Carolyn McSparren - Safe At Home

He realized as the woman started away that if she disappeared at this moment he would have no idea what she looked like or who she was.

He spun the tires getting the truck started, then moved it toward the growing oblong of light as the door lifted. He drove into the cavernous room, turned off the engine and stepped out of the truck. “Okay, close the door,” he said. “Sleet’s getting in.”

She punched the button again, and the door began to lower. He jabbed at the intercom button on the telephone mounted on the wall beside him.

“There’s no time to call anybody,” she said urgently.

He waved her away. After a moment, a sleepy voice answered.

“Dad?” he said. “Throw on some clothes and get over here fast. Bullet wound. No, the elephants are fine.” Pete glanced at the truck. “You are not going to believe this. Some crazy woman’s just dragged in a half-grown female African lion.”

“OKAY, BOY, what’s all this about a lioness?” Mace Jacobi slammed the door to the parking area behind him, shucked his parka and gloves and walked over to the pickup truck.

“Take a look,” Pete said. He’d hung his poncho beside the side door and slipped into a sweatshirt. He knelt on the lowered tailgate. “Can you believe this?”

Mace peered over his son’s shoulder. “Well, I’ll be damned!” He turned to the woman who hung over the side of the truck. Her fingers gently caressed the golden pelt of the animal. “She yours?”

“No. I almost ran over her on the road. At first I thought she was a big yellow dog, but the tail was too long, and she didn’t move like a dog. Then she turned and looked at me and her eyes went red in the headlights and…” She took a deep breath. “She just keeled over. I jammed on the brakes and slid all over the road. Almost wound up going over the side of Bryson’s Hollow.”

“Bryson’s Hollow?” Pete asked. “What’s a lone woman doing driving the Hollow road this time of night?”

“I live down there. Please, there’s no time for this. Can you help her?”

“Got to get her out of this truck and onto the examining table,” Pete said. “Can’t do it alone. Don’t know how you managed it.”

“I carry a big piece of plywood in the back of my truck. I dragged her onto it and used my trailer winch to haul her up.”

“Madam,” Mace said formally, “I take my hat off to you.”

“She could have bitten your head off,” Pete said. “Come on, Dad, she can’t weigh more than a couple of hundred pounds.”

“More or less. Madam, please be so good as to position your truck so that the rear end backs up to that steel table over there. No sense in carrying her farther than we have to.”

Five minutes later, Pete and Mace Jacobi had the unconscious cat on the steel table. She was limp, but the heavy bones and sinews of her body looked like steel cables under her fur.

“What can I do?” the woman asked.

“You’ve done your part,” Pete answered. “Dad, better get a full syringe of ACE ready in case she starts to come around. She’s going to be pretty pissed off when she does.”

“If she does,” Mace said as he slid his stethoscope onto the animal’s rib cage.

Pete gently probed the blood-matted pelt on her shoulder. “Doesn’t seemed to have nicked any major vessels, and it’s so damned hog-killing cold, the bleeding’s pretty much stopped. Somebody shot her all right. No obvious exit wound. Bullet must still be in there.”

“I’ll get the X ray.” Pete turned and nearly fell over the woman. “Why don’t you go sit down back there out of the way and let us work.”

She backed off as Pete rolled a heavy piece of steel equipment out of a cabinet in the corner by the office door.

“Listen, I can’t keep calling you lady. You got a name?”

“Newsome. Tala Newsome.”

Tala? Odd name. He wasn’t certain he’d heard her correctly. But Newsome he recognized. The Newsomes owned most of the county and half the businesses in Hollendale. Irene Newsome was on the county council Mace had dealt with when he built the sanctuary.

Tala Newsome shoved back the hood of her parka and began to unzip it. Her long black braid was soaked and hair stuck to her cheeks in pencil-thin tendrils. Her nose was red, her cheeks and lips denim blue. And her eyes…

He stopped in midstride as her eyes hit him like a cannon shot. Then his father’s voice jerked him back to the present.

“Don’t stand there, boy. She’s starting to warm up. Don’t need her jumping up and tearing our heads off.”

TALA SANK into a wooden kitchen chair propped against the metal bars that closed off the back section of the enormous room. The moment she sat down she realized how tired she was and how badly her shoulders ached.

Even without the lioness, the drive out to the farmhouse in Bryson’s Hollow was no picnic. After midnight with winter sleet pelting the road, it was downright treacherous. Nights like this she wished she still lived in town with Irene, Vertie and the kids.

But she couldn’t—not permanently. She’d tried staying in the big old Newsome mansion after Adam died, but as wonderful as Vertie and Irene were, she’d felt as if by leaving the farmhouse she’d somehow broken her last connection to her dead husband. She needed to be in Bryson’s Hollow for now. Maybe someday she could move on, but not now, not yet. Not with so much unfinished business and so many promises to keep.

Besides, if she’d stayed with the Newsomes tonight, she’d never have found the lion.

She blinked her eyes, shook her head to clear it, and watched the two men working in the circle of light over the steel table. The rest of the storeroom, or hospital, or whatever it was, lay in shadow.

The younger one, Pete, was doing the surgery. She’d known he was here, of course. The whole town knew about the elephant sanctuary, but she’d never seen him, not even at the grocery store.

He had a good face, a strong jaw and crinkles at the corners of his eyes. At the moment they looked more like frown lines than laugh lines, but he might have a nice smile if he ever bothered to use it.

Of course, who wouldn’t be grouchy being dragged out of bed at two in the morning in a sleet storm?

His father wasn’t grouchy, though. He’d been woken up as well, but he’d spoken kindly to Tala. He was almost courtly, and he’d taken time to smooth his iron-gray hair and beard. But then, Tala hadn’t given Dr. Pete Jacobi time to do much except throw on his clothes.

He looked a great deal like his father, only bigger. Much bigger. Like a professional football player. Or a big, brown grizzly. And when he’d stripped off that wet poncho, he had real muscles, and lots of chest hair. Broad shoulders…kind of a hunk…

In the semidarkness where she sat, she felt her eyelids grow heavy and jerked awake.

She ought to open the overhead door and drive back out into the night. She’d done all she could do for the cat, and she’d worked a double shift at the Food Farm tonight.

She needed sleep badly. She could simply unhook the padlock on the front gate and close it after her. The younger Dr. Jacobi hadn’t actually locked the thing, merely hooked it over the hasp. The men probably wouldn’t even notice she’d gone.

Except that the minute that door began to lift, the wind and rain would whip in again. And one of them would have to leave what he was doing to close it behind her.

Excuses. What she really wanted—needed—was to stay until they finished, until they could tell her whether or not the cat would live. She couldn’t bear the thought that it might die.

She’d been through too much death.

She leaned her head back against the bars behind her and closed her eyes. In an instant Adam’s face swam up from her subconscious. Didn’t often happen nowadays. She’d almost forgotten what having a husband was like, the sound of his laughter, the warmth of his arms around her…