The Delivery of Decor (Shiloh Ridge Ranch in Three Rivers #7) - Liz Isaacson Page 0,19
examine her fingers. She better get inside quickly.
She couldn’t see much, so she cupped her hands around her eyes and ran, keeping her gaze on the gravel. When there was a break in the fence, she darted through it, her feet meeting cement. Then a set of wide, wooden steps.
Wow, the wind up here was twice as deadly as the small gusts they’d had in town. It was like Dot now existed entirely on another planet. She panted as she reached the porch and faced the massive front door.
Something ran down her face, and when she wiped it, her fingers came away bloody. Alarm pulled through her, and Dot got woozy fast. She stumbled forward, pressing both hands against the wooden door. “Help,” she said, her heartbeat sprinting through her chest.
She had the mental capacity to step to the side and ring the doorbell, something she did once, twice, and then three times before she told herself to stop. She’d barely taken her hand from the little button when the door opened.
Ward’s younger brother stood there, and the surprise on Ace’s face switched to concern in less time than Dot could blink. She didn’t have time to say anything before he yelled, “I need help here,” and rushed out onto the porch to support her with one arm sliding under one of hers. “Okay, Dot, can you walk with me?”
Ward appeared, and his shock doubled as he took in Dot’s bloody face. Why did she have to show up with a bloody face? That wasn’t in the plan. Nothing she was doing was according to her plan, as she’d left the bag of cheeseburgers in the dump truck.
“George is going to eat the cheeseburgers,” she said as Ace passed Dot to Ward.
“I have no idea what that means,” Ward said, and Dot remembered she hadn’t told him much about her dog. She hadn’t told him much of anything. “Oh, wait,” he said. “George is your dog. Where is he? Did he come with you? Is he hurt too?”
“I left him in the dump truck,” she said as he guided her to the right of the stairs, past a flocked-white Christmas tree with charming crocheted ornaments on it, to a spot where he opened a door seemingly out of the wall itself. A half-bath sat there, and Dot marveled that it was so white and so clean. “I brought lunch for us, with a load of your thirty-five. I thought it would be a good Christmas surprise.”
“It’s a surprise,” he assured her. “Ace, will you go get George? He’s a hound dog, but he’s really nice.”
“I parked in front of the garage just north of the house,” Dot said.
“I’ll take Bishop and Mister,” Ace said, and Dot caught sight of the three men leaving in the mirror.
She looked at herself and drew in a sharp gasp.
“Tell me where it hurts,” Ward said, wetting a washcloth before he wiped it down the side of her face.
“It’s not my face,” she said. “At least I don’t think so.” She looked down at her fingers, and they were definitely the culprit of the blood. “Oh, I can’t look at my own blood.” Her words slurred, and the world spun. She could give herself a shot and be fine. But this much blood?
She reached out and grabbed onto the nearest solid object, which thankfully, was the bathroom counter and not Ward Glover.
Dot yelped at the pain that tore through her right hand, and Ward said, “Let me see, Dot.”
“I think…the wind blew the door on Brutus and my hand got cut.” She could see it all in clarity now, and she pressed her eyes closed and focused on pulling in breath after breath as Ward’s rough fingers handled hers gently.
He put a warm cloth on them. He cleaned them up. He wrapped them in bandages. “Good as new,” he said. “You’ve got some blood on your face still. Do you want me to…?” He turned on the sink again and Dot simply kept breathing while he finished making her presentable.
“You can open your eyes now.”
Dot drew in another breath and did what he said. His bright blue eyes had never been classified on the color scale, and they dove right into Dot’s heart. She reached up and cradled his face. “You’re so handsome.”
“Thank you,” he whispered, his hand mirroring hers on the side of her face. “You’re beautiful.”
“No one’s ever called me beautiful,” she said.
“I don’t believe that. Your former fiancé? Never?”