noses at everyone, tear up the woods and the roads, then take home trophy elk and deer as if it were their God-given right.
Not if he had anything to say about it, he thought grimly. The muscles in his jaw bunching at the thought, he turned his back on her and opened the door to the hall. “The airfield’s not for sale. If that’s all you wanted to discuss, I have patients…”
Dismissing her as easily as if she were a door-to-door salesman, he patiently waited for her to precede him into the hall. Caught off guard, Rocky stood right where she was. He was turning her down! she thought in disbelief. No one had ever turned her down without doing her the courtesy of considering her offer, and she found, to her irritation, that she didn’t like it. She didn’t like it one damn bit!
“Can’t we at least talk this out?” she persisted stubbornly. “I could come back at the end of the day.”
“What’s there to talk about?” His face as hard as the Rockies, he stood at the open doorway, clearly impatient for her to leave. “You want my airstrip to fly your rich friends in for the hunting season so they can all play big white hunter. Sorry, but I’m not interested.”
“Big white hunter?” she echoed in confusion. “You make it sound like I’m planning some kind of Jungle Jim party thing.”
“Aren’t you?”
“No! Oh, sure, I plan to hire out to hunters or anyone else who needs my services, but I have a lot more to offer than tour-guide services. I’m a licensed EMT, Dr. Greywolf,” she said proudly. “I’ve trained with one of the best search-and-rescue teams in the country and logged hundreds of hours flying in the mountains. This community needs that kind of emergency service. And I need an airfield.”
“Isn’t there one at your grandmother’s ranch?”
“That belongs to my cousin Kyle now. I want a place of my own.”
“Then you’ll have to find one somewhere else. Mine’s not for sale.”
He was so adamant, Rocky wanted to shake him. It wasn’t as if he were using the airstrip, she thought resentfully as the temper she’d inherited along with her red hair from her grandmother started to simmer. It was just sitting there going to pot. It would serve him right if she told him to just forget it. She could buy some land and build what she needed from scratch—but that would take time, dammit, and she wanted to get started now!
“All right,” she said abruptly, knowing when she was beating a dead horse. “You don’t want to sell. I can respect that. How about leasing it, then? Don’t say no,” she said quickly, before he could turn her down flat again. “Just think about it for now. The landing strip’s just sitting there, not earning you a penny. Maybe you don’t need the money personally, but you could always use it to make improvements here at the clinic.”
She saw resentment flicker in his eyes and wasn’t surprised. He was a proud man, but facts were facts. She’d had more than enough time to look around the place while she waited to talk to him, and it was obvious he was running the place on a shoestring. It was spotlessly clean, but the old building really needed some cosmetic work, work that could easily be paid for with the generous lease she was willing to pay.
Grabbing a piece of paper from her purse, she hurriedly jotted down her telephone number and address, then pushed it into his hand. “If you change your mind, just give me a call.”
She didn’t give him time to tell her hell would freeze over before he made that call. Stepping around him, her bearing as regal as a queen’s, she walked down the hall and turned the corner into the reception area. Staring after her, Luke crushed the slip of paper with her phone number in his fist and swore. “Brat,” he muttered, tossing the note into a nearby trash can. “Who the hell does she think she is? She’s got all the money in the world, and all she can think about is her damn airfield. If she thinks she’s got problems, let her talk to Michael Hawk. Or Abigail Wilson. They’re the ones who could use her money—”
“Which is why you should have at least considered what she had to say,” Mary retorted from the supply closet, which was conveniently located right next to examining room one. Making no apologies for the fact that she had blatantly eavesdropped, not only on his conversation with himself but also on his meeting with Rocky Fortune, she frowned at him disapprovingly. “It’s not like you’re using that airstrip. And the money you’d make on a lease would go a long way toward financing Michael Hawk’s operation.”
“His father won’t accept help, remember?”
“A handout, no. But Rocky was right—this place could use some work. You could hire Mr. Hawk to do it. That would save his pride, and Michael would still get his surgery.”
She had a point, Luke grudgingly admitted, one he hadn’t even considered. Damn! What the hell was wrong with him? He should have thought of Michael himself, but he’d been so busy drooling over the lady he couldn’t think straight. And then there was the money. She had it in spades, so she was used to getting what she wanted because she wanted it. And that had rubbed him the wrong way. So he’d cut off his nose to spite his face, just to bring her down a peg or two. Idiot!
“I’ll talk to her,” he said stiffly. “Later.”
“And you’ll apologize?”
He rolled his eyes, his lips twitching. Trust Mary to insist on a pound of flesh. “All right, I’ll apologize for being rude and obnoxious. Now can we get back to work? In case you’ve forgotten, we still got patients to see.”
“In a minute,” she said, and stepped into the first waiting room to retrieve the crumpled slip of paper he’d tossed in the trash. When she placed it in his hand and closed his fingers around it, she was grinning. “You can’t call her if you haven’t got her number.” Chuckling, she turned away to retrieve Christie Eagle’s chart.
The small fifty-year-old wood-frame house was showing serious signs of age. Even in the dark shadows of the night, Luke could see the peeling paint, the slightly uneven steps of the porch, the shutters that probably hadn’t hung straight in decades. Surprised, he braked to a stop at the curb and grabbed the wrinkled scrap of paper he’d tossed on the dash when he left the clinic a few minutes earlier. A quick glance at the address Rocky had scrawled there four hours earlier assured him he’d made no mistake. This was it—the place where Kate Fortune’s granddaughter was living.
It made no sense, he told himself as he approached the front steps. He didn’t know anything about the details of the old lady’s will, apart from what Rocky had told him, but it was a given that she wasn’t strapped for funds. She could, no doubt, afford the best that Clear Springs had to offer. So what was she doing living here?
Bothered more than he should have been by the question, he knocked briskly on the door, determined not to get caught up in the intriguing diversity that was Rocky Fortune. The lady had her quirks and the money to indulge them. He didn’t care what she did as long as she agreed to pay him a decent lease on the airfield.
Knocking again, he frowned when there was no answer. Someone was obviously home—he could see the lights through the covered windows, and the walls were practically vibrating from the country-and-western song being belted out on a radio inside. “What the hell?” he muttered, and tried the knob. It opened without a sound. Surprised, he scowled. Crazy girl, didn’t she know better than to leave her door unlocked at night? Clear Springs might not be much of a metropolis, but just like anywhere else, it had its fair share of crime.
Giving the door a slight nudge, he stepped cautiously inside and found himself in a small entrance hall. On the radio, a whiskey-voiced man was singing about a honky-tonk woman, but Luke hardly noticed. Through the arched doors that led to the living room he caught sight of Rocky, and he could do nothing but stare. This was, he knew, the same woman who’d come sashaying into his clinic earlier that afternoon, dressed to kill and flashing her money around. The expensive business suit, however, had been traded for paint-spattered jeans and a ragtag cotton shirt, her high heels for a pair of tennis shoes that looked as if they’d