Warm Nights in Magnolia Bay by Babette Jongh (best summer books .TXT) 📗

“Broken? No. It can’t be.” It hurt like holy hell, though.

He looked her in the eye, his blue-jean-blue eyes serious. “You want to stand up and prove it to me?”

The very thought of standing on that foot made adrenaline flare like a gas stove meeting a lit match.

Chapter 10

Quinn scooped Abby up and stood, holding her against his chest. “Please tell me you don’t have a field trip scheduled for today.”

She wrapped her arms around his neck. “I don’t.” The hot breeze blew her hair across his face; the wavy strands smelled like flowers.

“Good. I don’t have work, either, so we both get to spend the day in the ER.” He carried her toward the closed field gate, which they had both climbed over when the hysteria began.

“Wait,” she said. “You’ve got to clean up all the wire first.”

He held her tighter. “And leave you sitting in the dirt? I don’t think so.”

“But…”

He unlatched the gate. “Shush. First things first.” He carried her into the barn and put her on the UTV’s passenger seat. Georgia hopped in, too, then Quinn drove back into the field and loaded up the damaged wire. “Can you take that boot off? You probably should, in case your foot starts to swell.”

She started working on the laces. “Ow, ow, ow… We should have done this in the first place.”

“Done what?” He tossed the fence posts on top of the wire. “Broken your foot? Taken off your boot?”

“No. I’m saying that we should have put all the discarded wire in the UTV before any of this happened.” A nice way of blaming him, he thought—saying we when she really meant him.

“Live and learn.” As he recalled, he’d been too busy noticing her cute backside and can-do attitude to be thinking very hard about equine safety concerns. He climbed over the closed half-door of the UTV and wrestled the stick shift into reverse. “I’ve made an mistake I won’t repeat.”

“I’m not blaming you,” she blurted out. “If anyone’s to blame, it’s me.”

He ground the gears and the UTV shot forward. “Of course.”

“No, really,” she insisted. “Aunt Reva told me to check the grazing field for hazards on a regular basis. I didn’t do it at all, or I’d have—”

The UTV’s brakes squealed and gravel scattered when Quinn stomped on the brake, parking next to the farm truck. “Truck keys?”

“In the ignition.”

He picked up Georgia, who growled at him. “You can’t go,” he told her. “Where do I put this dog so she’ll stay put while we’re gone?”

“You know, I really think this isn’t as bad as you think. Probably I just need to rest it.”

Yeah, not really. He was pretty sure he’d heard a snap when that donkey ran over her. He lowered his eyebrows at her and looked down at the dog he held.

“Close the doggy door in the laundry room and leave her in the house. And grab my purse from the… From wherever it is. It’s pink leather. Might be hanging on those hooks by the door. Or maybe…”

He didn’t hear the rest of what she said because he’d gone inside and closed the door. He got the dog situated and found the purse, kicking himself the whole time. Who was gonna feed all these hollering animals when she was hobbling around on crutches?

As if the universe delighted in answering his question, he caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror by the back door on his way out.

* * *

Quinn was such a gentleman! He carried her into the waiting room of the local ER, deposited her into one of the wheelchairs by the door, and then wheeled her to the sign-in desk. He hadn’t been very chatty; in fact, he’d been a little broody. He was probably worried about her.

Within minutes, the efficient medical staff had taken over, passing her from a nurse who typed up the intake info to a fourteen-year-old X-ray technician to the elderly orthopedic doctor. He slapped a big sheet of film up on the light box on the wall. “Good thing you’ve got somebody to wait on you for the next few weeks.” He pointed out two clearly broken bones on the arched foot in the blurry image. “You’re gonna need it.”

Abby’s heart sank low. Yes, her foot hurt like hell, but she’d been hoping for a mild sprain. “For how long?”

“Six to eight weeks, I’d say. But you can tell your man anything you want. If you want to milk it for more than a cool two months, I won’t tell.”

He put a cast on Abby’s foot that went all the way up to her knee. “In my opinion,” he said, “a cast is better than a boot.”

“I feel all better, then,” Abby said, softening the snark with a smile. While the fiberglass cast dried and hardened, she chewed her fingernails and worried about what she’d tell Aunt Reva—and about when she’d tell Aunt Reva. Maybe she should call right now and ’fess up to the wire they’d left lying around, and the danger she’d put the donkeys in.

Or maybe Abby shouldn’t tell Reva at all, because she knew her aunt would drop the internship and come back home. At only two weeks into her sabbatical, Reva might take Abby’s accident as a sign from the universe that she should abandon the idea and come back home. (Reva took pretty much everything as a sign from the universe.)

As Abby pondered the wisdom of calling (or not calling) Reva, her phone pinged with an incoming text from her aunt. Is everything okay at the farm? For some reason, I can’t get you off my mind today.

Abby made a few false starts, typing and then deleting what she’d written. She finally settled on an evasive truth. Everything’s fine at the farm! Don’t worry about us!

Because Abby and her broken foot weren’t at the farm at the moment, so technically, everything at the farm was fine. She followed that text with another;