A Match Made in Texas- By Arlene James Page 0,40

appreciate it.”

Carter was the last out the door. He smiled at Kaylie, waggled his puck at her and winked. Stephen felt a kick in his chest and an instant spike in his temper, and that’s when it hit him that she was right, after all. He was jealous! Terribly so.

The knowledge took his breath away. For the first time in his life, he was actually jealous, and he didn’t like it, not one little bit. The question was, what could he do about it? What should he do about it?

Helplessly, he watched her check her watch again, and the next thing he knew, he was pleading with her.

“Wait. Don’t go yet. Just wait a minute, will you?” Well, that was another first: Stephen Gallow pleading with a woman. Usually, they threw themselves at him and he occasionally allowed himself to catch one. None of them had ever affected him as Kaylie did, though. “I—I have something to say.”

Standing all the way across the room, Kaylie looked down at her toes, rocking back on her heels and folding her arms. He held his breath until she looked up again. Heart pounding, he held out his hand. She hesitated for a long moment, but finally she moved forward. Once she drew near, she put her hand in his. A ridiculous smile broke out on his face. It was insane, but he couldn’t help a surge of nervous relief and sheer joy, especially when he gave her a tug and she came un-resisting to the side of his bed. Looking down at her much smaller hand in his, he swept his fingers across her knuckles and spoke with blunt honesty.

“I’ve been unreasonable at times, even unbearable, and I apologize.”

“No apology necessary,” she told him softly, all forgiveness and generosity.

“I know that it’s selfish of me to want to keep you to myself,” he went on, squeezing her hand, “but it’s so much easier when you’re here.”

“I understand,” she said.

He shook his head. “I don’t think you do. I’m not sure I understand it myself. When you’re with me, I feel so…comforted, peaceful…hopeful, even, but it’s more than that. It’s…”

“It’s what?” she asked, tilting her head.

He looked up into the purity of her face, her deep, dark, open gaze filling him with warmth. Her kindness and sweetness and patience enveloped him. A fierce yearning shook him to his core. Instinctively, he reached up, and then he was pulling her down, his hand clamped around the nape of her neck beneath the heavy weight of that crazy, looping bun that he hated simply because it kept her hair contained. She didn’t have far to go. He surely stood more than a foot taller than she did, but he was partially sitting in a high bed, and she was already bending close. It seemed like an eternity, but no more than a heartbeat passed before their lips met.

What happened next could not be explained.

The room and everything else seemed to spin away. Sensation electrified every nerve ending in his battered body. At the same time, Stephen’s mind clarified. He saw the stark reality of his own life.

He had been living, existing, in a kind of desert—a dry, cold, barren, lonely place where he didn’t want to be anymore—and Kaylie was his first, perhaps his only, chance to escape it. She was warmth and shelter, companionship, contentment, peace—and much too good for the likes of him. She obviously knew it, too, for she suddenly wrenched away and fled the room.

Stephen collapsed back against his pillow, closed his eyes and prayed that he hadn’t totally blown it. He suddenly did not see how he could do this, how he could put himself back together again and overcome this latest fiasco without her. He wasn’t even sure that he wanted to try.

As the morning passed into afternoon and then into an interminable evening, he began to fear that he might not have a choice. His kiss might well have driven her away for good.

Chapter Eight

“Stupid, stupid, stupid,” Kaylie murmured, pacing the hospital hallway the next morning. She still could not believe what had happened, what she had allowed to happen, the day before. That kiss had made her positively giddy—until she’d realized the implications.

She was not the sort of female that Stephen Gallow seemed accustomed to, and she certainly did not kiss her patients. What he must think of her now! She hadn’t been able to face him after that kiss, and so she’d run. She’d stayed away because

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