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  Jefferson’s jaw clenched. Her hair drifted across his shoulder. Touched his cheek. If he turned his head a few inches, his lips would touch her shoulder, left bare by the sleeveless white sweater she wore. She’d been torturing him all week wearing an assortment of skimpy, sleeveless things.

  Squire’s lashes moved. Once. Twice. Then lifted infinitesimally until a pale blue narrowly gleamed from between his thick, spiky lashes. His lips parted, and, still leaning across Jefferson, Emily held the plastic cup with the bendable straw to Squire’s lips. His eyes closed again as he gathered the energy to sip water through the straw.

  Squire sighed and relaxed, and Emily put the cup back on the table beside the bed. Her fingers dug into Jefferson’s shoulder, and she pressed her head against the top of Jefferson’s. He knew she was trying not to cry. Just as he knew, as Squire’s eyes opened once again, the picture his father saw looking at the two of them beside his bed.

  Jefferson’s fingers were already closing over the handle of his cane, when Squire’s lips moved.

  “Get…away…” he mouthed.

  Emily’s head shot up, and Jefferson rose, his lips twisted. “Welcome back, old man.” The chair scraped back with a sharp screech, and Jefferson limped out of the room.

  Dismayed, Emily’s eyes went back and forth between Jefferson’s departing back and Squire’s squinting eyes. “What—”

  “Emily,” Squire’s voice could barely be heard. She stepped next to the bed, looking over her shoulder. Jefferson stopped only to say a brief word to the male nurse, who rounded the counter immediately and headed toward them.

  “I’m here, Squire.” She lifted his hand again and turned her attention back to him. His eyes were closed once more.

  The nurse checked the monitors, flashed a light in Squire’s eyes. “Looking good,” he pronounced. “I’ll notify his doctor that he’s conscious. He needs some rest,” he told Emily. “Why don’t you come back this afternoon.”

  Emily jerked out a nod. She kissed Squire’s hand, saying a silent prayer of thanks when he squeezed hers in return. She laid his hand on the bed. “I’ll see you later, Squire.”

  She practically raced back to the waiting room. They were all there, except for Jefferson. She knew that he’d been there, however briefly. Obviously Jefferson had told his brothers that Squire was conscious. She knew that, just by looking at the collected relief on their faces.

  “Where’d Jefferson go?”

  “Back to the ranch,” Tristan said.

  “The Blazer?” She didn’t understand why he’d leave the lot of them stranded at the hospital.

  “He said he was going to find a cab or walk.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Emily scraped her hair out of her eyes. “You can’t be serious.” Clearly, he was. “Why didn’t he just wait until the rest of us went or have one of you drive him back?”

  “If you’d hurry, you’ll probably catch him down in the lobby,” Daniel murmured close to her ear as he headed to the door.

  “Stupid, stubborn Clays,” Emily muttered. “I’ll see you guys later.” She decided not to wait on the elevator and raced down the stairwell instead. Her heart was pounding when she burst into the lobby, and she made herself take a huge, calming breath when she saw him leaning against the wall outside the hospital’s main entrance.

  One way or another she was going to find out what was going on between Jefferson and Squire. She might as well start with the son.

  She straightened her purse strap and took another cleansing breath. When she walked through the automatic sliding glass doors, she knew her expression was calm. Jefferson didn’t even glance at her when she took up a similar position right next to him.

  Silently she stood beside him and watched a small bird hop around the grass growing beneath a young tree. It pecked at something unseen in the grass. A car slowly drove by, looking for a parking space, and the bird flew off. Emily took a faint breath. “You want to tell me what that was all about up there?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, Jefferson. I know you weren’t even surprised at what he said in there. It was like you expected it. Good grief, you were already half out of your seat when he…when he, um—”

  Jefferson looked at her, his expression bland. “When he told me to get out.”

  “You don’t know that’s what he meant.”

  His eyebrows rose slightly. As if he couldn’t believe she’d even suggest such a notion. He shook his head. “I know.”

  Emily moved around to face him. “Okay, so then why did he say it? Why on earth wouldn’t he want you to be there?” There was no point in suggesting that Squire hadn’t directed his comment straight at Jefferson.

  “Leave it alone, Emily.”

  She crossed her arms. “I won’t leave it alone.” If he insisted he was simply a brother figure to her, then she’d treat him the way she would any of the rest of the Clays. At least she’d try. “Did the two of you argue? I know it can’t have been recently, since until you showed up at Tristan’s, you’d pretty well dropped off the face of the planet for more than two years. Is that why you were gone so long? Did you and Squire have some major falling out or something?”

  “I said to drop it.” Each word was bitten off between his teeth.

  “Jefferson.” Unable to contain herself, she reached up to touch his cheek. “Whatever it is, it can be fixed. I know it can.”

  “There is nothing to be fixed.”

  “You’re just like him, you know.” Emily folded her arms once more. “Completely inflexible.” She shook her head, disgusted. She opened her purse and rooted through its narrow confines for the single key to the rental. “Here,” she held it out to him when she found it. “You can drive the rental back to the ranch. I’ll ride with Matthew and the others when they leave.”

  He didn’t take the key from her hand.

  “You’d rather spend a fortune on a cab than use my rental? Assuming that a cab would even make the trip.” She rocked back on her heels. She should have known she couldn’t come out of a conversation with him unscathed.

  “Don’t do that.” He bit off a curse. “Don’t look at me like I just shot your puppy.”

  “I can’t help it,” she snapped. “Some of us haven’t stomped out all semblance of emotion from our lives.” She flipped open her purse and dropped the key back inside. “Get yourself back to the ranch however you want to.” She spun on her heel.

  He swore again and grabbed her arm before she’d gotten two feet. Angrily, she shrugged off his touch.

  “I can’t drive.”

  She stopped in the entryway to the hospital. Surely she’d misheard. His voice had been so low, she’d barely heard him. “What?”

  Jefferson’s jaw clenched. The glass doors slid shut. Opened. Shut. Opened. Emily finally stepped off the entryway, and the doors slid closed. She moved closer to him. “What did you say?”

  His jaw set. “I said…I can’t…drive.”

  She blinked. Talk about male pride. “Well, good grief, Jefferson, why didn’t you just say so?” She extracted the key once again and headed toward the parking lot, still speaking. “Come on, then. I’ll drive you back. Is it because the rental’s a manual? The car you had in California was an automatic. Your knee won’t let you work a clutch yet, I’ll bet. How long is your knee going to take to heal, anyway?”

  Jefferson closed his eyes briefly. “A while,” he said grimly, earning himself a quick look from Emily. But she didn’t comment or question further, and he stepped away from the wall, following her slowly. She was cutting diagonally across the parking lot, slipping between two cars.

  He followed, then nearly fell flat on his face when his boot caught on a cement parking stop. Swearing a blue streak, he shot his arm out and latched on to the side of the truck bed of the pickup backed into the parking space beside him. His hip banged painfully against the side of the truck, but he kept himself from landing on the ground. His cane rolled under the car on the other side.
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  Emily whirled around, gasping when she saw what had happened. She rushed back and went to grab him, but stopped cold at the expression in his eyes. Vulnerability wasn’t something he’d chosen to share lately.

  Giving him a moment, she dropped to her hands and knees and fished around for his cane from beneath the car. With it tucked under her arm, she stood and brushed the dust from her hands.

  Fearing that he’d bite her head off if she tried to assist him, she silently handed him the cane and made herself turn around and continue to her car. She managed not to look back to see how he was progressing. But she did suck in a relieved breath when she went around to the passenger side to unlock the door and casually glanced across the top of the car to see that he was heading her way.

  How on earth was she supposed to stick to her decision to move on with her life? How could she when every fiber of her soul was telling her that Jefferson needed her? Whether he admitted it or not.

  Worrying the inside of her lower lip, she unlocked her side and climbed behind the wheel, starting the engine. She kept silent when Jefferson awkwardly maneuvered himself into the passenger seat. She turned up the radio when he stifled a groan. And she didn’t offer to help him out of the car hours later when she pulled to a stop in front of the big house.

  The back door was unlocked, as usual. She went into the kitchen, her ears perked to Jefferson’s uneven gait. But the path around the house from the front was grass, and she heard nothing. She quickly raced into the dining room and peeped through the lace curtains hanging at the tall windows just in time to see him round the corner toward the back of the house. When the wooden screen door squeaked open and banged shut, she was standing in the kitchen, one arm propped on the counter near the sink.

  She glanced up casually, her heart beating unevenly, then turned her attention to the leather sandal she was sliding from her foot. The piece of gravel that she’d picked up from the drive fell out, and she slid the shoe back on and tossed the little pebble in the trash.

  Watching him from the corner of her eye, she headed for the refrigerator and pulled out an apple juice. “Want one?” She held up the bottle for him to see.

  He shook his head, appearing as if he would just pass through the kitchen. Then he seemed to change his mind and abruptly pulled out a chair and sat down.

  Emily closed the refrigerator door and joined him at the table. It was then that she noticed the blood streaking the palm of his right hand. She caught his wrist in her hand and turned his palm upward. “You’ve cut yourself.”

  He curled his fingers shut. “It’s nothing.”

  “Don’t be a mule,” she muttered, pushing at his closed fist with her fingertips. “Let me see.”

  “I snagged it on the truck. No big deal.”

  Her eyebrows lowered and she let go. With a shrug, she picked up her juice and left.

  Jefferson grimaced. He opened his hand and poked at the cut with his other. Fresh blood spurted through the shallow cut. He reached for the basket of paper napkins sitting in the center of the table and pressed a few to his palm. He’d get up and wash it off in a minute.

  He lifted the wad of napkin, to see if the bleeding had stopped. It had. Pushing his left hand flat on the table, he began levering himself up off the chair, abruptly changed his mind and sank down.

  Maybe he’d wash it off in five minutes.

  He crumpled the napkin and left it on the table. It wasn’t the cut on his palm that had him concerned. It was the unexpectedly sharp pain arrowing from his hip down toward his thigh. Hopefully he’d just bruised himself knocking into the truck and hadn’t done any damage to the artificial hip he’d received in Germany.

  He glared at his boots. As if they were to blame for catching on that parking stop. When he knew full well why his foot had dragged. His brain had told him he’d cleared that damned block of cement. The message just hadn’t extended to his foot. Something that was happening more often than he liked.

  Which was why he hadn’t put himself behind the wheel of a car since he left San Diego. He’d probably end up killing someone if he did.

  Emily came back into the room. Her bare feet padded softly across the wood-planked floor and she set a rectangular white box on the table. She opened the first aid kit, her attention on its contents. She’d pulled her hair back into a loose braid, and he could tell by the way her smooth jaw was drawn up all tight that she wasn’t as calm as her expression indicated. She ripped open an antiseptic wipe and waited.

  “This wasn’t necessary.” But he held up his hand, anyway. “I was going to clean it.”

  “Shut up.”

  For some reason his humor kicked in. He squelched the grin wanting to spring free. “Mule, huh?”

  Her head tilted slightly to one side, and she firmly pressed the wipe to the cut.

  “Ow!” He jerked his hand away, but she grabbed hold. “That stuff stings.”

  She spared him no mercy. “You’re Mr. Macho,” she said. “Surely you can stand a little antiseptic.”

  When the cut was clean, she dried it with a gauze pad and covered it with a plastic bandage. His palm still stung when she let go of his hand. “Brat. Squire should have spanked you more often.”

  “Huh! Squire never laid a hand on me, and you know it.”

  “Obviously.”

  Emily gathered up the trash and dropped it into the trash can beneath the sink. “The only one who ever dared to spank me was you, mister. That time when—”

  “—you filched one of Squire’s cigarettes and tried smoking it out in the barn. You nearly set fire to the loft trying to light that stupid thing.”

  “I did not nearly set fire to anything,” she defended lightly. She remained at the sink, looking out the window. “You would never have even known I was up there if you hadn’t taken that…that…girl in there to, um, make out.”

  “You were pretty pissed off. Such a dinky thing, too. Damned if you didn’t punch me right in the stomach after I took away that cigarette and swatted your butt.”

  Emily’s lips twisted. She rinsed out the dishrag and needlessly wiped down the sink him. “I was fourteen,” she said. And she had been angry with Jefferson for daring to bring that girl with him on his brief stay. So angry that she’d have done almost anything to get his attention away from that tall, blond, curvy female. She’d succeeded, all right. Just not in the way she’d planned. Jefferson had been disgusted with her, calling her careless and immature. He’d left the next day, taking Miss Curves with him.

  “Fourteen or not, you were still dinky. That was the summer you went off to school, wasn’t it?”

  “Mmm.” She began wiping off the counter. “I thought my bacon was saved when you came back unexpectedly.” She rinsed the cloth again and squeezed the water out of it, watching the water drip into the white sink. “It seemed like fate to me. I was so sure you’d change Squire’s mind about sending me.” It had broken her heart that Jefferson hadn’t even tried.

  He’d breezed in and breezed right back out again within less than twenty-four hours. And though she received a tattered postcard from him now and then over the years, and the cassette tapes each and every Christmas, she’d seen him only once in person from the time she’d left for boarding school and the time she’d been in college.

  She closed her palms over the edge of the sink, curving her fingers down. For a long minute they were both silent. “Jefferson?”

  “Yeah?”

  She closed her eyes, willing her heart not to jump out of her chest. “Why did you come to see me at school that time?” She heard the creak of his chair as he shifted his weight. “When I was nineteen,” she added unnecessarily.

  “You’d just had a birthday. You hadn’t made it back home yet that year. Squire wanted to give you—”

  “Yes,” she said, interrupting his bland explanation. “I know all that. Squire wanted to make sure I received that pearl necklace of your mother’s safely, and he didn’t trust the mail. But he could have brou
ght it himself when he came to visit me, or just waited until I came home for vacation.” She looked over her shoulder. “Why you?”

  He was fiddling with the scissors from the first aid kit. “Just turned out that way. I’d been by here. Saw Squire. When he found out I was on my way to Washington, he asked me to stop off and give you your birthday gift.”

  She’d heard the story before. Yet she kept hoping… “You stayed in New Hampshire nearly a week.”

  “I had some time on my hands.” He turned the scissors point down and balanced his hand atop them.

  “So you were just…passing the time, then.” She didn’t know why she kept at this. It was like picking at an old wound. Painful. Yet morbidly fascinating.

  “What do you want me to say?” He sighed and flipped the scissors into the box. “Well, Emily? Are we talking about the fact that I visited you at school, or are we talking about the fact that I practically stole your innocence while I was there?”

  Emily’s breath dissipated, leaving her light-headed. She moistened her lips and slipped into a chair across the table. “It wasn’t stealing,” she managed. They’d spent five solid days together. Walking together. Talking. Laughing. Falling in love, or so she’d thought. Each night when he’d left her to return to his motel room, it had been harder and harder to let him leave. And then that night, when his chaste kiss on her forehead had turned into something more…

  “Why do you insist on rehashing this?”

  “You never answer!”

  He stifled a curse. “You were barely nineteen.”

  “Is that why you stopped? Because I didn’t have any experience and wasn’t any good at it? Did you get bored? You wanted to find some other way to kill some time? What?”

  He made an exasperated sound. “For Pete’s sake—”

  “Wait!” She scrambled out of her chair, kneeling before him before he could get up and leave. “I have to know, Jefferson. Can’t you understand that?” Her hands closed urgently over his legs, her fingers pressing into him. “I have to know!”