The Wolf And The Dove

Luke couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d said she wanted to buy him a Ferrari. Stepping farther into the room, he shut the door behind him, closing out the noise rolling down the hall from the waiting room. In the sudden silence, his brown eyes, dark with suspicion, met hers. “Is this some kind of joke? You can probably buy and sell me a hundred times over, Ms. Fortune. What kind of business could we possibly have in common?”

“You have an airfield that no one’s using,” she replied promptly. “I’d like to buy it.”

“Why?”

“Because I need it,” she said simply. “My grandmother left me a small fleet of planes and a helicopter, and I want to use them to start a flying service here in Clear Springs. You know, fly in hunters and skiers, that kind of thing. There’s not anything like that in this area. Everyone goes to Jackson, which is nearly a hundred miles away, not to mention on the other side of the mountains. That’s not only inconvenient, it’s a loss of revenue for the city. So surely you can see that there’s a need…”

Luke kept his gaze shuttered. He saw, all right. What he saw was that she needed his landing strip to fly in her rich friends to hunt and party. They’d throw their money around town, look down their noses at everyone, tear up the woods and the roads, then take home trophy elk and deer as if it were their God-given right.

Not if he had anything to say about it, he thought grimly. The muscles in his jaw bunching at the thought, he turned his back on her and opened the door to the hall. “The airfield’s not for sale. If that’s all you wanted to discuss, I have patients…”

Dismissing her as easily as if she were a door-to-door salesman, he patiently waited for her to precede him into the hall. Caught off guard, Rocky stood right where she was. He was turning her down! she thought in disbelief. No one had ever turned her down without doing her the courtesy of considering her offer, and she found, to her irritation, that she didn’t like it. She didn’t like it one damn bit!

“Can’t we at least talk this out?” she persisted stubbornly. “I could come back at the end of the day.”

“What’s there to talk about?” His face as hard as the Rockies, he stood at the open doorway, clearly impatient for her to leave. “You want my airstrip to fly your rich friends in for the hunting season so they can all play big white hunter. Sorry, but I’m not interested.”

“Big white hunter?” she echoed in confusion. “You make it sound like I’m planning some kind of Jungle Jim party thing.”

“Aren’t you?”

“No! Oh, sure, I plan to hire out to hunters or anyone else who needs my services, but I have a lot more to offer than tour-guide services. I’m a licensed EMT, Dr. Greywolf,” she said proudly. “I’ve trained with one of the best search-and-rescue teams in the country and logged hundreds of hours flying in the mountains. This community needs that kind of emergency service. And I need an airfield.”

“Isn’t there one at your grandmother’s ranch?”

“That belongs to my cousin Kyle now. I want a place of my own.”

“Then you’ll have to find one somewhere else. Mine’s not for sale.”

He was so adamant, Rocky wanted to shake him. It wasn’t as if he were using the airstrip, she thought resentfully as the temper she’d inherited along with her red hair from her grandmother started to simmer. It was just sitting there going to pot. It would serve him right if she told him to just forget it. She could buy some land and build what she needed from scratch—but that would take time, dammit, and she wanted to get started now!

“All right,” she said abruptly, knowing when she was beating a dead horse. “You don’t want to sell. I can respect that. How about leasing it, then? Don’t say no,” she said quickly, before he could turn her down flat again. “Just think about it for now. The landing strip’s just sitting there, not earning you a penny. Maybe you don’t need the money personally, but you could always use it to make improvements here at the clinic.”

She saw resentment flicker in his eyes and wasn’t surprised. He was a proud man, but facts were facts. She’d had more than enough time to look around the place while she waited to talk to him, and it was obvious he was running the place on a shoestring. It was spotlessly clean, but the old building really needed some cosmetic work, work that could easily be paid for with the generous lease she was willing to pay.

Grabbing a piece of paper from her purse, she hurriedly jotted down her telephone number and address, then pushed it into his hand. “If you change your mind, just give me a call.”

She didn’t give him time to tell her hell would freeze over before he made that call. Stepping around him, her bearing as regal as a queen’s, she walked down the hall and turned the corner into the reception area. Staring after her, Luke crushed the slip of paper with her phone number in his fist and swore. “Brat,” he muttered, tossing the note into a nearby trash can. “Who the hell does she think she is? She’s got all the money in the world, and all she can think about is her damn airfield. If she thinks she’s got problems, let her talk to Michael Hawk. Or Abigail Wilson. They’re the ones who could use her money—”

“Which is why you should have at least considered what she had to say,” Mary retorted from the supply closet, which was conveniently located right next to examining room one. Making no apologies for the fact that she had blatantly eavesdropped, not only on his conversation with himself but also on his meeting with Rocky Fortune, she frowned at him disapprovingly. “It’s not like you’re using that airstrip. And the money you’d make on a lease would go a long way toward financing Michael Hawk’s operation.”

“His father won’t accept help, remember?”

“A handout, no. But Rocky was right—this place could use some work. You could hire Mr. Hawk to do it. That would save his pride, and Michael would still get his surgery.”

She had a point, Luke grudgingly admitted, one he hadn’t even considered. Damn! What the hell was wrong with him? He should have thought of Michael himself, but he’d been so busy drooling over the lady he couldn’t think straight. And then there was the money. She had it in spades, so she was used to getting what she wanted because she wanted it. And that had rubbed him the wrong way. So he’d cut off his nose to spite his face, just to bring her down a peg or two. Idiot!

“I’ll talk to her,” he said stiffly. “Later.”

“And you’ll apologize?”

He rolled his eyes, his lips twitching. Trust Mary to insist on a pound of flesh. “All right, I’ll apologize for being rude and obnoxious. Now can we get back to work? In case you’ve forgotten, we still got patients to see.”

“In a minute,” she said, and stepped into the first waiting room to retrieve the crumpled slip of paper he’d tossed in the trash. When she placed it in his hand and closed his fingers around it, she was grinning. “You can’t call her if you haven’t got her number.” Chuckling, she turned away to retrieve Christie Eagle’s chart.

The small fifty-year-old wood-frame house was showing serious signs of age. Even in the dark shadows of the night, Luke could see the peeling paint, the slightly uneven steps of the porch, the shutters that probably hadn’t hung straight in decades. Surprised, he braked to a stop at the curb and grabbed the wrinkled scrap of paper he’d tossed on the dash when he left the clinic a few minutes earlier. A quick glance at the address Rocky had scrawled there four hours earlier assured him he’d made no mistake. This was it—the place where Kate Fortune’s granddaughter was living.

It made no sense, he told himself as he approached the front steps. He didn’t know anything about the details of the old lady’s will, apart from what Rocky had told him, but it was a given that she wasn’t strapped for funds. She could, no doubt, afford the best that Clear Springs had to offer. So what was she doing living here?

Bothered more than he should have been by the question, he knocked briskly on the door, determined not to get caught up in the intriguing diversity that was Rocky Fortune. The lady had her quirks and the money to indulge them. He didn’t care what she did as long as she agreed to pay him a decent lease on the airfield.

Knocking again, he frowned when there was no answer. Someone was obviously home—he could see the lights through the covered windows, and the walls were practically vibrating from the country-and-western song being belted out on a radio inside. “What the hell?” he muttered, and tried the knob. It opened without a sound. Surprised, he scowled. Crazy girl, didn’t she know better than to leave her door unlocked at night? Clear Springs might not be much of a metropolis, but just like anywhere else, it had its fair share of crime.

Giving the door a slight nudge, he stepped cautiously inside and found himself in a small entrance hall. On the radio, a whiskey-voiced man was singing about a honky-tonk woman, but Luke hardly noticed. Through the arched doors that led to the living room he caught sight of Rocky, and he could do nothing but stare. This was, he knew, the same woman who’d come sashaying into his clinic earlier that afternoon, dressed to kill and flashing her money around. The expensive business suit, however, had been traded for paint-spattered jeans and a ragtag cotton shirt, her high heels for a pair of tennis shoes that looked as if they’d been through a war. Standing with her back to him, her wild red hair covered with a blue bandanna, she was painting the living room and singing her heart out, while her slim hips kept heart-stopping time to the beat of the music. Feeling like he’d been struck by lightning on a clear day, Luke stood as if turned to stone, while deep inside a hot pulse kept time with every sway of her hips.

Belting out the current number one country hit, Rocky turned to add paint to her dry roller pan—and nearly dropped it, stunned when she saw Luke Greywolf standing in the doorway. She should have laughed—she was a mess, with white paint in her hair and on her clothes and even under her fingernails, and her singing had often been compared to a cat’s screeching. But there was something in his eyes that wasn’t the least bit funny, and suddenly her chest seemed tight and breathing wasn’t nearly as easy as it had been before she spied him in the doorway.

Flustered, she hit the power switch to the radio. “Well, this is a surprise,” she said, too loudly, shattering the sudden silence. “I wasn’t expecting to see you this evening.”

“I knocked,” he said stiffly. “But the radio—”

“Was blaring,” she finished for him, grinning. “I have to crank it up to max when I sing, or I’d have every dog in the neighborhood howling at the moon.”

For a moment, she thought she saw a smile start to curl up the corners of his mouth, and she found herself waiting expectantly, her gaze fastened on his lips. But then his eyes fell to the roller and pan at her feet, the paint on her arms and clothes, and a confused anger hardened his face. Scowling at her, he growled, “Tell me something, lady. Just what the hell kind of game are you playing, anyway?”

Taken aback by the unexpected attack, Rocky blinked. “Game? What are you talking about?”

“This handyman routine,” he retorted, waving at the drop sheets and painting paraphernalia that littered the living room. “I didn’t think you people cut up your own meat, let alone knew how to yield a paintbrush.”

Outraged, Rocky gasped, her brown eyes narrowing dangerously. “Cut up our own meat?”

It was the wrong thing to say. Luke knew it the second the words left his mouth, and he wanted to kick himself. What was it about this woman that knocked him off kilter so easily? He’d never had a problem communicating with women before—he liked them, dammit! But there was something about Rocky Fortune that just seemed to rub him the wrong way.

Heat climbing up his throat, he quickly back-pedaled. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. It’s just that your family is rolling in dough, and you’re probably not used to doing things for yourself—”

“Like tying my own shoelaces?”

Luke winced at the sweetly purred gibe. “You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?”

“Not on your life,” she retorted, beginning to enjoy herself. “So what can I do for you, Doc? You didn’t show up here just to insult me.”

She knew, dammit, why he was there—he could see the anticipation dancing in her eyes. And she was going to make him squirm. Amused in spite of himself, he swallowed his pride and admitted, “I’ve given it some thought and realized I may have rejected your offer to lease the airstrip too quickly. I thought maybe we could discuss terms.”

“Terms, huh?” she echoed, grinning. “I think I can manage that.” Whisking off the sheets covering the furniture, she motioned to him to take a seat in an overstuffed chair, then settled opposite him on a faded brocade coach. “Okay, Doc, the ball’s in your court. It’s your serve. Give it your best shot.”

He named a sum that he thought was more than fair, only to have her gasp as if he’d just insulted her. “You’ve got to be kidding! That’s highway robbery. Have you looked at the runway recently? And the hangar?”

She threw out a figure that was half the one he’d named, he countered, and the game began. With a skill Luke couldn’t help but admire, she held her ground and bartered like a horse trader, making no attempt to hide the fact that she was in her element. Later, it would bother him that he’d enjoyed himself so much, but when he rose to leave nearly an hour after he arrived, they had a deal.

Confident that he’d gotten the best of her, he solemnly shook hands with her, then couldn’t resist gigging her as she walked him to the door. “You drive a hard bargain, lady. But I would have taken less, you know.”

Unperturbed, she only grinned. “Really? That’s good to know, Doc. Because I would have paid more.” Her brown eyes sparkling, she laughed and shut the door in his face.

Two

The snow that had been falling all day had finally stopped, but the night was dark as pitch and cold as the devil. Flipping off the clinic lights, Lucas stepped outside and locked the front door, swearing under his breath as the wind seemed to cut right through his clothes. With a sharp jerk, he tugged the zipper of his down jacket as high as it would go, but it didn’t help. Nothing did when the temperature was dropping like a rock toward zero and a twenty-mile-an-hour wind was blowing fit to kill. Leaning into the gale, his shoulders hunched against the cold that snaked down the back of his neck, he hurried toward his Bronco at the far end of the clinic’s small parking lot and quickly climbed inside.

It wasn’t until he stuck the key in the ignition and started the motor and the heater, though, that he allowed himself to even glance toward the hangar that he’d leased to Rocky Fortune a week ago. A hulking shadow in the night on the far side of the runway, it was bathed in light, just as it had been every night that week. And for some gnawing reason that he couldn’t have explained, that irritated the hell out of him.

When he agreed to lease the place to her, he’d told himself the lady wasn’t going to be a problem. Because of the security deposit and first and last months’ rent she’d paid him, Michael Hawk had gotten his operation, and that was all he cared about. If that black pickup of hers was parked in front of the hangar when he got to work in the morning and was still there when he left at night, drawing his eye every time he stepped outside, he’d just learn to ignore it and her.

Yeah, yeah, he thought bitterly. Even on a bad-hair day, Rocky Fortune wasn’t the type of woman a man could easily ignore. And it was damn frustrating! What the hell was she doing in there, anyway? Didn’t she ever go home? And why did he care?

He didn’t, he told himself flatly. Not a lick. She had a lease—the place was hers to do with as she liked. She could move a cot in and sleep there for all he cared, as long as she left him alone. If he was curious, it was just because he couldn’t imagine what she was doing in there. When they struck their deal, he’d warned her the hangar had to be renovated before she could use it, but he had yet to see a work crew there. And he didn’t believe for a second that she was making the necessary improvements herself. Not a Fortune. She might have slapped a couple of coats of paint on the walls of that old house she was renting, but when it came to work, the hard, physical, dirty kind that got under your nails and stained your clothes and skin and left you bone-weary at the end of the day, she’d probably never done a smidgen of it in her spoiled little life.

His hands curling around the steering wheel, he glared at the hanger’s blazing lights and told himself that whatever Rocky was doing, it was none of his business. But when he put the Bronco in gear, he headed for the hangar instead of home, cursing himself all the way.

With a low moan, the wind whistled around the hangar, searching and finding a way in through the cracks and crevices of the old sliding metal door. In the corner, the heater was working overtime blowing, but it did little good against the chilly air that crept around her ankles. Shivering, Rocky tried to ignore it as she bent over the metal work-table she was sanding so that she could paint it in the morning, but her toes and fingers were nearly numb from the cold. She was, she decided, going to have to call it a night soon. Then, tomorrow, she was going to do something about that door. And get another heater—she could see right now that one just wasn’t going to be enough. The plumbing in the bathroom needed to be checked over, and then she’d have to see about getting someone out there to haul away all the rusty junk that had been left behind by the previous occupant. It had taken her most of the week to go through it all, salvaging what she could, then piling the discarded pieces neatly in a corner. But it couldn’t stay there—

Without warning, the outer door adjacent to the hangar’s small office suddenly flew open, sending a blast of icy wind rushing inside. Startled, her heart jumping into her throat, Rocky glanced up just in time to see Lucas Greywolf blow in with the wind.

Over the course of the past week, she’d spent every waking hour at the hangar and she hadn’t caught sight of the doc once, which was just fine with her. He’d made no secret of the fact that he didn’t approve of her, and that still galled her. Not that she cared what he thought of her, she was quick to assure herself. She had her own agenda and wasn’t looking for a man. Especially one who was so quick to look down that proud nose of his and find her lacking. That didn’t mean, however, that she’d forgotten how just the sight of him had made her stomach flutter.

Had he noticed? she wondered, and winced at the thought. She’d been expecting a middle-aged, paunchy doctor in a white lab coat, not a tall, lean hunk who could have just stepped out of one those sexy cigarette ads. If she’d been momentarily thrown for a loop, it was a natural enough reaction. He’d just caught her by surprise—that was all. The next time she ran into him, she’d promised herself, she wouldn’t bat an eye.

Well, here it is—the next time—Rocky, my girl, a voice drawled in her ear, and not only are you not batting an eye, you’re not breathing, either. Try not to drool, sweetie. It’s so tacky. And the good doctor just might get the mistaken impression that you’re interested. You’re not, are you?

Her heart stumbled. Of course she wasn’t! The last man she’d made the mistake of getting interested in had left a bruise on her heart that was only just now starting to heal. Greg Butler. Just the thought of him brought a bad taste to her mouth and put her off even looking at another man. If Lucas Greywolf caught her attention, it was only because she couldn’t figure him out. Every time she saw him, he was scowling, and tonight was no different. Did he never smile? Openly studying him, she watched him sweep his cowboy hat off and knock the snow from it and assured herself she wasn’t even close to drooling. Just because she wasn’t buying, however, didn’t mean she couldn’t window shop.

“Hey, Doc.” She greeted him easily as she reluctantly returned her attention to the rusty table she was sanding with a wire brush. “You picked a heck of a night to come calling. Sorry I can’t give you the guided tour, but I’ve sort of got my hands in this right now, and I want to finish before I close up shop for the night.”

If he hadn’t seen it with his own two eyes, Lucas would have never believed it. The oh-so-rich, born-with-a-gold-not-silver-spoon-in-her-mouth Ms. Fortune was actually working. Her face free of makeup, her worn jeans and faded college sweatshirt splattered with dirt and grime, she scrubbed at the metal table she was refinishing with a total disregard for the rust she was getting all over her. Her hands were stained with the stuff, splotches of it had settled on her cheeks and neck, and she even had it under her fingernails. Yet she still somehow managed to look beautiful. How the hell did she do it?

Disgusted with himself for even noticing, Lucas dragged his eyes away from her and glanced around in surprise. If the lady had done this all by herself in just a week, she’d really been hustling. She’d cleaned the place up, collected all the old motor parts in a pile in the corner, then scrubbed decades of grease from large patches of the cement floor. There was still a lot of work left to be done, but she’d made more of a dent than he’d expected, and he had to admit he was impressed. He hadn’t thought the lady had it in her.

As if reading his thoughts, she laughed softly. “Don’t look now, Doc, but your chin’s on the floor. What’s the matter? Did you think the spoiled little rich girl was too finicky to get her hands dirty?”

The teasing gibe struck home. Heat, brick red and uncomfortable, rose in a tide from his neck to his cheeks, making it impossible for him to deny the accusation. So he did the only thing a man with any integrity could—he looked her right in the eye and baldly told her exactly what he thought of her. “To be perfectly honest, I didn’t think you’d even know where to begin. But then again, spoiled little rich girls aren’t exactly my field of expertise.”

“So what is?”

He frowned. “What?”

“Your field of expertise,” she answered patiently, knowing she shouldn’t push the issue, but unable to drop it. Just what type of woman attracted a man like Lucas Greywolf? And why was that information suddenly so important to her? “And I’m not talking about medicine, Doc. You’re what—thirty? Thirty-two?”

“Thirty-five.”

“And well preserved for your advanced age,” she said teasingly. “Men like you, especially when they’ve got M.D. behind their names, don’t usually walk around loose. You must have to sweep the women off your front porch every night just to get inside your house.”

Something flickered in his eyes, something she couldn’t quite read before it was quickly shuttered behind a glint of amusement. “Yeah, life’s rough. So what do you want to know? How short or tall I like my women, and if you fit the mold?”

“No! Or course not!”

Flustered, she glanced away and inadvertently jerked her hand across a rough, jagged corner of the table she was sanding. The rusty edge, as sharp as a razor, cut right across the pad of her thumb, slicing it open. “Damn!”

“What’s wrong?”

Her teeth clenched tight to hold in the curses that rose to her tongue, Rocky pressed the wound against her middle, cradling the injured hand close. “Nothing,” she said tersely. “Just a scrape.”

“The hell it is. You’re white as a sheet.” Crossing the hanger in four swift strides, he reached for her hand. “Let me see, Rocky,” he said quietly. “In case you haven’t noticed, you’re bleeding all over that dirty shirt of yours.”

She wanted to deny it, but anything that hurt this bad had to be bleeding like a stuck pig. Reluctantly letting him take her hand, she winced as he gently turned it over to expose the two-inch cut at the base of her thumb. Blood seeped from it, flooding her palm.