you, Daddy,” she said quietly.
“For what?” he asked.
“For believing me.”
He slid a long arm across her shoulder, giving her a hug. There was nothing more that needed to be said.
“Looks like the snow’s about stopped,” he said, gauging the sparse spit of snowflakes dancing before the headlights of their truck.
“Who’s hungry?” Glory asked.
J.C. grinned. “Wanna guess?”
She laughed. It was a perfect ending to a very bad beginning.
Back in recovery, Wyatt Hatfield wasn’t laughing, but if he’d been conscious, he would have been counting his blessings. He had a cut on his cheek that would probably scar, and had survived a lung that had collapsed, a concussion that should have put him into a coma and hadn’t, five broken ribs and two cracked ones, more stitches in his left leg than he would be able to count and, had he been able to feel them, bruises in every joint.
He could thank a seat belt, a trucker who hadn’t kept going after causing the wreck, a rescue crew that went above and beyond the call of duty to get him off of the mountain and an EMT who didn’t know the meaning of the word quit. And it was extremely good luck on Wyatt’s part that, after all that, he wound up in the skilled hands of Amos Steading.
Yet it was fate that had delivered him to Glory Dixon. And had she not given of the blood from her body, the cold and simple fact was that he would have died. But Wyatt didn’t know his good fortune. It would be days before he would know his own name.
All day long, the sun kept trying to shine. Wyatt paced the floor of his hospital room, ignoring the muscle twinges in his injured leg, and the pull of sore muscles across his belly.
He didn’t give a damn about pain. Today he was going home, or a reasonable facsimile thereof. While he didn’t have a home of his own, he still had roots in the land on which he’d been raised. If he had refused to accompany his sister, Toni, back to Tennessee, he suspected that her husband, Lane Monday, would have slung him over his shoulder and taken him anyway. Few but Toni dared argue with Lane Monday. At six feet, seven inches, he was a powerful, imposing man. As a United States marshal, he was formidable. In Wyatt’s eyes, he’d come through for Toni like a real man should. There was little else to be said.
Outside his door, he could hear his sister’s voice at the nurses’ station while she signed the papers that would check him out. He leaned his forehead against the window, surprised that in spite of the sun’s rays it felt cold, and then remembered that winter sun, at its best, was rarely warm.
“Are you ready, Wyatt?”
Wyatt turned. Lane filled the doorway with his size and his presence.
He shrugged. “I guess.” He turned back to the window as Lane crossed the room.
For a while, both men were silent, and then Lane gave Wyatt a quick pat on the back before he spoke. “I think maybe I know how you feel,” Lane said.
Wyatt shrugged. “Then I wish to hell you’d tell me, because I don’t understand. Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to be alive.” He tried to grin. “Hell, and if truth be told, a little surprised. When I went over the mountain, in the space of time it took to hit the first stand of trees, I more or less made my peace with God. I never expected to wake up.”
Lane listened without commenting, knowing that something was bothering Wyatt that he needed to get said.
“As for my family, I consider myself lucky to have people who are willing to take me in, but I feel so…so…”
“Rootless?”
For a moment Wyatt was silent, and then he nodded.
“Exactly. I feel rootless. And…I feel like leaving here will be taking a step backward in what I was searching for. I know it’s weird, but I keep thinking that I was this close to the end of a journey, and now—”
Toni broke the moment of confiding as she came into the room.
“You’re all checked out!” When Wyatt started toward the door, she held up her hand. “Don’t get in too big a hurry. They’re bringing a wheelchair. Lane, honey, why don’t you pull the car up to the curb? Wyatt, are you all packed?”
Both men looked at each other and then grinned. “She was your sister before she was my wife,” Lane warned him. “So you can’t be surprised by all this.”
Toni ignored them. It was her nature to organize. She’d spent too long on her own, running a farm and caring for aging parents, to wait for someone else to make a decision.
“Why don’t I go get the car?” Lane said, and stole a kiss from his Toni as he passed.
“I’m packed,” Wyatt said.
“I brought one of Justin’s coats for you to wear. The clothes you had on were ruined,” Toni said, her eyes tearing as she remembered his condition upon their arrival right after the accident. She held out the coat for him to put on. Wyatt slipped one arm in his brother’s coat, and then the other, then turned and hugged her, letting himself absorb the care…and the love.
“Now all I need is my ride,” Wyatt teased, and pulled at a loose curl hanging across Toni’s forehead.
On cue, a nurse came in pushing a wheelchair, and within minutes, Wyatt was on his way.
The air outside was a welcome respite from the recirculated air inside his room. And the cold, fresh scent of snow was infinitely better than the aroma of antiseptic. Wyatt gripped the arms of the wheelchair in anticipation of going home.
Just outside the doors, Toni turned away to speak to the nurse, and Lane had yet to arrive. For a brief moment, Wyatt was left to his own devices. He braced himself, angling his sore leg until he was able to stand, and then lifted his face and inhaled, letting the brisk draft of air circling the corner of the hospital have its way with the cobwebs in his mind. He’d been inside far too long.
A pharmacy across the street was doing a booming business, and Wyatt watched absently as customers came and went. As a van loaded with senior citizens backed up and drove away, a dark blue pickup truck pulled into the recently vacated parking space. He tried not to stare at the three people who got out, but they were such a range of sizes, he couldn’t quit looking.
The older man was tall and broad beneath the heavy winter coat he wore. A red sock cap covered a thatch of thick graying hair, and a brush of mustache across his upper lip was several shades darker than the gray. The younger man was just as tall, and in spite of his own heavy clothing, obviously fit. His face was creased with laugh lines, and he moved with the grace and assurance of youth and good health.
It was the girl between them who caught Wyatt’s eye. At first he thought she was little more than a child, and then the wind caught the front of her unbuttoned coat, and he got a glimpse of womanly breast and shapely hips before she pulled it together.
Her hair was the color of spun honey. Almost gold. Not quite white. Her lips were full and tilted in a grin at something one of the men just said, and Wyatt had a sudden wish that he’d been the one to make her smile.
No
