Mystic Cowboy: Men of the White Sandy, Book 1 (25 page)

“Yeah?” Did he sound a little hopeful?

“Yeah. I think that would be fun on the weekends—at least when the weather’s nice.”

“Yeah.” The hope was gone, and he sounded dangerously close to something like depressed.

Did he not want her to go camping with him? Lord, this man drove her crazy. But she resolved not to get ahead of herself and ruin the day. “How about you? Do you like the cabin?”

His answer was a long time coming. “It’s pretty nice. I could maybe stay with you a night or two a week.”

A night? Or two? She swallowed. That sounded ominous. “Oh. I thought...” She caught herself before she got her foot too far into her mouth. She thought he couldn’t let her go. She thought she took care of him, and she knew exactly how well he took care of her. She sort of thought he might be able to love her, crazy white woman and all.

Perhaps she’d thought wrong.

They rode the rest of the way back to the cabin in a tense silence as she tried to figure out what was going on exactly. This wasn’t a one-night-stand kind of thing. He’d gone way out of his way to make her a part of his family and to explain his customs—especially the ones that made the least amount of sense. He’d made her moccasins—moccasins she was wearing right now. He’d made breakfast, for God’s sake.

So what the hell was it?

She half expected him to just tip his hat and ride off into the late afternoon sun, but he dismounted with her and then took her hand as they walked up onto her porch. She let him, because holding hands was holding onto something. For all she knew, it might be the only thing, but it was something.

He stopped in front of her door, like this was the end of the first date and he was nervous about the kiss. “My Madeline.” His voice said it all. He wasn’t coming in. He was leaving.

“Stay,” she said, surprising even herself. So much for that foot in the mouth. Well, hell. Since she’d already shoved it in there, she might as well keep on going. “Why won’t you stay here with me?”

He closed his eyes and touched his forehead to hers. “A piece of me will always be here with you.”

“I don’t want a
piece
of you, Rebel. I want
all
of you. Even the parts that make me crazy.”

“I...” He tightened his arms around her, like she’d said what he wanted to hear and didn’t want to hear at the same time. “I can only give you the one piece.” He found her hand and pressed it to his chest. She could feel his heart strumming along beneath the skin. “I don’t have anything else left to give.”

“What does that mean?” Was he dumping her, or what?

His raised his mournful eyes, and she saw a sadness that she didn’t think was hers. It was his. “I can’t leave the land, and it’s not fair to ask you to give up indoor plumbing.”

Her mouth opened and shut without her approval. So that was it. She’d just assumed he’d move in with her—that he’d
want
to move in with her and live in a real house and have a real life with her. But no. He wasn’t going anywhere.

It felt like he’d tied a lead sinker to her heart and made a long cast out to the middle of the river. He was right, of course. It was one thing to go from the Mitchell Mansion to a studio cabin, but it was a whole other thing to go from a cabin to a tent on a permanent basis. “So what do you want to do?”

A little bit of hope crept into his eyes. “We could do what we just said. A night or two during the week, camping on nice weekends. It’s not perfect...” He kissed her forehead. “But I can’t let you go.”

Her heart sank even farther. She’d had no idea that those words were so open to interpretation, but clearly they were. She’d interpreted them to mean something damn close to
I love you
. This was the problem with not speaking the local language. The interpretations were always open. “And you can’t stay.”

He nodded as he smoothed a curl away from her face. His mouth was saying one thing, his body something completely different. Maybe that was her problem. She’d been listening to the wrong part.

“I’ll understand if that’s not enough for you. But you’ll always have a piece of me.”

One piece. What the hell was she supposed to do? Love him when he was here, miss him when he was gone? Damn it. Damn it all. She was going to miss him no matter what. And if she couldn’t do that, couldn’t live half in his world and half in hers, then she wouldn’t get to love him at all.

One piece. She wouldn’t be able to avoid him. Every time he popped up at the clinic, she knew she would fall apart all over again, all because she wouldn’t settle for one piece.

She took a deep breath, hoping to clear her head and instead just breathing in his smell—the smell of horse and man and river and sun, all blended into a perfect musk—until she knew she couldn’t live without any part of him. Even if she couldn’t have all of him. “Will you stay the whole night? When you come?” Because if she woke up with him, she could pretend that there was something normal about all of this. If he wouldn’t be there when she woke up, then she couldn’t. She couldn’t just be a booty call.

His arms tightened a little more, until she thought he would squeeze her right back into bits again. “I want to wake up with you, Madeline. You’re beautiful when you sleep. Just beautiful. And I’ll even make you breakfast, as long as the coffee makes itself.”

That was it—that was as good as it was going to get. Not perfect, but good enough. She smiled, just a little, and he smiled back. And maybe, just maybe, by the time February rolled around, he’d change his mind. “There’ll always be a mattress here for you.”

His smile got wider. She could still see the sadness at the edge of his eyes, but it was tempered now. He almost looked normal as he said, “Would you go to a funeral with me?” like he was asking for a second date.

It wasn’t going to be perfect. After setting up when he’d come get her for Albert’s funeral and extracting a promise that he’d swing by the clinic before then, just so she could see him, she kissed him goodbye, watched her cowboy ride into the sunset, and went in to open a can of soup for dinner.

It wasn’t going to be perfect. But then life never was.

Chapter Fourteen

So it wasn’t perfect. Madeline had never needed anyone the way she began to need Rebel, and it took her more time to get used to the sensation of longing than she was comfortable with. She went to sleep most nights craving his arms around her waist, his breath on her cheek. She woke up most mornings missing the sight of him parading around the cabin in her pink towel. When he came into the clinic, she had to fight the urge to haul him into the supply closet and kiss the hell out of him. Definitely not perfect.

But that didn’t make it bad. After a few weeks, they settled into an easy routine. When he came for her Friday nights, she practically swooned at the sight of him riding up in the summer sun, leading Tanka for her. With every weekend she spent camping, she got more comfortable with no fans, no automatic coffee and no hot showers. She still missed an enclosed toilet, though, but for two days at a time, she was willing to trade that for long trail rides and campfires. When she came home on Wednesday nights, he’d be sitting in her recliner on the porch, waiting for her. God, how she loved the sight of him there, waiting for her. They’d make dinner together and then spend the night wrapped in each other. She loved him with everything she had. And all the while, she counted the days until the first snow fell.

Madeline was pretty sure everyone knew she and Rebel were sleeping together now. Tara started greeting him by saying, “Hiya, Rebel. Madeline’s in the back,” or in the closet, or with a patient. Clarence seemed to wink a lot more when Rebel was around, and Tammy was prone to quiet giggling when Rebel would make Madeline blush—which he continued to do with alarming frequency. But no one, not even Nobody, said anything. The medicine man sleeping with the doctor was just another day on the rez, apparently.

The clinic wasn’t perfect either, but it kept going. She began to get used to Nobody Bodine just appearing and disappearing at closing time, and he picked up on how she liked things arranged pretty quickly. One corner of the desk at a time, Tammy got the files organized, and then took the initiative to work up some new patient forms. Madeline cut Jesse’s cast off while Tara held one hand and Nelly the other. She delivered four babies, only one of which was premature and showed signs of fetal alcohol syndrome. More people came through with flu-like symptoms, although she still had no lab results to prove Rebel right or wrong. Some people paid some bills. It was just enough. And Rebel still showed up at unexpected times to translate or drive someone home.

A few times, Rebel came for her in the middle of the afternoon. Someone was sick, too sick to even be carried in. She’d never considered house calls a part of her professional world, but wasn’t that what she’d done for Albert? Plus, it made her look at Rebel in a new light. When he took her to see someone who was sick—dehydrated, weak, bloody diarrhea—she realized more and more that he wasn’t trying to practice medicine, and he wasn’t trying to kill people. And what’s more, he trusted her. When she couldn’t get a frail old man to respond to the anti-diarrhea meds she now kept stocked in huge quantities, and he died in spite of her best efforts, Rebel was waiting on her porch that night. They sat in the recliner for a long time, discussing their different versions of heaven as the sun set on another day. He didn’t even reprimand her when she got a little teary, but instead kissed her tears away. The next day, he brought in another new patient with the same symptoms. He had faith in her. She was beginning to realize that the feeling was mutual.

Maybe it was ridiculous, but she started to think of them as a team.
The yin and yang of the White Sandy Clinic and Hospital
, she thought with a smile as she hooked up another IV one day. He was good at the bedside manner thing, the caring and understanding thing, and the translating thing. He literally spoke the language. And she was good at the medicine. She knew what to expect now, what her patients could realistically be expected to afford and, beyond that, do. She began to understand on a fundamental level what Rebel and Nobody had meant by a good death. She began to understand what Rebel meant when he talked about being right with the world.

She began to understand what it meant to be a Lakota. As much as an outsider could, anyway.

July had long since turned into August when Rebel woke her up with a hard shake one Thursday morning. Immediately, Madeline knew something was wrong. Instead of wet hair, a pink towel and languid laziness, he was already dressed, and he was moving so fast he was almost a blur of agitation. “What’s happened?”

His eyes snapped up, and she saw his terror. “Are you okay?”

She was not the one having a panic attack right now, but she doubted he would see the humor in that. “Yes, fine.” She looked at him more closely. His pupils were dilated and he was breathing so fast that he was almost hyperventilating.

“What’s wrong?” she asked more carefully.

He began pacing, the heels of his boots hitting the wood floorboards so hard she was afraid he was going to take the whole house down. “I—I don’t know. Something. Something’s wrong. I don’t know what.”

“What did you see?” She’d only seen him go into a trance once since the night of Albert’s party, and all he would tell her when he snapped out of it a few minutes later was that Jesse really would have gray hair, which made him laugh and laugh. But this was different. This was no laughing matter.

“It was the same thing—the same thing I saw before you came here. The horse was sick, the people—” He shuddered, almost as pale as she was. “The people were all dead. And you—” He stopped—really stopped. He didn’t even blink as he stared at her with wild eyes.

Her blood went ice cold in her veins. “What about me?”

“You—I think it’s you, but I don’t see you, just footprints in the snow—you tried to save them again, and it was too late. They were all dead.” He spun on the balls of his feet and grabbed her by the shoulders. His hands were downright chilly. “It’s not like these things happen in repeats. This means something. Something’s wrong.”

Irrational relief flooded her system. She forced herself to take a breath, forced the air to move through her lungs. It wasn’t like she would have really believed he’d seen her dead—would she? Of course not. That was just not possible. But he was frantic.
One step at a time
, she thought as she said, “Have you talked to your brother?” in her calmest voice. She’d taken Jesse’s cast off three weeks ago. According to everyone, that meant it was just about time for him to hurt himself again.

His eyes widened with dread. “Can I use your phone?”

Madeline dressed quickly as Rebel called just about everyone in the phone book. And everyone had the same thing to say. They were fine. Everyone was just fine.

“I’m coming with you,” he said as she got her keys. He clutched her in his arms, and his current of terror shot through her.

Damn, in this state, he’d probably scare everyone, even Clarence. For the first time, she wished Albert was still here, not because she missed the old man, but because she was pretty sure he was the only one around who could talk Rebel down right now. But she was also pretty sure that telling him to go home and get over it—whatever it was—would push him right over the edge. “Okay. Come on. But I’m driving.”

On the way in, he grilled her. Had more people been getting sick recently? No, the number of people experiencing flu-like symptoms had been holding steady. Had she heard any chatter from the medical supply people? No, nothing.