waited for Lewis to get his keys out of the ignition and catch up with her. “Anyway, after—” Lexie broke off, then tried again. “I was in Italy, seeing my mother and going to the funeral and all that…”

Lewis blinked. “Funeral?”

“Riccardo died last month.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

Lexie shrugged, her expression more numb than grief-stricken. “I barely knew him. The Count had no interest in children and, truthfully, neither does my mother. But the funeral was a pretty big deal, and she wanted me there, so I had to go.”

“Your mom must be really upset.”

Lexie nodded and looked even more distressed. “Anyway, from Naples I went to Japan for a major film festival there—”

Lewis waited while she punched in the security code that would let her in the building. “That sounds like fun.”

She led the way through a dimly lit interior hallway to the stairs. “It was a nightmare. I had four clients all needing my help, all the time, all trying to elbow each other aside.”

He chuckled at the low note of exasperation in her voice. “No wonder you had acid reflux.”

“Anyway, from there I went on to London,” Lexie continued, apparently unaware just how sexily her stylish jeans cupped her lower half. “One of my clients was simultaneously trying to change her image and making her debut on the London stage. She couldn’t articulate what it was she wanted for her publicity appearances on British television, and I tried every look imaginable. Nothing was pleasing her. The next thing I knew I’d fainted dead away in Knightsbridge, and they’d rushed me to the hospital. My father came right over on his private jet and whisked me back to Texas.”

Lewis studied her in puzzlement. “The doctors there didn’t diagnose your reflux?”

Lexie shrugged, punched in another security code and then opened the door to the apartment. She hit the lights and led the way inside to what looked to be a two-room apartment, with living room and kitchenette in front, bedroom and bath in back. It was professionally decorated in the same shades of pale pink and cream as the boutique downstairs. “I didn’t tell them about my symptoms.”

Lewis watched her saunter over to the fridge. “Lexie!”

She brought out two plastic bottles of blackberry-flavored water and tossed him one. He caught it with one hand.

“It didn’t seem to have anything to do with my passing out. I was jet-lagged and exhausted.” Lexie frowned as she struggled unsuccessfully with the cap of her bottle. “I hadn’t been eating right since I was still recovering from the nonstop bout of ‘indigestion’ I’d had in Cannes. They concluded that I needed a few days of rest.”

Lewis took the top off his and did a trade with her. “If that’s the case, I don’t get why you and your father are quarreling.”

“Because,” Lexie enunciated clearly, “my father doesn’t respect me or what I do for a living. Bottom line, he wants me to quit working as a celebrity stylist and come home to Laramie to stay.”

LEXIE COULD SEE THAT Lewis did not think that was such a formidable offense.

“He was probably just upset.”

Lexie stalked over to one of the cream-colored sofas and sank down onto it. “Gee. You think?”

Lewis followed, looking very handsome and very much at home in the soft lighting of the small but luxuriantly appointed apartment. “As soon as you get better—”

Lexie watched as he sat down next to her. “My father’s still going to want me to leave Tinseltown for good.”

Lewis took a long draught of flavored water, then let the bottle rest on his muscular thigh. “What do you want?”

That, Lexie thought, was the dilemma. She didn’t really know.

“You do like your career, don’t you?” he persisted.

She looked into his lively blue-gray eyes. “I did.”

“Until…?” Lewis asked.

Lexie tried not to think what he would look like without the sexy wire-rimmed glasses. She swallowed hard. “A few months ago.”

He stretched out his long, jean-clad legs. “What happened?”

She sighed, relieved to finally be able to bare her soul to someone impartial. “Nothing out of the ordinary, really. There was no great epiphany or anything like that.”

The way Lewis was looking at her, as if he really wanted to understand her, prompted her to continue. “I just got tired of always being on a plane, always being at the whim of a client—a hundred clients, actually. I stopped waking up every morning wanting to go to work and meet the challenges ahead. Instead, I had to pull myself out of bed.”

Tenderness radiated from his slight smile. “Maybe you just need a rest.”

And maybe, Lexie thought wearily, pushing both hands through her hair, she needed a new life. Although what she would do, besides being a celebrity stylist, she didn’t know. Thanks to the fact she had dropped out of college to follow Constantine Romeo to Hollywood, she wasn’t prepared to do anything else. Besides, who gave up a lucrative six-figure career and professional acclaim to find themselves? She was remarkably successful for a twenty-seven-year-old. She’d be considered a fool for even trying to find something else to do for a living.

Lewis drained his bottle and put it aside. “Have you said any of this to Jenna or your dad?”

“No.” Lexie traced the condensation on the outside of her water bottle with the tip of her index finger.

He touched the back of her hand with the back of his. “How do you think he would react?”

She luxuriated in the warmth of skin to skin. “He’d be relieved.”

“Because he doesn’t want you tending to celebrities,” Lewis guessed.

Lexie bit her lip. “It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?” He turned toward her slightly, to better see her face.

Lexie began to pace the carpeted room. “My father thinks my profession is a joke, that in helping celebrities develop an individual style and image that I’m perpetuating at best a myth, and at worst, fraud.”

“Ouch!” Lewis tugged facetiously at the frayed neckline of his band-collared shirt as if it were choking him.

Happy to have someone understand how outrageous her father’s views were, Lexie stopped trying to contain her emotions. “He’s basically said if a person doesn’t know what to wear, or how to present themselves, then they have more problems than I can solve for them.”

Lewis winced. “When did he say this?”

She shrugged. “Five years ago, when my business really started taking off.”

Lewis got to his feet. “Because of the work you did for Constantine Romeo?” he asked, coming toward her.

Lexie nodded and headed back to the kitchen, this time to the cabinets next to the stove. She rummaged through them, until she found a box of saltines on the uppermost shelf. When she couldn’t quite snag it, Lewis reached up and got it for her. “That’s another sore subject between us,” she allowed, their fingertips brushing as he handed her the box.

He lounged against the cabinets, watching her open a wax packet and withdraw several crackers. “They didn’t get along?”

She offered him some, too. “My dad never forgave Constantine for taking me to Hollywood with him. Or me, for running off with him.” As always, the bland flavor of the cracker comforted her finicky tummy.

“You were just nineteen at the time.”

Lexie hunted in the fridge to see if there was any cheddar cheese. To her disappointment, there wasn’t. She got the peanut butter out instead. “Believe me, I know.”

“Regrets?” Lewis asked softly.

“More than you can count,” she admitted as she spread peanut butter on several crackers.

He smiled. “But that’s how we learn, right? By our mistakes.”

“You betcha.”

They both ate six or seven crackers. The silence between them was at once companionable, and fraught with a new tension that Lexie preferred not to identify. “How are you feeling?” Lewis asked finally.

She took a long drink, then shared what was left of her water with him. “The truth?”

He nodded, holding her eyes.

“Sleepy.”

He pushed away from the counter reluctantly. “Then I should be going.”

For some reason, Lexie did not want him to leave. Not yet. “What time is it?” she asked.

Lewis glanced at his watch. “Nearly four.”

“You must be tired, too,” she commiserated.

He shrugged.

“Want to stay and sack out on the couch?” The words were out before she could stop them.

Lewis paused.

Letting him know this was a strictly platonic move on her part, she teased, “I’d offer you the bed if I thought you’d take it.”

Desire lit up his blue-gray eyes. “Only if you’re in it, too.”

Lexie gasped. “Lewis!” she chided as heat filled her face.

He looked her square in the eye. “I may be a computer geek up here—” he pointed to his head “—but I’m a man down here.” He indicated the rest of him.

As if she hadn’t already secretly noticed how well he filled his jeans. Wishing he didn’t look so damn sexy Lexie looked away. “I’m beginning to realize that,” she said drolly.

“And you’ve already had one rough couple of days.” Lewis reached up to gently touch her face. His thoughts undoubtedly amorous, he looked down at her tenderly and caressed her cheekbone with the pad of his thumb.

Doing her best to slow her racing heart, she bantered back carelessly, “So you’re not offering to seduce me?” And why did she suddenly wish he were? Just because she had been totally in awe of him in their youth, did not mean they were right for each other.

“Not tonight.” Lewis bent his head, kissed her gently—and far too briefly. Not that this lessened the impact of his caress in any way. The feel of his lips brushing ever so sweetly over hers inundated Lexie with a longing unlike anything she had ever felt or imagined she could feel. An explosion of pleasure and need went off inside her, and she looked at him. What was happening here? Lexie wondered, struggling not to go up on tiptoe and kiss him back. She couldn’t be attracted to Lewis McCabe, could she? He wasn’t even her type. She fell for the smooth ones. The ones with all the lines. Not the ones who were so challenged in the wardrobe and personal style department it would take her professional guidance to get him straightened out; and even longer to make him into the complete babe magnet she knew he already was. At least to her. She privately admitted she didn’t want every other woman in his orbit feeling the same way.

Lexie caught herself up short. Aware she had already veered into dangerous territory, she said, “On second thought, maybe I shouldn’t be the one consulting with you on your new look.” It was too close to what she had done before. Taking on a man, making him her personal project. Helping him become everything he could be, only to have him leave her in the end. She did not want to go through that again. And she especially did not want to do that here in Laramie, Texas, under the watchful eyes of both their families.

Lewis grinned with a distinctly male satisfaction. “Too late,” he declared, cheerful as ever. “We already made a deal. I’m holding you to it.”

Lexie caught her breath, even as she wished he would kiss her again. Really kiss her this time. Not just tease her with the hope of what could possibly be.

“I’ll sack out on the sofa.” Lewis stepped back, ever the gentleman again. “That way, if you need anything, all you have to do is call,” he promised her softly. “I’ll be right here.”

Lewis McCabe had no idea how good that sounded to her.