Instant Gratification Read online

  At least Spencer was flying in for a few days. She was counting on her co-worker and closest friend to liven things up around there.

  She set down her casserole and walked through her father’s place. It was familiar to her. It should be, she’d lived here for her first six years, and being here gave her an undeniable sense of nostalgia. Oddly enough, she remembered every nook and cranny of the three tiny bedrooms, two tinier bathrooms and postage stamp size living area and kitchen. She remembered her mom cooking in that kitchen…

  She swallowed the sorrow that never seemed to go all the way down, and right there in the middle of the living room, she let it all wash over her.

  Her mom had been born in New York. A city girl at heart, she’d fallen in love on a college science field trip in the Sierras with the brand new young doctor teaching the course.

  Her father.

  Blinded by nineteen-year-old love, Sandy had given up everything and moved across the country to be with him. They’d lived in wedded bliss until her first Sierra winter.

  It’d hit hard.

  The twenty feet of snow had been a rough shock, but going weeks at a time with no contact with the outside world had slowly done her mom in. When a bear had broken into their kitchen and eaten the Junior’s Cheesecake she’d had shipped from Manhattan, she’d tossed up her hands, said, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done, Eddie”, and had packed herself and Emma up.

  Eddie hadn’t tried to stop her.

  Back in New York, Sandy had rented a one room flat, and though Emma knew now that money had been tight as Sandy worked sixty hour weeks nursing, Sandy had never once let on.

  Emma wandered to the log mantle over the fireplace, and looked at the frames. There was one of herself as a newborn, another of her around five and missing her two front teeth. Then there was a glaring gap in the pictures because the next frame was of Emma at her college graduation, when her father had made an unscheduled appearance.

  But the one that caught her by surprise, the one that grabbed her by the throat, was of her mom. She looked to be in her early twenties, and was smiling with easy whimsy into the camera. Emma reached for the frame, picking it up, running her finger over the glass as if she could touch her mom one more time. “I’m back,” she whispered. “Back in Wishful. Who’d have thought it, huh?”

  Yes, well, make sure you check for spiders before you get into bed, darling. Those wolf spiders are everywhere.

  Her mom’s soft, laughing voice echoed in Emma’s head, clear as a bell, making her laugh in shock. Clearly, she was far more tired than she thought. That, or she needed a mocha latte pretty damn bad.

  She settled on sleep.

  The next day, Stone took a group on a moonlight hike up Sierra Point. It’d been five days since his accident, and he felt much better. Finally. After the hike, his guests, who were up from the Bay Area, requested he drop them off at a local bar, where they could drink the rest of the night away.

  Though there wasn’t much left to it—it was nearly one in the morning—he dropped them off at Moody’s, then walked back out to his truck and faced an annoying dilemma.

  A flat tire.

  He pulled out the tools and changed it himself, somehow managing to kneel on a rusty nail, cutting open his knee in the process. Probably the same rusty nail that had wrecked his tire to begin with, and besides bleeding down his leg, it hurt like a son-of-a-bitch.

  As if he didn’t have enough injuries to deal with.

  With a sigh, he went to the glove box for his first-aid kit, and found…nothing. “Goddammit, TJ.”

  TJ was always too lazy to restock his own kit, far preferring to grab Stone’s. He looked down. He was bleeding like a stuck pig through the new hole in his favorite Levi’s. Shit. Maybe if he just cleaned it out really good, he’d be fine—which seemed to be the theme of his life lately.

  Problem was, he didn’t want to die of tetanus. He could go the twenty minutes home to clean out the cut, or be at Doc’s in two.

  In the old days, he’d have had no problem showing up on Doc’s doorstep in the middle of the night. Hell, Doc had given each of the Wilders a key, and there’d been many, many times when Stone had just let himself into the clinic, grabbed what he needed, gone on his merry way without waking Doc, who’d appreciated not having to get up.

  Hoping the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree, even while knowing it had, Stone put the truck into gear and drove to the clinic. It was locked up tighter than a drum, all lights off. Limping now, dammit, he knocked lightly on the door to be polite, then fished out his key and let himself in. He flipped on the reception room light because if Emma woke up, he didn’t want to scare her. Doc had always kept the staff kitchen stocked up for the few times he had to use it as a third exam room. Stone limped across the room and flipped on that light as well, heading for the supply closet. He pulled out the hydrogen peroxide, some gauzes and—

  “Hands where I can see them, asshole, or I’ll kick your balls into next week.”

  He raised his hands in the air—slowly because he was still aching like crazy—and turned. Emma stood in the doorway in a pair of men’s boxers and a thin camisole, wielding a baseball bat like she knew how to use it. Her hair was loose and a bit wild, but her eyes were ice. She wore no make up, which he loved, and he really loved the bed head, but mostly his brain stuttered and came to a screeching halt on the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

  He really, really loved that part. “Just me,” he said lightly. “And FYI, you can’t threaten a guy’s balls when he’s facing the other way.”

  She didn’t lower her bat, not a single inch. “I can threaten them now.”

  He resisted the urge to cover them. “Okay, let’s all just relax.”

  “Relax? You broke in!”

  She was looking and sounding very New York, and maybe he was sick, but he liked it.

  A lot.

  And maybe, just maybe, he’d meant for this to happen tonight. “I didn’t break in, I have a key. Your father gave it to me. I tend to have a lot of emergencies…” He flashed a smile. “And he liked his sleep.”

  “You want me to believe that my father let you come and go through his medical supplies whenever you wanted?”

  “As the situation required,” he corrected, trying another smile.

  She still didn’t match it. She was scowling, actually, and that sharp gaze ran down his body, stopping on a dime at the hole in his jeans revealing the bloody knee. “You’re hurt.”

  “Just a little. I want to clean it out and—”

  “Let me guess. Get a Band-Aid.” With a sigh, she finally lowered the baseball bat and jabbed it toward a chair. “Sit.”

  Instead he pulled himself up on the counter and eyed the bat as she set it down. “You actually ever use that thing?”

  “Didn’t I just threaten to kick your ass?” She smiled grimly. “Trust me, I could have done it.”

  Maybe. Only because he’d been too busy dropping his jaw to the floor to protect himself. Holy shit, the woman had been hiding a smoking hot bod; full breasts with nipples that were pressing up against the material of her cami, a sweet set of hips and a strip of bared belly, revealed by the boxer shorts she’d rolled over several times to adjust to her frame.

  She moved past him, picked up one of the doctor’s coats hanging on a rack and slipped into it. Damn.

  “Sorry,” she said at his expression. “Only invited midnight callers get to see me in my pj’s.”

  “Can I get an invite?”

  Her laugh told him no way in hell was he getting an invite, but he smiled anyway. “You look pretty when you laugh.”

  She was still smiling when she came close and bent, peering at his knee. “No stitches this time.”

  “Good.”

  She straightened and eyed the cut over his eye. “And that looks to be healing. I thought maybe you’d need some antibiotics, but you don’t. But.”

  Ah, hell.

  “You need a tetanus shot. You k