Dr. Sanders—Ileana, he’d heard the nurse call her—shook her head. “I’m sorry,” she said again. “But I’m only allowing family members to enter Ms. Cantrell’s room and even they are only allowed five minutes with her.”
“Is she in the intensive care unit?”
The woman’s shoulders drew back, as though remembering privacy laws for patients. He wondered just how well this doctor knew the woman. Maybe Frankie had been a patient of hers for a long time, but that didn’t necessarily mean Dr. Sanders knew all that much about Frankie’s personal life.
“Not exactly. She’s in a room where she’s monitored more closely than a regular room. That’s why I made the decision to limit her visitors to relatives only. People can be well meaning, but they don’t realize how exhausting talking can be to someone who’s ill.”
Mac’s visit hadn’t meant to be well meaning or anything close to it. Maybe that made him a hard-nosed bastard, but then in his eyes, Frankie had been more than callous when she’d walked out of Mac’s and Ripp’s lives. She’d promised to come back, but that promise had never been kept. Two little boys, ages eight and ten, had not understood how their mother could leave them behind. And now that they were grown men, ages thirty-seven and thirty-nine, they still couldn’t understand how she could have been so indifferent to her own flesh and blood.
Mac’s gaze settled on the doctor’s face, and Frankie McCleod was suddenly forgotten. Plain or not, there was something about Ileana Sanders’s soft lips, something about the dark blue pools of her eyes that got to him. Like a quiet, stark desert at sunset, she pulled at a soft spot inside him. Before he realized what he was doing, his glance dropped to her left hand.
No ring or any sign of where one had once been. Apparently she was single. But then, he should have known that without looking for a ring. She had an innocent, almost shy demeanor about her, as though no man had ever woken her or touched her in any way.
Hell, Mac, her sex life or lack of one has nothing to do with you. Plain Janes weren’t his style. He liked outgoing, talkative girls who weren’t afraid to show a little leg or cleavage and drink a beer from a barstool.
Yeah. Like Brenna, he thought dourly. She’d showed him all that and more during their brief, volatile marriage. Since then he stuck to women who knew the score.
Sucking in a deep breath, he tried again. “I guess you’d say I’m more than a visitor, Dr. Sanders. I—well—you might consider me…a relative.”
Even if Renae hadn’t told her that the man was from Texas she would have guessed. Not just from the casual arrogance in the way he carried himself, but the faint drawl and drop of the g at the end of his words were a dead giveaway.
“Oh? I didn’t realize Frankie had relatives living in Texas.”
“We haven’t been together—as a family—in a long time. And we just learned that she was living in New Mexico.”
Totally confused now, Ileana gestured to one of the couches. “Let’s have a seat, Mr. McCleod. And then maybe you can better explain why you’re here in Ruidoso.”
Without waiting for his compliance, Ileana walked over and took a seat. Thankfully, he followed and seated himself on the same couch, a polite distance away.
As he stretched out his legs, her gaze caught sight of his hands smoothing the top of his thighs. Like the rest of him, they were big and brown, the fingers long and lean. There was no wedding ring, but then Ileana had already marked the man single in her mind. She doubted any woman had or ever could tame him. He looked like a maverick and then some.
With a sigh she tried to disguise as a cough, she turned toward him and said, “Okay. Maybe you’d better tell me a little about yourself and your connection to Frankie. None of this is making sense to me.”
He glanced over to a wall of plate glass. Snow was piled against the curbs and beneath the shade of the trees and shrubs. It was as cold as hell here in the mountains, and being in this hospital made Mac feel even colder. At the moment, South Texas felt like a world away.
“I imagine right about now you’re thinking I’m some sort of nutcase. But I’m actually a deputy sheriff from Bee County, Texas. And I have a brother, Ripp, who’s a deputy, too, over in Goliad County.”
Ileana inclined her head to let him know that she understood. “So you’re both Texas lawmen who work in different counties.”
“That’s right. So was our father, Owen. But he’s been dead for several years now.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. And your mother?”
His gaze flickered away from hers. “We’re not certain. You see, my brother and I think Frankie Cantrell is our mother.”
If a tornado had roared through the hospital lobby, Ileana couldn’t have been more shocked, and she struggled to keep her mouth from falling open.
“Your mother! Is this some sort of joke?”
“Do I look like I’m laughing?”
No, she thought with dismay. He looked torn; he looked as though he’d rather be anywhere but here. And most of all, he appeared to be genuine.
“What makes you think she’s your mother?”
Clearly uncomfortable with her question, he scooted to the edge of the cushion. “It’s too long a story to take up your time. I’d better be going. I’ll—come back later. When you—well, when you think it’ll be okay for me to talk to her.”
For a moment, Ileana forgot that she was a doctor and this man was a complete stranger. Frankie and her family had been friends with the Sanderses for many years. In fact, Ileana’s mother, Chloe, was worried sick praying that her dear friend would pull through. If this man had something to do with Frankie, Ileana wanted to know about it. She needed to know about it, in order to keep her patient safe and cocooned from any stress.
Grabbing his arm, she prevented him from rising to his feet. “I’ve finished my rounds, Mr. McCleod. I have time for a story.”
He glanced toward the plate glass windows surrounding the quiet waiting area. “There’s not a whole lot of daylight left. I’m sure it’s time for you to go home.”
“I can find my way in the dark,” she assured him.
Her response must have surprised him, because he looked at her with arched brows.
“All right,” he said bluntly. “I’ll try to make it short. When I was ten and my brother eight, Frankie McCleod, our mother, left the family.” Reaching to his pocket, he pulled out a leather wallet and extracted a photo. As he handed the small square to Ileana, he said, “That was twenty-nine years ago, and we never heard from her again. At least us boys never heard from her. We can’t be certain about our father. He never spoke of her. But a few days ago, we found out that Frankie Cantrell had been corresponding through the years with an old friend of hers in the town where we lived. She has to be Frankie McCleod Cantrell.”
Dropping her hand away from his arm, Ileana took the photo from him and closely examined the grainy black and white image. Two young boys, almost the same height and both with dark hair, stood next to a young woman wearing an A-line dress and chunky sandals. Her long hair was also dark and parted down the middle. If this was Frankie Cantrell, she’d changed dramatically. But then, nearly thirty years could do that to a person.
“Oh, dear, this is—well, my family and I have been friends with the Cantrells for years. We never heard she had another family. At least, I didn’t. I can’t say the same for Mother, though.” She handed the photo back to him, while wondering if it was something he always carried with him. “The woman in the picture—she’s very beautiful. I can’t be sure that it’s Frankie. I was only a small child when she first came here. I don’t recall how she looked at that time.”
He lifted