The Mccaffertys: Matt. Lisa Jackson
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the ranch, he could damned well babysit.
* * *
The woman in the hospital bed looked horrible, though by all accounts she was healing. Nevertheless, in Kelly’s estimation Randi McCafferty had a long way to go. There were tubes and monitors running into and out of her body and she lay on the bed unmoving, thin and pale, her skin still showing some signs of discoloration, though some of the bruises and cuts had healed.
“If only you could talk,” Kelly said, biting her lower lip. For all the pain the McCaffertys had put on her family, Kelly still didn’t like seeing anyone like this. A nurse walked to Randi’s bedside and began taking her vital signs. “Has she shown any sign of waking?” Kelly asked.
“I can’t really say,” sighed the petite woman with shiny black hair, olive skin, eyes rimmed with excessive mascara and a name tag that read Kathy Desmond. “With this one, we might need a crystal ball,” she joked as she picked up Randi’s wrist and took her pulse, then slipped a blood pressure cuff over her arm. “It seems to me that she should wake up soon. Certainly she’s had plenty of eye movement beneath her lids, she’s yawned, and one of the night nurses thinks she moved her arm. Whether this means she’ll be waking up today, tomorrow or next week, I don’t know.”
“But soon.”
“I would think.” The nurse’s highly arched brows pulled together. “But I’m not sure.”
“I understand,” Kelly said, wishing Matt McCafferty’s half sister would rouse and open her eyes, be cognizant and clearheaded enough to answer questions about the day her car slid off the road. Had someone intentionally forced her over the embankment? Had she gone into labor and lost control? Had she just hit a patch of black ice that sent her vehicle into a skid? The McCafferty brothers seemed to think there was some person or persons behind the accident. Kelly wasn’t convinced. Right now only Randi McCafferty had the answers to what had happened up at Glacier Park and only she knew who was the father of her child.
The nurse left the room and Kelly stepped closer to the unmoving form on the bed. She wrapped her fingers around the cool metal rails, then touched the back of Randi’s hand, willing some life into Randi’s battered body. “Wake up,” she urged. “You’ve got so much to live for…a new baby, for starters.” And three stubborn, intense half brothers.
“Besides that you’ve got a lot of explaining to do when you wake up.” She squeezed Randi’s hand, but there was no response. “Come on, Randi. Help me out here.”
“She can’t hear you.”
Kelly released the comatose woman’s hand quickly and flushed. She recognized Matt McCafferty’s voice instantly. Her heart jumped.
“I realize that.” Turning, she found him in the doorway, still dressed in the jeans and shirt he’d had on a few hours earlier. His jacket was unbuttoned, his hat in his hands, his face not as hostile as it had been earlier, but there were still silent accusations in his dark eyes. Roguishly handsome and mad as a wet hornet.
“What’re you doing here?” he demanded.
“I met Detective Espinoza in the ER, then decided to check on your sister.”
“You should be checking out leads, trying to find the bastard who did this to her.” Matt stepped into the room, closer. Kelly’s nerves tightened and she silently chided herself for her reaction.
He stared down at his sister, and the play of emotions across his bladed features showed signs of a deeper emotion than she would have expected from the rogue cowboy, who had become, according to town gossip, a solitary man. Yes, there was anger in the set of his jaw, quiet determination in his stance, but something else was evident—the flicker of guilt deep in his near-black eyes. At some level Matt McCafferty felt responsible for his sister’s condition. He reached over the rails just as Kelly had minutes before and took Randi’s small, pale hand in his big, tanned fingers. “You hang in there,” he said huskily, his thumb rubbing the back of his sister’s hand, only to stop less than an inch from the spot where the IV needle was buried in her skin.
Kelly’s throat tightened as she recognized his pain.
“Your little man, J.R., he’s needin’ ya.” Matt cleared his throat, slid an embarrassed glance at Kelly, then turned his attention back to his sister. Obviously he felt more comfortable shoeing horses, mending fence or roping calves than he did trying to come up with words of encouragement to a comatose sibling. And yet he tried. Kelly’s heart twisted. Maybe there was more to Matt McCafferty than first met the eye, than rumor allowed. “And the rest of us, we need ya, too,” he added gruffly. With a final pat to his kid sister’s shoulder, he turned on his heel.
Kelly let her breath out slowly. Who was this man and why did she react to him—dear Lord, her hands were sweating, and if she didn’t know better, she’d swear her heartbeat accelerated whenever she saw him. But that was crazy. Just plain nuts.
Giving herself a quick mental shake, Kelly followed him through the door into the central hallway to the hub that housed the nurses’ station.
“Where’s Espinoza?” he asked, sliding a glance her way.
“Probably back at the office. He finished up here on another case, but he’s aware that you’re concerned. He’ll call you tonight, but I don’t think he can give you any more information than I have.”
“Damn.” They walked to the elevator and stepped into a waiting car. She ignored the fact that her pulse had accelerated, and she noticed that he smelled faintly of leather and soap. As the doors to the elevator shut and they were alone, his dark eyes focused on her. Hard. She wanted to squirm away from his intense, silently accusing eyes. Instead she stood her ground as he asked, “So why were you in Randi’s room?”
“Just to keep my focus. I hadn’t seen her for a while and after your visit this afternoon, I thought I’d see how she was getting along. I’ve kept in contact with the hospital, of course, gotten updates, but I thought seeing her might make me clearer on some points.”
“Such as?”
“Such as why was she up in Glacier Park? Where was she going? Who were her enemies? Who were her friends? Why did she fire the foreman of the ranch a week or so before she left Seattle? What happened at her job? Who’s the father of her child? Those kind of questions.”
“Get any answers?” he asked sarcastically.
“I was hoping someone in the family might know.”
“I wish. No one does.” He leaned against the rail surrounding the interior as the elevator car landed and the doors opened to the lobby. He straightened, his jacketed arm brushing hers. She stepped out of the car, ignored the faint physical contact. “What do you know about a book your sister was writing?”
“I’m not sure there is one,” he said as they crossed a carpeted reception area where wood-framed chairs were scattered around tables strewn with magazines and a few potted trees had been added to give some illusion that St. James Hospital was more than a medical facility, warmer than an institution.
“Your housekeeper, Juanita Ramirez, said she was in contact with your sister before the accident and that Randi had been working on a book of some kind, but no one seems to know anything more about it.”
“Juanita didn’t even know that Randi was pregnant. I doubt if she was privy to my sister’s secrets,” Matt muttered as he made his way to the wide glass doors of the main entrance.
“Why would she make it up?”
“I’m not saying Juanita’s lying.” The first set of doors opened automatically, and as Kelly stepped into the vestibule, she felt the temperature lower ten or fifteen degrees. Thank God. For some reason she was sweating.
“But maybe Randi fibbed. She’d talked about writing a book since she was a kid in high school, but did she ever? No. Not that my brothers or I ever heard of.”
The second set