Her steps slowed as she reached Cabrillo, the main street. The area was less familiar now, with new store-fronts on some of the buildings, and a few new structures housing a boutique and a crafts store. It was good to see the town looking prosperous, she supposed, though it did give her a twinge to see how things had changed.
Millie’s Café was just ahead, and that looked exactly the same. Maybe she would go in and have a cup of coffee and say hello to Millie, the mother of Shelley, her best friend in high school. Lights from the café spilled out onto the sidewalk, and Jodie began to anticipate how warm it was going to be once she’d gone in and snuggled into her old favorite booth.
But as she neared the corner, she got a glimpse of the people inside. It startled her to discover the place was packed. There were people crowding the entryway, waiting for seats, while others filled the booths, and still more sat at the counter. For a fraction of a moment, she got a flashing glimpse of a man who looked enough like Kurt to make her heart jump in dismay. Not wanting another possible run-in with that infuriating man, she just kept walking.
Darn! Was she really going to spend all her time reacting to Kurt? She couldn’t live this way. Looking back over her shoulder, trying to see if that really was him inside the café, she stepped off the curb and started across the street.
The thing was, there had never been a stoplight on that corner when she’d lived in Chivaree before. There had never been enough traffic to warrant one. Somehow, it hadn’t registered with her that there was one there now.
Brakes screeched. Fear flashed through her and she looked up, frozen for a few seconds. Then, she jumped, her whole body moving in a twitch reflex that somehow got her out of the way. But at the same time, her mind processed the fact that Kurt couldn’t be in Millie’s Café because that was Kurt’s face behind the wheel.
Kurt! After veering to miss her, he tried to regain control of his vehicle. And she watched in horror as his truck swerved just enough to get caught by a car coming in the other direction. There was a smash, a crunch, the horrifying shriek of metal in distress.
It wasn’t much more than a fender bender, but Jodie ran forward, apprehension flashing through her system, her heart in her throat. The driver of the car jumped out, swearing. But Kurt didn’t move. Dread building, Jodie yanked at the handle on the truck door. It came open, and she stared at the contorted way Kurt’s body lay in the cab. She gasped, and his green eyes opened.
“Hi,” he said, his wide mouth twisted, obviously in pain. “Uh, Jodie? Think you could call the paramedics? Something’s wrong with my leg.”
She was doomed, that was all there was to it. Every time she turned around, there was Kurt McLaughlin, interfering with her peace of mind. It was enough to make her want to scream.
Or at least complain a bit. But how could you complain about a man when you’d just crippled him?
Looking at him lying in his bed in the cozy house he shared with his baby daughter, Katy, she swallowed hard and wished she were anywhere else. Her brother Matt was using an automatic sander gizmo to smooth out a rough spot in the fiberglass cast he’d applied at the town clinic an hour or so before. Her brother David, who had helped get Kurt home, was standing around with his hands shoved down in the pockets of his jeans, looking very amused with it all. And she was standing in the shadows, between the bookcase and the closet, wishing the earth would open and swallow her whole.
“I knew Jodie had it in for me,” Kurt drawled, his voice half teasing, but with just enough of an edge to set her nerves twitching. “I just didn’t realize how far she was prepared to go.”
She moaned softly, but David couldn’t resist expanding on the joke.
“You know, sis, if you really want to take a guy out, you’re supposed to be the one in the car. He should be the one in the street, running for his life.”
She ignored him. She’d spent too many years fending off the pestering of big brothers—she knew better than to rise to the bait. Besides, she did feel terrible for what had happened, and she wanted to make sure Kurt knew it.
“I just don’t know how I could have been so stupid,” she began, and not for the first time.
Kurt looked up at her and groaned. “Jodie, if you try to tell me how sorry you are one more time, I’m going to have your brother use that surgical tape on your mouth.”
“We’d have to tape up her hands, too, or she’d be using them to give you apologies in sign language,” Matt said with a smirk.
“Do that, and she’ll have to resort to tapping out her pleas for forgiveness in Morse code with the toes of her shoes,” David threw in teasingly. “Let me tell you something. This sister of ours doesn’t give up easily.”
Jodie flushed as they all laughed. It was obvious her brothers both liked Kurt. She didn’t know how they could be so blind.
But another thing that stumped her was how well Kurt had taken the whole thing. She would have expected a little snarling, a few insults about watching where she was going, and a whole lot of swearing. But there had been very little of that. Maybe if he’d been grouchier about it all, she would feel better. At least then she could get mad instead of feeling so wretched.
Kurt had wanted paramedics. She only wished she could have obliged. But there were no paramedics in Chivaree. There was Old Man Cooper, who answered the phone at the fire department and then called around to the volunteers if there was a fire. He supposedly had a little first-aid training. But he certainly wasn’t competent to deal with a broken leg. So she’d called Matt. After all, he was the best physician in town as far as she was concerned. He’d come right away, bringing David with him, and between them they had carried Kurt to the clinic so that Matt could X-ray the leg.
No major bone was broken, but the patella was cracked, a situation that could be very painful and required a cast that held the knee immobile.
“We’ll have to keep you in the cast for a couple of weeks,” Matt had told him. “Then we’ll take it off and do some X-rays to see if you can transfer to a knee brace. That will give you a lot more freedom of movement.”
It had all gone pretty smoothly. They’d brought Kurt back to his house and installed him in his bedroom, where he was right now. Matt had given Kurt some sort of painkiller when he’d worked on him. Maybe that was why Kurt seemed to be taking it so calmly. Maybe he was just groggy from the medicine.
She wanted to go home. She ached to leave this behind. But she couldn’t really leave. After all, the accident had been her fault.
“Jodie is a licensed physical therapist,” Matt was saying. “That will be handy. She can help in your rehabilitation.”
“I’d forgotten that,” Kurt said. He grinned at her, knowing it would bug her. “That will be useful.”
Jodie felt numb. Everything that happened seemed to tie her more firmly to this man in one way or another. As she’d said before, she was doomed.
Matt rose to get something from his bag and, to Jodie’s surprise, he stopped in front of a framed picture of a cute baby girl, that was set on the top of an antique dresser.
“This your daughter?” he asked gruffly.
Kurt looked up and nodded proudly. “Yes, that’s Katy. She’s at my mother’s for the night.”
Matt was still staring at the picture in a way Jodie found a little odd. She couldn’t imagine when her big brother had become a child person. Considering that none of the six siblings in her family, including herself, were married or had children, she’d assumed they all felt pretty much the way she did. She didn’t dislike children, but she felt a lot more comfortable keeping them at a distance, avoiding too much up-close-and-personal