Though scattered by years and tears, they share mile-deep roots in one Wyoming ranch—and a singular talent for lassoing the unlikeliest hearts!

“Evie and I are both a little bit nuts about you,”

Bax said in a soft voice.

Carly realized only then that his hands were no longer massaging her foot, but caressing it….

Bax held her eyes with his, and even if Carly had wanted to break away she didn’t think she could have. Something about the depth of his gaze kept her hypnotized, enthralled, enchanted.

Why did he have to be so great looking? she wondered. So great smelling? So great all around…?

He reached one hand around to the back of her neck to guide her forward, nearer to him, as he leaned to the side to meet her.

There was no question that he was going to kiss her, and Carly’s pulse went into overdrive, beating hard and fast with anticipation. With excitement. With wanting…

Dear Reader,

With spring just around the corner, Silhouette’s yearlong 20th Anniversary celebration marches on as we continue to bring you the best and brightest stars and the most compelling stories ever in Special Edition!

Top author Sherryl Woods kicks off the month with Dylan and the Baby Doctor, a riveting secret baby story in the next installment of AND BABY MAKES THREE: THE DELACOURTS OF TEXAS.

From beloved author Marie Ferrarella, you’ll love Found: His Perfect Wife, an emotional story in which a man loses his memory and gains a temporary spouse…. And reader favorite Victoria Pade continues her popular cowboy series A RANCHING FAMILY with Cowboy’s Caress, a heartwarming story about a woman who’s ready to travel the world—until love comes to town!

Millionaire’s Instant Baby is rising star Allison Leigh’s must-read contribution to the series SO MANY BABIES. In this provocative story, a dashing tycoon gets more than he bargained for when he hires a single mom as his pretend wife in order to close a business deal.

THE BLACKWELL BROTHERS continue to capture hearts in the next book of Sharon De Vita’s cross-line series. In The Marriage Promise, a Blackwell brother is determined to woo and win the forbidden love of a beautiful Amish virgin. And you won’t want to miss Good Morning, Stranger, Laurie Campbell’s dramatically poignant story about a woman, a child and a handsome, mysterious stranger who uncover secrets that bring together a meant-to-be family.

It’s a month chock-full of great reading and terrific variety, and we hope you enjoy all the stories!

All the best,

Karen Taylor Richman

Senior Editor

Cowboy’s Caress
Victoria Pade

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Books by Victoria Pade

Silhouette Special Edition

Breaking Every Rule #402

Divine Decadence #473

Shades and Shadows #502

Shelter from the Storm #527

Twice Shy #558

Something Special #600

Out on a Limb #629

The Right Time #689

Over Easy #710

Amazing Gracie #752

Hello Again #778

Unmarried with Children #852

*Cowboy’s Kin #923

*Baby My Baby #946

*Cowboy’s Kiss #970

Mom for Hire #1057

*Cowboy’s Lady #1106

*Cowboy’s Love #1159

*The Cowboy’s Ideal Wife #1185

*Baby Love #1249

*Cowboy’s Caress #1311

Silhouette Books

World’s Most Eligible Bachelors

Wyoming Wrangler

VICTORIA PADE

is a bestselling author of both historical and contemporary romance fiction, and mother of two energetic daughters, Cori and Erin. Although she enjoys her chosen career as a novelist, she occasionally laments that she has never traveled farther from her Colorado home than Disneyland, instead spending all her spare time plugging away at her computer. She takes breaks from writing by indulging in her favorite hobby—eating chocolate.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter One

“What’s that saying? Life is what happens when you have other plans? I guess that applies to you, Carly.”

“No doubt about it,” Carly Winters agreed from the back seat of her best friend’s car where she sat sideways so her foot could be elevated.

But Deana’s comment from behind the wheel was a whole lot more lighthearted than Carly’s dejected confirmation. Deana had never been happy about Carly’s plans to travel so any interference was welcome to her.

“This hasn’t canceled my trip, though. It’s just postponed it a little,” Carly felt inclined to clarify so her friend didn’t think otherwise. “The doctors at the emergency room said I’d be as good as new in a few weeks. And then I’m off like a rocket.”

Deana didn’t say anything to that. She just turned up the radio and made it seem as if she were paying attention to her driving, as if she had confidence in more of life happening to thwart Carly’s plans.

Carly sighed away the feeling of frustration that those thwarted plans left her with—a feeling she was more familiar with than she wanted to be—and laid her head against the seat.

The sun was just rising on the June day she’d been certain would finally be her swan song to Elk Creek, the small Wyoming town where she’d been born, raised and lived almost all of her thirty-two years. Most of which she’d spent thinking—dreaming—about being somewhere else.

But she wasn’t headed away from Elk Creek. She was headed back to it after spending the night in a Cheyenne hospital emergency room, having her ankle X-rayed.

Luckily she hadn’t broken any bones. That could have cost her six weeks in a cast. As it was, her ankle was sprained, the tendons and ligaments were torn, but it was wrapped in an Ace bandage and she’d be able to get around on crutches. And even though it hurt like crazy, she was sure it would heal quicker than a broken ankle would have. Which meant all the sooner that she’d be able to go off on her grand adventure.

Better late than never.

She still couldn’t believe it had happened, though. At her going-away party, no less.

The whole thing had been a comedy of errors. There she was, saying goodbye to friends, neighbors and relatives, ready to go home to bed for the last time in Elk Creek, when her sister, Hope, had gone into sudden, hard labor. Their mother had gotten so flustered that in her hurry to reach Hope she’d caught her heel in the hem of her dress. Carly had seen her mother’s predicament, dived to catch her and fallen herself, twisting her own ankle to an unhealthy angle while her mother had barely stumbled.

The end result was that Hope had been taken to the medical facility where Tallie Shanahan—the town nurse and midwife—had delivered a healthy baby boy to go with Hope’s other three sons, and Deana had taken Carly to the hospital in Cheyenne. Not only had Tallie had her hands full, but she’d been afraid the ankle was broken, requiring the care of a physician—a commodity Elk Creek had been without for some time.

“Maybe this is a sign that you shouldn’t go,” Deana said from the front seat over the music, letting Carly know her friend was still thinking about her leaving even if Deana tried not to show it.

“It’s just a minor setback,” Carly countered.

And she meant it, too.

Because nothing—nothing—was going to keep her from doing what she’d wanted to do her whole life. Well, since she was seven anyway and her great-aunt Laddy had paid her family a visit and brought photographs of Laddy’s travels all over the world.

Carly had studied those pictures until they were burned into her brain, daydreaming over them, wishing she was seeing the sights in person. Somehow, from that day on, Elk Creek had seemed like small potatoes on the banquet table of the world. And she’d made it her goal to get out into that world and feast on it all herself.

Not that that goal had been easy to reach or it wouldn’t have taken her so long to get to it.

First, there had been getting her teaching degree in the nearest college where she and Deana could attend economically by staying with Deana’s aunt during the process. Once that was accomplished, Carly had returned to Elk Creek to work and save her traveling money. And then, of course, there had been her involvement with Jeremy and the wrench he’d thrown into the works the past few years.

But now all of that was behind her. She’d saved enough money to last a year or maybe more if she was careful. She’d taken a leave of absence from her job. And if she could ever actually manage to get out of Elk Creek, she was going to see everything she’d ever wanted to see and then pick her favorite city to live in. Maybe not forever, but for long enough to give herself a taste of life outside the confines of her small hometown.

She was going to be a cosmopolitan woman.

By hook or by crook.

Even if it killed her.

“It’s not as if I’m moving away permanently,” she said with a low concentration of conviction, but wanting to console Deana nonetheless. “I just want to see some things. Do some things. Meet some new people. Live outside the fishbowl for a while. Who knows? A little time away and I’ll probably get homesick and come back. That’s why I only leased my house and why I didn’t out-and-out quit my job.”

“You won’t be back if the grass is as green as you think it is on the other side of the fence.”

“Well, even if it is—and it probably isn’t—you know it won’t make any difference between you and me. We’ll still talk all the time, and we can write letters and E-mails and there’s nothing in Elk Creek to stop you from coming to wherever I am.”

“It won’t be the same as living next door the way we always have.”

Carly knew that was true. She also knew she was going to miss Deana and the way things had been since Deana’s family had moved into the house right beside her own when they were both four years old. They’d been together through everything from first kisses to burying their fathers within three months of each other.

Carly’s leaving would mean no more seeing each other every day, sharing every detail of their lives. No more late-night binges on ice cream when one or the other of them couldn’t sleep and they padded across the lawn in pajamas and bare feet. No more consoling each other at the end of a bad date. No more double dates—good or bad. No more filling each other’s lonely hours with company. No more shared bowls of popcorn over tear-jerker movies on videotape to occupy empty Saturday nights. No more impromptu shopping trips or makeover sessions. No more battening down the hatches together in snowstorms. No more working together. No more just being there for each other when either of them needed it for any reason.

But Carly didn’t want to think about the downside of leaving town. Instead, she did what she’d been doing to keep herself from dwelling on it since she’d finally decided to do this two months ago: she thought about San Francisco and New York. About seeing Vermont in autumn splendor. About the Alaskan wilderness. About Hawaiian beaches. About London and Paris and Rome and Brussels and Athens and Vienna and Madrid.

About how much she’d always wanted to see it all for herself…

“I still wish you’d come with me,” Carly said because that was true, too. She’d tried as long as she’d known Deana to infuse her friend with her own enthusiasm for seeing the world. Short of meeting the man of her dreams on the Orient Express in the middle of her travels, the only other thing that would make the trip perfect would be if Deana had the same wanderlust and they could do it together.

But Carly could see Deana shaking her head even now.

“There isn’t anything I want that isn’t in Elk Creek.”

“Mr. Right,” Carly reminded.

“He’ll show up one of these days,” Deana said with certainty. “And when he does, I don’t want to be somewhere else looking at bridges or mountains or leaves or churches or ruins or pyramids.”

For as much as they were like two peas in a pod, this was the one area where they differed—Deana was a hometown girl through and through.

And Carly wasn’t.

Or at least Carly didn’t want to be.

They headed into Elk Creek without fanfare just then. The small enclave’s main street—Center Street—was still deserted as Deana drove all the way to where it circled the town square. She turned at the corner taken up by the old Molner Mansion that had been converted into the local medical facility and stopped at the first house behind it. Carly’s house. The house her mother had left to her after her father’s death, when her mother had decided to move in with Carly’s two maiden aunts.

It was a moderate-size yellow clapboard farmhouse with a big front porch, a second level slightly smaller than the lower and a man and a little girl at the oval-glassed front door.

“Looks like you have company,” Deana observed as she drove around the station wagon parked at the curb and pulled into the driveway.

“He’s not supposed to be here until the middle of the morning,” Carly groaned.

“Apparently he arrived ahead of schedule.”

“And I’ll bet I’m a mess.”

Deana reached over and flipped down the visor on the passenger’s side so Carly could get a glimpse of herself.

Carly sat up straighter and saw the unruly ends of her straight, shoulder-length auburn hair sticking up every which way at her crown. To get it out of her face she’d twisted it into a knot at the back of her head and jammed a pencil through it.

The blush she’d applied for the party was a thing of the past, although luckily her skin had retained enough color of its own not to leave her looking sickly. Her mauve lipstick was history, too. Her mascara was still in place on longish lashes over topaz-colored eyes, but on the whole she knew she was the worse for wear.

“Not much I can do about it now,” she muttered to her reflection as Deana put the idling car in park and got out.

“If you need Carly Winters, I have her right here,” Deana called to the people on the porch. “Just give her a minute.”

Then Deana opened the rear door and went around to the trunk for Carly’s crutches while Carly slid to the end of the seat to wait for them.

“Hi,” she said feebly to her guests.

Both the man and the little girl, who looked to be about five or six, had moved from the door to stand at the railing that edged the porch with turned spindles.

The man raised one large hand to acknowledge her greeting.

“Wow,” Deana said under her breath as she returned with the crutches, nodding over her shoulder only enough to let Carly know the exclamation was a commentary on the man himself.

As if Carly wouldn’t have guessed.

He was tall, no less than six-two, and he looked much more like a muscled, ranch-rugged cowboy than the town’s new doctor she assumed him to be.

His hair was a pale, golden brown he wore short all over. His face had the distinctive McDermot lean angles and rawboned beauty Carly knew only too well since his brothers were residents of Elk Creek. His nose was long and thin and perfectly sculpted. His jaw was square and strong. And his lips were thin, kind and slightly sardonic all at once, not to mention way, way more sexy than Carly wanted to notice.

“Need some help?” he asked when he noticed Carly’s dilemma, coming off the porch on long, thick legs that were bowed just enough to look as if they’d spent more time straddling a saddle than standing at an examining table.

He wore faded jeans that rode low on narrow hips, and a plain white T-shirt that stretched tight across broad shoulders, powerful pectorals and bulging biceps that made Carly’s stomach do a little flip-flop when she got a closer glimpse of them as he joined her and Deana.

“I think I can manage,” Carly said, trying to remember what she’d been taught at the hospital about maneuvering the crutches when her brain was really in a haze due to the man’s head-to-toe staggeringly masculine glory.

“You must be Baxter McDermot,” she said feebly on her way onto the crutches.

“Bax,” he amended.

“Doctor McDermot,” Deana said with a hint of flirting in her tone that, for some reason, rubbed Carly wrong.

In spite of it she said, “I’m Carly Winters and this is Deana Carlson.”

“I apologize for showing up so early,” he said after a confirming nod of his handsome head. “We were in a motel for the night with World War III going on in the room next to us. We finally gave up tryin’ to sleep and figured we might as well finish the trip and catch a few winks when we got here.”

“Sure. Of course. There’s just been a little setback on this end,” Carly said, leaning her weight on the crutches and honing in on gorgeous sea-foam green eyes that stamped him a McDermot without a doubt.

“You aren’t leaving town and don’t want to hand your house over to us,” he guessed with a glance down at her bandaged ankle.

“I’m afraid I had an accident last night and I’m going to have to put off leaving until I’m healed up.”

“It’s okay. We can stay out at the ranch,” he offered congenially.

It might have been better if he’d been nasty about it. If he’d reminded her that they had a contract in the form of the lease that guaranteed she would turn the house over to him today.

Instead, he couldn’t have been nicer about it, offering to go to the ranch he and his brothers and sister now owned after having taken it over from their grandfather.

The trouble was, Carly knew that wasn’t what he wanted to do or he wouldn’t have rented her house in the first place. He’d arranged for the lease because he’d wanted to be closer to the medical facility where he would work—one of the same purposes the house had served for her father when he’d been the town doctor. And there was Bax McDermot’s daughter, too. He was determined to be near her so he’d be available to her during the daytime.

Carly knew all this because the real estate agent who had arranged the rental agreement had explained it to her. And now she felt bad that her change of plans had complicated his. She didn’t have to be told that if he had to stay out at the McDermot ranch, he’d be pulled in two directions. Not to mention that he wouldn’t have this precious time before he actually began seeing patients to get himself and his daughter settled into the house.

He was being such a good sport about it, it just made her feel all the more guilty.

“Listen,” she said. “A deal is a deal and according to ours the house is yours as of today. There’s a guest cottage just behind it that my dad sometimes used as a makeshift hospital. I could stay there until I’m healed enough to leave and you can have the house. It’ll just mean sharing the kitchen, but it will also give me a chance to show you around properly and teach you the workings of the place.”

“I don’t want to put you out. Maybe I could take the cottage,” he offered.

“It’s only big enough for one. Besides, I don’t mind. It’ll actually be easier for me to get around without having to use the stairs in the main house. And it will only be for a little while. As soon as I’m back on two feet I’m leaving. But in the meantime, things won’t have to be messed up for you.”

He seemed to study her for a sign that she meant what she said.

She aided the cause by adding, “Really, I don’t mind.”

He finally conceded. “If you’re sure…”

“I am.”

“Okay, then. Great,” he agreed with a slight shrug of broad shoulders and a smile that put dimples in both cheeks and made Carly’s head go light.

Not that her reaction had anything to do with him, she told herself in a hurry. She was just overly tired.

“Do you need me?” Deana asked.

Only in that moment did Carly remember her friend, and she was ashamed of herself for having been so focused on Bax McDermot that she’d forgotten her.

“I’m fine,” Carly assured too effusively. “Thanks for taking me to Cheyenne and everything else, Dee.”

“You’d do the same for me. At least if you were around,” her friend said pointedly. “I’ll check with you this afternoon. If you need me in the meantime, just holler.”

“Thanks,” Carly repeated as Deana closed the rear car door then got behind the wheel.

“Nice to meet you,” the new doctor said to Deana.

“You, too,” Deana answered just before she backed out of Carly’s driveway only to pull into the one next door.

“Short trip,” Bax McDermot observed with a laugh as he watched the move.

Annoyance struck Carly for the second time as she caught sight of the big man’s gaze following her friend.

She really did need sleep, she decided. Lack of it was making her cranky.

“We might as well go in,” she urged, taking her first steps on the crutches.

But heading across the lawn was a tactical error, and by the third uncoordinated three-legged hobble she set one of the crutches in a hole and everything went into a careen.

Bax McDermot lunged for her, catching her just short of falling with both of those big hands on her waist.

“Steady,” he advised.

But even though he’d accomplished just that, something about the warm feel of his hands sent things inside her reeling.

“Sorry,” she apologized, feeling like an idiot. “I haven’t had much practice on these things.”

“They work better on solid surfaces.”

Before she had any inkling of what he was going to do, he scooped her up into his arms and carried her to the porch on long, sturdy strides, setting her down near one of the posts so she could hang on to it for balance.

The whole trip took only a few seconds and yet that close contact had knocked her for even more of a loop.

So much so that it took her a moment of hard work to regain herself and realize he was introducing his daughter.

“This is Evie Lee.”

“Evie Lee Lewis,” the little girl corrected.

“Evie Lee McDermot is what’s on her birth certificate,” Bax explained. “She tacked on the Lewis herself a few months ago. I can’t tell you why or where she got it.”

“Everybody should have three first names,” Evie Lee added. “To tell them apart from everybody else.”

“Makes sense to me,” Carly agreed, seizing the distraction of the child.

“Why don’t you run and get the crutches?” Bax suggested to his daughter.

Evie Lee did just that, dragging them behind her on her return trip.

She was a tiny little thing with blond hair and a face that was the impish image of her father’s, complete with beautiful green eyes that Carly knew would break some hearts down the line.

She thanked Evie Lee when she took the crutches from her and was all too aware of Evie Lee’s father keeping his hands at the ready to catch her again when she turned and made her way to the front door on them.

“It isn’t locked,” she informed him when they’d reached it and he seemed to be waiting for her to produce a key. “No reason to lock doors in Elk Creek. It isn’t a high-crime area, so nobody bothers for the most part.”

“Nice,” he commented as he opened the old-fashioned screen and then the heavy oak panel with the leaded glass oval in its center.

Carly hobbled through ahead of him, stopping in the entryway at the foot of the stairs that led to the upper level. “We’re all too tired for the tour, so I’ll just give you directions, if that’s okay.”

“Fine.”

“The master bedroom is the first one at the top of the steps. I thought Evie Lee might like the one beside it. That was my sister’s and it’s still all done up for a little girl. I got them both ready for you yesterday, so there’s clean sheets on the beds and empty drawers for your things. The bathroom is down the hall a ways, along with the linen closet and the other bedrooms. Down here, you can see the kitchen at the end of this hall. That’s the living room—” she nodded over her right shoulder toward the room they could see from where they all stood “—and the dining room is beyond it, connected to the kitchen. There’s another bathroom and the den that you get to from under the stairs.”

“All we really need for right now are beds.”

“Me, too. The cottage is just across the back patio. That’s where I’ll be if you need me,” she said, pivoting on the crutches to face that direction.

“Can I help you get there?” he asked.

“No. I’m fine. Really,” she insisted, adding, “Sleep well,” just before heading down the hall on her own.

She could feel him watching her the whole way, and she was glad when she finally got far enough into the kitchen to be out of his line of vision.

But somehow that didn’t take away the lingering sense of those eyes on her and the inexplicable feeling of heat that they’d caused.

All part of the weird side effects of a sleepless night, she told herself.

But still she hoped she hadn’t made a mistake in keeping her agreement to let Bax McDermot move in before she’d actually moved out.

Because sleep-deprived or not, something inside her was sitting up and taking notice of too many things about the man.

And that didn’t have any place at all in her plans.

Chapter Two

For a split second when Bax first woke up he thought he was back in the days of his residency when it wasn’t unusual to work a twenty-four-hour shift and catch forty winks in any empty bed he could find, at any time of day he could manage it.

Then he remembered that he was long past that particular portion of his life and he searched his memory until he recalled that he was in Elk Creek, Wyoming, in the bed in one of the rooms in the house he’d rented.

Carly Winters’s house.

A wave of satisfaction washed through him.

He was just so damn glad to be out of the city.

He was a small-town boy at heart. Always had been. Except that the small town he’d grown up in had been in Texas rather than in Wyoming.

It had been exciting to leave that small town and go to medical school, exciting to practice medicine in the hub of that same university since then. But he’d had a change of heart over the past couple of years. A change of heart that had made him want all he’d left behind. For himself. And for Evie Lee. Especially for Evie Lee.

He felt as if his daughter had gotten short shrift in the parent department so far in her young life. His wife had died on the delivery table, leaving Evie Lee semiorphaned right from the get-go. And Bax knew he hadn’t been the best of dads since then.

He’d thrown himself into his work to escape a grief that had seemed unbearable any other way, building up one of the largest medical practices in Denver. That had meant sixty- and seventy-hour workweeks, being on call most nights and weekends, and generally putting fatherhood second.

It had meant leaving Evie Lee in the care of a string of live-in nannies. Not all of whom had treated her well.

He wasn’t proud of any of that.

But he was going to rectify it.

Here and now, he thought as he opened his eyes to glance at the clock on the bedside table.

Three o’clock on a Sunday afternoon and a new life had begun for both him and Evie Lee. He’d make sure of it.

Bax yawned, stretched, then clasped his hands behind his head and had a look around the room that had been predesignated his.

The bed was a fair-size four-poster. At the foot of it was a television on a stand against the facing wall. A tall, five-drawer dresser was to the right of the bed. And a door that no doubt led to a closet was to the left.

The whole room was painted a serene shade of beige, with the woodworking all stained oak. Crisp tieback white curtains bordered the two large windows on either side of the television, with scalloped shades pulled down to the sills of both.

The room was comfortable. Functional. Charmingly old-fashioned.

He liked it.

And he wondered if this had been Carly Winters’s own room.

Probably not, he decided. It didn’t smell the way she did.

Not that it smelled anything but clean. But he sort of wished it had that faintly lingering scent of honey and almonds that he’d caught a whiff of when he’d carried her to the porch. It was a nice smell.

A nice smell to go with a nice-looking lady, he thought.

Sure, she’d shown the wear and tear of a long night in an emergency room. But despite that, she was still a head-turner.

Besides smelling great, her hair was so smooth and silky and shiny, it had made him want to yank that pencil out of it and watch the tresses drift like layers of silk down around her face.

A face that glowed with flawless, satiny skin.

She had a rosebud of a mouth that was pink and perfect and much too appealing even without lipstick. She also had a cute, perky nose that was dotted with only a few pale freckles he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been so close.

Artfully arched eyebrows and long, thick lashes accentuated stunning, unusual eyes, too. Brown eyes, but shot through with golden streaks that made them the color of topaz. Sparkling topaz.

Her body hadn’t been anything to ignore, either. She was on the small side, weighing next to nothing when he’d lifted her. But petite stature or not, when she’d put her arm around his shoulder to help bear some of the burden, he’d felt a more than adequate breast press enticingly into his shoulder.

Oh yeah, it was all nice. Very nice…

And strange that he should remember everything about her so vividly.

Particularly when the other woman he’d met that morning was just a vague blur in his mind. He wasn’t even sure he’d recognize the other woman again if he met her on the street, and for the life of him he couldn’t recall her name.

Yet every detail of Carly Winters was right there in his mind’s eye.

Making him stare up at the ceiling with a smile on his face…

Cut it out, he told himself.

But that was easier said than done.

In fact, it was damn difficult to get her out of his thoughts, he discovered when he tried.

Maybe it was just that he was in her house, in a room that might have been hers. In a bed she might have slept in…

The idea of that stirred even more uninvited responses inside him, and he wondered where the hell it was all coming from.

But wherever this reaction was coming from, he put a concerted effort into chasing it away, reminding himself that he hadn’t moved to Elk Creek to think…or feel…things like he was thinking and feeling at that moment. It just wasn’t in his game plan.

He’d come to the small town to concentrate on practicing medicine and to raise his daughter hands-on, full-time, which was why it had been so important to live a stone’s throw from where he worked. And he wasn’t interested in trying to add a woman to the picture. He’d already made that mistake once, and he wasn’t going to make it again.

But not even the reminder of his second marriage, which was the worst thing he’d ever done in his life and in Evie Lee’s, not even his determination to conquer those thoughts of Carly helped to get the image of her out of his head. Or stopped those stirred-up feelings that went with them.

“Must be the house,” he muttered, convincing himself that the place was somehow infused with the essence of her, and that was why he couldn’t stop thinking about her, remembering how she’d looked, smelled, felt in his arms.

But as soon as she was gone and he and Evie Lee had settled in and taken over the place, all that would be different. The house would be theirs and Carly Winters would only be a faint memory.

He was sure of it.

He just wondered how long it would take for her to be well enough to leave.

And that was when he realized he hadn’t even asked what was wrong with her or what kind of an accident she’d had.

“Some good doctor you are,” he chastised himself.

But he was a good doctor. Ordinarily. In fact, he’d been named Doctor of the Year for the past four years running. Yet meeting Carly Winters had thrown him off-kilter.

Oh yeah, something very strange was going on, all right.

But strange or not, topaz eyes or not, honey-scented hair or not, it didn’t matter. Before long Carly Winters would be gone and he was going to be the best damn doctor Elk Creek had ever had. And, more importantly, the best damn dad Evie Lee could possibly have.

And that was that.

Except that even as he sat up and swung his legs over the edge of the mattress his first thought was whether Carly was up and about yet.

And if their paths might cross again anytime soon…

Carly might have slept longer if not for the quiet humming that was coming from beside her bed.

There was no real tune to it and it was terribly off-key, so she knew from the start that it wasn’t coming from the clock radio on the nightstand. And since no one had any reason to be in the cottage at all, let alone while she slept, the sound brought her abruptly awake.

Her eyes opened to the sight of the youngest of her new tenants sitting patiently on the dated, barrel-backed chair that was against the wall to the left of the bed, facing it.

Evie Lee was dressed just as she’d been when Carly had first seen her on the porch—short pink overalls and a white T-shirt dotted with rosebuds. But her wavy blond hair was matted and standing up on one side as if that were the side she’d slept on and hadn’t bothered to brush or comb since getting up.

If Carly had to bet on it, she’d wager that Evie Lee had woken up and come exploring without her father’s knowledge. He was probably still asleep. Or at least thought his daughter was.

“Hi,” the little girl said when she saw Carly’s eyes open.

“Hi.”

“I got tired of sleepin’ and I came to visit you. Is that okay?”

“You can visit me any time at all,” Carly answered.

Evie Lee glanced around. “I like this place. It’s like a big playhouse.”

That was true enough. The cottage was one large room—with the exception of a separate bathroom. Only the furniture divided the open space into sections. A double bed, the antique oak nightstand and the visitor’s chair Evie Lee was occupying made up the bedroom. A round, pedestaled café table with two cane-backed chairs and a wet bar were the dining area. A pale-blue plaid love seat, matching overstuffed chair and a television comprised the living room, although the TV was positioned so that it could be seen from anywhere in the room.

The cottage had a history as a guest house and also as a sometimes hospital room where her father had put up patients he’d wanted to keep a close eye on.

It was pleasant and airy, though, with off-white walls of painted paneling and ruffled curtains on the windows to give it a homey atmosphere.

“I don’t remember your name,” the little girl said bluntly.

“Carly.”

“Is that what I can call you, or do I have to call you Miss or something like at school?”

“You can call me Carly.”

“You can call me Evie Lee Lewis.”

“Thank you,” Carly said with a smile, sitting up in bed and bracing her back against the headboard. “Have you been to school yet?” she asked the little girl.

“I went to kindergarten before the summer and when the summer is over and it’s schooltime again I’ll be in the first grade. You go all day long in that grade. I hope I like it. I hope it’s not too much stressful. Alisha had a lot of stressfuls and then she’d go to bed and I wouldn’t want to have to go to first grade and then have to go to bed.”

“Alisha?” Carly repeated, her interest sparked at the mention of a woman’s name.

“Alisha was my sort-of mom for a while but she didn’t like me. She liked my daddy. But she didn’t like me. She said I was a bad kid and that I was a stressful and a pest and a pain-in-the—”

“Where did she go?”

“Away. My daddy sent her away because she locked me in the closet because I was naughty one day and I put on her shoes and messed up some of her lipsticks.”

The thought of putting this little girl or any other child in a closet raised Carly’s hackles. “Sounds like your daddy did the right thing by sending her away.”

“He was really mad.”

“Good for him. He should have been.”

“How did you hurt yourself?”

“I fell and sprained my ankle.”

“I got a bad scratch on my elbow. See?” Evie Lee displayed the underside of her elbow. “I got it on Mikey Stravoni’s slide and then I got a scab but I picked at it till it comed off and then it bleeded all over the place and my daddy said ‘I told you not to pick off that scab’ because he’s a doctor.”

Carly laughed at the lowered-voice imitation, enjoying the child who looked so much like her father that staring at her conjured flashes of the man himself in Carly’s mind’s eye. Flashes that left her with more eagerness to see him again than she wanted to acknowledge.

“Does your ankle hurt?” Evie Lee asked.

“A little.”

“Sometimes if you pinch yourself really hard somewhere else you’ll forget about it.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Could I play with your crutches when you don’t need ’em?”

“Sure, but they’ll be awfully big for you.”

“You have pretty eyes.”

“So do you.”

“I have pretty hair, too,” Evie Lee said matter-of-factly. “Will you show me how to put a pencil in it?”

“I will if you want me to. But we could probably put something prettier than a pencil in it.”

“Okay,” Evie Lee said with enthusiasm, her pale eyebrows taking flight with the anticipation. “My daddy is no good at hair combing. He says he could do surgery better. Do you have any l’il kids?”

“I’m afraid not. I’m not married.”

“Me, neither. My daddy isn’t neither, too. Are there any l’il kids around here to play with?”

Carly eased herself to the edge of the bed, letting both feet dangle over the side to test how her ankle felt when it wasn’t propped up. It hurt more, but it wasn’t unbearable.

“There’s a little girl up the street,” she answered.

“How old is she?”

“I think she’s six.”

“That’s good. That’s how old I am—six. I just turned it and I got Angel Barbie for my birthday because she’s the prettiest one.”

“You’ll have to show her to me.”

“I could go get her now.”

“I think we’ll have to do that later. My sister is at the medical building where your daddy will be working. She just had a baby last night and I want to go over and see how she is.”

“What kind of baby?”

“A boy.”

“Can I come with you?”

Carly laughed again, not minding the little girl’s chattiness or persistence. “It’s okay with me if it’s okay with your dad. But we can’t go without checking with him first.”

Evie Lee hopped out of the chair. “I’ll go ask him right now.”

“I want to clean up and then I’ll come across to the house to check with him.”

“I’ll clean up, too,” Evie Lee said as if she liked the idea.

The child ran for the door, opened it and turned back to Carly. “See ya.”

“See ya,” Carly answered.

And out went Evie Lee.

Since Carly wasn’t too sure whether or not the little girl might return within minutes—alone or with her father—she wasted no time getting to her crutches and heading for the bathroom.

But on the way she realized she was wearing only her slip, that the dress she’d had on the night before was tossed over the back of the love seat, and that she hadn’t brought any of her things with her from the house.

That meant she couldn’t take the fast shower she had in mind or so much as run a comb through her hair or brush her teeth or fix her face or change her clothes.

It also meant that if Bax McDermot was up and about, she was going to have to meet him looking even worse than she had the first time.

Not a proposition she relished.

But what was she going to do? She was in the cottage and everything she needed was in the house. She didn’t have any choice.

Her only hope was that he was still asleep and she could slip in and out before he woke up.

With that in mind, she put her dress back on over her slip and made her way out of the cottage.

The cottage was separated from the main house by only an eight-foot, brick-paved breezeway. The breezeway was covered on top but open on either side so it could be used as a patio in good weather. There was a cedar wood bench seat along one side, but Carly had left the rest of the patio furniture—chairs and small tables—in the garage so far this season. Minus the clutter of it, she maneuvered herself and the crutches across the breezeway without impediment.

When she reached the back door, she peeked in the window that filled the top half of it and spotted Evie Lee alone in the kitchen, standing on a ladder-backed chair to get herself a glass of water.

Carly knocked on the door to draw the child’s attention and then opened it enough to poke her head in. “Is your dad around?”

“He’s in the shower so I didn’t ask him yet about going with you. But he’ll be out in a little bit.”

Carly didn’t want to think about Bax being in her shower. Naked in her shower…

“I need to get up to my room. All my things are still in it.”

Evie Lee jumped down from the chair as if it were a tall cliff. “Okay. Come on.”

Carly pushed the door open wide with the end of one crutch and got herself through it. But as she did, it occurred to her that if she didn’t let the new doctor know she was coming inside, she was liable to bump into him accidentally. As he left the bathroom after his shower. Maybe not dressed…

And while that possibility erupted some wild goose bumps on the surface of her skin, she knew she couldn’t let it happen.

“I think it might be a good idea for you to go up and warn him I’m here.”

“It’s all right. He’s always in the shower for a looong time. Come on,” Evie Lee encouraged with a flapping wave of her hand, shooting off ahead of Carly.

Carly didn’t seem to have a choice but to follow, wishing the whole way that she could just send Evie Lee to get what she needed.

But most everything was packed and Carly had closed the suitcases to make sure she could. Evie Lee was too small to deal with what it would involve to get into them.

The stairs to the upper level presented a problem and after several attempts with the crutches, Carly conceded that she needed help.

Since Evie Lee was already on the landing at the top, Carly said, “I’m going to need you to carry the crutches up for me. But why don’t you let your dad know I’m coming first.”

Evie Lee shrugged and did her little-girl-happy-dance until she was out of sight.

Carly heard her holler through the door to her father that Carly was there, but no answer came in response.

“He can’t hear me,” Evie Lee said a moment later, at the top of the steps again. “It’ll be all right. I told you, he’ll be in there for a really, really long time.”

The prospect of standing there waiting for that really, really long time was not appealing. Especially when the alternative was that Carly could get in and out of her room without seeing him at all.

“Okay. Come and get the crutches for me, then.”

The child obliged and while Evie Lee dragged them up in front of Carly, Carly used the banister to aid in hopping one step at a time on her good foot.

It was noisy and awkward and Carly kept up a silent chant of Please don’t let him come out of the bathroom, Please don’t let him come out of the bathroom, the whole way.

When both she and Evie Lee had finally made it to the top and Carly was on the crutches again, she realized that sometime during the trip the shower water had stopped running. Not a good sign.

Before she moved from that spot at the top of the stairs, she said, “It sounds like your dad is out of the shower. Knock on the bathroom door and yell in again to let him know I’m out here.”

“Okay,” the child agreed as if she just didn’t understand what the big deal was.

But Evie Lee barely made it to the door when it opened before she had the chance to do or say anything. And out stepped Bax.

It was obvious he was fresh from the shower. His short hair was still damp and all he had on was a pair of faded blue jeans that rode low on his hips. His feet were bare and so was his entire upper body—broad shoulders, big biceps, muscled pectorals, flat belly and all.

And an even worse case of goose bumps sprang to the surface of Carly’s skin than the mere thought of the same scenario had caused.

“Whoops,” Evie Lee said at the look of surprise on her father’s face. “I was just comin’ to tell you Carly was out here.”

“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.

But it still took a force of will to yank her gaze up to his face.

Too bad that didn’t allow her any relief. Because the chiseled planes of his ruggedly perfect features only made her feel dizzy all over again.

“Need me for anything else?” he asked.

Needs were just what were churning inside her, but none he could meet in front of his daughter.

Or anywhere else, for that matter, without disrupting Carly’s plans more than they’d already been disrupted.

And she wasn’t going to let that happen.

“No, thanks. But thanks for helping me get my stuff down here.”

“How long shall I give you before I come back to wrap your ankle?”

“Half an hour?”

“Perfect.”

Yes, he was. Damn him, anyway.

“Come on, Evie, let’s do something with your hair,” he said to his daughter then.

The little girl skipped out ahead of him, clearly oblivious to her father’s effect on Carly. As was Bax, Carly hoped.

But only after they’d both left and closed the door behind them did Carly breathe freely again.

The trouble was, this time she couldn’t blame her response to Bax McDermot on lack of sleep. She had to admit that it was purely a reaction to something about the man himself.

But she had too much at stake to let it get beyond goose bumps and weak knees and itchy palms and dizziness and flutters in her stomach. She likened her reaction to sneezing when she got anywhere near ragweed—inevitable, inescapable, and over as soon as she got away from the ragweed or took her antihistamine.

She just needed to get away from Bax McDermot.

Which was exactly what she would be doing in just a few days.

In the meantime, she’d simply have to grit it out and keep reminding herself that she didn’t want anything to foul up her plans any more than they already had been.

Because unfortunately she didn’t think her antihistamine would be of any help with this particular reaction.

Chapter Three

Carly took the fastest shower of her life. Not an easy task when she had to do it standing on one foot like a flamingo lawn ornament. But there was absolutely, positively no way she was going to come face-to-face with Bax McDermot for the third time without being presentable.

With that in mind—actually with Bax in mind—she gelled her hair to give it body and let it air dry while she slipped into a pair of flowing rayon overalls in a red- and cream-colored batik print over a tight-fitting short-sleeve T-shirt.

She applied just enough blush to give her high cheekbones a healthy glow, mascara enough to accentuate every single eyelash and a pale gloss that guaranteed kissable lips.

Of course that kissable part didn’t matter, she assured herself, ignoring a second eruption of those stomach flutters at the thought.

By then her hair was dry, so she brushed it and pulled it to the top of her head in an elastic scrunchee and let the slight bit of natural wave on the ends have its way.

A scant splash of perfume was the final touch. Even though she knew there was no call for it, she couldn’t resist. She just rejected any thought that her desire to smell sweet and sexy and alluring had anything to do with the new town doctor.

She was in the midst of stashing the perfume bottle back in her carry-on bag when the knock on the cottage door came.

She took one quick look at herself in the full-length mirror on the bathroom door, approved of the improvement, and called “Come in,” in a voice she hardly recognized because it sounded so giddy and unlike her.

Bax only poked his handsome head through the door. “Are you ready for us?”

“Sure,” she answered after clearing her throat, this time sounding as calm as if she hadn’t just hopped around the place like a rabbit in fast-forward mode.

“You look ready,” he said, stepping inside and giving her the once-over as he did. Then he dimpled up with an appreciative smile that made her crazed hop worth it.

At least it would have if she’d been admitting to herself that she cared.

Behind him came Evie Lee, closing the door and turning to Carly, too. “Daddy wouldn’t put a pencil in my hair,” the little girl complained rather than saying hello.

Carly didn’t mind the omission. She was grateful for the distraction from Bax’s dimples and lowered her gaze to the child.

Evie Lee’s hair no longer stood up or was matted on one side. It was combed smooth all over, but merely left to fall loosely around her thin shoulders.

“Could you put the pencil in it now and maybe another time we could use a barrette?” Evie Lee persisted.

Carly looked to Bax for permission. “Do you mind?”

He rolled his eyes, shook his head and answered so slowly it was clear he’d been exasperated with the subject before ever getting to the cottage. “If she wants a pencil in her hair and you’re willing to put a pencil in her hair, then be my guest and put a pencil in her hair.”

“I’m willing,” Carly said with a laugh at his controlled loss of patience.

Since she was near the table and chairs where her suitcases were, she pulled the free chair out from under the table and sat on it.

Both the pencil Carly had used in her own hair earlier and her brush were close at hand so she motioned Evie Lee to stand in front of her.

Evie Lee came on a twirl of delight, stopping with her back to Carly.

It took only a few swipes of the brush to pull the silky tendrils off the child’s neck. Then Carly twisted Evie Lee’s hair into a loose knot at the crown and stuck the writing implement through it.

“There you go,” Carly said when she’d finished.

Evie Lee ran for the same mirror Carly had used moments before to check her own appearance and preened before it.

“Oh, that’s so cute!” the little girl said.

Carly laughed again, enjoying Evie Lee’s enthusiasm.

“What do you say?” Bax prompted his daughter.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you!” the child gushed.

Bax sighed out another breath as if he were glad to have that over with and said, “Okay, now for more important things than pencils as hair doohickeys.”

That drew Carly’s attention back to him.

Until that moment she hadn’t noticed he’d brought with him a black medical bag much like the one her father had carried. He set it on the floor by her feet, then hunkered down on his heels in front of her. Opening the bag, he took a fresh bandage from it as Carly hiked up her pant leg just to mid-calf, exposing an ankle swollen to triple normal size and turned a variegated shade of midnight-and-blueberry blue.

“You did a number on this, didn’t you?” Bax observed, studying the results of her fall. “So, what was your diagnosis?”

“Sprained ankle with torn ligaments and strained tendons. But no broken bones,” Carly recited.

“How did it happen?” he asked, still surveying it with only his eyes.

Carly explained the chain of events that had landed her sprawled on the floor at her going-away party.

“Well, at least you can say it happened in an attempt to do a good deed,” Bax said when she’d finished the story, barely suppressing a laugh at her recounting. “Let’s get it wrapped again for you. It’ll feel better.”

And with that he cupped her heel in the palm of his hand and raised it to rest on the thick, hard ledge of his thigh.

There wasn’t anything the slightest bit unprofessional or improper or out of the ordinary about what he did. Yet that was all it took for the whole array of sensations to kick in again, adding streaks of lightning to the list as they shot from her ankle all the way up her leg when he began to wrap the bandage expertly around her foot.

No doubt about it, having him touch her was not a good idea.

She didn’t know how hands that big could be so warm and gentle when they looked as if they belonged on the reins of a horse instead. But gentle they were. Exquisitely, enticingly gentle.

And worse than all the sensations going through her again was the intense desire to feel the touch of those hands on other places. Much more intimate places…

He was explaining to her how to wrap the bandage, but she only realized it belatedly. When she did, she yanked her thoughts out of the instant reverie his touch had elicited and tried to concentrate so she could perform this task for herself.

“We can soak this a couple of times a day and keep it elevated as much as possible,” he was saying. “But mainly with an injury like this you just have to wait it out.”

“Too bad. I’d do just about anything to speed up the healing process,” she heard herself say all the while she was thinking, Anything to speed up the healing process and get me out of town and away from everything being near you does to me.

He didn’t seem aware of the internal turmoil he was causing with his ministrations, though, which was one thing to be grateful for, Carly thought. Still, it would have been nice to be able to turn off the turmoil altogether.

When he’d finished with the bandage, her ankle was wrapped perfectly. He lowered her heel to the floor much the way he’d raised it to his thigh before and Carly suffered pangs of disappointment that the whole thing was over even as she silently screamed at herself to stop the insanity that seemed to overcome her every time she was around this guy.

Bax closed the bag and took it with him as he stood. “Done,” he announced.

Carly only wished her response to him was done, too.

But even though it wasn’t, she pretended it was, got to her good foot and hopped to where her crutches waited against the wall not far away.

“Thanks,” she said, not sounding genuinely grateful and regretting the flippancy in her tone. After all, it wasn’t his fault she’d turned into a sack of mush over him. He didn’t even know what was going on with her. So, feeling guilty, she added, “I really appreciate this.”

“Glad to do it,” he assured. But as he watched her wiggle around for the right position on the crutches, wobble, then right herself, his expression turned dubious. “Maybe we should drive to the medical center rather than walk,” he suggested.

The idea of being in an enclosed car with him was too dangerous at that point. Carly would have crawled to the medical building rather than that.

“It’s only across the way. I’d have to walk farther to get out to the car than to get where we’re going. There’s a path from the backyard over to the Molner Mansion.”

“The Molner Mansion?” he repeated as Carly led the way to the door. He still managed to get there enough ahead of her to open it for her.

She explained that the three-story redbrick building had belonged to one of the founding families of Elk Creek and had been donated to the town as the medical building. She also told Bax and Evie Lee that it contained what would be Bax’s office, examining rooms, the emergency center, the dental office, outpatient surgery facilities and two rooms that acted as hospital rooms when the necessity arose.

By then they’d reached the mansion and again Bax held the door open for her and Evie Lee to enter before him.

“Do you want a tour of the place?” she offered.

“How about tomorrow? Afternoon naps always leave Evie hungry, so I thought maybe we’d just visit our patients and then go home and I’d whip up some supper for the three of us. Which reminds me, thanks for stocking the refrigerator. That was really thoughtful.”

Carly could feel her face flush. Doing a good deed was one thing, but it embarrassed her to have it mentioned.

“It was nothing,” she said as she pushed the button for the single elevator that had been installed in the building to accommodate moving patients from one floor to the other.

Carly had ridden the elevator more times than she could begin to count, but never had it seemed so small.

Or smelled so good.

She breathed in the same scent that had come out of the bathroom with Bax when she’d met him in the hall of the main house, enjoying the second helping of it more than she wanted to. She was glad the trip to the second floor was quick.

But she was also slightly disappointed again when it was over and she had to leave the confines that allowed her the heady indulgence.

Maybe the fall that had sprained her ankle had knocked something loose in her brain, she thought, and left her a little nuts.

It didn’t take much to tell which room her sister was in because that was where the voices and laughter were coming from when they got off the elevator, so Carly led Bax and Evie Lee there, too.

One step inside the room changed the tone of things for Carly. The room was full of people visiting Hope and the baby, people who gathered around Carly to ask about her ankle, people who were interested in meeting the new town doctor and his daughter, people—Hope’s in-laws—who wanted to show off the most recent addition to Hope’s family.

The good thing about the whole situation, Carly thought, was that it gave her a break from Bax and diffused his effect on her. And at that point she was glad for any small favors.

They spent until nearly eight o’clock visiting with everyone before Bax finally cleared the room to examine Hope and the baby. When he had, he, Evie Lee and Carly headed for home again, leaving Hope with her company.

By then Carly had had a long while to lecture herself about how silly she was being over Bax McDermot, and she was convinced she could stop her vulnerability to him if she just put her mind to it.

But putting her mind to it was a whole lot easier when he was at a distance and they were both surrounded by other people than it was when she was sitting at the table in the kitchen of her family home, watching him make mile-high sandwiches for their dinner.

“Nice people,” he was saying about the townsfolk he’d just encountered. “I’ll bet this whole place is filled with more like them.”

“It is,” she confirmed, trying not to stare at the best rear end she’d ever seen as he stood at the counter.

“Your sister and the baby are doing well. I told her she could go home tomorrow.”

Carly laughed. “She’d probably rather not. There are three more boys waiting for her there, so her rest will be over.”

“True enough,” Bax agreed, laughing with her in a deep, rich chuckle that sluiced over the surface of her skin like warm honey.

He brought three plates to the table, complete with sandwiches, chips, pickles and olives, then hollered for Evie Lee to join them as he poured milk for his daughter and iced tea for himself and Carly.

Evie Lee must have been on her way to the kitchen even before the bellow because she popped through the swinging door right then.

“Know what?” she asked her father, her tone full of excitement. “There’s a bedroom way up high with pictures all over the walls of castles and mountains and all kinds of stuff. Could it be my room instead of that other one?”

Bax looked to Carly, questioning her with his expression.

“It was my room up until a year or so ago,” she explained. “It’s in the attic. There’s travel posters on the walls.”

“Ah,” Bax said, nodding. “Is it off-limits?”

“No. Evie Lee can use it if she wants. And if you don’t mind having her that far away from you.”

“It’s not far away,” Evie Lee countered. “If I leave the door open, you could still hear me if I called you.”

“If it’s all right with Carly, it’s all right with me.”

“Oh goody! Can I eat my dinner up there now? It’ll be like a picnic.”

“Okay, but you’ll have to be careful with your milk. Come on, you carry your plate and I’ll take the glass,” he instructed before excusing himself from Carly for a moment.

She spent the time he was gone working on her self-control yet again, looking around the warm, familiar country kitchen awash in blue and white, trying to get her bearings. To ground herself.

But then Bax came back and sat across from her at the round mahogany table.

And that was all it took for her to notice the color of his eyes as if for the first time, turning her to mush once more.

“That room is nearly wallpapered in posters,” he said, referring to her old bedroom as he settled in to eat. “Are any of those places where you’re headed?”

Carly swallowed a bite of sandwich she’d taken to camouflage her latest response to him. “All of them, with any luck.”

“Looks like you’ve been planning it for a long time.”

“It seems like forever. Since I wasn’t much older than Evie Lee.”

“And just when you were about to leave, this happens.” He nodded in the direction of her ankle.

“It’s only a minor setback.”

They both ate some sandwich before Carly picked up the conversational ball and got it rolling again. “Have you traveled at all?”

His eyebrows arched and he nodded as he finished his bite. Then he said, “Some. My brothers and I did a summer-long trip through Europe after I graduated college. I saw most of what you have posters of upstairs and then some. Then I came back here, went to medical school and did a stint in the Peace Corps afterward. Saw Africa that way.”

“Wow. And now you want to be in Elk Creek?”

He laughed again. “Don’t sound so shocked. I’ve seen enough to know a small town like this one is still the best place to put down roots, to raise a family. But it’s good to go out into the world and have a look at it all before you make that decision if you’ve a mind to. Helps you to know what’s right for you and what’s not.”

Okay, it was ridiculous, but there was a part of Carly that wasn’t happy that he was so in favor of her leaving. She couldn’t help feeling as if he were trying to get rid of her.

Or maybe she just would have preferred him trying to convince her to stay.

One way or the other, this whole day since she’d met him had been the strangest of her life.

And she was more than ready to put an end to it.

She’d finished her sandwich, so she pushed the plate away. “I should get going,” she announced, even though it seemed as if they’d just started to actually talk to each other and she was cutting that short.

But Bax merely nodded, putting no effort into stopping her from leaving the house, either.

“Are you sure you’ll be all right out in the cottage?” he asked.

“I’ll be fine,” she answered. “Better that than those stairs.”

“So, we’ll just leave the back door open and you can come and go as you need to use the kitchen—is that how we’re doing this?”

“That’ll work fine. I shouldn’t need anything else—especially upstairs—so you won’t have to worry about my being in the hallway when you come out of the shower the way I was today.”

He grinned at her, dimpling up again. “That wasn’t any big deal. With a daughter in the house I have to be careful about how I walk around anyway.”

“Still…” she said, remembering all too vividly the sight of his naked chest and feeling all over again what she’d felt then.

Carly pushed herself to her good foot and put a crutch under each arm.

“So, tomorrow you’ll show me my office?” he asked, confirming what they’d mentioned at the medical building when he’d declined the tour of the place.

“Sure.”

Bax stood then, too, and went ahead of her to the back door to open it for her. “I sleep with the window open, so if you need me during the night, just call,” he said as she started to pass through the door.

Needs she was certain were nothing like what he was referring to sprang to the forefront of her mind once more. But all Carly said was, “I think I’ll be fine.”

And then she did something catastrophic.

She glanced up at him as she passed in front of him to get through the door. Close in front of him. And an intense image of him kissing her good-night flooded through her.

This really had been the most bizarre day she’d ever spent.

“See you tomorrow,” she said in a hurry, forcing herself to look down at the ground instead of up at him and moving the rest of the way out of the house.

But as she hobbled across the breezeway, feeling his eyes following her, she couldn’t stop herself from wondering what kind of a kisser he would have been if he actually had kissed her good-night.

And then she could have kicked herself for the thought.

Because something told her that he would be as good at that as he was at handling sprained ankles.

And she had to fight hard against the desire to find out for real.

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