surprises about how much it would cost to build the place and put in the kinds of slopes that would appeal to everyone from the beginner to the pro. The designers had given him a rudimentary plan, but now he had to look over the actual site and see how much could actually become reality. And if it would be worth it.
He half hoped it wouldn’t be. Then he could leave and be sure he’d never see Bri again.
Just what the hell had he expected, anyway? The woman had always been stubborn, she clearly hadn’t trusted him and she’d divorced him. A sane man wouldn’t have returned for a second round.
But he knew what he had wanted. Their marriage was dust, but it still chapped him that she had believed those lies about him. It wasn’t enough to know in his own mind that he’d never cheated, he wanted—no, needed—Bri to know it, too. Somehow that mattered and had never stopped mattering.
Somehow it all still mattered, he thought grimly as he settled into a booth in the overbright truck stop diner. Three years since the divorce. Even longer if he counted back to when he’d first realized the relationship was crumbling. Shouldn’t he be over it all by now?
But maybe when you’d invested that many hopes and dreams into a person and a relationship, cutting loose wasn’t easy. God knew, he’d never wanted the divorce. He just hadn’t had the heart to fight her anymore.
Setting her free hadn’t been easy. It had been necessary.
A week later, Bri was in the locker room, ditching her scrubs for street clothes. She was feeling good, all things considered. Apart from an uneasy awareness that Luke was probably still around somewhere, she hadn’t seen him. A mercy. She felt she had stuffed all the painful genies back into the bottle, and that life had pretty much returned to normal.
That normalcy had been hard-won, and she welcomed its return. Even though her marriage had been running into trouble before the never-to-be-forgotten phone call from Barbara, that hadn’t made it any easier to break the ties. Anyone who thought divorce was easy had clearly never been through one.
She sighed, pushing the memories away once again. She was here now, reasonably content with her life and enjoying her job. No need to hash over the dead things in her life. Looking forward had always been her salvation.
After she had dumped all over Diane, however, her best friend had left her with a question that she was trying to ignore: Why do you still care so much?
Ah, heck, she thought, closing her locker. Why indeed? There seemed to be no answer to that.
Forcing her thoughts back to the mundane, she realized she hadn’t heard any more sounds from the attic. Maybe it hadn’t been raccoons after all, but simply the wood expanding or shrinking. Certainly the temperatures had been unpredictable this spring. It ought to be greening out there right now, but the trees were showing more intelligence than the calendar. They hadn’t even tried to bud yet, as if they knew darn well there was still snow on the ground and more in the forecast. Weird.
She was just emerging from the locker room when one of the nurses passing by stopped her. “Do you know Luke Masters?”
A week of good resolutions seemed to evaporate. “Unfortunately.”
“Well, he’s in the E.R. asking for you. Dr. Trent sent me to find you.”
“I’m on my way.” Why would he be asking for her? And what was he doing in the E.R? Her heart sped up, and she figured no amount of resolve was going to cure that until she found out what was going on.
Part of her just wanted to head for the door and pretend she hadn’t gotten the message. The cowardly part. The part of herself she sometimes believed might have been the cause of a lot of problems in her life.
Sighing, she headed for the E.R, but she couldn’t imagine any reason Luke would be asking for her. She thought they’d pretty well ended any hope of talking that night last week. On the other hand, as a nurse she’d seen plenty of the worst that could happen to people, and knew how often they wanted to see a familiar face. Any familiar face.
Then it hit her like a ton of bricks. Luke was in the emergency room? Visions of catastrophe, drawing on graphic memory, suddenly crashed home. She increased her pace to the fast walk hospital staff used because they weren’t supposed to run. It was damn near as fast.
She reached the nurse’s station in front of the emergency pod. Ira Mason stood there, sorting some files. “Hi, Ira. I hear you have a patient asking for me.”
He nodded. “Luke Masters? You know him?”
She caught herself just in time, holding back the statement that he was her husband. Not anymore. Man, was she going to slip into old habits that easily? A little flame of annoyance lit. “From way back.”
“Bay three.”
“Is it bad?”
“Well, he’s not in danger of dying. Pretty messed up, though.”
That was about all she was going to get from Ira. It wasn’t her case, she wasn’t a relative and the hospital was pretty strict about patient privacy. As it should be, she thought as she walked down the hall to the cubicles.
Sheila Gardner was hurrying toward the front with a clipboard. “Ah, you must be here to see that guy who’s asking for you. Bay three.”
Bri didn’t fail to notice the curiosity on Sheila’s face, but this was no time for a heart-to-heart about past heartbreaks. The silly phrase floated through her head, but provided no distraction. Luke was hurt, and the intervening years were slipping away as fast as a speed skater headed for the finish line. Nor did all her training as a nurse prevent her heart from climbing into her throat as she approached the bay. How bad was it? She had plenty of experience to raise horrifying images in her mind’s eye.
She pulled the curtain aside and stepped in. The sight of Luke’s naked leg raised and surrounded by metal framework didn’t shake her. They’d probably had to stretch his leg a bit to reset bones. There was no evidence that the fracture had broken the skin—a good sign.
What got to her was the face above the blanket that covered him from chin to hips. He had a huge bruise around his eye, red and angry-looking, and his left cheekbone appeared swollen. Then she noticed that the arm lying along his side already sported a cast.
Damn, he’d done a number on himself.
She heard a rubber-soled step behind her and turned to see Dr. Trent. “He’s going to be okay,” he said. “They’re checking the X-rays of his leg right now to see if the reset looks good or if they’ll need to pin it.”
She nodded quickly, wondering why her mouth was so dry. “His head?”
“So far the concussion actually appears mild. We did a CT on him and saw only some insignificant bleeding. He also cracked his cheekbone. No displacement, no movement of the bone, so we’re going to leave it. His arm was a simple fracture, but his hand is a mess of lacerations and contusions. He’s not going to be happy when he wakes up from the morphine.”
Then Dr. Trent touched her arm. “He was pretty angry when he came in here. Aggressive. We need to keep an eye on that concussion, at least overnight.
