“You should never have had to be Rhett’s daughter,” he whispered hoarsely. A girlish blush suffused her cheeks, but there was deeper meaning in his comment. Something that read like guilt. He didn’t elaborate. “A practitioner shouldn’t have to fork out their own money, and a clinic can’t run on donations, Sky. You’ll bleed yourself dry on every other case that comes through the door.”
“I’ve bled for years,” she whispered in such a quick response she couldn’t bite her tongue, and she felt her eyes sting around the rims. His hand fell. His brow furrowed. “Every time I treat a stray or volunteer to treat the shelter animals, many of whom were abandoned or surrendered or abused, I picture Courage all those years ago. I picture me.” Courage, the dog Travis had adopted from her arms. The dog he’d named Courage just for her. A dog he’d adopted so she could visit the Legacy to see it. The dog that had started it all. “I think on Rhett, and I think on you—”
She cut herself off. Too late.
Travis smarted, as if the remark had jabbed him like a rusty barb. Goddammit! It hadn’t been her intention to lump him in with Rhett. But it was true. Her bleeding heart had strengthened her, but it had ached repeatedly, through secondhand prom dresses and school photo proofs that were never purchased and empty liquor bottles on Rhett’s trailer floor, and yet she’d be lying if she said Travis wasn’t partly to blame. His death, the one man who she thought would always be there for her, was part of the reason she was who she was now. It had changed everything about her life. Changed the course of her future. Changed who she was as a person. It was why she shut the world out and hid behind her animals. She swallowed hard, their eyes connecting, so close she could see the flecks of lighter brown, amber, and gold striating his deep obsidian irises, the likes of which glowed like fire in a sunset.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured.
His hand cupped her cheek again. This time, with purpose. With firm, unabashed assertiveness.
“I’ll pay for her.” A harsh edge lined his words, as if he meant to pay for a helluva lot more. His thumb brushed back and forth across her cheek. She relented an inch, couldn’t help leaning into his palm or pressing a kiss into his skin, it felt so good. His breath hitched, a rough, needy inhale. His thumb braced her chin, mashing her lips out of shape as his eyes fixed hard on her mouth. He began to lean over the stretcher toward her. Her lips burned, anticipating—
“Dr. Rivers, do you want me to call Judy-Lynn again?”
Travis snapped his hand away at the sound of Joshua shuffling around in the exam room.
A shaky breath leaked from her lips as he withdrew his wallet, the same wallet he’d carried since his sixteenth birthday, she realized—these gifts from his dad meant more to him than he’d ever used to let on, it seemed—taking out a credit card and flicking it like a cigarette onto the reception desk as they rolled the stretcher again, down the hall toward her lead-plated room.
As if he could simply swipe his card to mend a broken heart.