Claimed By The Cowboy

He made his way back over to where Carson had been waiting for him, texting on his phone the whole time. With any luck, Carson hadn’t been paying attention to his and Lucy’s conversation.

“That seemed to go well,” he said without looking up.

Josh sighed. One thing was abundantly clear.

His luck had run out.

* * *

Lucinda did her very best to ban all thoughts of Josh Calhoun from her mind as she moved through her afternoon. She’d spent more time at the children’s hospital site than she’d meant to and was behind schedule. She hated being behind schedule. Things happened on time or there were dire consequences in her world. When it came to the health of her patients, waiting could be fatal.

This was what she kept telling herself as she moved around Midwest’s oncology ward, her hair still damp from the quick shower she’d taken to wash the construction dust off. Like any other day, some people were making progress and some people were losing the battle. Mrs. Adamczak was sitting up in bed and smiling for the first time in weeks. Mr. Gadhavi, however, had not responded to treatment and, as hard as it would be, Lucinda was going to recommend that he be sent home for hospice.

This was where her focus needed to be—on the people she could still help. That did not include Gary Everly and it did not include Josh Calhoun.

It did, however, include Sutton Winchester.

It was madness that she was even going to consider allowing him to continue his treatment away from this hospital. If it were any other person in the entire city of Chicago, it wouldn’t be an option. It wouldn’t even be a figment of someone’s imagination.

But Sutton Winchester wasn’t any other person. And his children weren’t going to let her forget it.

But before she could even get to his room, she was stopped by the vice president of Midwest, John Jackson, outside the nurses station on the oncology ward. “Dr. Wilde,” Jackson said with an unnaturally bright look to his eyes. “Just the doctor I was looking for!”

Lucinda didn’t have time for ego stroking right now. She knew that if Jackson worked up a proper head of steam, he could go on for hours. “How much money did they offer you?”

Jackson pulled up short and blinked at her. “How did you...”

“Because I’m not stupid, Mr. Jackson. I was there when Eve Winchester decided that this was going to be a reality whether I thought it was a good idea or not. You should merely count yourself lucky that you’re going to get the money for the cancer pavilion expansion out of it, shouldn’t you?”

Jackson didn’t know her very well and it was clear that he didn’t know how he was supposed to take this attitude. But he hadn’t made it to being a vice president of a hospital without understanding how to cover his tracks. “Just think of all the people that we’ll be able to help,” he said, putting all available lipstick on this pig of a situation.

“Yes, yes—I know. I hope you at least negotiated for the entire cost of construction?”

“The Newports and the Winchesters have agreed to $250 million!” The man actually did a little dance. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Whatever you did, Dr. Wilde, do you think you could do it again? We could use a new cardiac cath lab, too.”

She glared at him hard enough that he took a step backward. God, this whole situation had left her with a bad taste in her mouth. What else could go wrong today?

At that exact moment, the ward doors opened and a cart laden with floral arrangements was wheeled in. This was normally a happy time of her day as she got to see the flowers bring a bit of hope to people’s eyes.

“As I said to Mr. Winchester’s children, I will only allow him to be treated in his home if they can get a room set up to my specifications and if it won’t compromise the treatment of my other patients,” she told Jackson as she kept an eye on the beautiful arrangements being off-loaded. She shouldn’t like the flowers. She never got any, and the last time anyone had actually given her flowers had been at her senior prom with Gary.

He’d only been able to stand for the photos and for one dance. He’d gotten her a corsage, though. And then he made Josh Calhoun dance with her several other times throughout the night.

The last bouquet on the cart was a small arrangement of sunflowers and daisies—bright and sunny and full of the promise of tomorrow. The delivery guy set the bouquet on the nurses station counter and Lucinda saw one of her favorite nurses, Elena, glance at the card. Elena’s eyes got very wide very fast, and then she looked up at Lucinda and smiled.

Elena must have a new boyfriend. That was sweet of him to send flowers to work.

Lucinda turned her attention back to Mr. Jackson. “...find a way to make this work,” he was saying in his best salesman tone.

Elena held the card out to another nurse, who read the name on it and started giggling. “Fine,” she told Jackson. Because who was she? Just Sutton Winchester’s doctor, that’s all. Just the one person who wanted him to get the best treatment in the best place from the best people.

Apparently, that made her the bad guy there.

Well, she knew when it was time to cut her losses. You couldn’t hold back the tides and you couldn’t hold back Eve Winchester when she made up her mind about something.

Jackson was still making noises about pavilions, patients and money when Elena carried the sunny bouquet over to Lucinda. “It’s for you,” she said.

Lucinda wasn’t offended by the nurse’s awestruck tone. She didn’t believe it, either. “Seriously?” She grabbed the card out of Elena’s hand. Yes, that was her name on the envelope. Typed, not handwritten: “Dr. Lucinda Wilde.”

“When will you have a list of things Mr. Winchester needs to get ready?” Jackson asked in a tone of voice that was one small step removed from a flat-out demand. “I don’t want to keep Ms. Winchester or Mr. Newport waiting.”

“Give me an hour,” Lucinda all but growled at him. Elena was watching her with naked interest, Jackson wasn’t leaving her alone about the Newports and the Winchesters, and she was holding in her hands a card from Josh Calhoun, because who else would send her flowers?

No one, that’s who. She’d always been something of an introvert. She had a few good friends and it was more than enough for her.

Never in her entire life had she wanted to go hide more than she did right now.

“Great! I’ll check back in an hour, okay?” For the love of everything holy, Jackson looked so much like an overeager golden retriever at this moment that Lucinda was tempted to dig a treat out of her pocket and throw it just to get him to go away.

“Yeah.” She should probably work a little harder on sucking up to the hospital administrators, but she just didn’t have it in her today.

Once Jackson was out of sight, Elena whispered, “Well?” and crowded closer to read the card over her shoulder.

Lucinda slipped the card into her pocket and grabbed the floral arrangement. There was no way in hell she was going to read it right now, with half of the nurses on duty pretending not to listen in. If she was going to turn beet red again, she wanted to do so in the privacy of her own closet. “It looks like I’m going to be picking up some extra shifts at a private residence. I’m going to need a few trusted nurses who can keep their mouths shut.” The irony of the situation didn’t escape her. She wasn’t going to read Josh’s note in front of them because she didn’t trust a single one of them, but she was asking them to come to Winchester’s estate and help her discreetly manage him there. “Are you interested?”

The difference was, of course, that patient privacy was the law and that law was drilled into them over and over again. Her personal life, however, was fair game and everyone knew it.

“Of course!” Elena’s gaze darted over to Sutton’s room. Yeah, everyone knew who they were talking about. “Any word on what it’ll pay?”

“I’ll make sure it’s worth your while. Now, if you’ll excuse me...” Lucinda juggled the flowers and her tablet and, randomly tapping on the screen to make it look as if she was doing something important instead of fleeing like a trapped rat, turned on her heel and started down the hallway.

She couldn’t flee fast enough. “Is he cute?” Elena called after her. “Or she—it’s fine with us either way.”

As if Lucinda hadn’t been put on the spot enough already. She had always avoided the Grey’s Anatomy–style hospital romances that seemed to permeate Midwest. And, yeah, on some level, she probably knew that people assumed she didn’t date men because she was a lesbian or asexual.

But was it really such a common assumption that Elena would announce it in the middle of the hallway like that?

“Don’t you need to check on Mrs. Adamczak?” Lucinda shot back over her shoulder as she walked through the wide swinging doors. Without giving Elena a chance to catch up, she hurried to her office and blissfully shut the door. It wasn’t much of an office. Part of the plans for the expanded cancer pavilion was redesigning the doctors’ offices to make patients feel more comfortable when they sat down for life-and-death discussions. Right now, Lucinda barely had enough room for a desk and two chairs. But she had a door and a lock, and that was all she needed right now.

She pulled the envelope out of her pocket and realized with horror that her hands were shaking. No. No. She was absolutely not going to let Josh Calhoun get to her again.

She slipped a small card out. “L—I will always be your friend. Let me take you out to dinner. J”

Below that was an Iowa phone number.

She had to stop thinking it couldn’t get worse. Because at this point, fate was merely toying with her.

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