of his life, and it doesn’t have to be that way, dammit. If I could get him to Jeremy Stevens in Jackson—”
Mary cut in with the bluntness of a longtime friend. “But you can’t. His parents are proud—they won’t take handouts. And you’re already helping more people than you can afford to.”
“Don’t start,” he growled.
He might as well have saved his breath. Old enough to be his mother, Mary had been speaking her mind from the first day she came to work for him, three years ago, when he opened the clinic. “Somebody has to say something, and I’m just the person to do it. I know you came home to help people, but you’ve got to be sensible about it, Greywolf. Half the patients you see never carry through on their promise to pay, and you just let it go. That’s no way to run a business. You’ve got your own bills to pay.”
“I’m making it,” he said shortly. There was no way he was going to hound people who could barely put groceries on the table for the money for shots for their kids. “Who’s next?”
“Jane Birdsong,” she said, ticking them off on her fingers. “Then old man Thompson, Bill Parsons, Abigail Wilson, and Rachel Fortune.”
Reaching for the Birdsong chart, Luke threw her a sharp glance of surprise. “Fortune? As in one of old lady Kate’s brood?”
Mary’s faded blue eyes twinkled with amusement. “The one and only. If I remember correctly, this one belongs to Jake…one of the twins, I think.”
“And she’s here to see me?”
Chuckling at his suspicious tone, she nodded. “So she says. Word must have gotten out what a good doctor you are.”
He snorted at that. “Get real, Mary. We’re talking about the Fortunes, remember? The stinking-rich ones who hang out with the Kennedys and Rockefellers? The old lady had enough money to buy every major hospital in the country—somehow I can’t see her granddaughter going to a rural clinic for medical care unless she was dying. Did she look sick?”
“Are you kidding?” she asked. “I’d have given my eye teeth to look that sick at her age. Want me to show her in?”
Curious, Luke nodded. “Room three,” he began, only to stop short, scowling. What the hell was he doing? He had sick patients in the waiting room, poor people who would wait without complaint for as long as it took to see him. Rachel Fortune couldn’t just waltz in like she owned the place and cut to the head of the line because he couldn’t imagine what she wanted with him and her family had more money than God.
“Forget that,” he growled. “She can wait her turn just like everyone else. Show Mr. Thompson into three.”
“You’re the boss,” Mary said with a shrug, and went to do his bidding.
When Rocky was shown into an examining room nearly two hours later, she stopped in surprise. “Oh, I’m not here for an exam,” she told the nurse hurriedly. “I have a business proposition to discuss with Dr. Greywolf. I know I should have called first, but I was afraid he’d be booked up and it’d be weeks before I could see him.”
“And you didn’t want to wait,” Mary guessed shrewdly, grinning.
Caught in the trap of the older woman’s friendly, knowing eyes, Rocky couldn’t help but laugh. “What can I say? I was born a month early, and I’ve been in a hurry ever since. Is it always this busy around here?”
Her blue eyes twinkling, Mary said, “Busy? Today’s a slow day. Most nights we’re lucky to get out of here by eight.” Taking a quick inventory to make sure everything in the room was as it should be, she motioned to the straight-backed chair positioned against the wall. “Have a seat. I hate to tell you this, but you’ve got another wait. Dr. Greywolf will get to you as soon as possible.”
Rocky thanked her, but as soon as the door shut quietly behind the nurse she realized there was no way she was going to be able to just sit there and wait. She was too nervous, too anxious, too excited. For four months now, ever since she’d inherited a helicopter and three single-engine planes from her grandmother, she’d been searching for the perfect locale to start her own flying service. She’d checked out everywhere from Estes Park to Jackson Hole to Vail, and in the end she’d found what she was looking for practically in the backyard of her grandmother’s Wyoming ranch.
Shaking her head over her own stupidity, she wondered why she hadn’t thought of Clear Springs sooner. It was a small town, rough and rugged and charmingly flavored with the old West, and she’d always loved it. Invitingly situated between the Ghost Mountains to the north and a Shoshone Indian reservation to the south, it drew a respectable number of tourists in the summer and its share of hunters and hikers in the fall and winter. And, incredibly, there were no pilots for hire in the area to take hunters into the mountains or fly search-and-rescue in case of an emergency. The situation couldn’t have been better if her grandmother had arranged things for her in heaven.
Which Kate just might have done, she admitted with a rueful flash of dimples. There hadn’t been much that Katherine Winfield Fortune hadn’t done or tried in life. She’d gone her own way, done her own thing, always with a style that was legendary. She was the one who’d taught Rocky to fly when she was sixteen, and if there was a way to pull strings from heaven, Kate would have found a way.
Memories swamped Rocky. She still found it hard to believe Kate was dead. How could a woman who was so full of spirit, of life, let death take her in a plane crash in some godforsaken jungle? Kate had been tougher than that, stronger. And too good a pilot to let a plane she was flying go down so easily. She would have fought like hell to keep it in the air; and then, when it became clear that wasn’t going to be possible, she would have found a way to land the thing. And she would have walked away, dammit. She should have.
Only she hadn’t.
Her throat tight, Rocky swallowed. Lord, she missed her. Kate had always understood her need for independence, her need to stand on her own two feet and cut herself free of the Fortune money, Fortune Cosmetics, Fortune expectations. And with her death, she’d given her the means to do that. Thanks to Kate, she had her planes, experience flying in the mountains, and the emergency medical training Kate had insisted she take when she got her commercial pilot’s license. She’d taken care of everything.
Except a landing field.
Her cousin Kyle, who had inherited her grandmother’s ranch, had graciously offered to let her use the facilities there, but Rocky’s stubborn pride had refused to let her accept. She’d grown up with advantages most people couldn’t even dream of, and it was time she proved she could stand on her own two feet. That meant no favors from family, no free business advice, nothing. She would either succeed or fail, all by herself.
Which meant she still needed an airstrip. And the only other private one in the area was owned by Luke Greywolf.
The place had once belonged to Douglas Aeronautics, and Luke had bought it for a song—not, according to the locals, because he planned to reopen the old flying service that had gone belly-up during the oil embargo of the seventies, but because the land was cheap and close to the reservation. He’d turned the largest building on the property into a clinic and hot-topped the parking lot, but other than that, he’d made few other changes. The hangar was still rusted and the runway pitted and unused, and that was what she wanted to talk to the good doctor about.
She’d heard he was a reasonable man, so she didn’t see any reason why they couldn’t do business together…except for the clinic sign out front. Made of wood and painted a dull gray, it would have been plain and unobtrusive if not for the face of a wolf that had been carved into the rough wood by a talented hand. She had a sinking feeling that that sign said a lot about Luke Greywolf. If he was anything like the wolf in his name and as protective of his territory, then making a deal with him wasn’t going to be quite as easy as she’d hoped.
She wasn’t Kate Fortune’s granddaughter for nothing, however. Kate had taught her that when a woman wanted something in a man’s world, she had