Brokenhearted Beauty(Divine Creek Ranch 19)(42)

He nodded in understanding. “I get the possessive thing. I might be the same way.”

Heat filled her cheeks as she gripped the tile samples and then pain seared one of her fingers and she dropped the tiles. “Ow!”

“Oh, crap!” Denny said, taking a look at her clenched hand as blood flowed out between her fingers. She opened it, revealing a copiously bleeding slice on one of her fingers. “This needs stitches. Hang on a second.” He pulled out a first aid kit and ripped open a gauze square and wrapped it around her throbbing finger. Awesome. Another delay and now I have a pain in my ass and in my hand.

“Those samples were left over from a couple of tile jobs I did. I’m sorry, Leah. I didn’t realize that one was so sharp or I never would’ve put it out for you.”

He apologized several more times in his truck on the way to the emergency medical care center down the street. He looked at the soaked gauze wrapped around her finger as he pulled the door to the care facility open for her and said, “I’m sorry your visit is ending on a negative note, Leah. I know you wanted to be on the road by now.”

“No, it’s all right. You really don’t have to keep apologizing. I mean it’s not like you put that sample out there so I could cut myself. You had no idea. And I need to work at being more flexible. This trip is important and I’m not leaving until we’re done.”

She bit her lip as her finger throbbed when the nurse on duty met them and peeled away the gauze and clucked as the bleeding started up again. “Let’s get you in a room and stitched up, honey.”

Thirty minutes later they were back at the store. She began to wonder if she was going to get out of Abilene whole when a piece of drywall toppled over on her, scaring the daylights out of her and giving her a goose egg on the side of her head. Afterward she felt silly for being so startled by it, but she stepped carefully from that point forward.

Late in the morning she finally said her good-byes and wished Denny luck. She stopped in for a quick lunch at a sandwich shop. When she came out, she discovered that someone had dinged her driver side door and left a vicious red dent in the white paint of her car.

She sat in her car and prayed for the rest of the day to go smoothly before she turned the key in the ignition. Figuring it might be good therapy, she pulled out a George Strait CD she hadn’t listened to in a long time and popped it into the player. It certainly couldn’t make the day any worse. She pouted over the dent, wondering if James might know someone who could fix it for her.

With him on her mind, her mood improved a bit. The situation was a little more complicated than it had been just a few days ago, but she honestly missed him, a lot. She had to admit that even though she was still angry with Vincent, she missed him, too. She was ready to get home. Her ass ached, her finger stung, her noggin throbbed, and her formerly pristine car now had a boo-boo, too.

With everything else that had gone wrong, George singing to her in the background didn’t even faze her. She could even sing along to “Marina del Rey” without getting tears in her eyes, and the memories of Patterson that inevitably came to her made her smile. With a start, she realized the nightmare that had been nagging her every morning since his death hadn’t been what woke her up. She’d still been upset over Vincent’s lapse but at least it was different. Maybe the cycle had been broken.

Feeling a little more confident, she put the car in gear, turned the volume up, looked out at the road ahead of her and declared, “Bring it on.”

It wasn’t very far down the road that she was regretting her cockiness. She’d stopped in a little town that looked as though neglect was about to kill it outright. The only thing decent about it was the highway that ran through it. Of the buildings she’d seen on the way through, half had been boarded up or abandoned. The rest looked in poor repair, including the gas station and convenience store she stopped at out of necessity to fill up her gas tank. The air even seemed a little foul and she couldn’t wait to be on her way.

She went inside to pay the nice lady behind the counter, because the card reader on the pump outside was out of order. Her stitched up finger was starting to throb and after climbing into her car she shook it a little, hoping the ibuprofen she’d just taken worked quickly.

Movement drew her eye as a dusty older Toyota slowed on the highway and then swerved into the gas station parking lot at a cockeyed angle and slammed right into her front end, knocking her into the steering wheel.

“Ow! My car!” she screamed, as water spilled all over her navy blue slacks and made a mess of her bandaged finger. “Son of a bitch!” She squinted at the car in disbelief and yelled, “What the hell?”