Paradise County (18 page)

Having carried her into the bedroom, Welch set her down on the king-sized bed as he spoke. The covers had been flung aside, the sheets were mussed, and the pillows were lumpy and misshapen. Obviously it was his bed, and he had been sleeping in it earlier. Trying not to dwell on that, Alex released his neck with some reluctance, scooted back against the headboard, and stuffed the abused-looking pillows behind her back.

“I don’t need to go to the hospital.”

He had already turned away, moving toward the chest against the opposite wall. Like most of the rest of the furniture—bed, bookcase stuffed with paperbacks, a pair of nightstands, and a green-upholstered armchair with a floor lamp beside it—it was of sturdy oak, plain in design. The bedroom itself was small, painted a soothing sand color, and except for the mussed bed meticulously neat.

“Oh, yes, you do. You need stitches. I can sew up a horse in an emergency, but I think you’d rather have a doctor sew up your head. You could probably use an X-ray, too.” He glanced at her over his shoulder. His broad bare back gleamed faintly in the soft glow of the lantern, which sat atop the chest. Farther down, his butt in the loosely draped towel looked small and tight. She noticed its charms with objective interest even while she frowned at its possessor.

“You know, I appreciate everything you’ve done up to this point, but I’m the one who’ll decide when I need to go to the hospital and when I don’t. And I don’t.” She hated hospitals. The last time she’d been inside one had been when she’d been nine and had gotten slammed in the head by a hockey stick at boarding school. Her skull had been fractured, and they’d had to do surgery. Her parents hadn’t shown up for three days. They’d been divorced by then, and her mother had been unreachable, on one of her innumerable vacations with one of her innumerable boyfriends. Her father had been on a drunken bender; he’d owned up to it years later, after he’d sobered up. She could still remember being afraid she’d die, and then, as the teachers had kept coming by to check on her, having her embarrassment because her parents didn’t come grow until it outweighed her fear. She had felt unloved, and unwanted, and embarrassed because she was unloved and unwanted. The experience had given her an aversion to hospitals that had remained with her ever since.

“I disagree.” His tone was mild. He opened a drawer, rummaged around, and withdrew some garments—charcoal gray sweatpants, a lighter gray sweatshirt, and a pair of tube socks, she saw at a glance—which he tossed onto the bed beside her. “And around here what I say
goes.” Then, in a lighter vein, “Sorry, but my wardrobe doesn’t run to women’s underwear.”

“You work for
me,”
she reminded him, ignoring that last as she watched him cross to the closet opposite the bed, slide open the door, and pull more clothing from the depths. “I think that means that what
I
say goes.”

“You fired me, remember? That kind of takes the edge off your authority, in my book.” Clothes in hand, he headed toward the bathroom.

“What I remember is giving you thirty days’ notice, which you refused to accept. At least until the end of that thirty days, you still work for me. Which makes
me
the boss.”

“Yeah, well, the signature on my paycheck reads Whistledown Farm Inc., not Alexandra Haywood, last time I looked. Not that it matters, anyway. I’m going into the bathroom to get dressed now. If you need help getting into those sweats, just wait till I get back, and I’ll be glad to oblige.”

With that not so lightly veiled threat, he disappeared into the bathroom, pulling the door shut behind him. Alex glared at the closed door. Maybe he was right, and maybe she did need to go to the hospital. Her aversion wasn’t so strong that she would deliberately harm herself to keep from going. But she didn’t like him just telling her what she was going to do. She’d been making her own decisions for a long time now, and she liked it that way.

His cool assumption of authority was infuriating.

Nevertheless, she struggled into the clothes, and only then fully appreciated his aside on the lack of women’s underwear. The laundered-to-softness sweats felt awkward against her bare skin, but that was the least of her concerns. She’d seen enough of how he operated by this time to have little doubt that he would put the clothes on her by force if he had to. And to allow that to happen would be to sacrifice her dignity.

A brisk knock on the bathroom door just as she was gingerly removing the towel from around her head and checking her makeshift pad for blood warned her that he was about to emerge. Dropping the bloodstained white
towel over the side of the bed as hastily as if it had burned her, she snatched up the blue and white towel and began, rather gingerly, to towel-dry her hair. When she didn’t answer, he opened the door and came out anyway. A single glance showed him that she had done as he’d said.

“Good girl,” he said. Once again sitting propped up against the headboard, now rubbing the wet strands of her hair with the towel as if the cut were the farthest thing from her mind, Alex glowered at him. Dressed now, in jeans and the navy sweatshirt, he looked almost cheerful. Which was quite a stretch, in her experience of him.

“I was cold,” she said with bite, dropping the damp towel over the side of the bed to hide the other one, with its visible bloodstains. She had on no underclothes, his sweats were miles too big, her hair would be frizzing out like dandelion fluff as soon as it dried, and, most maddening of all, her head ached and pounded and swam. Maybe he was right, maybe she did need to go to the hospital and get herself checked out, but she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of admitting any such thing. His self-satisfied expression as he came around the foot of the bed already made her want to throw something at him. If she had it to do over again, she would still be sitting there in the towel and would dare him to do something about it.

His expression goaded her into adding, “Don’t think I got dressed because I’m going to the hospital, because I’m not.”

He stopped at the side of the bed, cast a single, keen-eyed glance at her crown, and handed her a folded washcloth. “Press this down on the cut until we get there,” he said.

“Did you not hear what I said?” Her voice was sharp. Her hand closed into a fist around the washcloth, which she had accepted without thought.

He stood for a moment, arms crossed over his chest, looking down at her with a contemplative expression on his face. “Are you always this much trouble, or am I just getting lucky here?”

“Look, Mr. Welch, all I need is a …” She was going to say
a couple of aspirin,
but she got no further because, just like that, he scooped her out of the bed into his arms.

“If you’re going to argue with me the rest of the night, you might as well call me Joe while you’re doing it.”

“Listen, damn it,
Joe,
I’m not going!” His name came easily to her lips. Indeed, it was hard to think of the man as
Mr. Welch
when she’d practically melted all over him in the shower. But instead of wrapping her arms around his neck, she pushed at his shoulder. “Put me down!”

“Fine.” He set her on her feet so abruptly that the room spun. “Show me that you don’t need to go to the hospital. Go on, show me. Walk across the room.”

The arm that had been around her waist was withdrawn, although he stayed close behind her. Alex blinked as the floor seemed to tilt. Determined to show him, she lifted her chin and took a step, followed by another. Then her knees quivered, and she staggered. He caught her as she groped instinctively toward the bed for support, swinging her up in his arms again.

“Still feel like arguing?”

“Okay, so maybe I do need to go to the hospital,” she muttered resentfully, one arm sliding around his neck. Her other hand still held the washcloth; surrendering, she pressed it against the cut, lifted it, looked at the blood staining it, and winced. He glanced at her, one corner of his mouth twisting up in a wry smile.

“You think?”

Alex’s head fell back against his shoulder in a silent gesture of defeat. Holding the washcloth to her throbbing head, she was so dizzy that she could have been riding a carnival tilt-a-whirl as he carried her downstairs.

“Alex! Is something wrong?” Clad in a yellow terry-cloth bathrobe over what looked like a pair of boys’ pajamas, her curly hair as unruly as Alex felt her own straighter locks were starting to be, Neely jumped up and hurried toward them as Joe carried her into the lamp-lit kitchen. Neely had been sitting at the big rectangular table with Joe’s three kids: a prepubescent girl with boyishly cut brown hair wearing white, waffle-weave long johns; the scalped-looking boy in jeans and a white T-shirt; and another, older boy, also in jeans with a flannel shirt, who looked like
a younger, leaner, long-haired version of Joe himself. They broke off what had been an animated conversation as their father entered with his burden. All of them stared curiously at Alex. Even the dog emerged from beneath the table to take a good look.

“I’m taking your sister to the hospital for stitches,” Joe said to Neely before Alex could answer.

“Stitches!” Neely exclaimed as Joe walked past her to deposit Alex in the chair she had vacated. Alex clung to his neck for an instant as her head cleared. Her weakness was not lost on Joe.

“Don’t fall over,” he whispered in her ear with a hint of mockery, then stepped away. His place was immediately taken by Neely, who hovered over her, her eyes wide with alarm as she took in the washcloth Alex was pressing against her head.

“I cut my head when I fell down. No big deal.” Alex was determined to downplay the extent of her injury as she reassured her anxious-looking sister. Neely had suffered so many losses in her life that she was far more sensitive than most teenagers to the fact that a loved one could be snatched away from her at any moment without warning, and Alex knew that. Unconvinced, Neely moved around behind her.

“Let me see.”

Alex lifted the washcloth.

“Oh, Alex!”

“That bad, huh?” Alex asked ruefully, reapplying the washcloth to the wound.

“A couple of stitches and she’ll be fine.” Joe was back, wearing a dark green rain poncho that reached halfway down his thighs and dropping a huge trench coat that from the size of it could only be his own around Alex’s shoulders. As she slid her arms into the sleeves, he crouched in front of her. Looking down at him, she registered that his broad shoulders looked massive in the enveloping poncho, and the lamplight picked up blue highlights in his black hair.

“Put your feet in here,” he said. Then, glancing around, “Eli, find me an umbrella, would you?”

Here
meant a pair of rubber boots, too small to be his. One of the
boys’, maybe? Alex did as he told her, sliding her feet into the shanks. The boots went on easily. Standing, bundling the trench coat around her like a blanket, he picked her up again. Having accepted the inevitable, she held the washcloth to her head with one hand and curled an arm around his neck, feeling more than a little self-conscious under the interested gazes of four children.

“These are my kids, by the way. Jenny, Eli, and you remember Josh,” he said, nodding at each in turn. Then, to them, “We’ll be at the hospital if you need me. This is probably going to take a while, so you guys might as well go on back to bed.” He looked at Neely. “There’s an extra bed in Jen’s room. You can sleep in there, if you want. Your sister can have my bed when we get back, and I’ll sleep on the couch. Unless you’re planning to go back up to Whistledown for what’s left of the night.”

Alex and Neely exchanged glances, and both simultaneously shook their heads. Their recent terrifying experience within its walls had definitely robbed Whistledown of some of its charm.

“It’s probably burned down by now anyway,” Alex muttered for his ears alone as he turned and headed for the back door.

“Nah,” he said. “We’d see the flames from here.” He nodded at the uncurtained windows. Beyond them, the night was black.

“Alex, do you want me to come with you?” Neely trailed them anxiously.

Looking over Joe’s shoulder, Alex managed a smile for her sister. “In that getup? No way. Stay here and go to bed.”

“Dad, here’s an umbrella.” The oldest boy, Eli, passed an unopened umbrella to Joe.

“Thanks. You’re baby-sitting.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“He’s not baby-sitting
me.
I’m almost as old as he is.” Josh, who had materialized on his father’s other side, sounded surly.

“He’s baby-sitting Jen. In fact, you both are.” Joe said it in a quelling tone. Then someone—Eli, Alex guessed—opened the back door. Cold, gusty air laden with moisture and the rushing sound of falling rain swirled around them as Joe stepped onto the small back stoop. It was,
fortunately, covered, which gave him time get the umbrella positioned over their heads before braving the monsoon.

“I’ll hold it,” Alex volunteered, as he seemed to be having a little difficulty managing to hang on to both her and the umbrella. He passed her the umbrella without comment. Hastily tucking the washcloth into a pocket of the coat, she held the umbrella in a precarious, one-handed grip over both their heads while rain pounded the taut nylon like pellets on a kettledrum and the wind tried to tear it away from her altogether. With her in his arms, he ran nimbly down the back steps toward the vehicle parked in the driveway below. Rain pelted her legs below the knees, and her feet. If it had not been for the water-repellent properties of the coat and boots, she would have been soaked. Tiny windblown droplets struck her face, icy cold. A narrow rectangle of light from the door vanished abruptly as it closed behind them. Darkness wrapped around them like a blanket.

Fifteen