Chapter Fifteen

	Jake sped along the highway towards Smythe Corners.  The rain had finally let
up enough to drive.  He'd had to hold back on his speed, and the ride had taken much
longer than he would have liked.  He was feeling incredibly tense from hunching forward
peering through the rain-soaked windshield as the wipers flashed past hit line of vision. 
But at last, he'd finally made it to the little town.  He knew the road to Camp Logan was
around there somewhere.  He'd been there as a teen himself, but it had been years ago,
and the scenery had changed.  
Smythe Corners was situated at a cross-roads, with three directions for him to
choose from.  Digging far back into his memory he tried to imagine the bus ride to camp
as a fifteen year old.  He hadn’t paid any attention to the surroundings back then, until
they’d pulled into the camp. Even then, the first impressions of a teenage boy hadn't
been the trees and the lake, but rather, the girls.  He kicked himself now for having not
paid enough attention, as he stared down each available stretch of highway attempting
to pick out anything that might trigger his memories.  When nothing did, he decided on
the path of least resistance, which  led straight through, and with a clenched jaw, he
drove on.  The camp turn off wasn’t very far from town, that much he did remember.  If
he didn’t find it within a few minutes, he’d turn around and try another direction.
 He drove past a gas station with a tired looking old sign mounted on the top of a
tall steel pole.  He was certain he remembered that place, but nothing else looked
familiar.   He scowled to himself as he drove on.  Just as he was about to give up and
turn around, he spotted the sign for the Camp Logan turn off, and pulled his truck off the
highway.  
	As he sped along the tree-lined gravel road, it occurred to him that he
didn’t have a clue what he was going to say to Max when he got there.  What could he
say to her to make her change her mind if she’d become interested in someone else? 
What could he, Jake Forrester, offer her that would entice her away from Camp
Councillor Cal?  Lord knows, he’d sworn off romance and made her well aware of the
fact.  He'd spent endless hours warning her that there was no romantic future for them,
so why should she remain single just because Jake couldn’t stand the idea of seeing her
with another man?
	This thought brought his heart to his throat as he realized what he had just
admitted.  Why couldn’t he stand the idea of Max with someone else?  Because he
wanted her with him, that’s why. Him and only him!  Not only that, but he wanted her with
a curly topped redhead baby in her arms, or maybe even two or three.  He wanted her,
and he wanted her children — their children — and this thought scared the hell out of
him.
	The next turn in the road brought the camp buildings into view.  Instantly he
recognized everything. The place hadn’t changed at all in twenty years, he thought,
except for maybe a coat of paint on the cabins.  He recognized the campers cabins to
the left, and the staff cabins to the right, and noticed the huge fire pit right where he
remembered it.  Fireside sing-songs were always a great place to cuddle up with the
girls, he recalled, and the memory stirred images of Max and Cal sitting arm in arm,
laughing and singing in the warm glow of the fire. 
	“Damn!”  Jake swore under his breath as he pulled his truck to a stop outside the
camp office and threw open the door.   In the next breath he was running up the steps
and bounding through the door, startling the poor girl behind the desk who sat staring up
at him in shock.
	“My name's Mindy. Can I help you?” she asked, a little shakily, and Jake raked
his hand through his hair. The last thing he wanted to do was scare anyone, he thought
to himself, as he tried to pull himself back together.   He grinned, and the girl relaxed a
little.
	“I’m looking for Max,” he said, brows raised questioningly.  “Maxine McGreggor? 
She is a councillor here, isn’t she?”
	Mindy smiled and nodded at him.  “Oh yes, she is, but she’s not here right now.”
	“Not here? Where is she?”  Jake blurted out, trying to keep the panic from his
voice.
	“Well, umm — may I ask who you are and why you’re looking for her?” Mindy
questioned, shifting a little uncomfortably in her chair.
	“I’m a friend of hers, and why I’m looking for her is none of your business!” Jake
frowned down at her.  Time was being wasted.  He needed to find Max now.  “Just tell
me where she is.”
	Mindy frowned.  “Well, Cal took her into town about an hour ago, but ...”  Her
voice trailed off as she watched the man visibly wilt,  and spin around with his hand on
his head.  “Sir, are you alright?”
	Jake groaned, and shrugged, and stood looking out the window.  The rain had
stopped now, and a soft glow of sunlight was beginning to filter through the mist over the
lake.  He supposed it would look pretty, if he were in the mood to appreciate it.
	“You can wait here if you like,” Mindy was saying, her cautious voice filtering
through his mind.  “As soon as they’re finished at the hospital, I’m sure they’ll be coming
back here.”
	Jake spun around again and stared at her.  “Hospital?”
	“Well, yes.  Cal drove Max in to the hospital at Greenburg.  She fell this morning
and — “
	Jake didn’t hear another word.  He flew out the door, nearly knocking down
Suzanne as she approached the office, and was into his truck before the screen door
slammed shut.
	“Who the heck was that?” Suzanne asked, as she stepped into the office, still
watching the truck as is sped away from the camp buildings.
	“Don’t ask me!” Mindy said, shaking her head in disbelief. 
	“Well, whoever he was, he was sure a hunk!”  Suzanne commented. 
 	Mindy raised her brow. “He came barging in here looking for Max.  He seemed all
upset. He said he was a friend of hers.  Then when I told him she was at the hospital he
took off like he was a bullet shot out of a gun, before I had a chance to say anything
else.”
	“You say he was looking for Max?”  Suzanne looked at the younger girl in
surprise.  Mindy nodded silently, and Suzanne crossed her arms and gazed out the
window down the now empty driveway.  “Well I’ll be damned!” she said, under her
breath, a grin playing on her lips.
	
	Greenburg.  Where the hell was Greenburg?  Jake swore to himself and wished,
not for the first time in the past ten minutes, that he had thought to ask the young
woman in the camp office that very question.  He assumed that Smythe Corners wasn’t
a large enough community to have a hospital, and that Greenburg was probably the
closest one.  But the highway was fast approaching, and he didn’t have a clue which
direction to turn when he got there!
	With a curse, he pulled the truck onto the side of the road and reached for the
glove compartment.  There must be a map there somewhere, he reasoned, although he
couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked at one.  All he could think about was that
Max had fallen, and she was at a hospital.  Who knew what sort of injuries she had. 
Maybe she had hit her head? Maybe she was in critical condition?  All he knew was that
she was there, and councillor Cal was there with her!
	“It should be me,” he grumbled to himself, then sighed as he found a crumpled
old map and pulled it out onto the seat.  Greenburg, it seemed, was forty miles west of
Smythe Corners; the opposite direction from Elmdale.  He let the map slide onto the floor
and pulled the truck onto the highway.  With any luck, he’d be there in a little over a half
hour.  It was going to be the longest half hour he’d ever spent in his life!

	Max rested her head back against the pillow on the emergency room stretcher. 
She winced as she attempted to adjust her leg to a more comfortable position under the
bag of ice cubes resting against her leg.  The ride to the hospital had been painful, no
matter how much she’d tried to pretend otherwise.  She’d spent most of it chastising
herself for having climbed up on the stupid block of wood in the first place.  Not to
mention the fact that she’d given her ankle worse twists on the basketball court in the
past, and never felt this much pain before.  Her sporty lifestyle was supposed to have
toughened her up!
 	She wasn’t used to being an invalid; this feeling of having to rely on others for
everything.  Sure, Cal was being sweet, sitting by her side and keeping her company
even though she’d told him he didn’t have to, but she still felt like all the fuss being made
over her could have been avoided.  She'd played the scene over in her head a
thousand times, and every time came up to the same conclusion.  She’d been careless!
	“Anyone you’d like me to call?” Cal said, penetrating her thoughts.  
	“Call?” She looked at him in surprise.
	He shrugged.  “I wondered if you wanted me to call him and let him know you
were hurt, or anything.”
	She stared at him blankly. “Call who?”
	“The guy who stole your heart, remember?”  Cal said with a wink and a grin.
	Max chuckled.  “Cal, I’ve only sprained my ankle, I’m sure of it.  I’m not dying! 
No one needs to be called about it.”
	Cal gave her a curious glance.  “Well, if it were me, I’d want to know anyway.”
	Max frowned at him.  “It’s not that simple, you know,” she said, a far away look in
her eyes. 
	“Sure,” Cal nodded. “Whatever you say, Red.”
	Max felt her heart skip a beat.  Cal had never used that nickname for her before,
but Jake called her that all the time.  Oh how she missed him!  She turned a pouty
glance towards her companion and opened her mouth to speak.
	“Cal, listen — I told you the other night that —“
	“That your heart was lost to him forever but he wasn’t paying attention,” Cal said,
grinning at her.
	“Well, I didn’t exactly say that!” Max stared at him wide eyed.
	He chuckled.  “You didn’t have to.  It was obvious.”
	“That obvious?”  She wrinkled up her nose at him, and he nodded.
	“To the guy standing in second place, yeah, it was that obvious.”  He smiled at
her and she couldn’t help but think how kind and sweet he was being, considering he
apparently had a thing for her that he had no hopes of having reciprocated.  
	She sighed, and rested her head back again. “Well, it doesn’t really matter if I did
want you to call him anyway,” she said, trying to steer the subject away from the state of
her heart.  “He’s out of town right now," she said, lifting her chin defiantly.
	Just then a nurse in a brightly patterned uniform arrived to wheel her stretcher off
to x-ray.   Cal told her he’d wait for her to return, and she promised she wasn’t about to
run away anywhere without him.  Then once again she found herself feeling useless as
she was floated down the hallway. 
	“Your boyfriend’s sweet,” the nurse said, glancing back as she pushed the
stretcher around the corner. 
	“Oh, he’s not my boyfriend,”  Max chuckled. 
	“No?”  The girl turned to take another look, a hint of interest in her voice.  “Your
brother?”
	Max shook her head.  “No, not my brother either.  Just a friend.”  She said. 
“We’re both councillors at Camp Logan.”
	The nurse nodded.  “I recognized the camp logo on the shirts.”  She glanced
behind her once again, then leaned over the stretcher closer to Max. “So, if you don’t
mind me asking — if you're not interested in him at all, umm, is he single?"  The girl
grinned at her expectantly, with just a hint of shyness shadowing her expression.  "He’s
a real hunk!”  
	Max stared at her, then laughed.  “Yes, he’s single,” she said. It had never
occurred to her before that Cal was a very eye-catching sight, and would probably turn
the head of any girl who crossed his path.  Perhaps that was why her friends at Camp
Logan had chosen to put them together.  If she didn’t have Jake to compare every male
in the world to, maybe she would have been captivated by the view as well.  Jake had
spoiled her for all others, which was pretty much bad news when she thought about it. 
She was destined to compare every man in her future to the one man she couldn’t have.
 	
	Jake pulled into Greenburg and drove around in circles searching for the
hospital.  At last, begrudgingly, he pulled his truck up next to a man sitting on a park
bench and asked for directions.  When he finally pulled his truck to a halt outside the
hospital, all he could think about was that something terrible might have happened to
Max.  He burst through the front doors and scanned the lobby with a frown.
	Perhaps he looked lost, or perhaps it was the expression of worry on his face. 
Whatever the reason, a young girl dressed in a uniform approached him with a sweet
smile and asked if she could help him with anything.  
	“A friend of mine was supposed to have been brought in here a while ago,” he
said, looking at the girl hopefully.  “Apparently she fell.”
	The girl’s smile broadened.  “You’re looking for the Emergency department then,”
she said, and held out his hand toward him as she turned to point out the directions.  He
thanked her, and practically raced along the corridor she had pointed out, nearly missing
the swinging double doors with the huge red letters “EMERGENCY” painted on them. 
Backing up he cleared his throat and grumbled under his breath, then pushed open the
doors cautiously.  
	Inside, nurses were bustling around in and out of doors; pushing wheelchairs and
stretchers this way and that; and calling for people from the almost full waiting area near
the door.   Jake took a quick look around the filled chairs.  Max’s red hair would be hard
to miss, and he didn’t see her there anywhere.  In his current state, he decided this
meant her condition was bad enough that she had been taken directly into a treatment
room somewhere instead of sitting in the waiting room.   Anxiously he looked around
again, until he spotted a desk with a woman sitting behind it. 
	Just as he approached the desk, however, the phone rang, and he found himself
standing impatiently, waiting while she carried on her conversation.  While he waited, he
craned his neck to see into one of the many rooms that lined the hallway.  A body lay
stretched out flat on a stretcher with a thin white blanket over it up to the waist.  He could
just make out a large amount of blood on the sheets beneath the person.  As his heart
raced a mile a minute, he finally noticed that the person on the stretcher was not a
redhead, and let out a sigh of relief.
	“Can I help you, Sir?”  A voice penetrated his thoughts and almost made him
jump.  He swung around again to find the woman at the desk had finished with her
phone call and was sitting looking up at him expectantly.
	“I’m looking for a friend of mine,” he said.
	She sat quietly waiting, a polite half-smile on her face.  When he said nothing
more, she spoke again. “Name?”
	“Jake Forrester,” he said, and the woman turned to her computer.
	“I’m sorry, we have no one by the name of Forrester here at the moment.”
	“Oh!”  Jake could feel his temperature rising, and coughed slightly.  “No, sorry,
that’s my name.  I’m looking for Max — McGreggor.”  He paused.  “Maxine.”
	The woman looked at him attentively, as if she weren’t sure if he were finished or
not, then turned to her computer again.   “Miss McGreggor is in treatment room seven,”
she said.  “Down this way on the — “  But when she looked up to point him in the right
direction, she found she was talking to thin air.  Jake was gone.  Having noticed the
numbers three and four on the nearest rooms, he’d headed down the corridor past room
four in search of room seven.  To his dismay, he found himself at a branch in the hallway
just after room five, with two possible directions to turn.  Grumbling to himself, he turned
right, then finding no rooms with the same large numbers outside their doors, he spun
around and tried the other direction.
	His heart lifted when he spotted a six on the wall, then sank again when he came
to room seven.  What was he going to find when he stepped inside that door?  He
clenched his fists ad stepped inside, prepared for the worst.
	Sitting in a chair in the otherwise empty room, was a blond man with a Camp
Logan T-shirt one, casually reading a Hot Rod magazine. “Where’s Max?” Jake asked,
his voice a mixture of confusion and worry.  
	The man looked up and smiled at him.  “Hi,” he said, resting the magazine down
and stretching his hand out toward Jake.  “I’m Cal,” he said, with a smile.  Jake’s frown
deepened, and he shoved his hands deeper into his pockets.  Instead, he turned his
attention to the rest of the room.  There was a large empty space where he’d seen the
stretchers in all the other rooms he’d passed.
	“Where’s Max?” he demanded again.
	Cal cleared his throat and drew his hand back.  “She’s gone for x-rays,” he said,
his smile fading only slightly.  “And you are?”
	Jake seemed to relax slightly, but his frown was still etched on his face when he
turned to face the other man again.  “Jake Forrester,” he announced.  “I’ve known Max
for a long time.” His eyes narrowed at that statement, clearly driving home the
statement.  “We’re very good friends, I’ll have you know!”
	Cal almost chuckled, but he held it back.  Instead, he smiled, and nodded, as he
closed his magazine.  “Ah yes,” he said, “You’re her friend,”  Jake’s eyes narrowed
further, but Cal said nothing more.
	After a pause, Jake cleared his throat and looked around the room again.  “What
happened?”
	“Max fell off a log in the rain.  Her leg is pretty sore.  They’ve taken her for x-rays
now to see if anything is broken.”
	Jake sighed.  “Her leg?  She didn’t hit her head or anything, did she?”
	Cal grinned.  “No, her pretty little head is just fine.”
	Jake shot the other man a cold stare.  “Listen, I don’t know who you are, or what
your game is, but I’ll have you know Max isn’t the kind of woman to just — just — “ he
paused, and grumbled to himself.  Cal crossed his arms on his chest and leaned back in
his chair, waiting for him to finish.  “I mean,  Max is a very special woman."
	"I couldn't agree with you more," Cal nodded.
	Jake grumbled some more.  "She needs more than just some summer romance,
she needs someone who'll be there for her all the time.  Someone who knows her well
enough to understand what she needs. Someone who'll treat her just right."
	Cal raised his eyebrow.  "Got someone in mind?"  he asked.
	Jake frowned at him.  Did he have someone in mind?  Damn it, of course he did!  
And that someone certainly wasn't Councillor Cal!  "Look, I'm just telling you, Max is — is
—"
	"Yours?"  Cal questioned, and Jake glared at him.
	"Well, I — I didn’t mean it that way.  No body owns Max McGreggor.  She's an
independent woman.  But she needs the right man to spend the rest of her life with,
that's all."	"And you don't think I'm the right one?" Cal asked.
	"No!" Jake agreed.
	Cal smirked at him. "But you think you are?"
	Jake glared at him and said nothing but said nothing.  The scary thing was he did
think he was the right one.  More than anything else, he wanted to be that one.  He shot
Cal a look meant to let him know he wasn't about to answer  that question, but Cal
merely smiled and stood up.
	"Well," Cal said, as he stretched and set his magazine down on the chair.  "I
think maybe it's time for me to leave."  Jake looked at him questioningly as the other
man approached him.  "Look," Cal continued. "Don't get me wrong.  I think Max is a
fantastic woman.  She's everything I've ever wanted as a matter of fact.  But I know
when and where I'm not wanted, and since she's got her heart set on someone else, I'll
just bow out and make myself scarce.  I trust you can get her back to camp when she’s
finished here?"
	"What do you mean she's got her heart set on someone else?" Jake demanded. 
	Cal chuckled.  "I mean she's not interested in me.  But I'll tell you right now, don't
play games with her heart.  If you let her down, I'll be right there behind you.  If I thought
she'd accept it from me, I'd damn well tell her exactly how I felt about her!  It's not me
she's in love with though, so I suggest you stop wasting your time."
	"What the ..."  Jake sputtered, but Cal had left the room, leaving him to pace the
floor alone.