McKettricks of Texas: Austin (19 page)

“Oh, Nurse Remington,” he trilled.

At least he thought he was trilling it.

She turned, a spatula in one hand, and glared at him. If ever he'd seen a woman in need of at least one more orgasm, Paige was that woman.
“What?”

“Shep wants to go outside,” he told her sweetly.

“Take him out yourself, then,” Paige snapped, turning back to the sandwich-making enterprise.

“I'm only trying to be a good patient,” Austin said, turning on the pathos. “Isn't that what you want?”

Angrily, she shoved the skillet back off the burner, set down the spatula and went to open the back door.

She was all sweetness and light when she spoke to Shep. “Come on, fella,” she said.

The two of them went out.

Paige slammed the door.

And Austin, grinning, turned around and went back to bed.

Who knew? If he got Paige riled enough, she just might join him there.

Again.

P
AIGE PRACTICALLY SHOVED THE PLATE
into Austin's hands, and it didn't improve her crazy, hormonal mood when he peeled back the bread and peered beneath it.

“Grilled cheese,” she said tightly. “Just as I promised.”

“I was only checking for obvious signs of tampering,” Austin retorted, with a grin that made her want to slap him.

It was galling how this man could take her through an entire range of emotions with his mischievous eyes and crooked grins—even
more
galling that she couldn't seem to stop herself from going along for the ride.

And she
so
knew better.

Still, Paige's own personal, private riot continued: she wanted to throttle him. She wanted to shut and lock the door and crawl right into bed with him. She wanted to scream and throw things.

It was dizzying. Everything in Paige's life made sense—except her penchant for this man. Maybe, she thought with alarm, she was one of those people who liked pain or, more accurately,
needed
it for some dark psychological reason.

While all these thoughts were whirling through her mind, Austin picked up half the sandwich, took a bite,
chewed slowly, ponderously. Waited a long, long time to take another bite.

“I was fresh out of cyanide,” Paige said with a brittle smile, spreading her hands. “So I had to resort to drain cleaner.”

“It's actually pretty good,” Austin told her. “Almost as good as the ones Esperanza makes. She usually chops up some jalapeño and—”

“If you don't like that sandwich, Austin McKettrick,” Paige broke in, “get off your cowboy-ass and make your own.”

He laughed. “You used to have a sense of humor,” he said.

“That must have been before we met,” she countered.

“I doubt it. We go all the way back to Mrs. Roberts's kindergarten class, remember?” Austin took another bite of the sandwich and took his time chewing, swallowing and thinking. Paige hoped he wouldn't hurt himself, trying that last thing.

Shep, the poor devil, was trying to join Austin on the bed.

Carefully, because of his injuries, Paige lifted the dog off the floor and onto the mattress.

Austin gave him the other half of the sandwich. At Paige's dark look, he said, “Point in your favor. I couldn't have fed him Esperanza's— God knows what jalapeños would do to a dog.”

Paige clamped down her jaw. Austin was
deliberately
baiting her, she
knew
that. But why—oh, why—did she have to take the hook? It was like some figurative tennis game, and she kept batting the damn ball back over the net instead of just walking off the court.

What was up with
that?

She went into his bathroom, counted out his various pills, filled a glass with water and returned to his bedside.

“Here,” she said, practically shoving the meds at him. “Take these. They'll make you sleep.”

“Maybe I don't
feel
like sleeping.”

“Imagine how bad I might feel if I
gave
a rat's ass what you feel like doing, Austin McKettrick,” Paige replied coolly.

He reared back a little, gave a low, exclamatory whistle. “Are you PMS-ing or something? Because I'll understand if you are. That's the kind of guy I am. Modern. Sensitive.”

“A real
softy,
” Paige said with an emphasis on the last word. She wanted to laugh in spite of everything, but she managed to keep a straight face.

Austin assumed an injured look. “I wouldn't go
that
far,” he said.

Paige smiled. Waited.

He finally took the pills from her still-extended palm, tossed them back and washed them down with a few gulps of water.

Paige's mouth twitched as she watched him set the glass aside. She
would not
laugh, by God.

She wasn't prepared for Austin's strength, or his speed. He gripped her wrist and pulled and the next thing she knew, she was flat on her back on the bed beside him, looking up into his devilish blue eyes.

With his mouth very close to hers, he breathed, “Oops. Sorry—that was clumsy of me.”

Paige blinked.
Get up,
she told herself.

But her self didn't listen.

Austin slid his hand under her sweater, splayed his fingers over the bare skin of her midsection.

And she
still
didn't move.

Unless a racing heart and some very fast breathing counted as movement.

“I think it's real important,” Austin drawled, his lips right against hers now, hot and firm, “that we don't have sex.”

He slid his hand down a little way, popped the button on her jeans.

And, at the same time, he kissed her—deeply, gently, in a way that rocked her to the core of her being.

“No, we definitely
should not
have sex,” he went on after the kiss had finally ended.

Paige was too breathless to respond, and too turned on—
already
—to do what she should have done, which was slap Austin McKettrick across his handsome, insolent face and
get off the bed.

He bent his head and, through her sweater and bra, nipped lightly at her left nipple, and then her right.

Paige moaned, and arched the small of her back.

Both responses were utterly involuntary.

“You just tell me,” Austin continued in a sleepy rumble, “when you want to stop not having sex, and that's the way it will be.”

“Stop.” Paige managed to croak out the word.

Austin looked into her face then, and although his mouth was serious, his eyes were laughing. “Stop what, Paige?”

“Just—stop.”

He pulled his hand out of her jeans, zipped them up, fastened the button. Pretty handy for a man with one
arm in a sling—but then, he'd probably had all kinds of practice getting into women's pants.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay?” she asked.

“I'm a man of my word. We'll stop not having sex.”

“But that would mean—”

Austin chuckled. “Yeah,” he agreed huskily. “That's what it would mean.”

She managed to suck in a breath, sit up, swing her legs over the side of the bed. Looked at her watch.

Thank heavens; the pills she'd given him ought to be kicking in any minute now.

He would probably doze off.

And she could sneak out of the room, give herself a much-needed break.

Sure enough, he closed his eyes.

Paige stood up and sidled out of his reach.

He let out a long breath, turned onto his right side.

Paige waited a few seconds, then ventured close enough to cover him with the timeworn quilt one of his female ancestors had made with her own two hands.

She half expected Austin to grab her again and pull her back down beside him, but he didn't. He really was asleep, evidently.

An unspeakable tenderness filled her, just to look at him.

Why, she could not have said.

Austin McKettrick was all man, but there was a boyish abandon in the way he slept, a vulnerability he'd never willingly reveal in a waking state.

Unable to resist, Paige leaned down and lightly kissed his forehead, then turned and hurried out of the room.

 

A
USTIN SLEPT
. And he slept. And then he slept some more.

He got up to use the bathroom, even gulped down a mug of soup Paige had fixed for him at one point, but he always tumbled straight back into slumber as soon as his head hit the pillow.

“How's Shep?” he would ask whenever he happened to wake up. “How's Molly?”

Each time, Paige was quick to answer that both animals were faring well—Ron Strivens took very good care of Molly and Shep was really on the mend, now that he could stay put on his blanket pile for hours at a time, recuperating, instead of wearing himself out keeping up with his master.

Biding her time, Paige sat in a rocking chair Tate brought in from the kitchen, reading, surfing the Internet on her laptop and trying, without much success, to knit a scarf. To the casual observer, she probably looked calm and proficient and relaxed—the private nurse on duty, well trained. In control.

Oh, it was true enough that she wasn't worried about Austin, though both Tate and Garrett had expressed concern about his protracted slumber. She knew he had simply used up his physical reserves—which must have been formidable—and his body, programmed to survive, had overridden the incessant demands of his mind, basically shutting down for repairs.

No, what troubled Paige was not
Austin's
condition, but her own.

She was losing her objectivity.

What started out as a Web search for a decent bridesmaid's dress, for instance, morphed into a fascination with the endless array of wedding gowns pictured online.

Paige nervously—and privately—attributed this odd obsession to the fact that both her sisters were about to get married. Somewhere inside, she was still that little girl who trailed after them, wanting to do what they did.

Maybe she felt a little left out.

When Libby got her driver's license, and Julie a year later, Paige had ached for her turn at the wheel of the family car.

When Libby had her waist-length hair cut short, as a junior in high school, Paige, lacking sufficient funds for a visit to the Curly-Girly Salon, had taken a pair of pinking shears to her own tresses.

She and Julie had fought constantly because she was always “borrowing” something black and dramatic from Julie's closet.

And the list went on.

Still, Paige reasoned, looking at bridal gowns was a harmless enough pursuit, wasn't it?

 

I
T WASN'T UNTIL
the next morning that Austin's eyes flew open, then widened, as he sat up in bed and focused on Paige.

She'd been reading his paperback Western; she set the book aside and smiled.

He threw back the covers, vanished into the bathroom and came back with his hair standing on end because he'd been shoving his fingers through it.

“How the hell long I have I been asleep?” he demanded.

Paige made a point of consulting her watch—a gift from her dad and her sisters upon her graduation from nursing school—and took her time answering, because
seeing him so rattled was a lot of fun and she wanted to stay in the moment as long as possible.

“Not quite thirty-six hours,” she answered.

Austin's knees seemed to give out. Still wearing the original pair of sweatpants he'd fallen asleep in two days before, he sank onto the edge of the mattress and swore hoarsely before echoing, “
Thirty-six hours?
And I wasn't in a coma?”

“Of course you weren't in a coma,” Paige told him. “I would have called an ambulance immediately if you had been.”

“You mean I was just sleeping? For the better part of two days?”

“In a word, yes.”

He was off the bed again, crossing to the dresser, where he must have stashed some clean clothes before the big sleep, because now he had jeans, shorts and a black T-shirt with no sleeves. “Why didn't you wake me up?”

“Because you needed to rest.” She inclined her head toward Shep, now rising off his improvised dog bed. He was doing so well that Doc Pomeroy had replaced his first bandage with a new and much lighter one. “So did your buddy, here.”

Shep stretched, yawned big and then crossed to Austin in a sort of skippy trot, wagging his tail and smiling a huge dog smile.

Austin grinned and ruffled the animal's ears, but when he looked at Paige, she saw frustration in his eyes. And a flash of that legendary McKettrick temper.

“Did you double up my pills or something?” he asked suspiciously.

The question set Paige back on her figurative heels. She rose slowly from the rocking chair, but only because
she didn't want to startle Shep by shooting toward the ceiling like a geyser. “You did
not
just ask me that question,” she said evenly, glaring at Austin.

He shook out the jeans, scrounged up a pair of socks. Maybe he thought he was all better now, and he could just shower, dress, saddle up and ride the range as though his back had magically healed and so had the bullet wound in his shoulder.

He made a grumbling sound, rubbed his stubbly chin, and started for the bathroom without offering a verbal response.

Paige marched over and started stripping the sheets off his bed, and she did it with such vigor that Shep, instead of following Austin as he normally would have done, stood watching her with his ears perked and his head tipped to one side.

She heard the water go on in the shower.

After a day-and-a-half-long sleeping marathon, Paige didn't blame Austin for wanting to suds up and sluice off, but attempting the feat on his own was a stretch, after so long in bed. Having removed the sheets from his bed, she waited until she heard the shower turn off to carry them out to the laundry room and fetch replacements.

Then she left the apartment and crossed the wide kitchen to the laundry room, stuffed the sheets into the washing machine, set the controls and added soap. By the time she got back, carrying a fragrant armload of fresh linens Esperanza must have washed and dried before she went on her trip, Austin was wearing the jeans and the black T-shirt, and he'd shaved, too.

The sling had been dispensed with, and probably the
bandages—which she'd changed twice while he was sleeping—as well.

Paige refrained from commenting on the absence of the sling. She'd spoken to his doctor at the clinic in town a couple of times, and he'd asked her to bring Austin in for a checkup as soon as he felt ready to make the trip.

Today, he was going to the clinic—whether he felt ready or not. If he needed more bandages and another sling—Paige doubted he would—then it would be young Dr. Colwin's responsibility to break the news.