Chapter Ten
S omehow, she and Wes managed to maintain a cordial relationship over the next week while she helped fill in the gaps of Brielle’s care, between his work schedule and the girls’ science camp schedule.
He was friendly enough when he would drop his daughter at Jenna’s apartment in the morning, a half hour before she had to take the girls to camp.
He would chat with Jenna about her upcoming day and would ask questions of Addie about camp and what other activities she was doing that summer.
A few mornings when he had extra time, he even offered to take Theo outside to the garden so that Jenna could focus on finishing up breakfast and getting ready for her shift at the gift shop, on the days she worked.
In the evenings, the routine was reversed. He would come to pick up his daughter about an hour after camp finished for the day. He never lingered long but took time to chat a little about the day and their respective plans for the evening.
Despite her lingering tumult over the kisses they had shared—and the secret part of her that undeniably wanted more—she quite enjoyed the routine they had fallen into. She sensed he did as well.
Everything changed on the morning of the girls’ last day of science camp.
The morning started like all the others. She and Addie both got up early to walk the dog on the beach as the morning mist hung heavy on the shore and the gulls swooped to scavenge for juicy treasure along the detritus left from high tide.
She wasn’t quite sure what happened. One moment, they were enjoying the morning, the next, the dog stopped to sniff directly in front of Jenna and she got tangled in his leash.
She could feel herself topple and reached a hand out to brace herself. Under normal circumstances, she would have been fine, simply annoyed at her own clumsiness. She landed on soft sand, after all.
Something in the sand wasn’t soft, though. She felt a slicing pain as her palm caught on something jagged buried in the sand. A piece of shell or driftwood, perhaps, or maybe even a shard of glass left by some unknown beach visitor.
She gasped at the pain and immediately rolled to her side, clutching her hand.
Addie looked down at her, wide-eyed. “What happened? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she lied.
She pulled her hand away and saw she had a nasty cut about four inches running right through her life line, between her right thumb and forefinger. “I’m afraid I’m bleeding, though,” she admitted to her daughter.
She could only be glad she had been the one to fall and not Addie.
“Oh no! How did you cut yourself?”
“I’m not sure. Something sharp in the sand. I should find whatever it was so it doesn’t hurt someone else.”
“I can look.”
“I’ll do it,” she said quickly, with visions of Addie being cut as well. “I don’t want you to hurt yourself, too. Why don’t you keep walking Theo down the beach a little more, and I’ll dig around and see if I can figure out what it was.”
Addie looked undecided but after a moment, her daughter obeyed. She and the dog headed away from Jenna a short distance.
Her hand was now bleeding copiously, which was one of the reasons she had sent Addie away. She didn’t have anything with her to stop the bleeding so she grabbed a corner of her T-shirt and ripped, feeling a pang as she did.
This had been one of Ryan’s T-shirts that she had packed away after he died. She wore them as sleep shirts and to work out.
She still had several of his shirts left, including three that she had sewn into pillows for Addie’s room. Still, losing this one stung worse than her cut, like slicing one more thread between her and her past.
She quickly wrapped the strip of cloth around her hand, hoping to stop the worst of the bleeding, then dug through the deep sand there until she found the culprit, a shell from what looked like a Dungeness crab, with a broken, jagged edge.
She tossed it into one of the garbage cans set at intervals along the beach, then caught up with Addie.
“Mom, you need a real bandage,” her daughter said, taking in the makeshift bandage that was also now covered in blood.
Jenna strongly suspected she needed stitches, but she didn’t want to worry Addie. A trip to the doctor or urgent care clinic could wait until after she dropped off the girls at day camp. Meantime, she would do some rudimentary first aid back at their apartment to staunch the bleeding.
They reached the second floor landing to their apartment just as Wes came down the stairs from the third floor, chatting with Brielle.
He stopped on the stairs halfway to the landing and stared at her.
“Good Lord. What happened to you?”
He looked gorgeous, she couldn’t help but notice, in worn jeans, work boots and a T-shirt that stretched over his hard muscles.
She, on the other hand, looked like she had gone a few rounds with an angry badger. She had tried to hold her arm above her heart to slow the blood flow. As a result, blood had dripped through her makeshift bandage to streak down her arm.
“I’m fine. It’s nothing. I stumbled while we were walking. When I reached out to catch myself, I landed on a broken shell with a sharp edge in the sand.”
“That looks like it really hurt,” Brielle exclaimed.
“It looks worse than it is.”
“My mom didn’t cry at all. She’s tough.”
Addie’s admiring tone made Jenna feel about a thousand feet tall. She only hoped her daughter still looked up to her after she reached the difficult teenage years, just on the horizon.
“Let me take a look at it,” Wes said, holding out a hand.
She didn’t want to show him, though she wasn’t sure if that was embarrassment at her own clumsiness or hesitation to have him touch her again, given the heat that flared between them at any given moment.
“You don’t have time,” she protested. “We’re late returning from our walk. You’ll be late for work. Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”
“I have time for this,” he said, in a tone that brooked no argument.
When her gaze met his, the implacable hardness there told her she had no choice. He intended to look at her hand. She should be grateful for his concern, not frustrated by his stubbornness.
With a resigned sigh, she unlocked her apartment and opened the door for all of them to follow her inside.
Theo, who had caused the whole disaster, trotted into the house, planted himself on his haunches and grinned at the four of them, clearly delighted to have his favorite people all together.
“Addie, will you clean up the breakfast dishes and load the dishwasher?”
“Okay.” Her daughter headed for the kitchen, Brielle right behind her.
“I’ll help,” her friend said.
Meanwhile, Wes pointed toward Addie’s bathroom, the closest to the living room. “Let’s start by rinsing it to get the sand and blood off so we can see what we’re up against.”
She followed him to the bathroom, wondering why she had never noticed how small the room was.
“I don’t want to get blood all over you.”
“By the end of the day, I usually have oil and brake fluid and any manner of other things all over me. This is nothing.”
He turned on the water while he unwound the scrap of T-shirt from her palm. She winced as the fabric caught in her jagged wound.
“Sorry.”
“It’s not your fault I’m so clumsy. I still don’t know quite how I tripped. I think I got tangled in the leash and caught myself before I could fall on Theo.”
“Bad luck that you would land right on a broken shell.”
“Yes. Out of the entire beach filled with soft, forgiving sand where I could have fallen, I had to choose that very spot.”
She shook her head, trying at the same time to catch her breath as he gently held her hand this way and that under the stream of warm water.
He smelled so good. He was obviously just out of the shower and smelled like a combination of laundry soap and some outdoorsy kind of male shampoo.
He was warm, too. After their chilly walk along the beach, she couldn’t help wishing she could snuggle up against him to draw some of his heat back inside her.
“How bad is it, Dr. Calhoun?”
“I’m afraid you’re going to need stitches. It’s not long, but it’s pretty deep. You said you landed on a broken shell? When was your last tetanus shot?”
She thought back to her most recent medical history and remembered getting one around the time that Ryan had died, when she had scraped herself on a nail trying to plant some flowers in the small fenced yard of their apartment.
“I should be good in that regard.”
“Do you want me to take the girls to day camp and then run you to the urgent care clinic? I can call my bosses and let them know an emergency has come up.”
She was very tempted to lean on him, to let him take over. It was very hard to ignore the allure of that broad chest, those strong shoulders.
She was tough, she reminded herself. She could handle this, even though her hand throbbed with pain, which was also giving her a headache.
“I should be all right. If you could just help me wrap it better, that would be really great. It’s my right hand and I’m right-handed, so I don’t think I will be able to do a very good job with my left hand.”
“You got it.”
Using her first-aid kit after she showed it to him, he applied antibacterial ointment with a gentleness that made her shiver.
She could only hope he didn’t notice as he rooted through the kit to find the largest bandage she had.
“This should hold you for a little while, until you can have someone take a look. You should definitely take care of it sooner rather than later.”
“Thank you.”
Bending low over her hand, he applied the bandage to her palm, pressing carefully around the edges to ensure the wound was protected as much as possible.
“I wish I could do more.”
“You’ve done enough. I’ll be fine. I’ll call my primary care doctor right now and see if I can get in this morning to have Dr. Sanderson take a look.”
“You see Eli Sanderson?”
“Yes. Do you know him?”
“I knew him in the military, only peripherally. But we have friends in common. He and his wife invited me to dinner when I first moved to town. They were very kind.”
“Melissa actually lived here in Brambleberry House before I did. We’ve become friends through Rosa, who is her good friend.”
“She’s the one who convinced Rosa to rent me an apartment when I was looking.”
“I’m glad she did,” Jenna said.
His gaze met hers and the moment seemed to stretch between them, taut and fragile, like the thread of a spider’s web, gleaming with morning dew.
Something sparked in his expression as he looked down at her, something hot and glittery that left her a little dizzy.
Maybe she had lost more blood than she thought, she told herself. Or maybe it was simply a result of being in such close proximity to Wes Calhoun.
He was the first to look away.
“That should do it. Are you certain you don’t want me to take you to urgent care? I feel wrong leaving you in your hour of need.”
“No. Definitely not. I’m fine. Thank you, though. You’ve been very kind.”
“Right. That’s what I’ve been,” he said, his voice gruff.
She sensed he wanted to say more, but Addie and Brielle came to check on her and the moment was gone.
After she had been treated at Eli’s office, Jenna returned to the house to let Theo out, then moved him to the fenced dog yard, placing his open crate in the shade under the covered porch, along with plenty of water and food.
When she was certain the puppy was settled and comfortable, she drove to the By-the-Wind gift shop for her noon shift.
The morning fog had blown away, as it usually did during the summer, leaving the day sunny and mild. She parked as close as she could manage. She would have been better off walking, judging by the number of vehicles clogging the downtown area.
The tourist season was in full force. From here, she could see the wide, long Cannon Beach stretching north for miles. It was dotted with umbrellas, bikes, swimmers and the occasional kite.
The crowds of visitors descending every summer could be a nuisance but so much of the Cannon Beach economy depended on them that she couldn’t be too upset.
Crowds were a small price to pay for the sheer delight in living in such magnificent surroundings. And if the masses of people became too overwhelming, she could always take a drive down the coast and find an isolated beach somewhere or she could hike into the hills east of town and find a beautiful mountain river wending its way to the ocean.
That was the beauty of the Oregon Coast. It was long, vast and certainly not overpopulated.
She let herself into the employee entrance of the store just as Rosa was coming out.
“What is this?” her friend cried, looking aghast at her bandage. “What have you done to yourself?”
“It’s nothing. Just a bit of bad luck. I fell on the beach this morning when I was walking with Theo and Addison and managed to land on a broken shell. I’m fine. Eli gave me only five stitches and some local anesthetic so I can’t feel a thing right now.”
“Oh, you poor thing. You must go home and rest your hand. I can work for you instead.”
Jenna rolled her eyes at this very pregnant woman trying to be protective of her over a little scratch.
“Absolutely not. Please don’t worry about me. The bandage is annoying but it should not stop me from doing anything.”
“I am sorry this happened to you. Did Addie help you with your bandage?”
She held up her bandaged hand. “Dr. Sanderson and his staff get the credit for this one. But Wes helped me with the initial triage.”
Rosa gave her a side glance. “Did he? I told you, he is a good man.”
Jenna was beginning to agree. Whenever she remembered the tender way he cared for her injury, she felt warmth seep through her.
She did not tell her friend that Wes was not only a good man. He was definitely a good kisser.
“Do not worry about me,” she said again to Rosa. “I’ll be just fine. Go and put your feet up.”
Rosa sighed. “Wyatt will probably come with his police car and drag me home if I don’t rest. If not him, Carrie and Bella will do it.”
Carrie was the sister of Rosa’s husband and Bella was Carrie’s daughter. Both of them adored Rosa and were even more protective of her than Jenna was.
“Good. You should listen to them. I’ll see you later.”
She hugged Rosa and hurried into the gift shop, grateful again for good friends.