Dancing in the Moonlight & Always the Best Man
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RaeAnne Thayne
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Chapter 1
For a doctor dedicated to healing the human body, he certainly knew how to punish his own. Jake Dalton rotated his shoulders and tried to ignore the aches and pains of the adrenaline crash that always hit him once the thrill of delivering a baby passed.
He had been running at full speed for twenty-two hours straight. As he drove the last few miles toward home at 2:00 a.m., he was grimly aware that he had a very narrow window of about four hours to try to sleep, if he wanted to drive back to the hospital in Idaho Falls to check on his brand-new patient and the newborn baby girl’s mother and make it back here to Pine Gulch before his clinic opened.
The joys of being a rural doctor. He sometimes felt as if he spent more time behind the wheel of his Durango on the forty-minute drive between his hometown and the nearest hospital than he did with patients.
He’d driven this road so many times in the past two years since finishing his internship and opening his own practice, he figured his SUV probably knew the way without him. It didn’t make for very exciting driving. To keep himself awake, he drove with the window cracked and the Red Hot Chili Peppers blaring at full blast.
Cool, moist air washed in as he reached the outskirts of town, and his headlights gleamed off wet asphalt. The rain had stopped sometime before but the air still smelled sweet, fresh, alive with that seductive scent of springtime in the Rockies.
It was his favorite kind of night, a night best suited to sitting by the woodstove with a good book and Miles Davis on the stereo. Or better yet, curled up between silk sheets with a soft, warm woman while the rain hissed and seethed against the window.
Now there was a particular pleasure he’d been too damn long without. He sighed, driving past the half-dozen darkened shops that comprised the town’s bustling downtown.
The crazy life that came from being the only doctor in a thirty-mile radius didn’t leave him much time for a social life. Most of the time he didn’t let it bother him, but sometimes the solitude of his life struck him with depressing force.
No, not solitude. He was around people all day long, from his patients to his nurses to his office staff.
But at the end of the day, he returned alone to the empty three-bedroom log home he’d bought when he’d moved back to Pine Gulch and taken over the family medicine clinic from Doc Whitaker.
On nights like this he wondered what it would be like to have someone to welcome him home, someone sweet and soft and loving. It was a tantalizing thought, a bittersweet one, but he refused to dwell on it for long.
He had no right to complain. How many men had the chance to live their dreams? Being a family physician in his hometown had been his aspiration forever, from those days he’d worked the ranch beside his father and brothers when he was a kid.
Besides, after helping Jenny Cochran through sixteen hours of back labor, even if he had a woman in his life, right now he wouldn’t be good for anything but a PB and J sandwich and the few hours of sleep he could snatch before he would have to climb out of his bed before daybreak and make this drive to Idaho Falls again.
He was only a quarter mile from that elusive warm bed when he spotted emergency flashers from a disabled vehicle lighting up the night ahead. He swore under his breath, tempted for half a second to drive on past.
Even as the completely selfish urge whispered through his brain, he hit the brakes of his Durango and pulled off the road, his tires spitting mud and gravel on the narrow shoulder.
He had to stop. This was Pine Gulch and people just didn’t look the other way when someone was in trouble. Besides, this was a quiet ranch road in a box canyon that dead-ended six miles further on—at the gates of the Cold Creek Land & Cattle Company, his family’s ranch.
The only reason for someone to be on this road was if they’d taken a wrong turn somewhere or they were heading to one of the eight or nine houses and ranchettes between his place at the mouth of the canyon and the Cold Creek.
Since he knew every single person who lived in those houses, he couldn’t drive on past one of his neighbors who might be having trouble.
The little silver Subaru didn’t look familiar. Arizona plates, he noted as he pulled in behind it.
His headlights illuminated why the car was pulled over on the side of the road, at any rate. The rear passenger-side tire was flat as a pancake and he could make out someone—a woman, he thought—trying to work a jack in the damp night while holding a flashlight in her mouth.
He bade a fond farewell to the dream he had so briefly entertained of sinking into his warm bed anytime soon. No way could he leave a woman in distress alone on a quiet ranch road.
Anyway, it was only a flat tire. He could have it changed and send the lost tourist on her way in ten, fifteen minutes and be in that elusive bed ten minutes after that.
He climbed out and was grateful for his jacket when the wind whistled down the canyon, rattling his car door. Here on the backside of the Tetons, April could still sink through the skin like a thousand needles.
“Hey, there,” he called as he approached. “Need a hand?”
The woman shaded her eyes, probably unable to see who was approaching in the glare from his headlights.
“I’m almost done,” she responded. “Thanks for stopping, though. Your headlights will be a big help.”
At her first words, his heart gave a sharp little kick and he froze, unable to work his mind around his shock. He instantly forgot all about how tired he was.
He knew that voice. Knew her.
Suddenly he understood the reason for the Arizona plates and why the Subaru wagon was heading up this quiet road very few had any reason to travel.
Magdalena Cruz had come home.
She was the last person he would have expected to encounter on one of his regular hospital runs, especially not at 2:00 a.m. on a rainy April Tuesday night, but that didn’t make the sight of her any less welcome.
A hundred questions jostled through his mind, and he drank in her features—what he could see in the glow from his vehicle’s headlights anyway.
The thick hair he knew was dark and glossy was pulled back in a ponytail, yanked through the back of the baseball-style cap she wore. Beneath the cap, he knew her features would be fragile and delicate, as hauntingly beautiful as always, except for the stubborn set of her chin.
Though he didn’t want to, he couldn’t prevent his gaze from drifting down.
She wore a pair of jeans and scarred boots—for all appearances everything looked completely normal. But he knew it wasn’t and he wanted more than anything to fold her into his arms and hold on tight.
He couldn’t, of course. She’d probably whack him with that tire iron if he tried.
Even before she had come to hate him and the rest of his family, they’d never had the kind of relationship that would have been conducive to that sort of thing.
The cold reality of all those years of impossible dreams—and the ache in his chest they sparked—sharpened his tone. “Your mama know you’re driving in so late?”
She sent him a quick, searching look and he saw her hands tremble a little on the tool she suddenly held as a weapon as she tried to figure out his identity.
She aimed the flashlight at him and, with an inward sigh, he obliged by giving her a straight-on look at him, even though he knew full well what her reaction would be.
Sure enough, he saw the moment she recognized him. She stiffened and her fingers tightened on the tire iron. He could only be grateful he was out of range.
“I guess I don’t need help after all.” That low voice, normally as smoothly sexy as fine-aged scotch, sounded as cold and hard as the Tetons in January.
Help from him, she meant. He didn’t need her to spell it out.
He decided not to let it affect him. He also decided the hour was too damn late for diplomacy. “Tough. Whether you need help or not, you’re getting it. Hand over the tire iron.”
“I’m fine.”
“Maggie, just give me the damn thing.”
“Go home, Dalton. I’ve got everything under control here.”
She crouched again, though it was actually more a half crouch, with her left leg extended at her side. That position must be agony for her, he thought, and had to keep his hands curled into fists at his side to keep from hauling her up and giving her a good shake before pulling her into his arms.
She must be as tired as he was. More, probably. The woman had spent the past five months at Walter Reed Army Hospital. From what he knew secondhand from her mother, Viviana—his mother’s best friend—she’d had numerous painful surgeries and had endured months of physical therapy and rehabilitation.
He seriously doubted she was strong enough—or stable enough on her prosthesis—to be driving at all, forget about rolling around in the mud changing a tire. Yet she would rather endure what must be incredible pain than accept help from one of the hated Daltons.
With a weary sigh, he ended the matter by reaching out and yanking the tire iron out of her hand. “I see the years haven’t made you any less stubborn,” he muttered.
“Or you less of an arrogant jackass,” she retorted through clenched teeth as she straightened.
“Yeah, we jackasses love driving around at 2:00 a.m. looking for people with car trouble so we can stop and harass them. Wait in my car where you can be warm and dry.”
She was still holding the flashlight, and she looked like she desperately wanted to bean him with it but she restrained herself. So the Army had taught her a little self-discipline, he thought with amusement, then watched her carefully as she leaned against the trunk of a nearby tree, aiming the beam in his direction.
He was a doctor with plenty of experience in observing the signs of someone hurting, and Magdalena Cruz’s whole posture screamed pain. He thought of a million more questions for her as he quickly put on her spare tire—what medication was she on? What kind of physical therapy had her doctors at Walter Reed ordered? Was she experiencing any phantom pain?—but he knew she wouldn’t answer any of them so he kept his mouth shut.
Questions would only piss her off. Not that that would be any big change—Maggie Cruz had been angry with him for nearly two decades. Well, not him specifically, he supposed. Anybody with the surname Dalton would find himself on the receiving end of her wrath.
Knowing her animosity wasn’t something she reserved just for him didn’t temper the sting of it.
“Your mom know you’re coming?” Tightening the lugs on the spare, he repeated the question he’d asked earlier.
She hesitated for just a heartbeat. “No. I wanted to surprise her.”
“You’ll do that, all right.” He pictured Viviana’s reaction when she woke up and found her daughter home. She would be stunned first, then joyful, he knew, and would smother Maggie with kisses and concern.
He didn’t know a mother in town more proud of her offspring than Viviana Cruz was of First Lieutenant Magdalena Cruz.
As well she should be.
The whole town was proud of her, first for doing her duty as an Army nurse in Afghanistan when her reserve unit was called up, then for the act of heroism that had cost her so dearly.
He finished the job, then stowed the flat tire and the jack and lug wrench in the cargo area of the Subaru, though he had to squeeze to find room amid the boxes and suitcases crammed in the small space.
Was she home to stay, then? he wondered, but knew she likely would tell him it wasn’t any of his business if he asked. He’d find out soon enough, anyway. The grapevine in Pine Gulch would be buzzing with this juicy bit of information.
He had no doubt that by the time he returned from Idaho Falls in the morning, his office staff would know all the details and would be more than eager to share them.
“There you go.” He closed the hatch. “You don’t want to run for long on that spare. Make sure you have Mo Sullivan in town fix your flat in the morning and swap it back out.”
“I will.” She stood, and in the headlights he could see exhaustion stamped on her lovely features.
“Your help wasn’t necessary but...thank you, anyway.” She said the words like they were choking her, and he almost smiled when he saw the effort they took. He stopped himself at the last minute. Accepting his help was tough enough on her, he wouldn’t make things worse by gloating about it.
“Anytime. Welcome home, Lieutenant Cruz.”
He doubted she heard him, since by then she had already climbed back into her Subaru and started the engine. He shook his head, used to the familiar chill from her.
He watched her drive away, then wiped his greasy, muddy hands on his already grimy scrubs and hurried to his Durango, pulling out behind her.
As he passed his own driveway a moment later, he thought with longing of his warm bed and the sandwich calling his name, but he drove on, following those red taillights another five miles until she reached the entrance to the Rancho de la Luna—Moon Ranch.
When she drove her little Subaru through the gates without further mishap, he flashed his brights, then turned around to drive back toward his house. Somehow he wasn’t a bit surprised when she made no gesture of acknowledgment at his presence or his small effort to make sure she reached home safely.
Maggie had been doing her best to ignore him for a long time—just as he’d been trying equally hard to make her notice him as someone other than one of the despised Daltons.
Despite the exhaustion that had cranked up a notch now that he was alone once more, he doubted he would be able to sleep anytime soon. He drove through the dark, quiet night, his thoughts chaotic and wild.
After a dozen years Magdalena Cruz was home.
He had a sudden foreboding that his heart would never be the same.
Jake Dalton.
What kind of bad omen made him the first person she encountered on her return?
As she headed up the curving drive toward the square farmhouse her father had built with his own hands, Maggie watched in her rearview mirror as Dalton turned his shiny silver SUV around and headed back down Cold Creek Road.
Why would he be driving back to town instead of toward his family’s ranch, just past the Luna? she wondered, then caught herself. She didn’t care where the man went. What Jake Dalton did or did not do was none of her concern.
Still, she hated that he, of all people, had come to her aid. She would rather have bitten her tongue in half than ask him for help, not that he’d given her a chance. He was just like the rest of his family, arrogant, unbending and ready to bulldoze over anybody who got in their way.
She let out a breath. Of course, he had to be gorgeous.
Like the other Dalton boys, Jake had always been handsome, with dark wavy hair, intense blue eyes and the sculpted features they inherited from their mother.
The years had been extremely kind to him, she had to admit. Though it had been dark out on that wet road, his headlights had provided enough light for her to see him clearly enough.
To her chagrin, she had discovered that the boy with the dreamy good looks who used to set all the other girls in school to giggling had matured over the years into a dramatically attractive man.
Why couldn’t he have a potbelly and a receding hairline? No, he had to have compelling features, thick, lush hair and powerful muscles. She hadn’t missed how effortlessly he had changed her flat, how he had worked the car jack it had taken all her strength to muscle, as if it took no more energy than reading the newspaper.
She shouldn’t have noticed. Even if he hadn’t been Jake Dalton—the last man on the planet she would let herself be attracted to—she had no business feeling that little hitch in her stomach at the sight of a strong, good-looking man doing a little physical exertion.
Heaven knows, she didn’t want to feel that hitch. That part of her life was over now.
Had he been staring? She couldn’t be sure, it had been too dark, but she didn’t doubt it.
Step right up. Come look at the freak.
She was probably in for a lot of that in the coming weeks as she went about town. People in Pine Gulch weren’t known for their reticence or their tact. She might as well get used to being on display.
She shook away the bitter self-pity and thoughts of Jake Dalton as she pulled up in front of the two-story frame farmhouse. She had more important things to worry about right now.
The lights were off in the house and the ranch was quiet—but what had she expected when she didn’t tell her mother she was coming? It was after 2:00 and the only thing awake at this time of the night besides wandering physicians were the barn cats prowling the dark.
She should have found a hotel room for the night in Idaho Falls and waited until morning to come home. If she had, right now she would have been stretched out on some impersonal bed with what was left of her leg propped on a pillow, instead of throbbing as if she’d just rolled around in a thousand shards of glass.
She had come so close to stopping, she even started signaling to take one of the freeway exits into the city. At the last minute she had turned off her signal and veered back onto the highway, unwilling to admit defeat by giving in so close to her destination.
Maybe she hadn’t fully considered the implications of her stubbornness, though. It was thoughtless to show up in the middle of the night. She was going to scare Viviana half to death, barging in like this.
She knew her mother always kept a spare key on the porch somewhere. Maybe she could slip in quietly without waking her and just deal with everything in the morning.
She grabbed her duffel off the passenger seat and began the complicated maneuver for climbing out of the car they taught her at Walter Reed, sliding sideways in the seat so she could put the bulk of her weight on her right leg and not the prosthesis.
Bracing herself, she took a step, and those imaginary shards of glass dug deeper. The pain made her vaguely queasy but she fought it back and took another step, then another until she reached the steps to the small front porch.
Once, she would have bounded up these half-dozen steps, taking them two or three at a time. Now it was all she could do to pull herself up, inch by painful inch, grabbing hold of the railing so hard her fingers ached.
The spare key wasn’t under the cushion of either of the rockers that had graced this porch as long as she could remember, but she lifted one of the ceramic planters and found it there.
As quietly as possible she unlocked the door and closed it behind her with only a tiny snick.
Inside, the house smelled of cinnamon coffee and corn tortillas and the faint scent of Viviana’s favorite Windsong perfume. Once upon a time that Windsong would have been joined by Abel’s Old Spice but the last trace of her father had faded years ago.
Still, as she drew the essence of home into her lungs, she felt as if she was eleven years old again, rushing inside after school with a dozen stories to tell. She was awash in emotions at being home, in the relief and security that seemed to wrap around her here, a sweet and desperately needed comfort even with the slightly bitter edge that seemed to underlie everything in her life right now.
She stood there for several moments, eyes closed and a hundred childhood memories washing through her like spring runoff, until she felt herself sway with exhaustion and had to reach for the handrail of the staircase that rose up from the entryway.
She had to get off her feet. Or her foot, anyway. The prosthesis on the other leg was rubbing and grinding against her wound—she hated the word stump, though that’s what it was.
Whatever she called it, she hadn’t yet developed sufficient calluses to completely protect the still-raw tissue.
The stairs to her bedroom suddenly looked insurmountable, but she shouldered her bag and gripped the railing. She had only made it two or three steps before the entry was flooded with light and she heard an exclamation of shock behind her.
She twisted around and found her mother standing in the entryway wearing the pink robe Maggie had given her for Mother’s Day a few years earlier.
“Lena? Madre de Dios!”
An instant later her mother rushed up the stairs and wrapped her arms around Maggie, holding her so tightly Maggie had to drop the duffel and hold on just to keep her balance.
At only a little over five feet tall, Viviana was six inches shorter than Maggie but she made up for her lack of size by the sheer force of her personality. Just now the vibrant, funny woman she adored was crying and mumbling a rapid-fire mix of Spanish and English that Maggie could barely decipher.
It didn’t matter. She was just so glad to be here. She had needed this, she thought as she rested her chin on Viviana’s slightly graying hair. She hadn’t been willing to admit it but she had desperately needed the comfort of her mother’s arms.
Viviana had come to Walter Reed when Maggie first returned from Afghanistan and had stayed for those first hellish two weeks after her injury while she had tried to come to terms with what had been taken from her in a moment. Her mother had been there for the first of the long series of surgeries to shape the scar tissue of her stump and had wanted to stay longer during her intensive rehab and the many weeks of physical therapy that came later.
But Maggie’s pride had insisted she convince her mother to return to Pine Gulch, to Rancho de la Luna.
She was thirty years old, for heaven’s sake. She should be strong enough to face her future without her mama by her side.
“What is this about?” Viviana finally said through her tears. “I think I hear a car outside and come to see who is here and who do I find but my beautiful child? You want to put your mother in an early grave, niña, sneaking around in the middle of the night?”
“I’m sorry. I should have called to make sure it was all right.”
Viviana frowned and flicked a hand in one of her broad, dismissive gestures. “This is your home. You don’t need to call ahead like...like I run some kind of hotel! You are always welcome, you know that. But why are you here? I thought you were to go to Phoenix when you left the hospital in Washington.”
“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I stayed long enough to pick up my car and pack up my apartment, then I decided to come home. There’s nothing for me in Phoenix anymore.”
There had been once. She had a good life there before her reserve unit had been called up eighteen months ago and sent to Afghanistan. She had a job she loved, as a nurse practitioner in a busy Phoenix E.R., she had a wide circle of friends, she had a fiancé she thought adored her.
Everything had changed in a heartbeat, in one terrible, decimating instant.
Viviana’s expression darkened but suddenly she slapped the palm of her hand against her head. “What am I doing, niña, to make you stand like this? Come. Sit. I will fix you something to eat.”
“I’m not hungry, Mama. I just need sleep.”
“Sí. Sí. We can talk about all this tomorrow.” Viviana’s hands were cool as she pushed a lock of hair away from Maggie’s eyes in a tender gesture that nearly brought her to tears. “Come. You will take my room downstairs.”
Oh, how she was tempted by that offer. Climbing the rest of these stairs right now seemed as insurmountable to her as scaling the Grand Teton without ropes.
She couldn’t give in, though. She had surrendered too much already.
“No. It’s fine. I’ll use my old room.”
“Lena—”
“Mama, I’m fine. I’m not kicking you out of your bed.”
“It’s no trouble for me. Do you not think it would be best?”
If Viviana had the strength, Maggie had no doubt her mother would have picked her up and carried her the short way off the stairs and down the hall to her bedroom.
This was one of the reasons she hadn’t wanted her mother in Washington, D.C., through her painful recovery, through the various surgeries and the hours of physical therapy.
It was also one of her biggest worries about coming home.
Viviana would want to coddle. It was who she was, what she did. And though part of Maggie wanted to lean into that comforting embrace, to soak it up, she knew she would find it too easy to surrender to it, to let that tender care surround her, smother her.
She couldn’t. She had to be tough if she was going to figure out how to go on with the rest of her life.
Climbing these steps was a small thing, but it suddenly seemed of vital importance.
“No, Mama. I’m sleeping upstairs.”
Viviana shook her head at her stubborn tone. “You are your father’s daughter, niña.”
She smiled, though she could feel how strained her mouth felt around the edges.
“I will take your things up,” Viviana said, her firm tone attesting to the fact that Maggie’s stubbornness didn’t come only from Abel Cruz.
Maggie decided she was too tired to argue, even if she had the tiniest possibility of winning that particular battle. She turned and started the long, torturous climb.
By the time she reached the last of the sixteen steps, she was shaking and out of breath and felt like those shards of glass she’d imagined earlier were now tipped with hot acid, eating away at her skin.
But she had made it, she thought as she opened the door to her childhood bedroom, all lavender and cream and dearly familiar.
She was here, she was home, and she would take the rest of her life just like that—one step at a time.
