If You Need Me: The Ashford Legacy, Book 1 (5 page)

“Okay,” the vet said. “Has she been eating? Does she get a full crop?”

“Uh…I’m not sure. I mean, yes, she was eating, but she’s my first chicken. I don’t know about the crop.”

“Your parents own a ranch in Texas?” The implied “and you don’t know about chickens?” hung in the air.

“My mom is allergic to feathers. I was mostly around cattle growing up. And goats.” And the occasional pig—but those didn’t last long.

The vet felt the front of the bird’s chest and made a small
hmm
noise. “When was the last time she laid an egg?”

Rayna thought of the tray in the fridge and those teeny-tiny, cream-colored eggs. “I guess that would be three days ago. And now that I think of it, her appetite has been going downhill ever since.”

“Glove,” the vet said to the person behind her, then she turned back to Rayna. “Can I use your table?”

“Of course.” Rayna cleared the mail away to make room.

With one hand subduing the ruffled bird, the vet raised the other hand and the vet tech, a skinny young man with pimply skin and sparse facial hair, slid the glove down her fingers. When he added a squirt of lube to one finger, Rayna glanced at Kyle with wide eyes. Oh, poor Bratty.

The other assistant held Bratty’s wings while the vet rummaged around under her feathers. “Hmm… No obstructions. No egg lodged in the vent.”

“Is that good?” Rayna felt stupid as soon as the question passed her lips. Of course that must be good. Who wanted an egg stuck up their
vent
?

The vet tech placed an electronic scale on the table, and then Dr. Wheaten handed Bratty over to be weighed. She peeled off her glove and looked from Kyle to Rayna. “I’ve figured out what’s wrong with your hen.”

Rayna swallowed. If it wasn’t stuck eggs, it must be avian flu. Dear Lord, her parents were right. She straightened her spine, preparing for the weight of the vet’s next words. “Yes?”

“She’s gone broody.”

Rayna blinked. “She’s gone
what
?”

She didn’t think she and the vet would be friends if they met on the street. Even now, as the woman visibly tried to control her expression, she was smug. “She’s
brooding
. It’s a state of inactivity that hens go through when they’re trying to hatch eggs.”

Rayna’s mouth opened and shut. “But she doesn’t even have any eggs in her box. And besides, we don’t have a rooster here. It’s not like I let her out to roam the neighborhood like some feathered floozy—so I don’t see how she could be hatching any babies.”

The doctor finally smiled. “That’s correct. If her eggs aren’t fertile, they won’t hatch. That’s really the crux of the problem here.”

“Oh.” She glanced at Kyle, but his faced showed nothing.

“Because Silkies aren’t prized for their egg size,” the vet continued, “the brooding instinct hasn’t been bred out of them like many breeds of domesticated chickens. Therefore, Silkies stick to the natural cycle, they lay a clutch of eggs—they sit on the eggs until they hatch. And the process of chicks hatching snaps the mother out of the brood.”

So…Bratty wasn’t dying… She was trying to hatch invisible chicks. “I see.” Rayna glanced at Kyle again. Was he starting to look…
mad
?

“But I’m not saying you’re in the clear, Miss Sommers. Because of your hen’s crossbeak and her general malnutrition, a long brood might very well kill her. You need to keep her active, don’t let her sleep in the nesting box during the day until she comes out of this brood, and you’re going to have to start tube-feeding if you want to get her up to a healthy weight.”

“Tube-feeding,” she repeated. Oh shit. She was going to have to start shoving a tube down Bratty’s throat? Was there anything worse? Well, yes…a dead bird.

The vet began digging through the clear tub. “We’re going to get out the supplies and show you what you need to do. Do you own a blender?” Rayna nodded. “Good. Let’s start with once a day for a week, in addition to the deep dish of wet mash that you’ve been leaving out for her. I’ll return next week to check on her progress.”

Kyle watched silently, his gaze focused while the team went through a twenty-minute tutorial on how to tube-feed a bird. With every passing moment, Rayna felt more and more ashamed for dragging him into this. Every once in a while, she would glance at him through the camera, but then he’d shift his gaze away.

Yes, Kyle Ford was pissed.

When the doctor and her team said their goodbyes, they all but virtually kissed Kyle’s ring. They’d told her the bill was taken care of, but she had no idea how much this ridiculous episode had set Kyle back. She’d make sure he got every penny coming to him.

Rayna shut the front door and set Bratty in her pen, locking the hen out of the nesting box so she had no choice but to join the land of the living. Then she turned to Kyle, waiting for the worst. She knew from that look in his eyes—a hard gaze she’d never seen before—that it was coming.

It was so obvious, she didn’t even say anything. She just sat in front of the screen and folded her arms across her chest, her eyes going glossy…her heart breaking. She didn’t have to wait long.

“I can’t do this anymore, Ray.”

Her lips quivered. “I understand, and I’m so sorry. I feel like such an idiot. I’ll pay you back, Kyle. I have the money.” Technically, she might not have the money at the moment, but her biannual royalty check was in the mail.

His head cocked slightly to the side. “What are you talking about?”

“Um…I don’t know. What are you talking about?”

“
The distance
, Rayna. I—”

“Yes, Kyle, I understand. Really.” She knew this day would come, but still it wrenched her heart near out of her chest.

He placed his forearms flat on the desk and leaned closer to the camera. “Would you please stop ‘understanding’ and try listening to me?”

“Okay. Fine.” He might be upset, but did he really have to make things harder with explanations and a long goodbye? She was barely holding it together as it was. “I’m listening.”

“When you called…” Kyle cleared his throat and looked away from the camera for a moment, then his gaze returned with a vengeance. “Look, I love Bratty, but when you called I thought it was you…that
you
might be hurt. I don’t want to be this far apart anymore. I don’t want to be
teleconferenced
in when there’s an emergency. I want to be
with
you.”

“So…” she paused, squinting like she was peering through a dense fog, “…what are you saying?”

His head tilted toward the ceiling in exasperation, and he ran a shaky hand through his sandy brown hair. “I want… Shit. I want to see you, Rayna. I
need
to see you. I need to hold you and know you’re all right.”

It took her a moment to realign her thinking. Kyle didn’t want to break off their friendship—he wanted to step it up. Against all odds, he wasn’t through with her agoraphobic ass quite yet. As this realization dawned, relief flowed into her like a lungful of air after surfacing from a rough sea. “Well, then…come over.”

She wasn’t joking or making light of it, but he was in New York, after all, and she was in California, so she was surprised when he glanced at his watch and said, “I’ll be there in six hours.”

She would have thought he was just being sweet or indulging in wishful thinking, but he wasn’t smiling. “Really?”

“Yes. If you want me to. Can I…come over for a visit, Ray?” He was trying to keep his voice light and even, but this wasn’t the phone. She couldn’t mistake the undercurrent of deep emotion in the lines of his features.

After wanting him for so long, why would the thought of actually seeing him terrify her? But it did. She was pretty sure she was in love with Kyle Ford, but then there was something safe about loving a man who lived on the opposite coast. In the last few minutes, she’d gotten a bitter taste of what it would be like when this came to an end. Why shouldn’t she be scared of something that already had the power to decimate her heart? And she hadn’t even touched him yet.

“Six hours? Don’t you have to see if you can get a ticket first?”

“I have it covered. The only real question is—do you want me to come?”

She glanced at the stubby orange flower sticking out of the coffee mug and the table now littered with emergency veterinary supplies. All around her were little signs that pointed to Kyle and how significant he’d become in her life. She was scared, yes—but she wasn’t stupid. The corners of her mouth turned up in a smile. “I’ll be waiting.”

Chapter Five

I’ll be waiting
might have been better said
I’ll be shaving my legs, changing the sheets and cleaning until I collapse
.

It was getting too hot to scrub anymore in her faded fleece, even with the air-conditioning cranking, but she hated taking the chance of getting bleach on nicer PJs. And she had to clean; her singular focus on the fight against grime was the only thing keeping her from another major panic attack. Besides, the grout on the kitchen floor was nasty. And when was the last time she’d cleaned under the—

The sound of the doorbell brought her head up. She wiped a sweaty strand of hair behind her ear. Who could be bothering her at a time like this? It had been almost six hours since she’d talked to Kyle, and she felt horrible that he was probably stuck at some airport in the middle of the country right about now.

Grrrr…
If Jenn and James from next door were coming over to play with her hen again, she would pack Bratty a little overnight bag and hand her over just to get them out the door that much faster. She had things to do, after all, like her makeup and perfuming her sexy spots and getting the bleach off her skin.

The doorbell rang again. She glanced at Bratty, but the bird was staring longingly at the hatch to her nesting box and doing nothing to help. At least dogs barked at unwanted guests to scare them away. In her current state of mourning, Bratty was too self-absorbed to care.

Rayna crept to the peephole and peered through. It was a man. Not James and certainly not Jenn. Shit—a tall man. And he was wearing a brown sweater and he looked like…

“Shit!” she shrieked and plastered her back to the wall in sheer and utter panic.

No, this couldn’t be Kyle. There was no way he could get here this fast. He’d have to have wings, or be a pilot with his own jet or something. Plus, she stank like mildew remover and old toilet brushes! How could he do this to her? Yes, she’d had a shower, but that was before she’d tried to jackhammer six months’ worth of grime from between the kitchen tiles.

A knock sounded. “Rayna? Are you there?”

She pulled off her rubber gloves and launched herself toward the kitchen sink. “Coming!” she called, as she frantically washed her hands and forearms with pear-scented soap.

Standing by the door a moment later, she dragged a huge breath in through her nose—making the underwire of her old cotton bra poke into her ribs—then let it out again.

Her hand closed over the shiny silver doorknob and twisted.

Well, it tried to twist, but her muscles were going limp, and from the prickly, sick sensation in her fingers and toes, she was worried that a few seconds from now her whole body was going to go limp—when she passed out.

She squeezed the knob harder, pivoted her elbow, using a larger muscle group, and pulled. The door stopped three inches later, the security chain snapping taut against the frame. “Oh. Sorry.”

Her cheeks were so hot, she wasn’t sure if they were causing the sweat dripping down from her forehead, or if her body was releasing the sweat to put out the fire on her cheeks.

“Hi,” said a deep, sexy voice before she had a chance to close the door and try again.

She peered through the space, catching a small vertical slice of tall, dark and handsome. “Hi…”

He was smiling, waiting patiently like he wasn’t in a rush. She knew that smile. She knew that face. She’d just never seen it looking so 3-D before. She’d known Kyle was handsome, but the camera had done something to dull him. In real life, he was… “Oh shit.”

He blinked. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. You’re just…”

He looked at her expectantly.

“I mean…you should have warned me you were so good-looking in person.”

“Sorry.” He rubbed his nose with his index finger, like he might have been trying not to laugh. “And thanks. How’s Bratty?”

The question did something to her—broke the block of ice that had frozen her brain. This was Kyle. It was him in a different form, somehow even hotter than the digital version, but this was her Kyle.

“Hold on.” She closed the door on him then took two more breaths before sliding the chain from the lock and pulling the door open again.

There he was. Tall. Several inches taller than she could discern from the computer screen. He’d said he was six-two, but she hadn’t had much to compare that to. And his shoulders. They were wide. And not thin-wide, but sturdy-wide. Her gaze traveled up to his eyes. Blue. Dark, stormy, ocean blue. She’d technically known he had blue eyes, but they’d never looked blue in the dim, fuzzy light of the computer screen.

He stepped forward and she caught herself before she jumped back. He smiled that patient smile. He knew her. Knew her fears and her struggles. She was safe with him. “Hi,” he said, offering his hand but not reaching for her. “I’m Kyle. And it’s so nice to meet you.”