made after her previous visits. She was pregnant with her sixth child and couldn’t afford to feed the five she already had. She seemed cheerful enough, but she couldn’t hide the stress in her eyes. Like all the women on the reservation, she wanted more for her children but knew the odds were against them. The lucky ones scraped and fought and found a way out the first chance they got. The rest stayed and struggled just to exist. There was nothing else they could do.
Frustrated, irritated, he closed the file and handed it to Mary. “Rachel Fortune still here?”
She nodded. “Room one. And not one word of complaint out of her when I showed her in there. In fact, she apologized to me for stopping in without an appointment—said she needed to talk to you. I thought she’d be snooty, but she’s been real nice.”
Reserving judgment, Luke merely grunted. The lady had to want something real bad if she’d sat over two hours in a waiting room full of sick patients to see him when she wasn’t even sick. “Yeah, I’m sure she’s a regular princess,” he drawled, heading for the door. “It shouldn’t take long to find out what she wants. Show Christie Eagle and her mother into three and tell them I’ll be right with them.”
His rugged face set in grim lines, he strode down the hall to examining room one, going over in his head what he knew about the Fortune family. It wasn’t much. The old lady, Kate, had died recently in a plane crash, and from what he’d heard about her, she’d been one sharp cookie. She’d ruled the family empire with a firm hand, and if the falling price of Fortune Cosmetics stock was anything to go by, her absence was already being felt.
So what did Kate’s granddaughter want with him? he wondered with a frown. They didn’t exactly run in the same circles. Apart from her cousin Kyle, whom he occasionally saw in town, he wouldn’t know her or the rest of the clan if he passed them on the street. And that was just fine with him. Because of the family’s connection to the town, the local paper faithfully reported every tidbit of gossip about the clan, and by all accounts, the younger Fortunes were wild, willful, and spoiled, not to mention attracted to danger. Just last week, he’d read about Rachel’s exploits at a charity air show. She’d been performing stunts—stunts, for God’s sake!—when her plane nearly stalled. She’d managed to pull out of it, but she could have just as easily crashed and killed not only herself, but dozens of innocent people on the ground.
Luke had little use for that kind of irresponsibility. The whole bunch was too used to doing what they damn well pleased. They flew in to the ranch when they wanted to play cowboy and flew out again when they grew bored with the game. From what he could see, they’d never done a hard day’s work in their life.
Reaching the examining room where Rachel waited, he pushed the door open and soundlessly stepped inside to find her standing with her back to him, examining his diploma from medical school, which was framed and hanging on the far wall. Determined to keep this short and sweet, he said, “Ms. Fortune? I understand you wanted to talk to me—”
That was as far as he got. She turned then, a smile of welcome flirting with the edges of her mouth, and he felt the impact clear across the room. Stopping dead in his tracks, he would have sworn she knocked him out of his shoes. This was Rachel Fortune?
He’d expected her to be attractive—money and good looks just seemed to go hand in hand—and her grandmother had started one of the most successful cosmetic companies in the world. With good bone structure and skin, not to mention the right makeup, any woman could be reasonably pretty.
Pretty didn’t even begin to describe the woman before him, however. With her sculptured cheeks, slanting brows and large dark brown eyes, she could have stopped traffic in any city in the world, but here in Clear Springs, where the harsh winters dried the skin and added years to a woman’s face, she was as breathtaking and unexpected as a rose in the snow. And he couldn’t stop staring. Tall and slim, she was dressed for business in a somber black wool suit and stark white blouse, but the effect was ruined by the way the fit of the skirt emphasized her slender waist and the impossibly long length of her legs. And then there was her hair. Wine red, it fell in a soft, sweeping curve to her angled jaw, just begging for a man’s touch.
He’d always been a sucker for red hair.
The thought slipped up on him like a craving in the night, easing into his blood in a sudden flash of heat that caught him totally off guard. Stunned, he stiffened, guilt and resentment twisting in his gut. He hadn’t looked twice at a woman in the two years since Jan had died, and he didn’t plan to start now with someone like Lady Fortune here, who had the world at her feet. He only had to see the amusement glinting in those big brown eyes of hers to know that not only was she aware of the effect she had on men, she expected it. If that was what she was here for, she’d made a wasted trip.
“I’m Dr. Greywolf,” he said coolly. “What can I do for you, Ms. Fortune?”
Caught in his intense dark brown eyes, Rocky hesitated, her smile wavering and her heart, for no reason that she could understand, suddenly jumping crazily in her breast. Okay, she acknowledged, he was a good-looking man, if you liked the stony type. She didn’t. She liked a man who laughed easily, at himself and the world. That did not in any way, shape or form appear to describe Luke Greywolf.
There was no glint of humor in his nearly black eyes, no smile to relieve the lean, chiseled features of his square face. Tall and broad-shouldered in a white lab coat, his straight, inky-black hair cut conservatively short, he stood like a pine in the forest that didn’t bend, his proud Shoshone heritage stamped all over him. It was there in the width of his brow, the granite-hard set of his jaw, his blade of a nose. And it was there in his eyes. Never taking his gaze from her, he watched her like a wary hawk that just dared her to make a wrong move.
It wasn’t, Rocky decided, swallowing to ease the sudden dryness in her throat, a look she particularly cared for. Her nerve endings bristling, she reminded herself that she didn’t have to like the man to do business with him, then gave him a smile that had, in the past, left more than one un-suspecting male panting. “Please…call me Rocky.”
Far from impressed, he arched a disbelieving brow. “Rocky Fortune? I thought your name was Rachel.”
“It is,” she said. “But I earned the nickname when I gave my brother a black eye when I was ten, and it just sort of stuck.” Crossing the room to him, she held out her hand and grinned. “I’ve still got a wicked left, but I haven’t punched anybody out in years. It’s nice to meet you, Doc. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Most people, upon hearing the story about her nickname, wanted to know what her brother had done to her to provoke her into punching his lights out, but Luke Greywolf only stared at her hand before reluctantly taking it in a quick shake that was over almost before it had begun. “I understand you wanted to talk to me,” he said curtly. “If this is about a contribution to one of the local charities—”
He hadn’t so much as moved, but Rocky could feel him mentally pushing her toward the door. “It isn’t,” she said quickly. “Actually, I have a business proposition for you.”
Luke couldn’t have been more surprised if she’d said she wanted to buy him a Ferrari. Stepping farther into the room, he shut the door behind him, closing out the noise rolling down the hall from the waiting room. In the sudden silence, his brown eyes, dark with suspicion, met hers. “Is this some kind of joke? You can probably buy and sell me a hundred times over, Ms. Fortune. What kind of business could we possibly have in common?”
“You have an airfield that no one’s using,” she replied promptly. “I’d like to buy it.”
“Why?”
“Because I need it,” she said simply. “My grandmother left me a small fleet of planes and a helicopter, and I want to use them to start a flying service here in Clear Springs. You know, fly in hunters and skiers, that kind of thing. There’s not anything like that in this area. Everyone goes to Jackson, which is nearly a hundred miles away, not to mention on the other side of the mountains. That’s not only inconvenient, it’s a loss of revenue for the city. So surely you can see that there’s a need…”