The Cowboy's Texas Sky (The Dixons of Legacy Ranch 2)

Chapter Twenty-One

Stay. She deserved a family, too. She’d been right. He’d distracted her with his insta-lust for her, but she’d drawn a line in the sand. Chemistry, history, and meshing personalities just weren’t enough. He’d tossed and turned about it all through the night.

Travis had feared Sky’s pity, but he hadn’t gotten it. Instead, she’d given him a kick in the rear, and it had been just what he’d needed, someone to hear him, accept him, and then tell his stubborn ass to try again anyway.

Stay. The electron had found his atom. He just needed to prove he deserved to be sucked in now.

He scrubbed the betadine over his forearms, hands and fingers, his skin turning orangey brown as he sterilized and rinsed himself for the OR, then pushed with his back into the operating room, holding his hands up, dripping.

“Message Eugene Lopez for me, would you?” he said to the nurse as he passed her, maneuvering around the patient whose heart monitor beeped steadily, while Dr. James lined up syringes and clinked her dirty blade into the bin used for intubating the patient.

Her eyes crinkled in a flashing smile. He ignored it.

All day long, as Travis conducted surgery, saw follow-up patients in clinic, and sat for his PT exam, he’d stewed on what had happened. Skylar had prodded every sore spot she could prod. She was damn good at prying. He’d been so sure that admitting any of that to her would drive her away from him, and yet it had brought her close, brought her arms around him in an embrace that had nothing to do with pity and everything to do with love. And brought an ultimatum to his threshold to cowboy up.

“Sure, Dixon. What do you want me to say?” the nurse asked.

That Skylar was right? They couldn’t kiss this away? No matter how much he wanted to give into the fireworks he still felt when his lips and body meshed with hers, he had a chance to do it right this time. And if she was going to fight for him, he damn well better fight for her and Brandon just as hard. He had to be more for Brandon, not just the surgeon who’d reset his shoulder and buddied up to him over baseball. He’d vied to get a second chance with her at her clinic, but he needed to be ready to be a foster dad, too, not just ponder it like it was an amusing idea. She’d, in no uncertain terms, challenged him to see that even though circumstances had changed him, deep down, he was still himself, even after he’d snapped at her, downplaying her accomplishments as daydreams. She’d always seen him beneath the surface. It had always been his favorite thing about her, more than her beautiful body and memories of nights horizontal in his truck bed or her lush hair or musical laughter and road trips to truck stops to snap pictures of hats. That she had such intuition to see beneath the surface still and compel him to cut open his wounds to bleed for her meant something.

But of all her challenges, she’d challenged him to stay. Which meant the Dallas location was out. Alpine was in. He needed to call Toby and get over himself, for her, and brace himself to hear whatever hard things Toby might have to say to him about how he’d hurt him. He needed to be with Skylar to put in the work. Be patient with her. And she was here.

“Tell him Dallas is out. Gotta go back to the drawing board.”

“What does that even mean?” The nurse smirked behind her mask as she clicked away on the paging system and his scrub tech opened his sterile gown, gloves, and patted dry his hands with a sterile rag.

Travis chuckled. “He’ll know. Tell him if he wants All Creatures, then I got a new idea to float.”

The nurse punched the message into the paging system as his scrub tech helped him don his sterile gown, him turning in a revolution so she could tie it.

“Then open my cell phone messages. I need you to send Skylar Rivers a message for me.”

The nurse, used to his antics, did so, leveling a playful glance at him as she picked up his phone already plugged into the speakers. “Oh, ‘My Sky,’ is it?” A couple others in the operating room oooh-ed conspiratorially. “Single doctor’s got a lucky lady after all?”

He grinned but couldn’t nod. He hoped to have her, but he was still earning it. She was as scarred as he was, and he didn’t yet fully know why. “And don’t you go snoopin’ through the thread. Just tell her we’re riding this coming Saturday.”

Again, the nurse smirked at his cryptic vagueness as his sterile gloves were stretched on next. He chuckled. “She’ll know what I mean. And add, ‘I’m stayin’.’ Then X out of it and don’t you dare look at whatever she sends back, y’hear?” he threatened playfully.

And as he marked the patient’s hip, as the surgery commenced and he asked the nurse to turn on a country playlist—earning a few strange looks and what about Smashing Pumpkins utterances—he made a mental note to call his prosthetist as soon as he was done charting on the surgery, to get a consult on what was best for riding, and to hound Lopez until he could get a sit-down with him to put a new location for the clinic on the table. He wasn’t going to let his own insecurities get in the way anymore, and maybe, just maybe, he’d finally be able to get Skylar to open up to him, too, so he would know how to convince her that he would always love her.