Chapter One

      For a doctor dedicated to healing the human body, he certainly knew how to punish his own. Jake Dalton rotated his shoulders and tried to ignore the aches and pains of the adrenaline crash that always hit him once the thrill of delivering a baby passed.

      He had been running at full speed for twenty-two hours straight. As he drove the last few miles toward home at 2:00 a.m., he was grimly aware that he had a very narrow window of about four hours to try to sleep, if he wanted to drive back to the hospital in Idaho Falls to check on his brand-new patient and the newborn baby girl’s mother and make it back here to Pine Gulch before his clinic opened.

      The joys of being a rural doctor. He sometimes felt as if he spent more time behind the wheel of his Durango on the forty-minute drive between his hometown and the nearest hospital than he did with patients.

      He’d driven this road so many times in the past two years since finishing his internship and opening his own practice, he figured his SUV probably knew the way without him. It didn’t make for very exciting driving. To keep himself awake, he drove with the window cracked and the Red Hot Chili Peppers blaring at full blast.

      Cool, moist air washed in as he reached the outskirts of town, and his headlights gleamed off wet asphalt. The rain had stopped sometime before but the air still smelled sweet, fresh, alive with that seductive scent of springtime in the Rockies.

      It was his favorite kind of night, a night best suited to sitting by the woodstove with a good book and Miles Davis on the stereo. Or better yet, curled up between silk sheets with a soft, warm woman while the rain hissed and seethed against the window.

      Now there was a particular pleasure he’d been too damn long without. He sighed, driving past the half-dozen darkened shops that comprised the town’s bustling downtown.

      The crazy life that came from being the only doctor in a thirty-mile radius didn’t leave him much time for a social life. Most of the time he didn’t let it bother him, but sometimes the solitude of his life struck him with depressing force.

      No, not solitude. He was around people all day long, from his patients to his nurses to his office staff.

      But at the end of the day, he returned alone to the empty three-bedroom log home he’d bought when he’d moved back to Pine Gulch and taken over the family medicine clinic from Doc Whitaker.

      On nights like this he wondered what it would be like to have someone to welcome him home, someone sweet and soft and loving. It was a tantalizing thought, a bittersweet one, but he refused to dwell on it for long.

      He had no right to complain. How many men had the chance to live their dreams? Being a family physician in his hometown had been his aspiration forever, from those days he’d worked the ranch beside his father and brothers when he was a kid.

      Besides, after helping Jenny Cochran through sixteen hours of back labor, even if he had a woman in his life, right now he wouldn’t be good for anything but a PB&J sandwich and the few hours of sleep he could snatch before he would have to climb out of his bed before daybreak and make this drive to Idaho Falls again.

      He was only a quarter mile from that elusive warm bed when he spotted emergency flashers from a disabled vehicle lighting up the night ahead. He swore under his breath, tempted for half a second to drive on past.

      Even as the completely selfish urge whispered through his brain, he hit the brakes of his Durango and pulled off the road, his tires spitting mud and gravel on the narrow shoulder.

      He had to stop. This was Pine Gulch and people just didn’t look the other way when someone was in trouble. Besides, this was a quiet ranch road in a box canyon that dead-ended six miles further on—at the gates of the Cold Creek Land & Cattle Company, his family’s ranch.

      The only reason for someone to be on this road was if they’d taken a wrong turn somewhere or they were heading to one of the eight or nine houses and ranchettes between his place at the mouth of the canyon and the Cold Creek.

      Since he knew every single person who lived in those houses, he couldn’t drive on past one of his neighbors who might be having trouble.

      The little silver Subaru didn’t look familiar. Arizona plates, he noted as he pulled in behind it.

      His headlights illuminated why the car was pulled over on the side of the road, at any rate. The rear passenger-side tire was flat as pancake and he could make out someone—a woman, he thought—trying to work a jack in the damp night while holding a flashlight in her mouth.

      He bade a fond farewell to the dream he had so briefly entertained of sinking into his warm bed anytime soon. No way could he leave a woman in distress alone on a quiet ranch road.

      Anyway, it was only a flat tire. He could have it changed and send the lost tourist on her way in