Mystic Cowboy: Men of the White Sandy, Book 1 (2 page)

Her stomach fell. She’d expected rustic, sure. Her little cabin was rustic. This? This was squalid. Maybe Darrin had been right. This was idiotic—the dumbest thing she could do. Career suicide.

Ugh. Darrin. Her nervous stomach tried to revolt on her, but she kept things firmly under control and talked some damn sense into herself. Darrin had nothing to do with this. Darrin wasn’t here, and that’s the way she liked it. Besides, she shouldn’t jump to conclusions at 7:37 in the morning. At least things couldn’t get much worse.

And then they did.

She barely got her new Jeep parked when a rusted-out truck careened into the lot behind her. The first—the only—thing she saw in the rear-view mirror was the shotgun in the gun rack.
Shit
, she thought, but that was as far as she got before the truck’s door opened and a guy the size of Maine hopped out of the driver’s seat. Madeline’s jaw dropped. Jesus, he was huge, with one of those biker-style do-rags on his head and tattoos visible at twenty paces. And he was armed.

All she could do was lock her car door, although the guy could probably remove it with one hand tied behind his back. He cricked his neck, looked around and headed straight for her.

She should have gotten a gun. Or some mace. Or a baseball bat. Anything that might level the playing field with the tank that was...smiling?

“Sorry I’m late, Doc,” the tank yelled, loud enough to be heard through the glass.

“Excuse me?”

“You’re Dr. Mitchell, right?” Madeline noticed that he was wearing blue scrubs with a medical-style badge hanging off the pocket of his shirt.

Moving slowly, she rolled down her window. “Yes, I am. And you are
...
?”

“Clarence Thunder.” He waved again. Up close now, she could see the anchors tattooed on his arms. He noticed she was looking. “Navy Medical Corps, retired,” he said with a tired salute. “Chief—well, only—nurse here on the White Sandy.”

“You’re
the
nurse?” Excellent. Shock and surprise were exactly the first sorts of impressions she wanted to make. At least she wasn’t being overbearing, right?

He shrugged, seemingly amused with her confusion. “Fresh out of lady nurses around here. I’m all you got. Come on in.”

A tattooed tank named Thunder was all she had? What had she gotten herself into?

The clinic was better on the inside than it was on the outside. The floors were swept, the lights all flickered on, and there was no mistaking the comforting smell of chemical clean. “Like I said, sorry I’m late. Indian time, you know.”

No, she didn’t, but she wasn’t going to own up to that level of ignorance in the first three minutes. “It’s fine,” Madeline replied with what she hoped was a friendly, easy-going tone as she scoped out the joint. Style-wise, the waiting room was what one might term
original
, as in everything in it looked like it was original to the building, circa late 1960s. The Naugahyde chairs were held together with duct tape, and she saw a grand total of four tattered magazines. She could barely see the huge desk underneath the rotary phone, an old computer and about two thousand files. No filing cabinets?

Clarence sidestepped the desk with a level of grace she wouldn’t have attributed to a man his size. “After Tara gets the patients all checked in, I bring them back here.” He waved to four exam tables, one of which had stirrups for gynecological exams at the ready. On the other side were two hospital beds.

The room was wide open. Each bed was backed against the far wall with a small tray separating them. No monitors, no blood-pressure machines—no walls. “No walls?”

“We got them curtains a few years ago.” Clarence shrugged, gesturing to the tracks on the ceiling. Each one ringed the four exam tables. And tied against the wall were the curtains in question. The pleats on three of them were still crisp. Only the one around the gyne table looked like it ever got pulled. “Someone thought we needed them. Can’t seem to recall why.”

For the first time, she noticed his accent. He clipped the ends of his vowels, which gave his voice a lilting quality. It seemed an odd fit on a man who looked like he did, but not unpleasant. “Doesn’t that violate HIPAA? Patient rights?”

“Don’t really matter. Everyone here’s family.” Clarence fixed her with a stare that walked a fine line between amused and irritated, and she resolved to be more agreeable before she pissed off her one and only nurse.

Before she could even process that thought, the door whooshed open. “Clarence? Dr. Mitchell? It’s me, Tara.”

Tara, it turned out, was a plump young woman with big hair and bigger earrings. She was wearing a skin-tight red T-shirt and low-cut jeans that left little of her muffin top to the imagination. “Hi. I’m Tara Tall Trees. I’m the receptionist—and I do the transcribing,” she added, propping the door open with a fan.

Okay, the names were crazy, but she was the one who’d come to the Indian reservation, right? She was the one who loved a challenge, right? She smiled as warmly as she could manage with her head swimming. “I’m Dr. Madeline Mitchell. Nice to meet you.”

She didn’t get the chance to make any more chitchat. Suddenly the waiting room was mobbed by people who looked like seven levels of hell. The time for pleasantries was over. She had a job to do.

It didn’t take her long to realize that the job was going to be a hell of a lot harder without actual supplies. The normal conversation went along the lines of, “Where’s the iodine?” Or saline or cotton swabs or vaccines or any number of things a clinic needed to function on a daily basis.

“Don’t have any.”

“When are we getting some?”

“When someone pays us.”

Over and over and over. The clinic didn’t have any supplies beyond four bottles of Tylenol that were about three days from expiring, two boxes of bandages and half a box of hypodermic syringes. She’d brought supplies, sure, but a few boxes of bandages and needles weren’t enough to hold her through the morning. By eleven, the supply closet was empty of everything but alcohol swabs.

She didn’t have time to get frustrated. The patients came in droves. Diabetics who were in danger of losing feet, what seemed like dozens of people with the stomach flu, and people who were going blind from chronic alcohol poisoning. Few people actually looked at her, unless she caught them staring out of the corner of her eye. Half of them didn’t even talk to her, just to Tara and Clarence.

The worst was a guy who came in looking like he’d wandered right out of a cage match. He was compact and muscled with his head shaved on the sides and his hair was pulled into a tight, tribal-looking braid. Which was intimidating enough, but with the flesh wound he was sporting on his shoulder? Mercenary, was all she could think. That, and what did the other guy look like? Clarence wouldn’t tell her what his name was. “That’s nobody,” was all she got out of anyone. No one looked at him, and he looked at no one.

And then she was alone with him, behind the curtain. If he wasn’t so damn intimidating, he’d be a good-looking man—definitely one of the healthier ones she’d seen today. However, the blood-soaked shirt she cut from him looked anything but good, and the old scars on his chest were even worse. A trickle of fear cut through her stomach as she snapped on a new pair of gloves. What had happened to this man?
Nobody
, she repeated to herself as she began to dig for the bullet. Just nobody. “How did this happen?”

Nothing. Not even a grunt of pain as she packed the wound with the last of the gauze. It was like performing surgery on a statue. She found her hands shaking as she wondered just who the hell nobody was, and what, exactly, he’d done to get shot. The list was long.

Okay. So this guy was terrifying. She still had a moral obligation to make sure her patients received the best care, as long as they weren’t ax murderers, right? “You’ll need to come back in within a week for me to check the wound,” she said as she opened the curtain and made notes in a blank file. She thought about writing Nobody on the top. “And I’m required by law to inform the authorities, Mister…” she said, hoping to get something out of him.

She felt a breeze rustle her hair.
That’s weird
, she thought as she turned around. The fan doesn’t normally…

Nobody
was gone.

The trickle became a waterfall of panic. What kind of person just blew out with the breeze—after a bullet wound? Someone who didn’t want to be found, that’s who. Someone who was wanted. Someone who was dangerous. More than just her hands shook as she tried to walk casually over to Tara. “We’ve got to call the police,” she said, hoping her voice wasn’t giving her away—at least not within earshot of patients.

Tara gently shook her head as she answered the phone again. “It was just Nobody. Tim—he’s the sheriff—he’ll call us if he needs us,” she replied as she handed Madeline another file, like gunshot wounds in unnamed patients were just another day.

And that was all before lunch.

Madeline tried to keep upbeat. Clarence was a hell of a good nurse, and the patients clearly trusted him—at this point, more than they trusted her. Tara was a multitasking genius. She could answer the phone, greet new patients and take histories all at the same time. Madeline had a good team to work with. Now if she only had some supplies to go with it.

“Tara, start a list,” she called across the room upon discovering the only bottle of penicillin was expired.

“We don’t have any money,” Clarence repeated with a grunt as he lifted an old woman without her feet out of a rusty wheel chair.

She’d been here for three hours and had already heard that seventeen times.
They
might not have any money, but
she
did. “I’ll get it. Just write it down.”

By the time they stopped for a twenty-minute lunch, the list was up to number forty-seven, and she’d already seen forty-four patients and two emergencies. Tara slipped out with a promise to be back soon, whenever that was.

She was exhausted. She’d sweat through both her shirt and coat, rubbed blisters on top of blisters in her new cowboy boots, and the artificial smoothness she’d ironed into her hair this morning was all but shot. Even though she was sitting on the floor in front of the fan, she was still hot. She’d done more in four and a half hours than she normally did in a twelve-hour shift in the E.R. “Is it always this busy?” she asked between bites of peanut butter and jelly. She needed to get something closer to real food if she was going to sustain this energy level for long, but she didn’t have any idea where she’d put groceries in her minuscule kitchen. At least she’d guessed right about there being no microwave in the clinic.

“Nah,” Clarence replied from Tara’s chair. He had his feet up on an exam table and his head leaned all the way back with his eyes closed. She was afraid he was going to fall asleep on her, but a nap actually sounded like a great idea right now. Add coffee maker to the list. “We just haven’t had a doctor for a few months. Kind of a backlog.”

“You did this by yourself for a few
months
?”

“It’s a paycheck. Sometimes,” he added.

Things picked up again at one thirty. Tara made it back in at two. Madeline was beginning to figure out that Indian time did not necessarily coincide with numbers on a clock, but no one else was exactly rushing around either.
Indian time. Just a time zone not found on any map
, she mused as she looked down another throat.

A lot of these people had the same symptoms—stomach cramps, low-grade fevers and occasionally diarrhea.
Seems like everyone always has the same stomach bug
, she thought as she took a few blood samples from the people who seemed the worst. A few samples were all she could take—those were all the vials she had.
Add them to the list
. How huge of a chunk she was going to have to take out of the trust-fund money she’d transferred into her checking account for all this stuff? And how long it would last before she had to do it again?

Her wheels were already turning. After all, she knew people whose hobbies included expensive dinners and charity auctions. The Mitchells had been one of the leading philanthropic families in Columbus. It wouldn’t take much to convince people with bleeding hearts and open wallets to have a dinner and charity auction for this clinic. And the hospital back home—maybe she could get Todd in Supplies to ship her at least the bandages that were just past their freshness date? It wasn’t like gauze went bad. The drugs were going to be harder. She couldn’t weasel extra freebies out of pharmaceutical reps if no reps got within a hundred miles of the place.

Things began to slow down around four, which meant there was only one person left in the waiting room, an old man with gray hair that just hit his flannel shirt collar. He didn’t look sick as he sat and thumbed through an ancient magazine.
The end is in sight
. She sighed.
Maybe he just needs a prescription re-authorized.
It would be nice to end on something easy. At least today hadn’t been boring.

And suddenly, it got a whole lot less boring. Tara gasped in shock as the fan was kicked out of the door.
Now what?
Madeline spun around in her pitiful supply closet.

Two men stood in front of Tara. Well, one man stood. He was tall and straight, all the more so compared to the broken people she’d looked at all day. His jet-black hair hung long and loose under a straw cowboy hat, all the way down to his denim-clad butt. Even though he was supporting the other man, he was moving from one black cowboy boot to the other, his hips shifting in a subtle-but-sexy motion. He was wearing a T-shirt with the sleeves torn off, revealing a set of honest biceps that looked like carved caramel—the best kind of delicious.