A Match Made in Texas- By Arlene James Page 0,36

say.”

“It helps that I have you, right?” he pressed, sitting up a little straighter. The pillow slid down behind him, and Kaylie reached around to pull it back up. “I mean, you can take care of me at home, uh, Chatam House, so why stay here? Yeah?”

“We’ll see,” she repeated, smiling.

Stephen leaned back. “I need you, you know.” Kaylie blinked, more than merely surprised. “No, really. Yesterday, for instance. What would I have done without you?”

“Someone would have called an ambulance,” she told him.

“Yeah, maybe, but who would have held my hand throughout one of the worst days of my life?”

She said nothing to that, but when he held out his hand, she placed her own in it.

“I need you, Kaylie,” he said softly. “That’s why it’s so tough when you cut out on me.”

Warmth spread throughout her chest, radiating from her heart. “I’ll do my best for you, Stephen,” she told him, “I promise you, my very best. But I do have other obligations, you know. My dad needs me, too.”

His smile flattened. “Sure,” he said, letting go of her hand. He glanced around the room. “So what now? We stare at the walls until the docs show up?”

Sighing, Kaylie gathered up the newspapers. “Why don’t we start by taking a look at the news?”

“Oh, that’ll cheer me right up,” he grumbled, but he lay there and listened to her read, commenting from time to time and offering reasoned, if sometimes sarcastic, arguments when she disagreed with him. In truth, they agreed more often than not, and Kaylie found some of his comments to be surprisingly insightful, informed, no doubt, by his life on two continents.

His foul mood seemed to lighten considerably, and his pain level remained low. The nerve block administered by the surgeon would wear off sometime in the next thirty-six to forty-eight hours, and his pain would return to previous levels, but she trusted that they could manage it successfully. Though mercurial, Stephen in a better mood and not in pain was a delightful experience, and it pleased her to be responsible for that in some small way.

Perhaps it pleased her too much.

“In the Netherlands,” Stephen pointed out in response to an article on highway gridlock, “if you live more than ten kilometers from your job—that’s just over six miles—your employer must provide you with a bicycle.”

“A bicycle!” Kaylie exclaimed. “Oh, yeah, that would work. I can just see it now, bicycles fighting all those pickup trucks for space on our freeways. Yikes!”

“The bicycles don’t go on the freeways,” Stephen pointed out. “They go on the city streets, which have special bike lanes, and that frees up space on the highway.”

“Bike lanes aside—and I’ve never seen a bike lane on a Texas street—what about heat stroke? We get triple-digit summers here, not to mention other extreme weather.”

“The weather’s not the issue. They get freezing weather in the Netherlands. The issue is distance. Here, everybody lives an hour’s drive from work.”

“Not everyone can live where they work,” she argued.

He started to reply, but just then the door swooshed open and Brooks Leland strode into the room. Tall and fit with a touch of distinguished gray at his temples, a stethoscope about his neck and a white, knee-length lab coat in place of a suit jacket, the general practitioner was both genial and handsome. Stephen had liked Leland from the first moment they’d met only days earlier, but the instant the other man’s eyes lit on Kaylie, Stephen knew the good doctor’s likeability was about to take a nosedive.

The plummet began when Kaylie hopped up from the bedside chair and rushed toward Leland, calling out, “Brooks!”

It dropped like a rock when the doctor grinned and opened his arms. “There’s my favorite nurse.”

The two didn’t just embrace, they hugged, rocking side to side in their exuberance.

“Kaylie darlin’,” Brooks Leland drawled, pulling back slightly to gaze down at her, “it’s been too long.”

“That’s what you get for being such a stranger,” she scolded playfully. “Why don’t you ever come by anymore? Dad would love to see you.”

“I’ll make a point of it. Soon.”

“You better.”

The door opened again, bumping Leland in the back, and another white coat slipped into the room. Stephen recognized the orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Craig Philem. So did Kaylie. Worse, he recognized her.

“Kaylie, Kaylie, Kaylie,” he admonished with mock censure, reaching out an arm toward her. “Don’t you know that our Dr. Leland makes time with all the best-looking nurses?”

“None of whom will give Craig here the time