Angel's Rest(98)

Then … a touch. A brush against his arm.

A paw.

Oh, for crying out loud. Sighing, he threw off the covers and sat up. He could barely make out the dog’s form in the darkness. Stupid dog. Gabe had put him out before they’d gone to bed. Softly, so as not to wake his wife, he said, “I ought to let you out and leave you out.”

Wearing only his boxers, Gabe trod sleepily downstairs. Halfway down, he realized the dog hadn’t followed him. “What now?” he muttered. Then, in a voice just above a whisper, he called, “Hey, dog. C’mon.”

Still nothing.

“Grrr,” Gabe grumbled. He trudged back upstairs and reentered his bedroom. What was wrong with the mutt? For a dog, he was relatively smart. It wasn’t like him to do something—

“Ouch!” Gabe yelped as his bare foot came down on something sharp on the floor.

“Gabe?” Nic asked, sitting up in bed and switching on the lamp. “What’s wrong?”

“I stepped on … a stapler? How did that get in the middle of the floor?”

“Oh, man. I was finally asleep.”

“Sorry, but I’m only partially to blame. The dog woke me up. I thought he wanted out, but apparently not. And if that weren’t enough, he dragged the stapler off the desk and dropped it in the middle of the doorway, where I’d step on it.”

“Tiger wouldn’t do that,” Nic protested. “Look, he’s curled up in his bed sound asleep. You must have been dreaming.”

“That dog shouldn’t be sleeping in here anyway. He snores.”

“Well, yes, but so do you.” With that, Nic threw off the bedcovers and padded into the master bathroom.

Gabe scowled down at the dog. He had plenty of places to sleep—Nic had dog beds scattered in almost every room in the house. “It’s about time I assert myself as the alpha dog in the pack,” Gabe declared. From now on, the boxer would be banished from the bedroom.

As he bent over to grab the dog bed and wake the troublemaker, a frightened gasp from the bathroom distracted him. He jerked upright. “Nic?”

“Gabe, something’s wrong. I think … oh, God … Gabe, I’m having contractions.”


“What do you mean, CareFlight isn’t available?” Gabe yelled into the telephone’s receiver as he rifled through a pile of newspapers on the counter in the kitchen. Where had he left his keys?

“I’m sorry, sir. There’s been a horrible accident on the highway east of Montrose. An eighteen-wheeler hit a bus. All birds in the area are tied up there.”

“Then send someone from Colorado Springs.”

“The weather has flights grounded along the front range. I’ll send someone as soon as possible, but you need to understand it will be a couple of hours before anyone can get to you.”

“Fine.” He slammed down the phone with a curse, then turned to Nic, who was securing the boxer in his crate. “It’ll be two hours at least,” he told her. “What do we do?”

“I’m afraid to wait.” She gestured toward the kitchen table, where his keys lay in plain sight. “You’d better drive me.”

Five minutes later, they were on the road. For the first fifteen minutes of the trip, neither of them spoke. Tension was a living, breathing beast riding with them.

Nic sat with a small spiral notebook and a pencil in hand. When he noticed her writing something, he glanced at the dashboard, where the clock’s red numerals read 3:42. “Another contraction?”

“Yes.”

Damn. His natural inclination was to punch the gas pedal, but the storm, the terrain, and his own horrific history behind the wheel kept him driving at a safe speed.

“It’s probably nothing,” Nic said. “This whole thing is probably just a case of a first-time mom who doesn’t know what she’s doing. Dr. Marshall said checking me was just a precaution.”

“Uh-huh.”

They rode in silence for another twenty minutes before Gabe said in a grim tone. “Eternity Springs doesn’t need a healing center. It needs a hospital, or at the very least a full-service medical clinic with a real staff of real doctors. If you’d had a heart attack, you’d be dead.”

“No, actually we’re well-equipped to deal with heart attacks. The town paid for EMT training for six people. The system usually works. It’s just our bad luck that I’m having this trouble while another serious medical situation is taking place under horrible weather conditions.”