The Soldier's Holiday Homecoming. Judy Duarte
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great. He’s on the third floor, in room 327. I’ll have the paperwork ready for his discharge.”
Five minutes later, Chloe climbed into the faded green GMC pickup and turned on the ignition. The old ranch truck roared to life, just as dependable as Chloe herself.
To be honest, she was apprehensive about taking in a stranger, but she chided herself as quickly as the thought crossed her mind. Teresa Cummings, Dave’s mom, had let Chloe move to the Rocking C when she didn’t have anywhere else to go. So taking in Joe Wilcox was her way of paying it forward. Besides that, Teresa would have taken the wounded marine under her wing in a heartbeat.
One night, before Teresa’s death, she and Chloe had shared a pot of tea and talked about Teresa’s terminal illness, her fears and her thoughts on life. The dying woman had also shared her regrets, one of which was about a kid she’d neglected to take in and offer a home.
Apparently, years ago, when Dave had been in high school, one of his friends had needed a home. The teenager had been living in foster care and had been miserable. So Teresa had asked her husband if the boy could move in with them. Her husband had been reluctant because the kid had gotten into trouble in the past and had even been suspended from school on several occasions. Still, he’d always been polite and helpful whenever he’d been on the Rocking C, and Teresa had suspected he’d only been acting out because of his sad childhood and difficult living situation.
Dave had begged them to let the boy stay with them, but his father had been firm in his decision. Teresa hadn’t pushed her husband, although she always suspected she could have gotten him to see reason.
Shortly thereafter, the boy ran away from his foster home and was never heard from again. Dave had been inconsolable for nearly a year, and his relationship with his father had suffered terribly because of it.
Teresa had wished that she would have insisted that they take the boy in. And she’d always wondered what might have happened, how he might have fared if she had provided him a loving home. She also wondered if Dave and his father’s relationship might have been a happier one, especially since her husband had died of a heart attack shortly after Dave joined the Marines in his one and only act of sheer rebellion.
To appease her guilt, Teresa had promised herself that, from then on, the Rocking C Ranch would always have its paddocks open for any stray, whether it had four legs or two.
And since Chloe had resolved to keep the ranch running exactly as Teresa would have done had she still been alive, that meant letting a hit-and-run victim who couldn’t recall his own name recover there.
By the time she reached the medical center, it had grown dark outside and was threatening to rain. She turned into the hospital parking lot and pulled into a spot close to the entrance.
After entering the lobby, which had been decorated with twinkly lights and a big Christmas tree near the front window, she took the elevator to the third floor, where the nurses’ station was a flurry of activity, reminding her of the shift changes at the Sheltering Arms. But thanks to the administrator at the nursing home who’d fired her rather than the incompetent nurse she’d reported, Chloe was no longer a part of the staff.
She checked out the room numbers until she spotted 327. The door was open, so she walked in. But she stopped short when she saw the wounded man standing near his bed, wearing a pair of tattered jeans, his broad chest bare.
Unable to help herself, she watched as he attempted to put on a torn black sweatshirt he must have been wearing at the time of the accident. His left hand was wrapped in an oversize bandage, and his muscled form struggled with the effort.
“Would you like... I mean, I could...”
He glanced over his shoulder, those amazing blue eyes locking in on hers and exposing something deep within, something vulnerable.
“Thanks, but I’ve got it.” His handsome face bore a couple of scrapes, but other than that, he appeared strong and healthy. She could hardly tell that he’d been brought in on a gurney last night.
Maybe she should have taken a few extra minutes to freshen up and change out of her work clothes. Not that she was dirty or unkempt. It’s just that he...well, she...
Oh, forget it. She didn’t have time to let her thoughts drift into girlish, romantic notions.
“I don’t mean to interfere if you’d rather do it yourself. It’s just that, with the bandage and all, I thought...” She gave her head a little toss. “I’m sorry. I guess I shouldn’t have just barged into your room like that. But...well, you’re Joe Wilcox, right?”
“That’s what they tell me.” He pointed toward a stack of papers on the bed tray with his bandaged hand, yet her focus remained on his broad shoulders, on the scatter of dark chest hair that ran along taut abs and trailed into the waistband of his jeans.
“Do you remember me?” she asked.
“You’re the woman who came in last night to identify me. Chloe Dawson, right?”
She tossed him a smile. “Yes, that’s me. I’m glad you remembered.”
“Don’t be too optimistic,” he said. “I can recall everything as far back as the ambulance ride. Anything before that is a giant black spot in my mind. Besides...” He patted the paperwork one more time. “Your name is on my discharge sheet.”
“So Dr. Nielson told you that I was coming to pick you up?”
“Yep. Right before she signed off on my chart. I think she was eager to get home to her new baby. Not that I can blame her.”
So he liked children? That ought to mean he was one of the white hats and that she had nothing to worry about by being alone with him.
“Do you have kids?” she asked.
He froze, and his blue eyes darted upward as if he had to look up the answer in his cranial database. “I have no idea. But that’s not what I meant. I can’t blame the doc for wanting to ditch this place as soon as she could. Hospitals give me the creeps.”
Maybe, if she prodded him with enough questions, she’d latch on to the thread that would unravel all of his suppressed memories. “Have you been in the hospital before?”
“I don’t know the answer to that, either. I’m going to guess that I have—and that I didn’t like it.”
“Why?”
“Because I can’t wait to get out of here.” He finally managed to slip on the sweatshirt. “You ready to go?”
“Sure. If you are.”
He snatched a white plastic bag off the floor by his chair and headed out the door. As she tried to keep up with his determined pace, her dusty cowboy boots clicked along the polished corridor floor.
“Wait,” she called out just before he reached the elevator. “I realize you’re in a hurry to leave and would probably hitch a ride with the first ship setting sail, but Dr. Nielson is releasing you to my care. So let’s slow down just a minute. Is there anything in that discharge paperwork that I need to know about before we hightail it out of here?”
“Sorry.” He handed her the top sheet off his stack for her to read. “Listen, Miss Dawson.”
When she looked up from the paper he’d given her and caught his gaze—or rather, when those amazing blue eyes caught hers—her tummy did a somersault.
He smiled. “It’s miss, right?”
Was he asking if she was single? Or just trying to be polite?
While working at the Stagecoach Inn, she’d gotten used to men—old and young, drunk and sober— hitting on her. And she was usually pretty quick on the draw when it came to letting them know she wasn’t interested.
But she’d make an allowance for the sexy marine who was still probably disoriented from the accident and the shock of having his