looks kinda familiar. Is he an actor or somebody famous?”
Reese had another look for herself. He didn’t look familiar to her, but he was special. He’d given her the best sex of her life. Right in the nick of time, too, since he would be her last lover.
“Are you going to try to see him again?” Jimena asked.
“No. I don’t even know his name. Besides, this morning I found an engagement ring box in his pocket so I think last night for him must have been a sow-your-wild-oats kind of thing.”
“Ewww.” She jabbed the button to close the photo. “Then he’s a hot asshole cowboy.”
Yes, he was, if that’s what had happened. “But it’s possible his girlfriend turned him down. I figure there’s a reason he was drinking all that Scotch, and he seemed almost as miserable as I was.”
At least, that’s how Reese was choosing to see it.
“And the watch?” Jimena pressed.
“The cowboy has it.”
However, if Reese had seen that ring the night before, she wouldn’t have landed in bed with him or given him the watch. Which meant, of course, that she’d given her most prized possession to a potential hot a-hole, but since this was her fantasy, she preferred to believe that he would treasure it as a reminder of their one incredible night together.
“Good.” Jimena made a shivery, ick sound. And Reese knew why. Jimena had this aversion to antiques or rather what she called “old shit previously owned by dead people.” That’s the reason Reese hadn’t given the watch to her one and only friend.
“So, what’s left?” Jimena said, looking at the bucket list again.
“Nothing.”
And no, Reese wasn’t counting throwing away the popcorn glue. Since she’d traveled all over the world, there weren’t any places left that she really wanted to see. Besides, she’d learned about four moves ago somewhere around Tulsa that, like tequila, places were really all just the same.
So, there it was—everything important ticked off her bucket list.
For the past week there’d been times when it felt as if a meaty fist had clamped on to her heart to give it a squeeze. That fist was doing a lot of squeezing now.
“I started my own bucket list of sorts,” Jimena said. “I’ve decided to sleep my way through the alphabet so last night I had sex with that busboy named Aaron.”
Most people put travel and such on their bucket lists, but this was so Jimena. She didn’t have any filters when it came to sex and saw it more as a recreational sport. Unlike Reese. Sex for her was more like forbidden fruit. It meant tearing down barriers, letting someone into her life, and while it had been an amazing night with the cowboy, part of that amazement was that he hadn’t known who she really was.
Not exactly a pleasant reminder.
Reese stood to excuse herself so she could go lie down on the air mattress. Jimena wouldn’t even question it, thank God, but before Reese could say anything, she heard the movement in the still-open doorway.
“All the stuff is gone,” Reese said, figuring this was just another neighbor responding to her “free stuff” sign that she had taped on the side of the apartment complex’s mailboxes.
But it wasn’t a neighbor.
It was Dr. Gutzman.
Since Reese had never seen the stocky gray-haired man outside his office and never dressed in anything but a white coat, it took her a moment to realize who he was. Another moment for her to think the worst.
“Did you come to tell me there’ll be no radiation, after all?” Reese managed to ask.
He opened his mouth, closed it. Then nodded. “You won’t be having radiation,” he confirmed.
As much as Reese was dreading the treatments—and she was indeed dreading them—they’d been the tiny sliver of hope. Her 2 percent chance of survival. Of course, she hadn’t truly embraced that sliver, but now Dr. Gutzman had just taken it away.
“I’d rather not die in a hospital,” Reese volunteered.
Jimena stood and took hold of her hand. Reese could feel the bits of sticky Cheetos on her friend’s fingers.
The doctor nodded, came in and eased the door shut. He glanced around the nearly empty room and frowned. Perhaps because of the junk-food stash.
“You’re not going to die in a hospital,” he said. “At least, not in the next week or so from an inoperable brain tumor.”
Reese was still on the page of thinking the worst. “Does that mean I’m going to die even sooner?”
He huffed, glanced around as if this were the last place he wanted to be. “There was a glitch with the new electronic records system. Your images got mixed up with another patient. When I realized the mistake, I had a look at yours, and other than an enlarged left sinus cavity, you’re fine.”
Reese couldn’t speak. She just stared at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The doctor didn’t look like a prankster, but maybe this was his idea of a really bad joke.
“Did you hear me?” he asked.
She had. Every word. And Reese was desperately trying to process something that just wasn’t processing in her mind.
“So, there’s really nothing wrong with her?” Jimena asked.
“Nothing. She’s as healthy as a horse.”
Reese hadn’t been around too many horses to know if they were especially healthy or not, but she would take the doc’s news as gospel.
Right after she threw up, that is.
God, she was going to live.
* * *
LOGAN SLAMMED DOWN the phone. Jason Murdock, his friend and the rancher Logan had been buying stock from for years, had just given Logan a much-too-sweet deal on some Angus.
Hell.
Much more of this and Logan was going to beat the crap out of somebody. Especially the next person who was overly nice to him or gave him a sweet deal on anything.
For the past three months since the mess with Helene, nearly everybody who called or came into the office was walking on sonofabitching eggshells around him, and it not only pissed him off, it was disrespectful.
He’d run McCord Cattle Brokers since he was nineteen, since his folks had been killed in a car crash, and he’d run it well. In those early years people had questioned his ability to handle a company this size.
Silently questioned it, anyway.
But Logan had built the image and reputation he needed to make sure those questions were never spoken aloud. He’d done that through ball-busting business practices where nobody but nobody walked on eggshells. Yet, here they
