Caroline Ruth was definitely an attractive woman, he’d give her that. Still. He was in no position to be noticing such things, and she was clearly in no position to be receiving his unwanted attention. Craig shifted guiltily in his seat and Caroline’s eyes suddenly shot open.
“Hey there,” Craig offered weakly. What else was he supposed to say to a complete stranger with her head in his lap? Caroline smiled dreamily at him before her lids fluttered closed and she was out cold again.
Caroline heard steady beeping before feeling something squeeze around her upper arm. It took considerable effort to raise her eyelids, and when she finally got them to stay open, there were a few seconds of blurriness.
Where was she?
What had happened?
“She’s awake,” a woman said, and Caroline blinked several times until the light fixture in the middle of the white ceiling came into focus. She wiggled her toes as her hands flexed against something that felt like a starched sheet. Was she in a bed? She was definitely lying down.
“Caroline?” someone else asked and she turned toward the voice, her eyes narrowing on the person standing beside her. A woman with steel-gray curls and smooth skin the color of dark copper placed a calming hand on Caroline’s shoulder. “Can you hear me?”
“Where am I?” Caroline asked.
“You’re in the emergency room at Kalispell Regional. I’m Dr. Robinson. Do you remember what happened?”
Caroline shook her head and then flinched at the stabbing pain that shot through her forehead.
“Careful, now,” the doctor continued. “From what I understand, you hit your head pretty hard. Your friends brought you in and we did an MRI while you were still unconscious. We think you have a concussion, but we’d like to get a CT scan of your brain to rule out anything more serious.”
“My friends?” Caroline asked, then turned toward the other woman in the room. She sighed when she saw Josselyn Weaver on the other side of her bed.
“Hey, Caroline.” Josselyn squeezed Caroline’s hand, accidentally dislodging some little white wires and causing a shrill beep.
“Don’t worry. It’s just the oxygen reader,” the doctor offered, putting the plastic device back over Caroline’s pointer finger. “You up for answering some questions?”
“Sure,” Caroline said as she tried to sit up. She was relieved that the rest of her body cooperated and that her head was the only thing hurting.
“Do you know your name?” Dr. Robinson asked.
“Caroline Ruth.”
“And what day is it?”
She blinked a couple of times until it came back to her. “November 21.”
“Good.” The doctor’s bright white smile was reassuring. “And what did you have for breakfast today?”
Caroline’s stomach rumbled at the reminder. “Only a couple of bites of a protein bar. I should’ve gotten a breakfast sandwich at Daisy’s this morning but I didn’t want to be late for my appointment.”
“Oh? What kind of appointment?”
“I’m a wedding planner.”
The physician looked over to Josselyn, who nodded in agreement. The questions must be part of some kind of test and Caroline hoped she was passing.
Dr. Robinson lifted a finger in front of Caroline’s nose. “Do you know where you live?”
Caroline’s eyes followed the finger as she rattled off the address for the tiny guest house she’d rented in the heart of Rust Creek Falls several months ago. The sooner she answered everything and proved she was perfectly fine, the sooner she could get something to eat.
“What’s the last thing you remember before coming to the hospital?”
“I was talking to Josselyn about her wedding and I climbed up on a chair to get the binder with a brochure for a venue when...” Caroline trailed off as she couldn’t recall what had occurred after that. Lifting her fingers to stroke her forehead, she asked, “Is that how I fell?”
“Yes,” Josselyn said, sighing as though she’d been holding her breath up until this point. “You went face-first into one of the shelves on your way down and were out cold. We didn’t want to wait for an ambulance, so we brought you straight to the ER.”
“We?” Caroline asked and looked around the room. There was another man near the partitioned curtain of the exam room, but he’d been talking to a nurse outside and she’d assumed he was another doctor.
“That’s—” Josselyn started, but Dr. Robinson cut her off.
“Do you know the name of this man?”
“No idea,” Caroline replied, hoping her honesty wouldn’t mean that she couldn’t get a snack soon. When she’d been ten years old, her dad had to be rushed to the hospital near the faculty housing at Berkeley. He’d insisted that it was only heartburn and asked Caroline to go to the cafeteria and get him some vanilla soft serve to soothe the acid. Turned out it was a perforated gallbladder and because he’d eaten the ice cream, the anesthesiologist delayed the surgery until his stomach was empty. It had been a long ten hours of her dad doing his awful Oliver Twist impression by begging for more food and insisting he was starving.
“Technically, she hadn’t met me prior to her fall.” The man the doctor had just asked about stepped forward and placed an arm around Josselyn’s waist. “I’m Drew Strickland, by the way. You’re planning our wedding. We had just walked in the door and you’d turned to look at us. That’s when you got your foot twisted in the chair and fell.”
“We?” Caroline asked again, feeling like a parrot. Her eyelids were getting heavy again and all she wanted was a hot breakfast sandwich and a nap. “Who’s we?”
“Me and—” Drew was cut off by Dr. Robinson holding up a hand like a stop sign.
“Do you remember them walking in the door before you fell?” the emergency room physician asked.
Caroline focused on a bright red electric outlet on the wall in an effort to concentrate, trying to form an image in her mind. But nothing was coming to her. She replayed the events of the morning over and over again, and the weight of the silence in the room suggested that everyone else knew what two plus two equaled and were desperately waiting for her to shout out, “Four!”
However, she was drawing a complete blank. In fact, she was positive that there wasn’t anything else that happened after that. She was getting tired again, probably from concentrating so hard, and just wanted to fall asleep. Couldn’t they simply tell her what had happened and let her take a nap?
“Sorry, I don’t.” Caroline shrugged, then yawned. “The last thing I remember was reaching for that binder on the top shelf.”
It was then that a second man walked into the room and Caroline’s breath caught as he took off his cowboy hat and ran a golden hand through his black, close-cropped hair.
Her entire body eased back onto the bed and she smiled in relief, everything finally making sense. “Oh, there you are.”
“So you know him?”