Читать книгу The Doctor's Texas Baby - Deb Kastner - Страница 12

Chapter Two

Wyatt let out the breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. Relief rushed over him like a crisp, cool waterfall.

Carolina was going to stay.

Well—at least she was going to stay for a little while. And although her reasons might have nothing to do with him, he was determined to make it be about him and Matty. Which meant he had exactly two months to convince her she ought to make her permanent home in Haven, so he could be near his son for always. He knew it wouldn’t be easy for him to see Carolina on a regular basis, but he would do anything for Matty.

That his initial encounter with Carolina hadn’t gone over particularly well was hardly the point. What could she possibly have expected his reaction to be? Even after having an hour to get used to the idea of her arriving in town with their son—a boy he hadn’t even known existed—in tow, he still felt like he’d been run over by a freight train, but with effort he’d taken that tornado of emotions and tucked it deep into his heart and out of sight. He was still angry and frustrated, and probably would be for a long time to come, but displaying how he felt wasn’t going to help anyone, least of all Matty.

Wyatt had only been half listening to the conversation going on around him. His mind kept wandering to the dark-haired little boy who was probably even now exclaiming in delight over the horses.

Despite Wyatt’s hurting heart, he couldn’t help but smile at the thought of his son and being a daddy now. He could teach Matty how to ride a horse and buy him his own mount as soon as he learned to balance in the saddle. He would show his precious child everything about the world, introduce him to all the different kinds of farm and domestic animals he vetted and teach him all about life in the country.

One day, when he was all grown up, Matty even might want to become a veterinarian like his father. Wyatt would be proud to pass on his business to his son.

His son. That one word made his chest expand until he thought he might burst.

But he was getting a little ahead of himself. Oh, who was he kidding? He was shooting off way ahead of himself.

First, he needed to get to know Matty, not to mention give the boy time to get comfortable with him. At some point—hopefully soon—he and Carolina would be able to explain to Matty that Wyatt was his daddy in a way a two-year-old could understand.

He was troubled by one thing. He had no idea how to go about being a good father. As a kid, he hadn’t had a real male role model in his life. His parents had worked in a foreign aid office, and Wyatt had been raised solely by Gran.

He realized that while he had all of these idealistic notions about what a father should be, he didn’t have a clue what was realistic and practical in everyday life.

It was unnerving to say the least, but no matter how much apprehension he felt inside, nothing would deter Wyatt from knowing his little boy and being part of Matty’s life.

A big part.

He only hoped Carolina felt the same way. He was going to move forward with this either way, but it would certainly be easier if she wasn’t fighting him at every turn. Did he dare assume that part of her reason for returning to Haven was that she had finally recognized that Wyatt had both the right and the responsibility to be in Matty’s life? He knew she’d ostensibly come back to Haven to personally deliver the news of Morton Mason’s death, but she could just as easily—actually, even more so—have sent an email to Bea. She hadn’t had to come in person.

So maybe there was another reason she’d come back to town. Maybe it was for his sake—and Matty’s.

Although that didn’t explain why she had appeared so startled when she’d first seen him. Was that because he’d caught her off guard?

There were so many questions, and the only way to find the answers was to try to get along with Carolina—and cross his fingers that she would try to get along with him. At this point all he could do was hope for the best and step up for his role in this drama.

“I’m glad we got that all settled up,” said the attorney, closing his briefcase with a snap that pulled Wyatt back to the present. “Thank you, Carolina, for agreeing to stay on here in Haven. I expect I speak for the Lone Star Cowboy League and the boys ranch when I say we appreciate your willingness to represent your family legacy at the seventieth-anniversary party. It may make all the difference to us and all the boys who call this place their home.”

Carolina nodded. “Of course. I’m happy to do it.”

Wyatt didn’t think she sounded happy. He thought he still knew her well enough to distinguish the sadness in her voice. The grief.

And the stress.

Well, that made two of them.

Anyway, he really wasn’t positive he knew Carolina all that well, if at all. Three years ago, he certainly hadn’t anticipated that not only did she not reciprocate his feelings, but she’d run away from them, and while she was pregnant, no less.

No. He sighed inwardly. Three long years had passed between them. The truth was he probably didn’t know the real Carolina Mason at all.

“We’ve still got one problem,” Gabe said, cutting into Wyatt’s thoughts about Carolina and their personal issues. “Even after searching extensively, I haven’t been able to find my grandfather. At this point I’m not sure it’s going to happen before the anniversary party.”

Harold nodded gravely. “That is a problem.”

Gabe planted his hat on his head and frowned. “I don’t suppose you’ve got any enlightening letters for me in one of those file folders of yours.”

“Actually, now that you mention it, there is a letter.”

Gabe’s eyes lit up with hope, but Harold’s next words quickly doused that flame.

“It’s not what you’re hoping for. But it is based upon another contingency, and one that you all should know about. Especially you, Gabe. If, upon the morning of the seventieth-anniversary party, all of the men—and ladies,” he said, tipping his Stetson to Carolina, “are not present and accounted for, I am to open the letter and read Cyrus’s instructions on how to proceed with parceling out the land. I must caution you, it does not look promising. Obviously Cyrus had one thing and one thing only in mind when he wrote his will. So I encourage you to continue doing all you can to try to locate your grandfather before time runs out.”

“Believe me, I am,” Gabe said, his voice lowering in frustration. “So you’re pretty much saying that the land will revert to the developer and half our boys will lose their places at the ranch.”

Wyatt cringed in sympathy for his friend. Talk about a tough position to be in. He wouldn’t want to be in Gabe’s shoes right now, with the entire future of the boys ranch now dependent on his ability to find a man who had disappeared off the planet years ago.

Harold’s steady gaze met Gabe’s. “I’m not saying ’tis or ’tisn’t. We won’t know until I open the letter on the day of the party.”

“At which point it will be too late for us to try to change things,” Bea said with a groan, swiping a tired hand down her face.

“And that is exactly why we can’t let that happen,” Gabe said determinedly. “We’ve come too far to see this endeavor fall apart now. Somehow, I’ve got to find my grandfather and make this right.”

“I know I’m new to all of this,” Carolina said hesitantly, “but please feel free to call upon me if I can be of any assistance. I don’t know what, if anything, I can do to help you, Gabe, but you’ve got my support any way you need it.”

“Yeah,” added Wyatt. “Same goes for me.”

Wyatt’s eyes met Carolina’s and their eyes locked. They had their own set of problems to wade through, and the water was deep and murky.

Bea knocked her fist twice on the desk and stood, effectively ending the meeting. Folks started shuffling out of the office. Wyatt lingered so he could walk out directly after Carolina.

“I want to get to know my son,” he said as soon as they cleared the building. “Spend some quality time with him.”

The gaze Carolina flashed him was a combination of annoyance, frustration, hesitation and panic.

It was the hesitation that hit him hardest.

What? She didn’t think he could handle Matty? That he didn’t have it in him to be a father?

He frowned, all of his muscles tensing in response. He pressed his own fears aside in favor of feeling downright insulted by her attitude.

She didn’t trust him with his own son? Granted, he knew nothing about children, but he’d been caring for animals all his life. He could be gentle.

If anything, she was the one who’d proven herself untrustworthy.

“Look. Not today,” she said at last.

He clenched his fists to keep from barking out a rebuttal. At the moment, she was holding all the cards, and he felt entirely powerless.

“When, then?”

She sighed deeply, sounding bone weary. “I don’t know, Wyatt. I just got into town. I haven’t even set up house yet at my uncle’s cabin, just a bunch of boxes in the living room and mattresses on the floor for Matty and me. It’s going to take a while. And I’m still looking for a job.”

“You’re a registered nurse. You ought to be able to find employment around here easily enough. Have you checked at the hospital yet?”

Her eyes narrowed and she pursed her lips for a moment before answering. “Like I said—I’m looking. I’ll let you know when I’ve found something suitable.”

She sounded as if she doubted her own training and competence. Which was ridiculous. He might not be too thrilled with her personally right now, but he knew her to be an excellent nurse. She’d taken the very best care of his gran in her time of need, so much so that Gran had refused another nurse after Carolina had left.

Several other nurses, actually. No one could live up to the bar Carolina had set.

Surely any nearby medical facility would pick her up in a second. Nurses were always in shortage, especially good ones.

Maybe she was just trying to throw their conversation off track. He wasn’t going to let that happen.

“Fine. I understand that you need to have the opportunity to work out all the details of your move to Haven. But I want an exact date and time when you will bring Matty to meet me, and it has to be soon.”

“I said I don’t know,” she shot back, sounding thoroughly exasperated.

His dander rose. If she was irritated, that was all on her. He wasn’t being unreasonable in asking for time to get to know his son.

Carolina blew out a breath. “I promise I’ll call you just as soon as I get settled in. I suppose we can plan to set up a playdate at the park or something.”

His eyebrows rose.

A date? Really?

If she thought he’d be going on any kind of date with her, she was sadly mistaken.

She looked at him questioningly and then burst into nervous laughter.

“I’m not asking you out, Wyatt. A playdate is when kids get together at the park. In this case, it will be you and your son. You can push him on the swing or play in the sandbox.”

“Oh.” He felt deflated, somehow. What was up with that? He knew he would have a great time with Matty, but—

“I have to go get Matty. I’m sure that Katie is rethinking her offer to watch him right about now. He can really be a handful when he gets excited, and I’m guessing he’s over the moon about his first introduction to horses.”

That should have been him. Yet another first that got away from him. Wyatt was determined it wouldn’t happen again.

“But you’ll call me, right?” Wyatt reiterated, knowing he was pushing her but beyond caring. “Soon?”

He wasn’t sure he was ready to take on a handful of two-year-old energy any more than Katie was, but he would have to be ready. He would make himself ready.

He was a father now.

* * *

This was pointless.

Why was she even bothering to fill out an eight-page employment application at Haven’s local nursing home and hospice? Carolina already knew she wasn’t going to get the job. Probably not even an interview. She barely dared hope, and yet she had to try.

Thankfully, she didn’t have to worry about Matty while she searched in vain for employment in the medical field. She and Katie were becoming good friends, and Katie had offered to watch Matty at the boys ranch office while Carolina went job hunting, as futile as it no doubt would be.

When had she become a cup-half-empty type of person?

Probably when her cup drained to its dregs and she hadn’t seen a drop of liquid to fill it again.

No amount of previous background or additional skill sets could overcome the thorn in her side—or her knee, to be more accurate. She’d already been turned down by every other medical facility in the area, for the same reason she’d lost her job at the hospital in Colorado.

The need to be able to catch a fainting patient or respond to a slip and fall never even used to be a consideration for Carolina, much less a problem. She’d always kept herself in good shape with a gym membership that she actually used.

But then she’d made the mistake of going on a weekend ski trip with her roommate, Geena Walker. In hindsight, why she’d thought she ought to learn how to ski was beyond her comprehension. To be honest, she hadn’t even really been all that interested in the sport. At the time it had seemed like a good idea, a fun way to take a short vacation and spend a weekend trying something new. She was living in Colorado, after all. Snow meant skiing, right?

She’d taken an hour’s worth of quick instructional lessons, even though it was humiliating to be in a class of half-pint children who effortlessly picked up the necessary skills ten times faster than she did.

Afterward, she’d successfully skied the bunny slope a couple of times and thought she was ready to tackle a beginner’s run.

It was easy, Geena had assured her. Simple as pie, she’d said. All Carolina had to do was ski from one side of the hill to the other in a diagonal fashion, slowly zigzagging her way down the mountainside.

Her first clue should have been when she slipped and nearly fell getting off the lift at the top of the mountain. But she’d chalked that up to being off balance and hit the slope.

Literally.

Neither Geena nor her ski instructor had mentioned what Carolina was supposed to do when her skis became crossed in the front and she went flipping head over heels for who knew how many yards down the snow-packed ski run.

All she remembered was not being able to breathe and feeling as if she were drowning in the snow, blinded by the icy white powder that had stolen inside her supposedly leak-proof goggles.

The next thing she knew, an entire crew of very young men sporting bright red jackets with white crosses embroidered on them surrounded her, insisting that they put her on a backboard and place a brace around her neck. She’d tried to tell them that she was a nurse and it wasn’t necessary to overkill the situation, but they apparently wanted to practice their rescuing skills on her.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, there was the humiliating turn down the hillside with all six of her escorts, while the regular skiers—the coordinated ones who didn’t make themselves into human avalanches—watched on with interest.

As it happened, her back and neck were fine. Her left knee, however, not so much.

Then had come the surgery, rehabilitation and getting summarily dismissed from her job because of her inability to lift fifty pounds. And those doctor’s orders weren’t going anywhere any time soon.

Nope. They were permanent.

Which meant she was in permanent trouble.

Bringing her thoughts back to the present, she sighed under her breath and scribbled her references on the employment application. Even if she already knew what the answer would be, she had to try.

Now that she had Wyatt breathing down her neck to spend time with Matty, it was more important than ever that she provide her son with a stable home, not only for his sake but to prove to Wyatt that she was able to make it on her own as a single mother.

That she didn’t need his help.

Though she had started with every medical facility in the area, she didn’t have time to be picky about where she worked. Even though she owned her great-uncle’s cabin free and clear, she and Matty still needed to eat, and she had to pay to keep the lights on and put gas in the car.

Unfortunately for her, she wasn’t really qualified for any other kind of work besides nursing. All of her education and expertise were the medical field. Retail or fast food might be an option in a pinch, but they didn’t pay enough for her and Matty to subsist on in the long run. She needed a living wage, not a teenager’s part-time after-school job. She supposed she could try to switch gears and become a medical receptionist, but her typing skills were atrocious and she’d never quite understood the medical filing system in the business classes she’d had to take in college.

Carolina closed her eyes and said a silent prayer. She’d been praying a lot more often recently, asking the Lord for guidance, not only in her career, but in her life. And now, more than anything, she needed direction on what she should do about her relationship—or lack of one—with Wyatt Harrow.

She was just about out of options.

Please, dear Lord, don’t make me have to beg.

Carolina was handing in her application at the front desk when, to her surprise, she spotted Wyatt out of the corner of her eye. She would have recognized his long, confident gait anywhere, not to mention his handsome profile.

Though he’d come in through the main glass doors of the nursing home, he clearly hadn’t seen her. He was walking down a hallway with his head down and his hands crammed into the front pockets of his jeans.

Even at a distance, and even though she couldn’t see the expression on his face, Carolina could tell he was troubled from his posture alone. She’d seen that look before, when his gran had been having so much trouble.

It was none of her business. She should leave now, before he turned around and recognized her. That would be the sensible thing to do. The smart thing.

But her days of doing the sensible thing were long behind her.

Instead, curiosity got the better of her and she followed him down the hallway, taking care to stay a few steps behind him and ready to duck into a doorway if he looked back.

Happily, he didn’t. He took a right, then an immediate left, and then he disappeared into a room on the right side of the hallway.

Carolina paused. What Wyatt was doing had nothing to do with her, but—

She had to look.

She just had to.

She continued down the hall straight past where Wyatt had gone, quickening her pace as she glanced into the room. She felt silly, like a teenage girl stalking her first crush around the halls in high school.

When she saw Wyatt sitting in a chair next to an old woman’s bedside, her heart swelled and then melted like warm chocolate.

Of course.

Wyatt was visiting his gran. No wonder he’d looked so burdened. Eva Harrow had clearly gone downhill from when Carolina had last seen her.

Carolina was more than a little bit familiar with Wyatt’s grandmother, having been the old woman’s home nurse for several months three years ago, just before Carolina had left Haven.

That was how she’d gotten to know Wyatt and when she had fallen in love with him. He clearly cared so much for his grandmother—such an attractive trait in a man.

Eva had accidentally plunged down a set of porch steps and had broken her hip. At that time in her life, it had become clear that her dementia was slowly overtaking her. Wyatt had needed Carolina’s round-the-clock help to keep Eva safe, but at that time he wouldn’t even consider putting her in a nursing home where she could get the kind of medical assistance she needed on a more permanent basis.

Eva was also—indirectly—the reason Matty had been conceived. One evening a few months into Carolina’s work for the Harrows, Wyatt’s gran had taken a sudden turn for the worse and spiked a high fever. She had ended up in the ICU with pneumonia and little chance of recovering. In his grief, Wyatt had turned to Carolina for comfort.

Carolina breathed deeply as memories flooded over her. Eva had managed to fight off a bad infection, although it was touch and go there for a while. She was one of the strongest people Carolina had ever had the privilege of knowing, but the woman had been ninety-six at the time of her injury and there was only so much recovery she could make, especially considering how quickly her dementia was changing her world for the worse.

But Wyatt hadn’t been ready to let her go then—or even now, apparently. Her heart welled as she watched him interact with her. He was holding Eva’s hand and speaking in a loud, animated tone of voice. Carolina was fairly certain from Eva’s blank-eyed, slack-featured expression that she did not recognize Wyatt at all.

Still, she appeared to be listening to him intently and wasn’t pulling away from his touch, so it was at least the semblance of a good day for her.

“Did I tell you about the donkey Johnny and I rescued? You remember I told you about Johnny, right? He’s the teenager I’m mentoring. Anyway, the whole thing with the donkey was so funny. We pulled him out of the mud bog he was stuck in, and I kid you not, Gran, that animal grinned from ear to ear when we freed him. A donkey smiling. Can you imagine? And you should have heard him braying a thank-you.”