“you’re not fine—you’re doing well, but you are not unscathed. You’re nowhere near ready to go outside into the snow without shoes or a coat, much less to hike a mile to your car—because that’s where it is, at the end of the drive up to this cabin. It’s not drivable even if you could get to it—it’s going to need a tow truck. Then there’s the fact that if you were in an emergency room where you belong, they’d admit you to keep an eye on you overnight, and there is no way in hell I’d let you drive even if this was a balmy summer day. So no matter how you want to cut it, you, Maicy Clark, are stuck here. With me.”
Oh...it was worse than she thought. Not only had she encountered the one person she’d hoped never to see again in her life, she was stranded with him?
“You look sick—what’s going on?” he said.
“What’s going on is that I don’t want to be here.” With you! she added in her head.
But what she said was, “I don’t see mine, but surely you have a cell phone—call for help! Maybe somebody could come and get me—an ambulance, or the fire department.” She refused to believe that things were as impossible as he claimed.
“If I couldn’t get in to town, no one can get out,” he reasoned.
“I don’t want to be here with you!” she blurted, unable to stop herself this time.
“I get that,” he said. “But right now we have to do what we have to do. And arguing about it will only waste time we don’t have to spare. This place is not a four-star hotel and we’re going to have to work to stay warm and fed. So if you think you’re doing okay enough for me to get you onto the couch, there are some things I need to do to get this place up and running—as much as it runs—in order to get us through tonight.”
Tonight? They’d be spending the whole night together in this cabin?
Could this day possibly get any worse?
First her wedding had become a disaster.
And now here she was, isolated and alone with the guy who had broken her heart and abandoned her in her most desperate time of need.
Oh yeah, it definitely would have been better if she were just hallucinating.
Maicy took a deep breath, rallied the strength she’d had to find in herself years before and said, “I can get to the couch myself.”
He ignored that.
Which was good because once he’d helped her to her feet her knees buckled and she nearly collapsed.
He caught her in strong, powerful arms that—if she’d had even an iota of strength herself—she would have slapped away.
As it was she had no choice but to let him help her to the sofa.
Once she was there, she shrugged out of his grip and swore to herself that if she couldn’t get back up again without his help, she would stay rooted to that spot.
Because the last thing she would ever do again was lean on Conor Madison.
“Dammit!” Conor shouted into the wind.
After trying several different locations outside, he’d found a spot where he had cell phone reception...temporarily. It lasted long enough to reach his brother’s doctor and learn that Declan’s fever was rising. Then he’d lost service again. And no matter where he went now, the phone showed no signal.
Meanwhile, the storm was worsening. Now that it was dark the temperature had plummeted, and the wind was howling and making the snow a whirling dervish that was even more impossible to see through.
So Conor turned his attention to the other reason he’d bundled up to come outside—firewood.
He circled to the back of the cabin where the woodpile was, staying close to the log structure so as not to risk losing his bearings. But he was far less worried for himself than he was for his brother.
He’d heard the stories about the shoddy, outdated conditions of some stateside veterans’ hospitals, constantly understaffed and undersupplied. And since he’d been back with Declan, he’d seen it for himself. Doctors and nurses were stretched thinner than Conor knew they should be, and he had to put pressure on them to make sure his brother had what he needed.
Was Declan’s care suffering now that he wasn’t there to keep an eye on things?
Why the hell had he thought it was a good idea to leave Declan’s side in the first place?
But Declan had been doing so well and they’d both known that one of them had to get to Kinsey to talk some sense into her before she shook up their lives with her quest to build a relationship with the family they hadn’t known they had.
For cripes sake, Kinsey, why couldn’t you just leave well enough alone? Who cares if Mitchum Camden was our biological father? We were just his dirty secret, hidden away from his high-society wife and family while he carried on with Mom behind their backs all those years.
They’d barely even seen the man while he was still alive. And after he died—in a plane crash with various other members of his family—their mom had eventually moved on. She’d married their stepdad, the man who truly raised them. And she’d never told any of her children about their father...until her deathbed confession to Kinsey.
Now Kinsey was determined to build a relationship with Mitchum Camden’s other children. And neither Conor, Declan nor Declan’s twin, Liam, were on board with that. She was determined to build a relationship the Camdens didn’t seem to want, either.
With Declan laid up and Liam on special assignment overseas with his own marine unit, the job of dissuading their sister had fallen to Conor. But since the weather was keeping him from meeting Kinsey, this trip was a complete waste.
Well, maybe not a complete waste since it did put him here to save Maicy.
But still, thinking about what he should be doing for his brother made frustration hit him all over again. Frustration that piled on top of the uneasiness that had been dogging him for a while.
Initially in his career he’d liked the excitement, the speed, the exhilaration of emergency and trauma medicine, of being the first person to treat injured military men and women, to safeguard their lives just as they safeguarded the world with their service. But the longer it went on, the more it had begun to eat at him that it wasn’t up to him to give extended care, to see his patients through and make sure their ongoing treatment was successful. Declan was the first patient he’d been able to stay with—and now he was letting his brother down.
Conor reached the woodpile and, with a vengeance born out of those frustrations, threw back the tarp covering it.
There’s nothing you can do about it! he told himself firmly. Nothing he could do about Declan or about any of the hundreds of military men and women whose treatment it was his job only to begin.
Nothing he could do other than continuing to look for a phone signal at any rate, so he could stay on top of Declan’s care from here, no matter what it took.
It
