Seduction of Saber (Saving the Sinners of Preacher's Bend #3) (16 page)

Julia was more than aware she barely ate enough to
feed a sparrow, tossing her half-finished sandwich into the trash bin. She had
far more important things to do than eat, picking up dustpan and broom and making
headway into an all-out cleaning of the garage. She’d lost weight too; nearly
fifteen pounds at last measure, and at a rate to where she would likely have to
buy a completely new wardrobe come fall.

What had she gained from near starvation? A cleaned
house, cleaned garage, and a broken heart, when least expected. That’s all.

It had been two full months since she’d given Saber
Patterson that final kiss to the cheek; her rather unexpected
Good-bye
in the hospital room down in Sparta. She’d been too afraid of her own shadow
during the moment, too afraid of getting in too deep and never getting out. She
hadn’t stayed to wait it out, nor wait for his recovery.

She couldn’t.

He’d been nothing more than a stranger to her. A man who
showed up out of nowhere, seated on Petty’s sacred rocker, and rode dangerous
bulls for a living because he’d given up a promising career of heart medicine
the day his son died.

Saber Patterson wasn’t the man for her. She should’ve
figured it out much sooner than she had, before letting him break her heart.

After an all-out, no-holds-bar heated argument about her
just up and leaving Saber in his hour of need, and Liddy left to make the
excuse—Julia spent an entire week inside the local library, looking up
everything she could on the Internet about Dr. Patterson’s supposed miracle. And,
ultimate betrayal dealt him by the child’s mother.

What she found out about Dr. Patterson tore her apart,
physically and mentally. How could a woman be so horribly cruel to her husband?
The ex-Mrs. Patterson had willfully, with malicious intent, destroyed a man’s
child and promising career in the blink of an eye. Carol Patterson was as far
down the totem pole as any low-class bitch could ever get. Even Eliza Porter,
Liddy’s archenemy and only real reason Liddy’d left town ten years prior, was a
few steps above Carol Patterson.

In Julia’s lopsided opinion Carol Patterson should be
rotting in prison. She killed her own son. Not directly, but by having kept his
medicines from him so Dr. Patterson would take the fall by negligence.

This all came out during a dragged out, four month
trial.

Carol Patterson wasn’t anything more than a vindictive
bitch, with an ulterior motive to remove her only child from the scene. She’d
taken out a large insurance policy on her kid; more than two million dollars.
Never once had she disclosed the child born with a heart defect to the
insurance company.

The Patterson child born while Saber and Carol were on
vacation, the paperwork of the boy’s birth got lost between the two countries. Carol’s
sight set on only the money, nothing more, Mrs. Patterson figured her son wouldn’t
live long enough to be a burden to her lifestyle.

But the insurance company never paid up. Saber would
not give her any money. In the end, Carol Patterson skipped town with her rich
lover in tow. She might not be in prison, but she was a wanted woman now.

How Saber could have kept this to himself was beyond
anyone’s guess. He had a good heart, but used it in the wrong context from
where Julia stood.

She was taking out her frustrations with the world on
a large pile of accumulated dirt, sweeping the concrete with a vengeance. She
glanced at her tremendous accomplishment and sighed heavily. Petty’s minuscule
one-car garage hadn’t seen this good a cleaning since Richard Tressle was
alive. At that was saying
a lot
. Preacher’s Bend’s citizens tended to shy
away from what a man who impregnated a married woman owned. His assets
eventually had passed onto his mother after his death and not to his real son,
Gill.

Cleaning the garage was like sweeping out the
skeletons of one’s closet; therapeutic to a certain degree.

So what if Julia was simply turning chicken these days.
She kept ignoring the numerous phone calls, the small tokens of delicate
bouquets brought to her door by the florist. She was hiding her broken heart in
dust, dirt, and smelly paint fumes. She had a boarding house to keep up,
boarders to take care of. In another two weeks, there were fifty some odd
students to teach mathematics at the local high school. She had things to do.
She couldn’t possibly answer phone calls from someone who was a complete
stranger to her, or stick into vases daisies with little to no meaning.

Denial was quite therapeutic, as well.

She was about to turn around when she heard the free-fall
of heavy footsteps. They stopped, as did her heart. Turning ever so slowly her
stomach moved to her throat, and stayed there.

“Heard you take in boarders, Little Darlin’?” he
drawled out.

Oh, God. The man’s incredibly sexy voice came
dangerously close to starting that submerged ember again.

Julia found her voice pathetically squeaky and simply
told him like it was. Her response was flat. “Not anymore.” Yet, it was all she
could do not to run into his arms and throw herself at his mercy.

Her eyes glued themselves to his newest T-shirt, which
now read
“I survived White Hot Lightning
.
Can You?”

A picture of the very bull that nearly killed him was
plastered across his muscular chest, while large, brilliant white flames shot
out of the creature’s flared nostrils.

Julia dragged her sight from the anger in that devil’s
eyes and moved it up to an even more dangerously unwise position. Saber
Patterson’s face.

He made no initiative of moving any closer to her than
he already was. A good ten feet away, he was leaning heavily on a cane.

“Sure about that, Little Darlin’?”

**

God, it was good to see her. Good to see Julia up to
her eyeballs in dirt and grime; numerous garbage bags strewn about and the
woman right in her element. She had to take care of something that needed her
care and attention or she wasn’t happy in life.

He’d heard through the grapevine she would be starting
to teach in another couple of weeks. Damn. If ever he’d had a teacher as hot as
her, he would’ve probably paid much closer attention in school than he had, and
would have wished those last two weeks of summer vacation over more quickly.

Liddy was the one who’d called him a week ago, pushing
him into standing up on his own two feet and dealing with the problem directly.
Julia certainly wasn’t going to do it. She needed a hard shove in the right
direction. And a hard shove from a man down on his luck was as good as any.

The fact of school starting was the very reason he’d
bribed his Uncle LeRoy to drive him all the way up here, six hundred
forty-three miles to be exact. He had a lot to say to this woman, whether she
wanted to hear any of it said out of his mouth—or not. But it was going to be
said, nonetheless.

She’d left him hanging, on a precipice with no bottom,
on a cliff with no edge. He didn’t know whether he was coming or going most
days. When he finally could figure it out, he hated that actual feeling of
acknowledgment. It stung a man’s pride to know he’d been wrong.

“Very sure,” she responded, brushing an unruly lock of
long red hair out of her eyes, then smudging a dark line of dirt across her
suddenly pale cheek.

Saber willed himself not to openly stare at her
actions, or her face. He cleared his throat,
and
his conscience. He
wanted to see her. Now that he had, it was much harder than he ever thought it
would be.

Very
hard.

“If that’s the case, would you mind too terribly at
giving an injured man the offering of a chair so he can sit a spell? His leg is
feeling mighty poorly right about now.”

His leg was killing him; a continuous hard throb over
the past two hours. The doctors said this would happen and as a doctor himself,
he knew it would, but that still did not make the pain go away; or him having
to deal with it on a daily basis, any better.

Though his body had healed considerably over the near
goring …His heart? Not as fast. But it would, in time. He would get over
Julia’s disappearing act from the hospital while he’d been under the knife.

They told him two days after the surgery that she ran
out of the place as if the devil had been at her heels. Damnit. He’d surely
been dumped before. But never by someone not even considered as dating him…

Nor while recuperating from getting his ass kicked in
by twenty-two hundred pounds of pure mean, with his insides ripped apart,
altogether twelve bones broken; and his pride perhaps the most physically
destroyed of all.

Women generally fawn all over an injured man. Not
Julia,
Mind-of-Her-Own, Don’t-Stand-in-My-Way
Hillard. No. Independent
Julia truly meant it when she’d said she would not do the sympathy thing.

“Is it now?” she asked; with very little compassion
put to these words. In fact, they’d come out of her mouth razor-edged sharp. “Perhaps
if the man speaking hadn’t gotten himself thrown to the ground by White Hot
Lightning, and then pummeled until unconscious, his leg would not be hurting
him so badly.”

“Why do you always do that?” he warned softly, taking
a painful step forward. His every intention was to clear the air.

**

Julia’s blue eyes widened, her hackles raised. “Do
what?”

For two whole months she’d been trying her damnedest
not to think about this man, not remember his dimpled face, and not remember
how great he smelled. Nor how easy the sexy cowboy could make her melt into a
pool of forgetfulness when barely tried. And what happened? He shows up,
unannounced, yet again; when she certainly wasn’t ready for him to show up
unannounced.

“You attack when you think it will protect you from
getting hurt,” he said.

“I do not attack,” she tried ruling.

Saber raised a brow that said otherwise.

“I do no such thing!”

“Yes. You do, Little Darlin’. Every damn time anyone
tries to get close to you, wanting little ole’ Julia to think for herself, you
attack. With perfect aim I might add.”

Angered by his awful and callous words, she physically
stormed over to a lawn chair set leaning against the far wall of the garage and
actually tossed one at his body.

“There. There’s your chair. Sit on it, for all I care.”

His sight moved recklessly to the carelessly tossed
piece of lawn furniture, as his smile widened. “Why did you not stay, Little
Darlin’?”

She balled her fists, completely frustrated with his
arrogance, frustrated Saber was right. She did attack when she thought it could
keep her from getting hurt too badly.

And, he was rubbing in being right,
the arrogant sonofabitch!

“Stay where?” Julia snapped.

“At the hospital …with me.”

She turned her head, and muttered her answer. “I had better
things to do with my time. I couldn’t stay in Sparta holding your hand, waiting
for you to heal.”

“Why the hell not? Any other woman would have done it.”

His head tilted to the left, the sunlight hitting his
blond hair just so, that it had Julia groaning aloud. She raised her line of
sight to above his head, holding back the tears.

“Because,” she said.

“Because you were too afraid of what it might have
meant, had you done so?” he asked, moving toward her ever so slowly.

There was a definite limp to his gait.

“No.” Julia took a baby step back “No. Well, just …because,”
she repeated.

Mr. Patterson stalled his forward momentum. He looked
down at her. Hard. Eyeball to eyeball, prey to predator.

Unfortunately, as the prey, Julia was also a terrible
liar. She knew more than anyone she would turn her head when she wanted to tell
a lie. Her friend Liddy would chew on her bottom lip. Neither had ever gotten
away with it.

Saber’s grin deepened as he kept his eyes locked with
hers.

“Why the devil are you smiling at me?” She asked; openly
glared at his handsome face. A face she’d missed dearly.

“I’m smiling because you are lyin’ your little heart
out, Little Darlin’. You did not stay at that hospital, holding my hand,
nurturing me back to health, because you were too afraid of what others would
say about you, and far too afraid of what they would figure out about us.”

“Such as?” she questioned rudely.

“Such as, you are completely head over heels in love
with me, and you can’t help yourself.”

Startled by this seemingly easy comment coming out of
his mouth, she sputtered, “I am no such thing!”

“You’re not?” He cocked a lone brow. “Really? Well, if
not, my mistake then. I thought you were.” His lopsided grin didn’t sit properly
on his face, however.

“It was your mistake, Dr. Patterson.”

She made to move past the very determined individual,
toward the relative safety of the boarding house. Hopefully, to escape from
what she was feeling. It took an awful lot for her to call him Dr. Patterson.
She was so used to simply knowing this man as Saber.