LITMIR.BIZ

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ya, Bram,” the clerk said absently, intent on her emergency admittance forms.

      Two hours later Bram returned to the hospital and was told that the young man had been installed in a room on the second floor. Bram walked past the elevator, which he knew from experience was slow as molasses, and opted for the stairs. He took them two at a time, mostly out of habit, although there was no question about his feeling hurried and unusually anxious lately. He was busier than normal, what with the courthouse fire and that peculiar burglary of the newspaper office, added to the usual roster of domestic disputes and petty crimes common to the town and county.

      He easily located the accident victim’s room. But when he walked in, he suddenly became a tongue-tied schoolboy. Nurse Jenna Elliot was in the room, the beautiful young woman that Bram had secretly had his eye on for a very long time.

      Jenna saw Bram’s tall, dark form enter the room, and her pulse rate quickened. “Hello, Bram,” she said, managing to sound like her usual self in spite of the explosion of adrenaline rushing through her system. That was what he did to her—what he always did to her—and not once had he ever smiled directly at her. She’d seen him smile at his sister, Willow, who was a good friend of Jenna’s. Smile at his friends, and even at total strangers. But he would not smile at her, and she knew why. It was because of his Comanche blood, and because her father, Carl Elliot was a snob. Jenna had always wished Bram wouldn’t lump her and her dad in the same category of ignorant intolerance, but she didn’t know how to change his mind. The whole thing was frustrating and worrisome and just plain dumb; the other Coltons—and they were plentiful in and around Black Arrow—didn’t snub her as Bram did. He had no right to assault her senses so powerfully and then treat her so coldly, no right at all.

      “Jenna,” Bram said stiffly. “Sorry for the interruption. I’ll come back later.”

      Before Jenna could tell him to stay, that her patient was only slightly sedated and quite capable of talking to him, Bram was gone. She glared at the door he’d whisked through, then shook her head in abject disgust and shoved Bram Colton to the back of her mind, something she was well-practiced at doing.

      Bram’s teeth were clenched as he walked up to the nurse’s station. Running into Jenna always set his hair on end. “How long are you planning to keep James Westley in the hospital?” he asked the nurse on duty.

      “Just overnight. He’ll be released in the morning.”

      “What time is the shift change around here today?”

      “At six. Same as always.”

      “Thanks.” Bram left. He would come back later in the evening to talk to James Westley and get the information he needed for an accident report.

      Jenna was relieved that her dad wasn’t home for dinner that evening; she was always relieved when he wasn’t there to harangue her for becoming a nurse. “It’s such a common profession! Nursing is beneath you, Jenna,” she’d heard him say a hundred times. “Disgusting, considering some of the things you have to do to strangers, no matter who. You should have finished college and gotten your degree in art history, as you set out to do.”

      Jenna’s relief at her dad’s absence was shortlived. Because she was such a softie when it came to hurting anyone, or even thinking about hurting someone—especially her father, whom she loved in spite of his horrid, undeserved sense of superiority—she next felt a wave of guilt.

      After all, she was living under her dad’s roof. Not by choice, God knew, but because Carl Elliot had acted almost mortally wounded when his only child had returned to Black Arrow as a full-fledged registered nurse and announced that it was time she got a place of her own. Jenna’s mother had died several years before, which had left Carl rattling around alone in the large and quite elegant home he’d had constructed in what he considered the best part of town. Losing her mother had been hard on Jenna, and it was during her mom’s illness that Jenna had become profoundly focused on the nursing profession. She wished her father possessed just a fraction of the compassion for mankind with which her mother had been blessed.

      But he didn’t. Jenna could argue against prejudice and bigotry until she was blue in the face, and nothing she said ever made a dent in Carl Elliot’s supreme confidence that the color of his skin—and that of his ancestors—made him superior to anyone who wasn’t as white as the driven snow. Actually, Jenna had given up on trying to change her father’s infuriating intolerance. It cut her deeply that he’d made so much money from those residents of Black Arrow with Comanche blood, yet still looked down on them. As a youngster, she’d been forbidden to play with Indian children and had been sent to a private, all-white school. All the same, she’d had Indian friends growing up. Willow Colton would always be a friend, and Jenna would give her eyeteeth if Bram would relax his guard and become a friend.

      Martha Buskin was chief cook and bottle washer in the Elliot household—had been for many years—and she had roasted a chicken that afternoon. Jenna thanked her and told her to go on home. Normally Martha’s final chore of the day was to tidy the kitchen after the evening meal, but whenever Jenna ate alone she let Martha leave early.

      When the housekeeper had gone, Jenna ate some chicken and salad at the table in the kitchen. Then she went upstairs with a glass of her favorite wine and ran a bubble bath. Lighting scented candles placed around the tub, she switched off the bright bathroom lights, undressed and sank into the sudsy hot water. Sipping wine and feeling all the kinks of the day leave her body, she did what she’d known she would when she began this delightful ritual: relived and dissected those few moments in James Westley’s hospital room when Bram Colton had come in.

      She could see Bram in her mind’s eye as clearly as if he were standing next to the tub…which she found herself wishing were true. She thought him to be the most physically attractive man she’d ever met or even seen. He made her spine tingle and her legs wobble, her heart beat faster and her mouth go dry. She loved his thick, lustrous black hair and black eyes. She loved the deep bronze tone of his skin and his perfect white teeth. The sight of his broad shoulders, flat, hard belly and long legs clad in his tan sheriff’s uniform, with a big gun on his hip, almost caused her to go into respiratory failure. Was she in love with him? No, she couldn’t say that. But lust? Oh, yes, she most definitely lusted after the county sheriff; after Willow’s big brother. And if Bram ever decided to give her the time of day, she would give him a lot more than time. She’d give him…

      “Oh, stop,” she mumbled, finishing the last of her wine and hitting the small lever to drain the tub. Why did she torture herself over a man who was never going to do anything but look through her? Bram was every bit as stubborn as her dad. Her father would have a heart attack if his daughter took up with a Native American, or a “breed,” as he called those with even a drop of Indian blood, while Bram’s stiff-necked pride would never permit him to get involved with Carl’s daughter. She was in a no-win situation and she might as well forget that Bram Colton even existed.

      That was easier said than done, but she hoped she would at least leave him behind when she went to Dallas for her week’s vacation on Saturday. She was going to visit an old college friend, Loni Owens, and there was no doubt in Jenna’s mind that she would have a good time. Loni was a bright, upbeat and extremely uninhibited gal when it came to fun, especially fun with guys. Jenna had hesitated in accepting Loni’s invitation to spend her week off in Dallas because she knew Loni would have a dozen male friends lined up to meet her.

      But what the heck? she’d finally concluded. She sure wasn’t getting anywhere with the one man she would love to get somewhere with, so she might as well settle for second best.

      She would be leaving very early on Saturday morning.

      After obtaining the accident information that he needed and then leaving the hospital that evening, Bram stopped in to see his grandmother. He did that three or four times a week, and not just out of a sense of duty. He genuinely loved the elderly woman and thought her witty, wise and wonderful. Gloria was eighty years old, but since her father, Bram’s great-grandfather, George WhiteBear, was still living at ninety-seven—at least that was the age George claimed to be—Bram

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