Читать книгу The Wolf And The Dove - Linda Turner - Страница 12

With his usual enthusiasm, Michael Hawk gave Dr. Luke Greywolf a fierce hug, then ran out of the examining room as fast as his injured leg would allow, his attention jumping to the toy he would pick out at the nurses’ station before he left with his mother. A muscle clenching in his square jaw, Luke watched the five-year-old awkwardly make his way down the hall and swore, long and fierce. The boy needed a good orthopedic surgeon and surgery to correct a break that hadn’t healed properly six months ago, but he wasn’t likely to get either. His father was a day laborer, and what money there was went for food and clothes, not health insurance. Surgery, however necessary, was a luxury that was out of reach.

“Don’t beat yourself up over this,” Mary Littlejohn, his nurse, said quietly from behind him. “You’re doing all you can.”

“It’s not enough,” he said flatly, turning away to wash his hands. “That kid’s going to live with a limp the rest of his life, and it doesn’t have to be that way, dammit. If I could get him to Jeremy Stevens in Jackson—”

Mary cut in with the bluntness of a longtime friend. “But you can’t. His parents are proud—they won’t take handouts. And you’re already helping more people than you can afford to.”

“Don’t start,” he growled.

He might as well have saved his breath. Old enough to be his mother, Mary had been speaking her mind from the first day she came to work for him, three years ago, when he opened the clinic. “Somebody has to say something, and I’m just the person to do it. I know you came home to help people, but you’ve got to be sensible about it, Greywolf. Half the patients you see never carry through on their promise to pay, and you just let it go. That’s no way to run a business. You’ve got your own bills to pay.”

“I’m making it,” he said shortly. There was no way he was going to hound people who could barely put groceries on the table for the money for shots for their kids. “Who’s next?”

“Jane Birdsong,” she said, ticking them off on her fingers. “Then old man Thompson, Bill Parsons, Abigail Wilson, and Rachel Fortune.”

Reaching for the Birdsong chart, Luke threw her a sharp glance of surprise. “Fortune? As in one of old lady Kate’s brood?”

Mary’s faded blue eyes twinkled with amusement. “The one and only. If I remember correctly, this one belongs to Jake…one of the twins, I think.”

“And she’s here to see me?”

Chuckling at his suspicious tone, she nodded. “So she says. Word must have gotten out what a good doctor you are.”

He snorted at that. “Get real, Mary. We’re talking about the Fortunes, remember? The stinking-rich ones who hang out with the Kennedys and Rockefellers? The old lady had enough money to buy every major hospital in the country—somehow I can’t see her granddaughter going to a rural clinic for medical care unless she was dying. Did she look sick?”

“Are you kidding?” she asked. “I’d have given my eye teeth to look that sick at her age. Want me to show her in?”

Curious, Luke nodded. “Room three,” he began, only to stop short, scowling. What the hell was he doing? He had sick patients in the waiting room, poor people who would wait without complaint for as long as it took to see him. Rachel Fortune couldn’t just waltz in like she owned the place and cut to the head of the line because he couldn’t imagine what she wanted with him and her family had more money than God.

“Forget that,” he growled. “She can wait her turn just like everyone else. Show Mr. Thompson into three.”

“You’re the boss,” Mary said with a shrug, and went to do his bidding.

When Rocky was shown into an examining room nearly two hours later, she stopped in surprise. “Oh, I’m not here for an exam,” she told the nurse hurriedly. “I have a business proposition to discuss with Dr. Greywolf. I know I should have called first, but I was afraid he’d be booked up and it’d be weeks before I could see him.”

“And you didn’t want to wait,” Mary guessed shrewdly, grinning.

Caught in the trap of the older woman’s friendly, knowing eyes, Rocky couldn’t help but laugh. “What can I say? I was born a month early, and I’ve been in a hurry ever since. Is it always this busy around here?”

Her blue eyes twinkling, Mary said, “Busy? Today’s a slow day. Most nights we’re lucky to get out of here by eight.” Taking a quick inventory to make sure everything in the room was as it should be, she motioned to the straight-backed chair positioned against the wall. “Have a seat. I hate to tell you this, but you’ve got another wait. Dr. Greywolf will get to you as soon as possible.”

Rocky thanked her, but as soon as the door shut quietly behind the nurse she realized there was no way she was going to be able to just sit there and wait. She was too nervous, too anxious, too excited. For four months now, ever since she’d inherited a helicopter and three single-engine planes from her grandmother, she’d been searching for the perfect locale to start her own flying service. She’d checked out everywhere from Estes Park to Jackson Hole to Vail, and in the end she’d found what she was looking for practically in the backyard of her grandmother’s Wyoming ranch.

Shaking her head over her own stupidity, she wondered why she hadn’t thought of Clear Springs sooner. It was a small town, rough and rugged and charmingly flavored with the old West, and she’d always loved it. Invitingly situated between the Ghost Mountains to the north and a Shoshone Indian reservation to the south, it drew a respectable number of tourists in the summer and its share of hunters and hikers in the fall and winter. And, incredibly, there were no pilots for hire in the area to take hunters into the mountains or fly search-and-rescue in case of an emergency. The situation couldn’t have been better if her grandmother had arranged things for her in heaven.

Which Kate just might have done, she admitted with a rueful flash of dimples. There hadn’t been much that Katherine Winfield Fortune hadn’t done or tried in life. She’d gone her own way, done her own thing, always with a style that was legendary. She was the one who’d taught Rocky to fly when she was sixteen, and if there was a way to pull strings from heaven, Kate would have found a way.

Memories swamped Rocky. She still found it hard to believe Kate was dead. How could a woman who was so full of spirit, of life, let death take her in a plane crash in some godforsaken jungle? Kate had been tougher than that, stronger. And too good a pilot to let a plane she was flying go down so easily. She would have fought like hell to keep it in the air; and then, when it became clear that wasn’t going to be possible, she would have found a way to land the thing. And she would have walked away, dammit. She should have.

Only she hadn’t.

Her throat tight, Rocky swallowed. Lord, she missed her. Kate had always understood her need for independence, her need to stand on her own two feet and cut herself free of the Fortune money, Fortune Cosmetics, Fortune expectations. And with her death, she’d given her the means to do that. Thanks to Kate, she had her planes, experience flying in the mountains, and the emergency medical training Kate had insisted she take when she got her commercial pilot’s license. She’d taken care of everything.

Except a landing field.

Her cousin Kyle, who had inherited her grandmother’s ranch, had graciously offered to let her use the facilities there, but Rocky’s stubborn pride had refused to let her accept. She’d grown up with advantages most people couldn’t even dream of, and it was time she proved she could stand on her own two feet. That meant no favors from family, no free business advice, nothing. She would either succeed or fail, all by herself.

Which meant she still needed an airstrip. And the only other private one in the area was owned by Luke Greywolf.

The place had once belonged to Douglas Aeronautics, and Luke had bought it for a song—not, according to the locals, because he planned to reopen the old flying service that had gone belly-up during the oil embargo of the seventies, but because the land was cheap and close to the reservation. He’d turned the largest building on the property into a clinic and hot-topped the parking lot, but other than that, he’d made few other changes. The hangar was still rusted and the runway pitted and unused, and that was what she wanted to talk to the good doctor about.

She’d heard he was a reasonable man, so she didn’t see any reason why they couldn’t do business together…except for the clinic sign out front. Made of wood and painted a dull gray, it would have been plain and unobtrusive if not for the face of a wolf that had been carved into the rough wood by a talented hand. She had a sinking feeling that that sign said a lot about Luke Greywolf. If he was anything like the wolf in his name and as protective of his territory, then making a deal with him wasn’t going to be quite as easy as she’d hoped.

She wasn’t Kate Fortune’s granddaughter for nothing, however. Kate had taught her that when a woman wanted something in a man’s world, she had to pull out all the stops, and that was just what she’d done. Turning toward the mirror on the wall by the small dressing area, she took a quick inventory of herself and grinned. Lord, she looked like Allie today! Of course, most of the world thought she looked like her twin sister every day, but she knew better. Oh, they were identical right down to their toes, but it was Allie who loved makeup and glamour and had been born with the style that made her the perfect choice as the model for Fortune Cosmetics.

And Rocky didn’t envy her one little bit. She would have hated the fuss and bother and never being able to step out in public without worrying about her mascara being smudged or her hair limp. But on a day when she needed everything going for her, Rocky decided with a chuckle, looking like her sister couldn’t hurt. Giving her image in the mirror one last critical glance, she nodded, satisfied. If Lucas Greywolf could turn down her proposal when she looked this good, then the man didn’t have any blood in his veins.

Luke made a few quick notes in Abigail Wilson’s file, his brows knitting as he stared down at comments he’d made after her previous visits. She was pregnant with her sixth child and couldn’t afford to feed the five she already had. She seemed cheerful enough, but she couldn’t hide the stress in her eyes. Like all the women on the reservation, she wanted more for her children but knew the odds were against them. The lucky ones scraped and fought and found a way out the first chance they got. The rest stayed and struggled just to exist. There was nothing else they could do.

Frustrated, irritated, he closed the file and handed it to Mary. “Rachel Fortune still here?”

She nodded. “Room one. And not one word of complaint out of her when I showed her in there. In fact, she apologized to me for stopping in without an appointment—said she needed to talk to you. I thought she’d be snooty, but she’s been real nice.”

Reserving judgment, Luke merely grunted. The lady had to want something real bad if she’d sat over two hours in a waiting room full of sick patients to see him when she wasn’t even sick. “Yeah, I’m sure she’s a regular princess,” he drawled, heading for the door. “It shouldn’t take long to find out what she wants. Show Christie Eagle and her mother into three and tell them I’ll be right with them.”

His rugged face set in grim lines, he strode down the hall to examining room one, going over in his head what he knew about the Fortune family. It wasn’t much. The old lady, Kate, had died recently in a plane crash, and from what he’d heard about her, she’d been one sharp cookie. She’d ruled the family empire with a firm hand, and if the falling price of Fortune Cosmetics stock was anything to go by, her absence was already being felt.

So what did Kate’s granddaughter want with him? he wondered with a frown. They didn’t exactly run in the same circles. Apart from her cousin Kyle, whom he occasionally saw in town, he wouldn’t know her or the rest of the clan if he passed them on the street. And that was just fine with him. Because of the family’s connection to the town, the local paper faithfully reported every tidbit of gossip about the clan, and by all accounts, the younger Fortunes were wild, willful, and spoiled, not to mention attracted to danger. Just last week, he’d read about Rachel’s exploits at a charity air show. She’d been performing stunts—stunts, for God’s sake!—when her plane nearly stalled. She’d managed to pull out of it, but she could have just as easily crashed and killed not only herself, but dozens of innocent people on the ground.

Luke had little use for that kind of irresponsibility. The whole bunch was too used to doing what they damn well pleased. They flew in to the ranch when they wanted to play cowboy and flew out again when they grew bored with the game. From what he could see, they’d never done a hard day’s work in their life.

Reaching the examining room where Rachel waited, he pushed the door open and soundlessly stepped inside to find her standing with her back to him, examining his diploma from medical school, which was framed and hanging on the far wall. Determined to keep this short and sweet, he said, “Ms. Fortune? I understand you wanted to talk to me—”

That was as far as he got. She turned then, a smile of welcome flirting with the edges of her mouth, and he felt the impact clear across the room. Stopping dead in his tracks, he would have sworn she knocked him out of his shoes. This was Rachel Fortune?

He’d expected her to be attractive—money and good looks just seemed to go hand in hand—and her grandmother had started one of the most successful cosmetic companies in the world. With good bone structure and skin, not to mention the right makeup, any woman could be reasonably pretty.

Pretty didn’t even begin to describe the woman before him, however. With her sculptured cheeks, slanting brows and large dark brown eyes, she could have stopped traffic in any city in the world, but here in Clear Springs, where the harsh winters dried the skin and added years to a woman’s face, she was as breathtaking and unexpected as a rose in the snow. And he couldn’t stop staring. Tall and slim, she was dressed for business in a somber black wool suit and stark white blouse, but the effect was ruined by the way the fit of the skirt emphasized her slender waist and the impossibly long length of her legs. And then there was her hair. Wine red, it fell in a soft, sweeping curve to her angled jaw, just begging for a man’s touch.

He’d always been a sucker for red hair.

The thought slipped up on him like a craving in the night, easing into his blood in a sudden flash of heat that caught him totally off guard. Stunned, he stiffened, guilt and resentment twisting in his gut. He hadn’t looked twice at a woman in the two years since Jan had died, and he didn’t plan to start now with someone like Lady Fortune here, who had the world at her feet. He only had to see the amusement glinting in those big brown eyes of hers to know that not only was she aware of the effect she had on men, she expected it. If that was what she was here for, she’d made a wasted trip.

“I’m Dr. Greywolf,” he said coolly. “What can I do for you, Ms. Fortune?”

Caught in his intense dark brown eyes, Rocky hesitated, her smile wavering and her heart, for no reason that she could understand, suddenly jumping crazily in her breast. Okay, she acknowledged, he was a good-looking man, if you liked the stony type. She didn’t. She liked a man who laughed easily, at himself and the world. That did not in any way, shape or form appear to describe Luke Greywolf.

There was no glint of humor in his nearly black eyes, no smile to relieve the lean, chiseled features of his square face. Tall and broad-shouldered in a white lab coat, his straight, inky-black hair cut conservatively short, he stood like a pine in the forest that didn’t bend, his proud Shoshone heritage stamped all over him. It was there in the width of his brow, the granite-hard set of his jaw, his blade of a nose. And it was there in his eyes. Never taking his gaze from her, he watched her like a wary hawk that just dared her to make a wrong move.

It wasn’t, Rocky decided, swallowing to ease the sudden dryness in her throat, a look she particularly cared for. Her nerve endings bristling, she reminded herself that she didn’t have to like the man to do business with him, then gave him a smile that had, in the past, left more than one un-suspecting male panting. “Please…call me Rocky.”

Far from impressed, he arched a disbelieving brow. “Rocky Fortune? I thought your name was Rachel.”

“It is,” she said. “But I earned the nickname when I gave my brother a black eye when I was ten, and it just sort of stuck.” Crossing the room to him, she held out her hand and grinned. “I’ve still got a wicked left, but I haven’t punched anybody out in years. It’s nice to meet you, Doc. I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Most people, upon hearing the story about her nickname, wanted to know what her brother had done to her to provoke her into punching his lights out, but Luke Greywolf only stared at her hand before reluctantly taking it in a quick shake that was over almost before it had begun. “I understand you wanted to talk to me,” he said curtly. “If this is about a contribution to one of the local charities—”

He hadn’t so much as moved, but Rocky could feel him mentally pushing her toward the door. “It isn’t,” she said quickly. “Actually, I have a business proposition for you.”

Luke couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d said she wanted to buy him a Ferrari. Stepping farther into the room, he shut the door behind him, closing out the noise rolling down the hall from the waiting room. In the sudden silence, his brown eyes, dark with suspicion, met hers. “Is this some kind of joke? You can probably buy and sell me a hundred times over, Ms. Fortune. What kind of business could we possibly have in common?”

“You have an airfield that no one’s using,” she replied promptly. “I’d like to buy it.”

“Why?”

“Because I need it,” she said simply. “My grandmother left me a small fleet of planes and a helicopter, and I want to use them to start a flying service here in Clear Springs. You know, fly in hunters and skiers, that kind of thing. There’s not anything like that in this area. Everyone goes to Jackson, which is nearly a hundred miles away, not to mention on the other side of the mountains. That’s not only inconvenient, it’s a loss of revenue for the city. So surely you can see that there’s a need…”

Luke kept his gaze shuttered. He saw, all right. What he saw was that she needed his landing strip to fly in her rich friends to hunt and party. They’d throw their money around town, look down their noses at everyone, tear up the woods and the roads, then take home trophy elk and deer as if it were their God-given right.

Not if he had anything to say about it, he thought grimly. The muscles in his jaw bunching at the thought, he turned his back on her and opened the door to the hall. “The airfield’s not for sale. If that’s all you wanted to discuss, I have patients…”

Dismissing her as easily as if she were a door-to-door salesman, he patiently waited for her to precede him into the hall. Caught off guard, Rocky stood right where she was. He was turning her down! she thought in disbelief. No one had ever turned her down without doing her the courtesy of considering her offer, and she found, to her irritation, that she didn’t like it. She didn’t like it one damn bit!

“Can’t we at least talk this out?” she persisted stubbornly. “I could come back at the end of the day.”

“What’s there to talk about?” His face as hard as the Rockies, he stood at the open doorway, clearly impatient for her to leave. “You want my airstrip to fly your rich friends in for the hunting season so they can all play big white hunter. Sorry, but I’m not interested.”

“Big white hunter?” she echoed in confusion. “You make it sound like I’m planning some kind of Jungle Jim party thing.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No! Oh, sure, I plan to hire out to hunters or anyone else who needs my services, but I have a lot more to offer than tour-guide services. I’m a licensed EMT, Dr. Greywolf,” she said proudly. “I’ve trained with one of the best search-and-rescue teams in the country and logged hundreds of hours flying in the mountains. This community needs that kind of emergency service. And I need an airfield.”

“Isn’t there one at your grandmother’s ranch?”

“That belongs to my cousin Kyle now. I want a place of my own.”

“Then you’ll have to find one somewhere else. Mine’s not for sale.”

He was so adamant, Rocky wanted to shake him. It wasn’t as if he were using the airstrip, she thought resentfully as the temper she’d inherited along with her red hair from her grandmother started to simmer. It was just sitting there going to pot. It would serve him right if she told him to just forget it. She could buy some land and build what she needed from scratch—but that would take time, dammit, and she wanted to get started now!

“All right,” she said abruptly, knowing when she was beating a dead horse. “You don’t want to sell. I can respect that. How about leasing it, then? Don’t say no,” she said quickly, before he could turn her down flat again. “Just think about it for now. The landing strip’s just sitting there, not earning you a penny. Maybe you don’t need the money personally, but you could always use it to make improvements here at the clinic.”

She saw resentment flicker in his eyes and wasn’t surprised. He was a proud man, but facts were facts. She’d had more than enough time to look around the place while she waited to talk to him, and it was obvious he was running the place on a shoestring. It was spotlessly clean, but the old building really needed some cosmetic work, work that could easily be paid for with the generous lease she was willing to pay.

Grabbing a piece of paper from her purse, she hurriedly jotted down her telephone number and address, then pushed it into his hand. “If you change your mind, just give me a call.”

She didn’t give him time to tell her hell would freeze over before he made that call. Stepping around him, her bearing as regal as a queen’s, she walked down the hall and turned the corner into the reception area. Staring after her, Luke crushed the slip of paper with her phone number in his fist and swore. “Brat,” he muttered, tossing the note into a nearby trash can. “Who the hell does she think she is? She’s got all the money in the world, and all she can think about is her damn airfield. If she thinks she’s got problems, let her talk to Michael Hawk. Or Abigail Wilson. They’re the ones who could use her money—”

“Which is why you should have at least considered what she had to say,” Mary retorted from the supply closet, which was conveniently located right next to examining room one. Making no apologies for the fact that she had blatantly eavesdropped, not only on his conversation with himself but also on his meeting with Rocky Fortune, she frowned at him disapprovingly. “It’s not like you’re using that airstrip. And the money you’d make on a lease would go a long way toward financing Michael Hawk’s operation.”

“His father won’t accept help, remember?”

“A handout, no. But Rocky was right—this place could use some work. You could hire Mr. Hawk to do it. That would save his pride, and Michael would still get his surgery.”

She had a point, Luke grudgingly admitted, one he hadn’t even considered. Damn! What the hell was wrong with him? He should have thought of Michael himself, but he’d been so busy drooling over the lady he couldn’t think straight. And then there was the money. She had it in spades, so she was used to getting what she wanted because she wanted it. And that had rubbed him the wrong way. So he’d cut off his nose to spite his face, just to bring her down a peg or two. Idiot!

“I’ll talk to her,” he said stiffly. “Later.”

“And you’ll apologize?”

He rolled his eyes, his lips twitching. Trust Mary to insist on a pound of flesh. “All right, I’ll apologize for being rude and obnoxious. Now can we get back to work? In case you’ve forgotten, we still got patients to see.”

“In a minute,” she said, and stepped into the first waiting room to retrieve the crumpled slip of paper he’d tossed in the trash. When she placed it in his hand and closed his fingers around it, she was grinning. “You can’t call her if you haven’t got her number.” Chuckling, she turned away to retrieve Christie Eagle’s chart.

The small fifty-year-old wood-frame house was showing serious signs of age. Even in the dark shadows of the night, Luke could see the peeling paint, the slightly uneven steps of the porch, the shutters that probably hadn’t hung straight in decades. Surprised, he braked to a stop at the curb and grabbed the wrinkled scrap of paper he’d tossed on the dash when he left the clinic a few minutes earlier. A quick glance at the address Rocky had scrawled there four hours earlier assured him he’d made no mistake. This was it—the place where Kate Fortune’s granddaughter was living.

It made no sense, he told himself as he approached the front steps. He didn’t know anything about the details of the old lady’s will, apart from what Rocky had told him, but it was a given that she wasn’t strapped for funds. She could, no doubt, afford the best that Clear Springs had to offer. So what was she doing living here?

Bothered more than he should have been by the question, he knocked briskly on the door, determined not to get caught up in the intriguing diversity that was Rocky Fortune. The lady had her quirks and the money to indulge them. He didn’t care what she did as long as she agreed to pay him a decent lease on the airfield.

Knocking again, he frowned when there was no answer. Someone was obviously home—he could see the lights through the covered windows, and the walls were practically vibrating from the country-and-western song being belted out on a radio inside. “What the hell?” he muttered, and tried the knob. It opened without a sound. Surprised, he scowled. Crazy girl, didn’t she know better than to leave her door unlocked at night? Clear Springs might not be much of a metropolis, but just like anywhere else, it had its fair share of crime.

Giving the door a slight nudge, he stepped cautiously inside and found himself in a small entrance hall. On the radio, a whiskey-voiced man was singing about a honky-tonk woman, but Luke hardly noticed. Through the arched doors that led to the living room he caught sight of Rocky, and he could do nothing but stare. This was, he knew, the same woman who’d come sashaying into his clinic earlier that afternoon, dressed to kill and flashing her money around. The expensive business suit, however, had been traded for paint-spattered jeans and a ragtag cotton shirt, her high heels for a pair of tennis shoes that looked as if they’d been through a war. Standing with her back to him, her wild red hair covered with a blue bandanna, she was painting the living room and singing her heart out, while her slim hips kept heart-stopping time to the beat of the music. Feeling like he’d been struck by lightning on a clear day, Luke stood as if turned to stone, while deep inside a hot pulse kept time with every sway of her hips.

Belting out the current number one country hit, Rocky turned to add paint to her dry roller pan—and nearly dropped it, stunned when she saw Luke Greywolf standing in the doorway. She should have laughed—she was a mess, with white paint in her hair and on her clothes and even under her fingernails, and her singing had often been compared to a cat’s screeching. But there was something in his eyes that wasn’t the least bit funny, and suddenly her chest seemed tight and breathing wasn’t nearly as easy as it had been before she spied him in the doorway.

Flustered, she hit the power switch to the radio. “Well, this is a surprise,” she said, too loudly, shattering the sudden silence. “I wasn’t expecting to see you this evening.”

“I knocked,” he said stiffly. “But the radio—”

“Was blaring,” she finished for him, grinning. “I have to crank it up to max when I sing, or I’d have every dog in the neighborhood howling at the moon.”

For a moment, she thought she saw a smile start to curl up the corners of his mouth, and she found herself waiting expectantly, her gaze fastened on his lips. But then his eyes fell to the roller and pan at her feet, the paint on her arms and clothes, and a confused anger hardened his face. Scowling at her, he growled, “Tell me something, lady. Just what the hell kind of game are you playing, anyway?”

Taken aback by the unexpected attack, Rocky blinked. “Game? What are you talking about?”

“This handyman routine,” he retorted, waving at the drop sheets and painting paraphernalia that littered the living room. “I didn’t think you people cut up your own meat, let alone knew how to yield a paintbrush.”

Outraged, Rocky gasped, her brown eyes narrowing dangerously. “Cut up our own meat?”

It was the wrong thing to say. Luke knew it the second the words left his mouth, and he wanted to kick himself. What was it about this woman that knocked him off kilter so easily? He’d never had a problem communicating with women before—he liked them, dammit! But there was something about Rocky Fortune that just seemed to rub him the wrong way.

Heat climbing up his throat, he quickly back-pedaled. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. It’s just that your family is rolling in dough, and you’re probably not used to doing things for yourself—”

“Like tying my own shoelaces?”

Luke winced at the sweetly purred gibe. “You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?”

“Not on your life,” she retorted, beginning to enjoy herself. “So what can I do for you, Doc? You didn’t show up here just to insult me.”

She knew, dammit, why he was there—he could see the anticipation dancing in her eyes. And she was going to make him squirm. Amused in spite of himself, he swallowed his pride and admitted, “I’ve given it some thought and realized I may have rejected your offer to lease the airstrip too quickly. I thought maybe we could discuss terms.”

“Terms, huh?” she echoed, grinning. “I think I can manage that.” Whisking off the sheets covering the furniture, she motioned to him to take a seat in an overstuffed chair, then settled opposite him on a faded brocade coach. “Okay, Doc, the ball’s in your court. It’s your serve. Give it your best shot.”

He named a sum that he thought was more than fair, only to have her gasp as if he’d just insulted her. “You’ve got to be kidding! That’s highway robbery. Have you looked at the runway recently? And the hangar?”

She threw out a figure that was half the one he’d named, he countered, and the game began. With a skill Luke couldn’t help but admire, she held her ground and bartered like a horse trader, making no attempt to hide the fact that she was in her element. Later, it would bother him that he’d enjoyed himself so much, but when he rose to leave nearly an hour after he arrived, they had a deal.

Confident that he’d gotten the best of her, he solemnly shook hands with her, then couldn’t resist gigging her as she walked him to the door. “You drive a hard bargain, lady. But I would have taken less, you know.”

Unperturbed, she only grinned. “Really? That’s good to know, Doc. Because I would have paid more.” Her brown eyes sparkling, she laughed and shut the door in his face.