Cowboy's Caress

“I’m sorry,” Carly was quick to say. Once she could drag her eyes off his chest. “I didn’t bring any of my stuff with me to the cottage, and I was trying to get to my room for it now. Evie Lee knocked before and called in to you, but you must not have been able to hear her.”

And didn’t Carly just want to crawl into a hole rather than face him looking the way she did!

Bax recovered himself and granted her a smile that made her suddenly feel wobbly on the crutches. “No problem. Do you want to use the bathroom up here?”

Hot, steamy air was wafting out into the hallway, smelling like a far more manly soap than she’d ever used. The idea of stepping into that was too arousing to entertain.

“No, I’d rather just take my things down to the cottage.”

“How did you plan to do that?” he asked reasonably.

Only then did it occur to her that he was right. How was she going to manage suitcases and crutches, too?

“I guess I hadn’t thought it through,” she admitted.

“I don’t mind if you want to use the bathroom up here, but if you’d rather not I can carry your things down to the cottage for you.”

She didn’t know how he could be so calm and collected when she felt like a blithering idiot.

But then, he wasn’t looking at the magnificent specimen she was looking at. He was looking at her, dressed in the same rumpled sundress she’d gone to her going-away party in, her face unwashed in more hours than she wanted to think about and her hair straggling around her ears, weeping for a comb.

“It would be great if you could bring my suitcases down to the cottage,” she said when she found her voice. “There’s a full bathroom down there. In fact, it’s better equipped for someone incapacitated because my dad sometimes had patients stay there. Well, not in the bathroom—I mean, he’d have patients stay in the cottage. But the bathroom has grab bars and a seat in the shower and—”

She stopped herself before she babbled anymore.

“Anyway,” she said, “I’d really appreciate it if you could bring my suitcases down. That would be great.”

“Why don’t you show me which room is yours and I’ll get them,” he said.

Carly pointed with a nod of her chin to the end of the hall. “It’s that one.”

“Can I go with Carly to visit her sister in the hospital?” Evie Lee said then.

Carly explained what the child was talking about as she followed Bax into her room.

“So I have two patients already,” he said as he put Carly’s carry-on bag under one arm, picked up the smaller of the other two to tote in one hand and then hoisted the largest in the opposite hand.

“I don’t think there were any complications or anything,” she answered, trying not to watch the flex and swell of his muscles in the process. “Tallie Shanahan—she’s our nurse and midwife—delivered the baby, and when I called from Cheyenne, she said everything was fine. So I don’t know if you’d call Hope and the baby your patients.”

“I should still look in on them. How about if we all go together? You can show us the way.”

“Sure. That would be fine,” Carly said, feeling anything but fine.

She hated that just being near this man could reduce her to some kind of bumbling schoolgirl.

She took a deep breath to try to get control over herself. “I’d like to shower first, though,” she added.

“Need help?”

“No!” she said in too much of a hurry before being sure if he was teasing her, flirting with her, or if he was offering medical aid.

But the glint in his green eyes and the hint-of-the-devil smile that brought out his dimples made her inclined to think he was teasing. And flirting.

“Like I said,” she continued, “the shower is equipped for people who aren’t at their best. Besides, they told me at the hospital that I could unwrap my ankle to bathe and then just wrap it again, so I shouldn’t be too handicapped.”

“Did they show you how to wrap it again afterward?”

“No, but I’m sure it won’t be too hard.”

“You might be surprised. If you wrap it too loose, it won’t do any good and too tight will do damage. Why don’t you leave it unwrapped and I’ll do that for you before we go over to the hospital? At least I can teach you how to do it right so you can take care of it yourself from here on out.”

There was no mistaking his more professional tone.

“Well, okay,” Carly agreed without enthusiasm. Somehow just the thought of his touching her—even only her ankle—made flutters of something she didn’t understand go off in the pit of her stomach.

“Let’s get you back downstairs then,” he suggested.

Carly did an ungraceful about-face on the crutches and headed for the stairs again.

At the top of them she hesitated, unsure how best to make the descent.

“You probably ought to go down on your rear end,” came the advice from behind her in a deep, baritone voice edged with amusement once more.

There was no way she was going to sit and slide down those stairs while he watched!

Carly ignored his recommendation, handed Evie Lee the crutches again and bounced on her good foot from step to step much the way she’d gone up.

Granted, it wasn’t an improvement in the grace or aplomb department, but at least it was quick and didn’t involve her rear end.

Once she was at the bottom she held her head high, accepted the crutches from her tiny assistant, and led the way through the house, back to the cottage with Bax and Evie Lee both following behind.

Only when she was in the middle of the cottage again did she turn to find that Bax McDermot was trying to hide a laugh. At her.

“Are you always this headstrong?” he asked.

“I got here, didn’t I?”

He just chuckled and raised her bags. “Where shall I put these?”

“Set the big one on the table, the carry-on on one of the chairs beside it and the smaller bag in the corner,” she instructed. “If you wouldn’t mind,” she added to soften the command.

The cottage had never felt as small to Carly as it did then. Bax was a big man and he seemed to fill the space with a heady masculinity that seeped through Carly’s pores and made her almost dizzy.

She couldn’t keep from watching as he did as she’d told him. Her gaze was glued to his bare back where it widened from his narrow waist to the expanse of his shoulders in smooth-skinned glory. No doctor should have a body like that, she decided. It put too many other men to shame.

And she had to fight the itch in her palms to reach out and run them over the hills and valleys of honed muscle.

Then he turned to face her once more and tearing her eyes off his chest again became a battle she almost lost until she reminded herself that the last thing in the world she wanted was to be attracted to a man right now. Any man.