True Love at Silver Creek Ranch - By Emma Cane Page 0,4
guessed, feeling your way around, wondering if you were ever going to get out again. He still didn’t know.
After using butterfly bandages to keep the wound closed, Brooke taped a small square of gauze to his face, then straightened, hands on her hips, to judge her handiwork. “You might need stitches if you want to avoid a scar.”
He shrugged. “Got enough of those. One more won’t hurt.”
He rose slowly to his feet, feeling the stiffness in his leg that never quite went away. The docs had got most of the shrapnel out, but not quite all of it. The exertion of the fire had irritated the old wound, but that would ease with time. He was used to it by now, and the reminder that he was alive was more than he deserved, when there were so many men beneath the ground.
After closing the kit, Brooke turned back to face him, tilting her head to look up. They stared at each other a moment, too close, almost too intimate alone there. Drops of water still sparkled in her dark lashes, and her skin was fresh-scrubbed and free of makeup. She looked prettier than he remembered, a woman instead of the skinny girl.
Adam was surprised at the sensations her nearness inspired in him, this awareness of her as a woman, when back in high school she’d barely registered as that to him. He’d dated party girls and cheerleaders—including her best friend, Monica Shaw—not cowgirls. Now she held herself so tall and easily, with a confidence born of hard work and years of testing her body to the limits.
She cleared her throat, and her gaze dropped from his eyes to his mouth, then his shirtfront. “You have a limp,” she said. “Did one of the horses kick you?”
“Had the limp on and off for a while. Nothing new.”
She nodded, then stepped past him to return the med kit to the bathroom. When she came back out, she was wearing a fixed, polite smile, which, to his surprise, amused him. Not much amused him anymore.
“I’m glad you’re not hurt bad,” she said. “You did me—us—a big favor, and I can’t thank you enough for helping rescue the horses. How’d you see the fire?”
“I was at the boardinghouse and saw the smoke out the window.” If the trees hadn’t been winter-bare, he might not have seen it at all, which made him think uneasily of Brooke, battling the fire alone. “Where are your brothers? They might have come in handy if I hadn’t seen the fire. I assume they still work on the ranch?”
She nodded. “They’re at the hospital with my dad, visiting my mom. Did you remember she has MS?”
He shook his head. “I never knew.”
“She never talked about it much, so I’m not surprised. Most of the time, she only needs a cane, but she’s battling a flare-up that’s weakened her legs. The guys took their turn at the hospital today, while I rode fence. Guess I found more than I bargained for.” She eyed him with speculation. “So you’re back to visit your grandma.”
She put her hands in her back pockets and rocked once on her heels, as if she didn’t know what to do with herself. That stretched her shirt across her breasts, and he had to force himself to keep his gaze on her face.
“Grandma’s letters were off,” he admitted. “She seemed almost scattered.”
Brooke focused on him with a frown. “Scattered? Your grandma?”
“My instincts were right. I got here, and she was a lot more frail, and she’s using a cane now.”
“A cane? That’s new. And I see her often, so maybe I just didn’t notice she’d slowly been . . .” She trailed off.
“Declining?” He almost grumbled the words. Grandma Palmer was in her seventies, but some part of him thought she never changed. She’d been the one woman who could briefly get him away from his parents to sleep on sheets that didn’t smell of smoke, to eat meals that didn’t come from a drive-thru. He was never hungry at Grandma Palmer’s, whether for food or for love. There weren’t holidays or birthdays unless Grandma had them. All he’d been to his teenage parents was an unwanted kid, the result of a broken condom, and they blamed him for making so little of their lives. He saw that now, but at the time? He’d been relieved to enlist in the Marines and start his life over.
Now he and Grandma Palmer only had each other. His parents had