Chapter 6
“Damn fool.”
“Shut up, Betty.”
The woman bristled in outrage. “You’re my boss,” she snapped. “Not my father. Talk to me like that again and you can do your own books.”
Jake’s answering smile was at best grim. “I’m sorry. I’m...a little...”
“Stupid,” the woman finished for him, slamming a cup of coffee down before him so hard the liquid sloshed over the rim. “I’ve seen you mad before. Scared, drunk, delirious and dumbstruck. This is the first time I’ve ever seen you stupid.”
He seemed more used to the diatribe than Amanda, who sat along open-mouthed. “Thanks.”
Amanda wasn’t sure whether she was more amazed or frustrated to see him sitting at the kitchen table. He didn’t look appreciably better than when they’d stood him up out in the corral. Only a little cleaner, with a row of not-too-neat stitches marching along the crescent-shaped laceration along the left side of his forehead.
“Well, look there,” Doc McPherson had marveled while sewing his patient up in the living room. “Right down to the bone. You’re lucky you’re not seein’ double.”
“Iamseein’ double,” Jake had answered evenly, eyes closed, hands clenched.
The doctor had simply nodded with some kind of professional satisfaction and gone on stitching. “Not surprisin’ at all.”
Amanda had spent the time looking out the window.
Betty had called the doc, not the paramedics. It seemed that this hadn’t been the first time there had been a medical emergency of some kind or another out at the ranch, and the doc, an old friend of the family’s, usually had a better response time—and didn’t insist that the patient be transported all the way to Jackson Hole for treatment, which none of the men liked, anyway. A short, thin man with less hair than Clovis and more wrinkles, he peered at the world through half lenses and seemed to consider the human condition an endlessly amusing situation. Much more composed by the time he showed up, Amanda had immediately cast him in the part of the small-town doctor trying to bring medicine to the untamed West.
The doc was gone within about fifteen minutes, and Maria dispatched to town to pick up prescriptions for antibiotics and pain medicine for Jake’s “most probably busted” ribs. Clovis had gone back out at Jake’s insistence to keep working Sidewinder on a lungeing line just so the horse understood that bucking a rider off did not win him some time off from training. That left Amanda and Betty for nursing duty. Amanda didn’t think now was the time to admit to a queasy stomach.
“Are you still seeing double?” she asked tentatively, wondering what they were supposed to do if that got worse-—or what worse was.
Jake took an exploratory sip of coffee. “I’m fine. I keep saying that, but nobody believes me.”
“That’s ‘cause they’re lookin’ at you,” Betty challenged from where she stood over by the sink, arms crossed and forehead pursed. “What are we gonna do tonight, I ask ya?”
“Nothing,” Jake assured her yet again, even though not as heartily as he obviously intended. “I told you, I’m fine.”
“No, you’re not,” she argued. “You’re—”
He lifted a hand. “Stupid. Yeah, Betty. I heard.”
Amanda squirmed a little in her chair across from him. Her own coffee was going cold in her hands as she did her best not to stare at the strain on his hard face, the careful way he breathed and talked so his chest wouldn’t work too much.
She hurt for him, and it made her angry. He didn’t want her to. He didn’t ask her to. He’d probably be mad if he knew. But she couldn’t help the notion that somehow she was responsible for this... stupidity. He’d been so intense on that horse. She could still see the glint in his eyes, as if what he’d been doing had been more than a contest or a job; it had been a battle. A proving ground of some kind. And Amanda simply couldn’t imagine what Jake Kendall had to prove to anyone.
“I’m talkin’ about keepin’ an eye on you tonight,” Betty insisted. “Last time you hurt yourself, the kids were home. I can’t stay, and Clovis doesn’t know what to do for anything with less than four legs and a tail.”
Jake’s scowl was pretty impressive considering the fact that he still didn’t move much. “Leave me alone, Betty, or I will get somebody else to do my books.”
She snorted. “In a pig’s eye. Nobody else knows your system. Now, you figure somebody to stay and wake you up, or I’ll do it for you. I’m sure Lila’d be happy to help out in a mission of mercy.”
Jake actually stiffened in outrage. Then he thought better of protesting and dropped his head into his hands. “You’re tryin’ my patience.”
“Why does he need to be watched?” Amanda asked quietly, certain she didn’t want the answer or the responsibility Betty was inexorably shoving her way.
“His head,” Betty sighed. “Has to be wakened every so often, make sure he makes sense—as much sense as he ever makes—and can see and the like. Make sure he isn’t bleeding in there, though how he could in that thick head of his, I don’t know.”
“Which means I won’t need a baby-sitter,” Jake insisted yet again from behind his hands.
“Which means you need a caretaker if you ever try and get on that horse again.”
