Читать книгу The Cowboy And The Baby - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 11

Chapter Three

As usual, the waiting room of Forever’s lone medical clinic was very close to filled. It was the only available medical facility for fifty miles and the people of Forever were grateful for that. It wasn’t all that long ago that the clinic had stood empty, its last physician having moved away thirty years ago. There was something comforting about having someone to turn to because they felt ill, or just because a husband or wife had nagged them into availing themselves of an annual—or bi-annual—exam.

Startled by the combined, unnerving sound of screeching tires and squealing brakes, everyone in the clinic’s waiting room turned in unison toward the noise. As a rule, Forever was thought of by its residents as a sleepy little town that no one outside of the area ever really noticed and where nothing of consequence ever happened.

That meant that no one, either out of boredom or a sense of competitiveness, engaged in car races or harrowing displays of one-upmanship.

So when the teeth-jarring noise pierced the morning air, every patient within the waiting room, as well as the one nurse manning the desk, Debi White Eagle, instantly glanced in the direction of the bay window. The window looked out toward the front of the clinic.

“What the hell was that?”

Rancher Steven Hollis jumped to his feet, verbalizing what everyone else in the room was thinking.

The question didn’t go unanswered for more than a couple of quick beats. Almost immediately thereafter, the roomful of patients witnessed what all would have readily agreed was a very unlikely sight: a bare-chested Deputy Cody McCullough bursting into the clinic with what appeared to be a newborn baby in his arms. The baby was wrapped in his uniform shirt.

Debi, a surgical nurse by vocation as well as one of the most recent additions to Forever’s population, vacated her desk and rushed over to Cody.

“What happened?” she asked.

Cody quickly transferred Layla into her arms. “The baby’s mother is in the truck. She’s lost a lot of blood and I need help.”

“Holly!” Debi yelled over her shoulder toward the rear of the clinic. “We need a doctor out here, STAT!”

It was an order she was accustomed to issuing when she worked at the hospital in Chicago. Here, however, the word left more than one of the patients looking at the others in bewilderment.

Grabbing the fresh lab coat she’d brought in for one of the doctors, Debi quickly removed Cody’s shirt from around the tiny body and rewrapped the newborn in the lab coat. Acting in the interest of practicality, not to mention cleanliness, she figured the doctor would forgive her.

“Here,” she said, giving Cody back his shirt. “You don’t want to be out of uniform, Deputy.”

With that, Debi immediately turned toward the most maternal patient available to her, Anita Moretti, who had five children and a brood of grandchildren of her own. “Anita, hold the baby,” she requested, then looked at Cody. “Where’s the mother?”

“Out here.” He threw the words over his shoulder as, shrugging back into his shirt, he ran outside, secretly almost afraid of what he would see once he opened the truck’s passenger door.

“Where is she?”

The question came from Dan Davenport, the doctor who had initially reopened the clinic and who was currently in charge of it as well as the care of the citizens of Forever.

Cody was already at the truck. He threw open the passenger door and unbuckled the seat belt that was the only thing holding Devon in place and semiupright.

As carefully as he could, he lifted Devon out of the vehicle. The lower half of her dress was soaked with her blood.

Dan attempted to take the unconscious woman from him, but Cody shook his head. He wasn’t about to let her go. “No, I’ve got her.”

“This way,” Dan said needlessly as he and Debi went back into the clinic ahead of Cody. “What happened?” Dan asked. “Did you find her this way?”

More than a dozen set of eyes looked in their direction as Cody carried the woman in.

“No, she was conscious and screaming when I found her,” Cody answered, giving no indication that he even saw the other people in the room.

“Was she still in labor or had she given birth already?” Dan asked, leading the way to the room where he and his partner, Dr. Alisha Cordell-Murphy, performed both the simple surgeries and the ones that were classified as emergencies.

“As far as I could see, she had just started,” Cody told him, aware that every word was being greedily absorbed by all the people in the waiting room. “I tried to help her. When she gave birth, I thought she’d be okay,” Cody went on. “I didn’t realize...” His voice drifted off helplessly.

It was clear to Dan by Cody’s tone that he felt guilty that the situation had somehow devolved to this point.

“Not your fault,” Dan told him, indicating the freshly prepared gurney in the room. “People don’t realize that there are a lot of unforeseeable elements that can go wrong as a baby’s being born.”

“What have we got here?” Alisha Cordell-Murphy asked, peering into the room in response to Holly’s summons. Her eyes widened when she saw the unconscious woman. “Omigod, who is she?” she asked, looking from Dan to the man who was covered in the woman’s blood. She had only been in Forever a little over a year now, but she was acquainted—at least by sight—with everyone who lived within the area. This one was definitely not anyone she knew.

“Cody found her and brought her in,” Dan answered.

Cody gave her the highlights. “Her truck was pulled over on the side of the road. I wouldn’t have even seen it if she hadn’t screamed,” he confessed.

“I need plasma,” Dan declared. “It looks like she’s lost more blood than she can afford to.”

Debi, who had come into the room with them, was cutting away the woman’s clothing, preparing to put a sterile gown on her. Holly, who had already brought in the plasma, was now wordlessly preparing what she assumed the doctors were going to need to stop the hemorrhaging as well as to get a transfusion going.

Cody took a step back, and then another, giving everyone else there room to work. He felt as if he was just in the way.

“I’ll just wait outside,” he said to no one in particular as he took another step back.

Dan looked up, sparing him a fraction of a moment. “Don’t go too far away. I’ve got a few more questions you might be able to answer.”

“I don’t know more than I just told you, but sure, I’ll just be in the waiting room,” Cody told the doctor, but he knew he was talking to himself. Everyone else in the room was busy, doing their best to try to save the woman’s life.

Concerned and more than a little agitated, Cody slipped out.

The minute he was back in the waiting room, a barrage of questions rose all around him, coming from all different directions.

“You know her?”

“Where’d you find her?”

“Is this her baby?”

“Where’s the father?”

There were more, all mingling with one another until it was just a huge wall of sound.

“Everyone, hush,” Anita Moretti scolded, raising her voice to be heard above the rest. She was still holding the baby and rocking her as she patted the baby’s bottom, doing her best to soothe the infant the way she had with each one of her children and grandchildren in turn. “Can’t you people see that he’s been through a lot, too?” Turning toward Cody, Mrs. Moretti smiled at him, the perennial, protective mother. “Don’t pay them any mind, Cody. They’re just looking for something exciting to talk about over dinner tonight. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to.”

“There’s not much to talk about,” Cody told her, taking a seat and glancing around at the others. He was grateful for the woman’s concern, but he was also very familiar with and understood a small-town mentality, especially since he’d become one of Sheriff Rick Santiago’s deputies. “I was running late and only noticed the truck on the side of the road when I heard screams coming from it.”

“She was on the side of the road?” Wade Hollister, one of the patients, asked.

Cody humored the man, despite the fact that he felt the answer was self-evident. “Well, she was in labor so I don’t think she really felt like she was able to do any driving.”

Rusty Saunders scratched his head. “Hell, what was she doing out there in her condition, anyway?”

Cody laughed quietly as he eased Layla out of Mrs. Moretti’s arms. The woman looked at him skeptically, and then smiled and surrendered her precious package.

“I didn’t get a chance to ask her,” he told Rusty. “I was kind of busy at the time. We both were.”

To underscore his point, he smiled at the baby in his arms.

“You delivered that?” Nathan McLane asked Cody. He was as close as possible to a permanent occupant at the Murphy brothers’ saloon. His weathered expression was creased with awe.

Cody had never been one to embellish on a story or give himself credit if he could avoid it. He shrugged now. “I was just there to catch her. She more or less delivered herself,” he told Nathan and the rest of the waiting-room occupants.

Travis Wakefield, ever the practical man, was obviously trying to work out the logistics to Cody’s story. He’d gone to the window to look again at the truck Cody had driven over.

“You leave your truck back there?” he asked. “’Cause the one out there sure isn’t yours.”

That was when Cody suddenly remembered. He looked up. “My horse.”

“What about Flint?” Red Yakima asked, getting up and moving closer to Cody.

Cody had risen to his feet as well and now walked over to the bay window, scanning as much of the area as he could make out from his present vantage point. Flint was nowhere in sight.

“I couldn’t tie him to the back of the truck because I had to drive fast,” he told Red. “I told him to follow me.”

“You ‘told’ him to follow,” Rosie Ortiz, one of the occupants in the waiting room, repeated skeptically. “And what, he said, ‘Sure’?”

“Horses are smarter than most people,” Red tonelessly informed the woman. He turned his attention back to Cody. “You want me to go out and see if I can find him for you?” the man offered.

Cody turned the matter over in his head. He could either take the man up on his offer or turn the infant back over to Mrs. Moretti—and he did want to hang around to make sure Devon pulled through. There was a chance that she might not, although he really didn’t want to entertain that idea for the baby’s sake.

He had no idea why, but he felt that if he remained here, she wouldn’t die. He knew he was being superstitious, but everyone around here had some superstition they clung to. His was that if he walked out, the door would be left open for bad things to transpire.

Cody looked at the weathered ranch hand he had known for most of his life. “I’d appreciate that, Red.”

“Don’t mention it,” the man told him, waving a dismissive hand. “I’ll stop at the sheriff’s office and tell them you didn’t fall into a ditch or off the side of the cliff, put Rick’s mind at ease,” Red added matter-of-factly.

“I owe you.”

Red smiled for the first time. “Hey, buy me a beer next time we’re at the saloon together and we’ll call it even.”

“You got it,” Cody agreed, although in his opinion it didn’t really even begin to repay the man for taking the trouble to track Flint down.

Red walked out of the clinic.

Less than a minute later, Holly came out, an apologetic expression on her face. She looked around the waiting room at the patients.

“It’s going to be a while, I’m afraid,” she told them. Braced for complaints, she was surprised when none were voiced. “The doctors have got their hands full. Your names are all on the sign-in sheet. If you’d like to come back tomorrow, you’ll be seen in the order that you arrived today,” she said, once again looking around the room, waiting for some sort of descent or grumbling.

“How long is ‘a while’?” Oral Hanson wanted to know, obviously weighing his options.

Holly answered honestly. “At least a couple of hours.” Honesty forced her to add, “Maybe more.”

The man shrugged his wide shoulder. “Got nothin’ I’m doing anyway, not since my boys took over the ranch. Seems they’re always telling me to ‘go take a load off’ anyway, so I might as well do that and stay put.” Smiling at the baby in Cody’s arms, he added, “I’d like to find out if the little one’s mama pulls through.”

Most of the other patients were not of the same mind as Oral. They had busy lives to get back to, so they decided to leave the clinic and return the next day as suggested.

But a few, including Mrs. Moretti, remained. When Cody looked at the older woman quizzically, Mrs. Moretti said, “I thought maybe I’d stick around, give you a little help if you need it. You’ll want to have your hands free if they call you back in there.” Lowering her voice, she added, “You know, just in case.”

It was obvious to Cody that Mrs. Moretti had already convinced herself that there was more going on between him and the woman he’d found today.

Anita Moretti wasn’t a gossip by any stretch of the imagination, but the woman did enjoy a good story, both hearing one and, occasionally, passing one along. He couldn’t fault her for being human, even though what he knew she was thinking was entirely a fabrication.

And Cody knew better than to protest or try to set the woman straight. Saying anything to the contrary would only get him more deeply entrenched. Mrs. Moretti would go on believing what she chose to believe.

Connor had always maintained that when you lost control of the situation, the best thing to do was to politely say “thank you” and then back away as quickly as possible.

“I appreciate that, Mrs. Moretti,” Cody told the woman.

Because he was agitated and didn’t know what to do with himself, Cody began to walk the floor. Layla seemed to enjoy the rhythmic movements and before long obligingly dozed off.

Making no secret of the fact that she was watching him, Mrs. Moretti smiled and gave him the thumbs-up. “You’re a natural,” she told Cody, beaming.

“I’m not doing anything but walking,” Cody pointed out.

He heard the door behind him opening. Turning, he was about to tell whomever had come in that service was temporarily on hold until further notice.

But he didn’t have to say anything. It wasn’t a new patient. Red had returned to the clinic.

“Couldn’t find Flint?” Cody asked the older man. Red hadn’t been gone very long, but, then, Cody had no right to expect him to scour the area. After all, Flint belonged to him, not Red.

“Didn’t really have to look,” Red replied. “That is one loyal stallion you’ve got yourself there, McCullough. Saw him coming right into the outskirts of town, as pretty as you please, minding his own business like he didn’t have a care in the world and was just out for a morning stroll. Had to gentle him a little before I tied him to the hitching post down the street, but that’s to be expected. He’s waiting for you there,” the ranch hand informed him.

Well, that was a relief, Cody thought. He hadn’t realized he was so concerned until just this moment. He supposed this morning’s events had stretched his nerves taut to the very limit.

“I appreciate it,” Cody told the man.

“Yeah, yeah,” Red dismissed the words of gratitude. “I said a beer would square us, remember? Now I’ll go tell the sheriff you’re safe and sound. See you around, McCullough,” he told Cody.

Inclining his head in a show of respect, Red nodded at Mrs. Moretti just before he left the clinic.