Angela Hunt - A Time To Mend

A sudden yowling interrupted her. Bailey. Fear knotted inside her as Jacquelyn jerked toward the source of the sound, just in time to see the huge puppy clambering out of a stand of brush. He was shaking his head in abrupt, jerky movements while trying to lunge toward Jacquelyn, but his chain had caught on something. In one desperate effort, the dog threw himself into the air with a pitiful yelp, then fell limply to the ground.

“Craig, help!” Jacquelyn leapt up and ran toward the dog. The animal lay on his side, his chest heaving, the velvety folds of skin around his mouth covered with snow-white foam. Terror twisted around her heart. “We’ve got to do something, Craig! What could be wrong?”

“How am I supposed to know?” Standing beside her, Craig lifted his hands in a helpless gesture. “I’m not a vet, Jacquelyn, I don’t know anything about dogs.”

“Help me. Let me untangle his lead, then we’ll lift him.” Jacquelyn scrambled frantically into the brush, then found the chain wrapped around the base of a shrub. As her fingers trembled, she jerked the tangled lead around again and again, until the chain was finally clear of the obstructing branches. Within another moment she had unsnapped the lead from the stake and darted forward to free it from Bailey’s collar.

“Now, Craig, help me,” she said, tossing the lead onto the ground. She straddled the unconscious animal and bent to slip her arms under the dog’s chest.

Unbelievably, Craig stood with his hands on his hips and calmly shook his head. “You can’t carry him. That dog weighs more than you do.”

Jacquelyn was in no mood for debate. “Help me!” she yelled, her voice ringing with command.

Responding at last, Craig slipped behind her and struggled to lift the dog’s hips. Somehow they half carried, half dragged Bailey to the blanket. Jacquelyn hurriedly tossed the containers of picnic food onto the grass, then wrapped the blanket around the puppy. When the big animal was covered, she knelt and pressed her ear to the dog’s chest. The heartbeat was slow and steady, but the skin felt burning hot. What had happened? Heatstroke? The weather was warm, but Bailey had access to water and shade. Snakebite? Certainly possible. And puncture wounds could be tiny, or hidden in the folds of that precious wrinkled skin….

“He’s going into shock,” she said, forcing a note of calm into her voice. “We’ve got to get him to the car and to the vet.”

“The vet won’t be open on a holiday, Jacquelyn.”

Something in his infinitely reasonable tone infuriated her beyond all common sense. “Craig, I’m not going to sit here and argue with you. Help me lift him! Now!”

Stunned into compliance, he knelt by Jacquelyn’s side.

“Hang on, Bailey. Mama’s going to help you,” she whispered, wrapping the animal in the lightweight blanket. She pulled the fabric over the dog’s head to keep the sun out of his eyes. “If we can just get him to the road—”

“Honey, let me do this,” Craig said, finally rising to the occasion. He did not question or argue now, but gathered the animal in his arms. “On three, we’ll lift together, okay? Just help me get a good grip on him.”

Jacquelyn nodded, tears filling her eyes. In a pinch, Craig always came through.

“One, two, three!”

Together they hoisted the animal. Jacquelyn caught her breath and breathed a prayer as she ran before Craig to the parking lot. “Dear God, please let Bailey be okay!”

An eagle rode hot updrafts rising from the lake and Jonah Martin put down the medical journal he’d been studying and looked up at the sky. Insects whirred from the trees above him, and the distant sound of food being scraped from a picnic plate dulled the cutting edge of his loneliness. Somewhere overhead a jet whispered through the cloudless sky, reminding him for the briefest of moments that he hadn’t been home…in a long time.

A sudden scream chilled him to the marrow. Out on the lake, a young woman on skis had fallen and was now splashing and screaming for help. For an instant his pulse quickened and his hands tingled in the old adrenaline rush he remembered from his stint in the E.R., then the woman’s scream turned to laughter and Jonah saw that her head and shoulders were safely above water. She wore a buoyant life vest, a skier’s best friend. Her boyfriend fussed loudly as he turned the boat to pick her up.

“Yeah, hurry back,” Jonah murmured as he lowered his eyes again to the reports he had intended to study on his day off. “Don’t keep her waiting, buddy, or you’ll be sorry.”

He reached under his sunglasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, consoling himself with the reminder that he’d learned his lesson. He’d been sorry every single time he’d ever become involved with a woman. Christine, the love of his high school and college years, had been more eager for a ring on her finger than for him. Marriage during medical school and internship wouldn’t be practical or fair to either of them, he had warned her; he’d be under tremendous pressure and working long shifts at the hospital. And if their love was real, it could stand the test of time….

But Christine didn’t want to put love to the test. He’d received her letter the week after his arrival at medical school; she’d found someone else, an aspiring lawyer from Georgia, a boy willing to marry her right away. “He doesn’t mind that we’ll be married during his law school years,” she had written, and Jonah idly wondered if she realized she’d be financially supporting her new husband as he finished his education. He hadn’t wanted to place that kind of burden on her. He was a doctor; he had years of schooling and hard work before he could seriously consider establishing a home. And so, after receiving Christine’s letter, he had guarded his heart against romantic entanglements.

He should have learned his lesson then, but he was a normal red-blooded male, and women, for some unaccountable reason, were drawn to him. He’d once heard a professor warn about the tendency for female patients to fall in love with their doctors, but Jonah had always found that his patients—mostly older women—thought of him more like a son than a love interest. His patients were no threat.

But other women worried him. Ever since the incident at the University of Virginia Hospital, he’d been careful to keep younger women at arm’s length. He had been naive and completely innocent in his UVA days, but one nurse he dated told a different—and totally fabricated—story. He’d smelled mischief on her as strong as the cheap scent she wore, so after one disastrous date he ignored her advances. Later, he tried to ignore her threats…and found that he could not.

And so began his troubles. His running. Now he was an expert at recognizing the lazily seductive glance that signaled trouble, and it always seemed easier to remove himself from a situation than to call for someone else’s job.

Besides, people always believed the woman.

So now he found himself sitting by a lake in Central Florida, one county away from Mickey Mouse, blocks from the southern belles who wore hoop skirts and talked with accents as thick and sweet as honey. Now he was the doctor he’d always dreamed of becoming, and the work here was fulfilling, even if it was lonely. From day one, he’d established a strong rapport with his patients and a frigid enmity with the women at the clinic—especially Jacquelyn Wilkes, whom he found particularly unsettling. He’d been harder on her than the others, though he couldn’t say what drove him to alienate her so ruthlessly. Perhaps it was her skill, her quiet competence…then again, maybe it was those green eyes.

“Hurry, Craig! I can’t hear him breathing!”