Читать книгу Her Private Bodyguard - Gayle Wilson - Страница 14

“Taken to banging your head into brick walls now, have you?” Halley Burgess asked Val with a grin.

His big fingers were gentle, however, as he swabbed the clotted blood off the gash on her temple. Even if they hadn’t been, Val doubted she would have felt it much, considering the size and volume of her headache.

It had grown with each rut Grey had driven over to get her here. After his ultimatum, she hadn’t bothered to argue with him anymore. She had handed over the keys to her Jeep and given him the directions to Halley’s clinic on the outskirts of Rainsville.

Halley had been her doctor since she had moved out to the ranch ten years ago, although she could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times she’d visited him. In spite of her thinness and her limp, she was as healthy as the proverbial horse. Except, as the doctor had just suggested, when she had been banging her head against something that was equally hard.

“Actually, it was a fence post,” she said.

She was sitting on the end of his examination table, thankful Halley hadn’t made her lie down. She felt less like an invalid—and a whole lot less like a fool—sitting up.

“How’d you manage to do that?” he asked.

“The stud horse I bought from Kirby Gills went loco this morning. He knocked me down, and when I fell, I hit my head on the fence.”

“Went loco?” Halley echoed.

“Just…went crazy. Totally spooked. I still don’t have any idea what set him off.”

Halley didn’t say anything in response. Apparently he had cleared away enough of the dried blood to finally get a look at the wound under it. At least he had stopped dabbing and talking. After a moment he moved back, dropping the bloodstained gauze pad he’d been using onto the tray beside him.

She turned her head carefully, looking up at him. “So what’s the verdict? Am I going to live?”

“I expect so, but your friend was right. Needs a few stitches to pull that together, as fragile as the skin is there. Maybe take four or five. Then you’ll be right as rain.”

“No concussion?” she asked.

“I didn’t say that. Eyes look good, though,” Halley said, assessing them. “Head hurt?”

Val hesitated. She had a lot of experience living with her various aches and pains, and she hated to complain about any of them. An evaluation of her head injury was part of what she had come here to get, however, so it seemed stupid not to give Halley all the information that would allow him to make one.

Of course, she hadn’t exactly come voluntarily. And she suspected that Grey would ask about the possibility of a concussion, which was why she had mentioned it to Halley in the first place. And with a bang on the head there was always the chance of internal bleeding—which she didn’t want to risk.

“It feels like somebody’s working inside my skull with a jackhammer,” she said truthfully.

“I can give you something for that. Make you a little drowsy, but that’s okay, since you aren’t driving. That guy that brought you in a new hand?” he asked.

He lifted his eyes from hers and raised his eyebrows, an obvious signal to his nurse, who was standing on the other side of the examination table. Halley was probably indicating that he was ready for the local he would use to deaden the area around the cut before he sewed it up. One prick as opposed to several.

“Or is he something else?” the doctor asked, his eyes coming back to her as the nurse moved to the other side of the room.

“Something else,” she agreed.

“Boyfriend?”

“Oh, please,” she said dismissingly, her tone mocking.

“Not a ranch hand, and not a beau. You keeping secrets from old Doc Burgess, Valerie?”

“Maybe I should. The truth sounds pretty far-fetched,” she warned. “Actually, it sounds downright ridiculous. And I don’t particularly want to become a laughingstock.”

The nurse handed Halley something, keeping it behind Val’s back and out of sight, as if Val wouldn’t know what was going on. She couldn’t help smiling at that not-sosubtle subterfuge.

“I could use a good joke,” Halley said as he prepared the needle.

Val grimaced at the sting. She wasn’t sure if Halley’s comment about needing to hear a good joke was a reaction to her amusement at the nurse’s tactics or to her saying she didn’t want to become a laughingstock. And it didn’t really matter. She supposed she would have to tell him the truth in any case.

“He’s my bodyguard,” she said.

Halley’s hands hesitated, hovering a couple of inches over her temple. “Did you say…bodyguard?”

She started to nod, but he had already put his fingers on her chin, turning her head slightly to position it. He slid the needle in once more, on the other side of the gash this time. The local anesthetic must have already started to work, because the sting wasn’t nearly so bad.

“I told you it was ridiculous,” she said. “Something to do with an insurance policy the company took out on Dad. It seems that when I inherited his part of Av-Tech, I also inherited that policy. Its terms require that I have a security system on the ranch. Since I don’t, they sent him out to guard me until I can get one put in.”

“Well, he looks tough enough to handle most any kind of security,” Halley said. “Bodyguard, huh?”

She heard his chuckle as he took the suture needle the nurse handed him. It would take a minute or two for the local to take effect, so she suspected that she was going to have to give Halley the whole story while they waited.

“If he’s supposed to be guarding you, how come he let that horse beat you up?” he asked.

“He’s the one who dragged me out from under him.” Then she hesitated, knowing what she was about to say was the truth, even if she wasn’t overly eager to confess it. “I guess if he hadn’t been there, I could have really been hurt.”

“Is that when you reinjured your knee?” Halley asked.

She had been grateful when the doctor had made no comment on her limping progress into the examination room. Her leg had stiffened up royally on the ride over here, so that climbing out of the Jeep had been a test of will. Grey had offered his hand, and again she had been forced to accept, leaning on his arm as they slowly made their way inside the office.

The feel of his fingers lingered in her head. They had been rough, a little callused. A working man’s hands. And under her forearm they had felt every bit as strong and steady as they looked.