Galahad in Jeans (Louisiana Knights Book 2) (11 page)

All that was left to tell he was in the tree was his quiet voice and musical whistles as he called to the bird.

The live oak was rain-soaked. Every time Beau moved, droplets showered down from the leaves. The limbs, with their overgrowth of lichen and small ferns, were as slippery as greased glass. He’d be lucky if he didn’t break his neck before he got his hands on the wary parakeet.

Twitter fluttered from branch to branch, always just a hair out of reach. Beau knew he should have armed himself with something to attract him, though what that might have been was a question. He had no idea what parakeets liked other than birdseed and cuttlebones.

The bird seemed to be enjoying the rain. He treated it like a bath, fluttering his wings and ruffling his feathers, letting the wetness slide down his back. Or maybe it was a female; it was all the same to Beau. He just wanted to get his hands on the feathered critter, return it to Lizzie safe and sound, and get home.

He was tired of rain. He needed his fields to dry out so he could plow again. If the eternal drenching didn’t stop soon, the creeks would overrun their banks and the countryside would have major flooding. Rescue calls a lot more dangerous than this one would require the unit’s attention.

He couldn’t believe Carla had come to him to apologize this morning. He’d been struck dumb, or close to it. She had so little to apologize about, since he had been in the wrong. Well, not on purpose, but the facts were clear. She’d seen him kissing a married woman. Simple enough.

He’d been off the hook with the gentleman thing. With a little effort, he could have explained away even Merry Lou’s visit. All he’d had to do was say she was lying to protect him.

He’d had his chance to convince Carla of how wrong he was for the deal, and he hadn’t taken it. No, not him.

How crazy was that?

The fact was, he didn’t want her to think that badly of him. He really didn’t want her to pack up and leave.

He must be losing it.

So here he was, doing his Tarzan imitation, swinging from limb to limb in pursuit of a dumb bird. Lizzie more or less expected his antics, but Carla apparently didn’t. He liked the concern that she tried to hide. Crazy, but there it was, in spite of everything. He wanted to save the day, to be the hero, and was risking his neck for the appearance of it.

It wasn’t the same as being the perfect gentleman, but was probably as close as he was going to get.

Damn, but he needed to get his head straight, to decide exactly what he did and didn’t want where the lady was concerned.

“Come here, little birdy,” he crooned, “come to old Beau. You’re a handsome Twitter, yes, you are. If I get my hands on you, I may wring your scrawny little neck for scaring everybody like this. And why you couldn’t pick a nice, dry sunshiny day for your adventure beats the hell out of me.”

The parakeet tilted its head to one side and whistled. Beau whistled back and eased closer.

Twitter flew to a higher limb. Its perching choices were getting smaller and smaller. At some point, the bird would run out of options; he could only go so far. Trouble was, the same was true for his would-be rescuer.

“Lizzie loves you, you ungrateful little beast. She’s crying because she’s afraid of what might happen to you. Do you really want to be lunch for a hawk or its nest full of babies? Do you? Think how she’d feel if that happened.”

The parakeet cocked its head. Beau inched higher, made a quick grab.

“Gotcha, you feathered fiend!”

He tucked the bird into his T-shirt while he searched for the best way down. Easing along a wide limb, he reached for another.

His foot slipped, losing purchase on wet bark, moss and fern. He grabbed for a side branch and missed.

Abruptly he was plunging downward past thick branches that scraped him from hip bone to armpit, slapping at side limbs, grasping them a second before they broke away with his weight. It was a free fall then. Breathless seconds of emptiness passed before he caught a wide, lower limb with one hand while protecting poor Twitter with the other.

He couldn’t hold on. His fingers slipped with slow inevitability. The ground came up to meet him with a wallop that made fireworks go off behind his eyes in gold and red sparkles.

Lizzie screamed, a shrill sound of despair. Carla shouted his name; he heard that clearly. A moment later, both of them were kneeling over him; he could feel their warmth, though he hadn’t realized how cold he was until then. He could hear a tapping sound, too, and realized Carla must be holding her umbrella over him, protecting his head and shoulders from the endless rain as he had protected her not so long ago. Turnabout was fair play, it seemed.

“Is he—is he dead?” Lizzie asked, her voice thick with tears.

A hand, gentle yet firm, pressed down on his chest, directly above his thundering heart. “No,” he heard Carla say with precision. “He’ll live to do plenty of other stupid things.”

He opened one eye to see her hovering over him. The frown of soft concern he read on her face didn’t quite go with the bite in her voice. It was swiftly banished as she saw he was conscious, which was a fine and timely reminder that it would be foolish to read too much into a twitch of facial muscles.

“Are you hurt? Can you move your legs? What about your arms?

“I’m okay all over, I think, except for my ego.” He paused, then asked because he couldn’t help it, “Stupid things?”

“Canceling the rescue equipment that would have made this job easier. Climbing a tree in the rain.” She gave a quick shake of her head. “You could have broken your neck.”

“But I didn’t,” he said quietly, answering the concern behind the scolding instead of the accusation.

“What about Twitter?” Lizzie asked in an agony of doubt. “Did you see him? Could you get him?”

Beau turned his gaze to the girl, more than a little glad of the diversion. “I did, and I could,” he said, as he pushed up to a sitting position and released his hold on the parakeet. Small claws scratched his breastbone, scrabbling for purchase. Seconds later, a blue head came poking up at the hollow of his throat, struggling from under the neck of his wet T-shirt.

“Twitter!” Lizzie sobbed, and launched herself into Beau’s arms, catching his neck in a stranglehold. “You saved him! I knew you would.”

“Hey, no more of this crying stuff,” he said, rocking her a second in his arms while making certain Twitter wasn’t flattened between them. “Everything is all right.”

“I thought he was gone and I’d never see him again!”

At the sound of a screen door slamming, Beau looked past the girl to where her mother was coming toward them with a cigarette in one hand and a bird cage in the other. “Here’s your mom now. You’d better take Twitter inside where it’s warm and dry. He’s a house bird, not used to being out in the rain.”

That wasn’t the end of it, of course.

Lizzie’s mother thanked him over and over, saying how much she appreciated him coming out for nothing but a bird, running on about how upset Lizzie had been when it got away, and how over the moon she was now to have Twitter returned to her. She also had to be introduced to the lady from the magazine, as she called Carla, though it was obvious she knew who she was already. She couldn’t get over having the two of them standing in her front yard, tried to insist they come inside for coffee.

Beau was as polite as he knew how to be while standing there without a dry stitch on his body and his scrapes and bruises beginning to sting as rainwater seeped over them. Thankfully, Carla took things in hand.

“I believe Beau needs to get home and get cleaned up,” she said. “I’m seeing blood on his shirt. He must have hurt himself when he fell.”

She was right, he saw as he lifted his arm to look. There wasn’t a lot of the red stuff, it was true, but it made a good excuse for leaving. When Carla took his arm and turned him toward his truck, he let her get away with it.

No one was around when they reached Windwood. Eloise had left early to run errands. The field hands that helped out this time year were off, and had been since it started raining. They had the place to themselves.

“I’ll make fresh coffee while you shower,” Carla said as they entered the house through the kitchen. “That’s unless you’d rather have something else hot to drink?”

“You’re wet, too. I can make it.” He had been more than a little aware, all the way home, of the way her damp shirt clung to the curves of her breasts. It wasn’t exactly a wet-T-shirt-contest view, but was hard to ignore.

“Not as wet as you, or as muddy. I didn’t land flat on my back on the wet ground.”

She had a point. Besides, his white T-shirt really was nearly transparent, so his bloody scrapes were shining through. With a grudging nod, he headed toward the stairs.

Beau stood under a hot shower for a good five minutes, trying to thaw out. Dragging on a pair of sweat pants then, he turned this way and that in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to check out the damage. He had a bruise on his ribs, but the main scrape was along his side a few inches above his waist.

“Here,” Carla said from the open doorway, “I found this in the kitchen.”

He turned to see her holding Eloise’s first aid kit. He felt the tips of his ears turn hot as he took it from her with a quick word of thanks and set it on the vanity counter. Though he wasn’t particularly bashful, neither was he accustomed to entertaining females in his bathroom.

“Coffee ready?” It was the first thought to enter his head.

“Almost. You might want to clean those scratches with peroxide first, and put antibiotic cream on them.”

A frown drew her brows together as she studied his injuries. Goose bumps rippled over his skin as if her gaze was a physical touch. “I can do it later.”

“Or I can do it now. I’m not sure you can reach that spot under your arm, anyway.”

She was so logical. It didn’t help that he was torn between dislike for being treated like an invalid and a heated need to feel her hands upon him. He reached for a touch of mockery to counteract that last impulse.

“You can do better with one hand in a sling?”

She chuckled, a rich sound that made him want to laugh with her. “We’re quite a pair, aren’t we? But yes. I can try.”

What could he do except stand still and let her have her way?

Tearing open a packet of gauze squares, she soaked a couple in hydrogen peroxide and rubbed down the worst of his scrapes. Beau set his teeth and endured the burn, though his eyes watered. At least she was quick, and had the good sense to fan the damaged skin with a washcloth to sooth and dry it before reaching for the antibiotic cream.

“I didn’t mean to be sarcastic about the rescue,” she said as she handed him the tube so he could squeeze a dollop of cream onto the fingertips of her good hand. “I do understand why you went for a solo attempt.”

“You don’t have to keep saying you’re sorry. I gave you a scare, that’s all. And that’s okay since I gave myself one, too. Lizzie would never have let me forget it if I’d squashed poor Twitter.”

“Don’t even think about it,” she said with a shudder.

“Right.” He shuddered right along with her, though it had more to do with the warm, smooth glide of her fingertips down his side, and the current of need it set off low in his belly, than it did any bird.

“I think you scared Lizzie’s mother, too. She didn’t even want to look until she was sure that parakeet was safe.”

“I don’t doubt it. Her husband was a lineman for the power company. He was killed by a live wire while trying to restore power after a storm. She’s a single mom, now, working at the liquor store to make ends meet.”

She gave him a quick glance in the mirror in front of him. “Do you know everyone in town?”

“Most of them.”

“And they know you.”

“It’s the way it works.” He wasn’t sure what she was getting at. Hadn’t she ever lived in a small town or maybe a neighborhood in a larger one?

She held her hand out for more cream. “You’re Lizzie’s hero now, anyway. She was singing your praises even before you pulled her parakeet out of that tree—something about working at a camp for disadvantaged kids last summer?”

“Yeah, well, nothing much happens on a daylily farm in July and August, at least not in this part of the country. Too hot and too dry for people to think of buying plants.”

“Dry?”

He grinned down at her as she ducked around, spreading cream on his ribcage under his arm. “Hard as that might be to believe.”

“I’ll take your word for it.”

That was something at least, since he wasn’t sure she’d believed much of anything else he’d said since she got here.

She’d changed her shirt, he noticed, now that she’d moved around in front of him. The one she wore was leaf green and form-fitting, showing off her toned arms and flat stomach. He had a flashing fantasy of spanning the slender turn of her waist with his hands to see if his fingers would meet.

At least he thought it was a mental image, that was until he felt the warmth of her body through the green shirt, felt her stiffen in his grasp. He looked up from his hands and was snared by her eyes that reflected the same green as her shirt, also by a sense of time hanging suspended, waiting for something vital, and maybe irrevocable, to happen.