Cowboy's Caress

“Okay, then. Great,” he agreed with a slight shrug of broad shoulders and a smile that put dimples in both cheeks and made Carly’s head go light.

Not that her reaction had anything to do with him, she told herself in a hurry. She was just overly tired.

“Do you need me?” Deana asked.

Only in that moment did Carly remember her friend, and she was ashamed of herself for having been so focused on Bax McDermot that she’d forgotten her.

“I’m fine,” Carly assured too effusively. “Thanks for taking me to Cheyenne and everything else, Dee.”

“You’d do the same for me. At least if you were around,” her friend said pointedly. “I’ll check with you this afternoon. If you need me in the meantime, just holler.”

“Thanks,” Carly repeated as Deana closed the rear car door then got behind the wheel.

“Nice to meet you,” the new doctor said to Deana.

“You, too,” Deana answered just before she backed out of Carly’s driveway only to pull into the one next door.

“Short trip,” Bax McDermot observed with a laugh as he watched the move.

Annoyance struck Carly for the second time as she caught sight of the big man’s gaze following her friend.

She really did need sleep, she decided. Lack of it was making her cranky.

“We might as well go in,” she urged, taking her first steps on the crutches.

But heading across the lawn was a tactical error, and by the third uncoordinated three-legged hobble she set one of the crutches in a hole and everything went into a careen.

Bax McDermot lunged for her, catching her just short of falling with both of those big hands on her waist.

“Steady,” he advised.

But even though he’d accomplished just that, something about the warm feel of his hands sent things inside her reeling.

“Sorry,” she apologized, feeling like an idiot. “I haven’t had much practice on these things.”

“They work better on solid surfaces.”

Before she had any inkling of what he was going to do, he scooped her up into his arms and carried her to the porch on long, sturdy strides, setting her down near one of the posts so she could hang on to it for balance.

The whole trip took only a few seconds and yet that close contact had knocked her for even more of a loop.

So much so that it took her a moment of hard work to regain herself and realize he was introducing his daughter.

“This is Evie Lee.”

“Evie Lee Lewis,” the little girl corrected.

“Evie Lee McDermot is what’s on her birth certificate,” Bax explained. “She tacked on the Lewis herself a few months ago. I can’t tell you why or where she got it.”

“Everybody should have three first names,” Evie Lee added. “To tell them apart from everybody else.”

“Makes sense to me,” Carly agreed, seizing the distraction of the child.

“Why don’t you run and get the crutches?” Bax suggested to his daughter.

Evie Lee did just that, dragging them behind her on her return trip.

She was a tiny little thing with blond hair and a face that was the impish image of her father’s, complete with beautiful green eyes that Carly knew would break some hearts down the line.

She thanked Evie Lee when she took the crutches from her and was all too aware of Evie Lee’s father keeping his hands at the ready to catch her again when she turned and made her way to the front door on them.

“It isn’t locked,” she informed him when they’d reached it and he seemed to be waiting for her to produce a key. “No reason to lock doors in Elk Creek. It isn’t a high-crime area, so nobody bothers for the most part.”

“Nice,” he commented as he opened the old-fashioned screen and then the heavy oak panel with the leaded glass oval in its center.

Carly hobbled through ahead of him, stopping in the entryway at the foot of the stairs that led to the upper level. “We’re all too tired for the tour, so I’ll just give you directions, if that’s okay.”

“Fine.”

“The master bedroom is the first one at the top of the steps. I thought Evie Lee might like the one beside it. That was my sister’s and it’s still all done up for a little girl. I got them both ready for you yesterday, so there’s clean sheets on the beds and empty drawers for your things. The bathroom is down the hall a ways, along with the linen closet and the other bedrooms. Down here, you can see the kitchen at the end of this hall. That’s the living room—” she nodded over her right shoulder toward the room they could see from where they all stood “—and the dining room is beyond it, connected to the kitchen. There’s another bathroom and the den that you get to from under the stairs.”

“All we really need for right now are beds.”

“Me, too. The cottage is just across the back patio. That’s where I’ll be if you need me,” she said, pivoting on the crutches to face that direction.

“Can I help you get there?” he asked.

“No. I’m fine. Really,” she insisted, adding, “Sleep well,” just before heading down the hall on her own.

She could feel him watching her the whole way, and she was glad when she finally got far enough into the kitchen to be out of his line of vision.

But somehow that didn’t take away the lingering sense of those eyes on her and the inexplicable feeling of heat that they’d caused.

All part of the weird side effects of a sleepless night, she told herself.

But still she hoped she hadn’t made a mistake in keeping her agreement to let Bax McDermot move in before she’d actually moved out.

Because sleep-deprived or not, something inside her was sitting up and taking notice of too many things about the man.

And that didn’t have any place at all in her plans.

Chapter Two

For a split second when Bax first woke up he thought he was back in the days of his residency when it wasn’t unusual to work a twenty-four-hour shift and catch forty winks in any empty bed he could find, at any time of day he could manage it.

Then he remembered that he was long past that particular portion of his life and he searched his memory until he recalled that he was in Elk Creek, Wyoming, in the bed in one of the rooms in the house he’d rented.

Carly Winters’s house.