He’d been profuse with his thanks. What she’d wanted was his promise.
As she walked the block from the diner to the clinic the next morning, under skies of blessedly brilliant blue, she still didn’t know which bothered her more. That he hadn’t promised, or that he had so obviously preferred someone else’s help over hers after what she’d been through with him.
To be fair, she supposed she couldn’t blame him for not wanting anything else to do with her. All he really knew about her was where she currently lived, that she’d recently been involved with detectives and that she was a tad desperate to keep him quiet about that.
A knot of quiet anxiety had taken up permanent residence in her stomach. With her hand over it, she smoothed the front of the cocoa-colored blouse tucked into her beige slacks and climbed the four steps leading into the white clapboard building that had housed Maple Mountain’s only clinic for over a hundred years. She had come home to start over. No matter what Dr. Greg Reid’s impression of her, she didn’t want him making that start any harder than it was already.
The screen door opened with a squeak a moment before a bell over the white wooden door gave a faint tinkle.
Six dark wood chairs lined one wall of the tidy, pale-green reception room. Only one was occupied. A teenage mother—one of the McGraw girls from the looks of her flaming-red hair—sat with a listless toddler, soothing the child with pictures from an office copy of Parenting magazine.
“Hi,” said Jenny on her way to the reception window.
The girl smiled and went back to pointing at pictures.
From inside the front office, a very pregnant brunette in a light-blue scrub smock and ponytail turned to see who had just come in.
“May I help you?” she asked, an instant before her eyes widened. “Jenny Baker!”
Pressing her hand to the small of her back, thirty-something Rhonda Pembroke turned to get a better look at the girl she hadn’t seen in four years. “Bess told me this morning that you were back. And Lois Neely was in here not two hours ago sayin’ you’ve moved into your grandma’s old place.”
Word had definitely preceded her—which meant at least one of the two men she’d encountered during her first hours home had wasted no time spreading it. Jenny’s money was on Joe as the culprit. Lois worked as dispatcher at the sheriff’s office, and Joe’s name had come up when Jenny had been met with virtually the same greeting at the diner an hour ago.
“Are you really going to restore your grandma’s house?”
Jenny’s smile faltered. She had no idea who had assumed such a thing, though she could see where someone might take it for granted. No one in her right mind would live there without redoing the place. Restoration, however, would cost a fortune she would never have.
“It certainly needs work,” she replied, deliberately hedging as she nodded toward the woman’s girth. “How are you and your family doing? Is this your third?”
“Fourth. I had a little girl while you were gone. But you didn’t come by to hear about me,” she insisted. “Who are you here to see? The doctor?” Her glance made a quick sweep of the bruises barely visible beneath the makeup on Jenny’s jaw. “Or Bess?”
Jenny felt herself hesitate. Being Greg’s receptionist and office manager, Rhonda would know that he’d been hurt. He might even have told her that she’d helped him, and the woman simply assumed that she was there to see how he was doing. Which she was. Partly.
It was whatever else he might have said that worried her.
“The doctor,” she replied. “Is he available?”
“He’s with a patient. But give me a minute.” Turning from the desk below the wide window, she dropped her hand from her back. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”
A large bulletin board hung by the door that separated the waiting area from the exam rooms. Wanting to take her mind off her growing uneasiness, Jenny glanced over a poster for a senior citizens’ exercise classes at the local community center. She had no idea why the local seniors needed a formal exercise routine. Most of those she’d known growing up got plenty of exercise working their gardens and gathering berries in the woods in the summer and shoveling snow and snowshoeing in the winter. The people in the North Woods seemed to be of hardier stock than those she’d encountered in the city.
She was wondering if she could pick up a few extra dollars this winter shoveling snow for those who weren’t so hardy when the door suddenly opened.
There was a little more white in Bess Amherst’s tight crop of salt-and-pepper curls than Jenny had remembered, and the crow’s feet around her narrowed hazel eyes seemed to have fanned a little farther toward her temples, but she hadn’t otherwise changed since Jenny had last seen her. The midfifties, suffer-no-whiners nurse practitioner still wore her reading glasses on a silver chain around her neck, still preferred pastel plaid shirts and elastic-waist pants to the nurse’s scrub uniform Dr. Wilson had never been able to get her to wear, and still wore white athletic shoes—which more or less matched her short lab jacket.
Stylish, she wasn’t.
Interested, she always was.
Jenny had known Bess since she was a child.
“You’re too thin,” the woman immediately pronounced, hands on her hips. “I don’t know why you girls go off to the city and come back looking like waifs. Everybody’s always bragging about what great restaurants they have in Boston, but seems to me you girls never eat in ’em. And your hair.” Had it not been for the twinkle in her eyes, Bess might have looked as disapproving as she sounded. “How big-city you look with it all short and wispy like that.” She shook her head as she stepped forward, shoes squeaking. “Let me see that forehead of yours.”
Before Jenny could even say hello herself, Bess nudged back the sweep of her dark bangs. She smelled faintly of antibacterial soap, rubbing alcohol and—vanilla. “The doctor said he didn’t get a chance to look at that,” she said, frowning, as she concentrated on the two-inch sidewalk burn above Jenny’s right eye. “What have you put on it?”
“Nothing. I just dabbed at it with soap and water.”
“Well, you need to keep your hair away from it. And it needs ointment. Come on back and I’ll get you some. And don’t go putting any makeup on it. Not until it heals. It doesn’t look like it’ll scar now, but it will if you get it infected.”
Her shoes gave another chirp as she turned. After waiting for Jenny to pass, she closed the door behind her and glanced down the wide hallway to where Rhonda headed toward them, her hand at her back.
“How’s her head?” Rhonda asked.
“Just an abrasion. I’m going to give her some salve to put on it.”
“I told Dr. Reid you’re here,” she said to Jenny. Her voice dropped to nearly a whisper as she moved past. “And I don’t blame you for wanting to come home.”
Bess turned into a white room lined with black counters and lab equipment and pointed Jenny to a chrome-legged stool. A faint frown pinched her mouth. “She must have overheard the doctor tell me he wanted me to check on you. He felt bad that he wasn’t thinking clearly enough to check you himself.”
“He wanted you to check on me?”
“That’s the kind of man he is. If he thinks a person needs help, he sees that she gets it.” Her shrug looked vaguely preoccupied as she pulled open one of the dozens of drawers and motioned again for Jenny to sit. “Considering the pain he had to be in, I’m surprised he was thinking at all. Good that you were there for him.”
Taking out what she was after, she closed the drawer, collected a small packet, a gauze pad and paper tape and walked to where Jenny stood by the stool. Since Jenny hadn’t sat, she proceeded to work on her where she stood. “Hold your bangs back.”
“Bess, you don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do,” she said, and pushed them back herself to dab at the scrape with the orange-brown pad from the packet.
Jenny didn’t know what was on it, only that it smelled awful and stung like the devil.
Paper crackled as she opened a gauze pad. Removing the lid from a little silver tube, she looped a coil of ointment onto the pad and moved Jenny’s finger to hold it in place when she positioned it above her eye.
As desperately as Jenny wanted to leave the events of the past month behind, it seemed easiest to let the women assume she had come home only because she hadn’t felt secure where she’d been. The older residents of Maple Mountain had always regarded cities as dens of iniquity that lured and swallowed up their young people. Having one of their own back, battered and bruised, undoubtedly vindicated the attitude.
All Jenny cared about was that Greg apparently hadn’t mentioned her comment about having been cleared by the detectives. If he had, the outspoken nurse practitioner would have already demanded to know what he’d been talking about. Bess had been good friends with her mother.
“Keep this covered.” Deftly applying strips of tape, Bess secured the pad in place. With that done, she handed her the silver tube, a handful of gauze pads and the tape roll. “Use the salve twice a day.” The woman’s friendly scolding suddenly softened. “Welcome home, Jenny.”
Bess often had the manner of a field marshal, but Jenny knew there wasn’t a more sincere soul on the planet than the woman now patting her on the shoulder.
Jenny smiled back, accepting the welcome with guilty grace.
“Thank you,” she murmured, torn between the comfort of a friendly and familiar face and feeling like a total fraud. “And thank you for all this,” she said, hoping she wouldn’t appear terribly ungrateful as she held out her filled hands. “But I really don’t think I need it.” She couldn’t afford it even if she did. She had exactly $46.08 to last until she got her first paycheck—which, if she’d calculated correctly, would be less than two hundred dollars before taxes. “Can you just bill me for taking care of my head?”
“You do need that,” Bess informed her. Taking what Jenny held, she stuffed it into the small purse hanging by a thin strap from Jenny’s shoulder. “I know you didn’t come for an examination. Rhonda said you’re here to see the doctor. I imagine you’re wanting to know if he’s all right after helping him out last night. But that,” she said, pointing at Jenny’s forehead, “is a nasty scrape and it needs to heal properly. And don’t you worry about a bill,” she admonished. “All I did was slap a bandage on you. That antibiotic is a sample. No charge. Now, come on. You can wait for Dr. Reid in his office.”
Bess obviously knew all about the help Jenny had given her boss. Because she did know about it, and because Jenny asked if he would be all right, the briskly efficient woman confided that she had X-rayed and wrapped his shoulder herself last evening and that he would be just fine in a couple of weeks. She offered nothing else, though, before she ushered Jenny into the office near the end of the hall, told her the doctor wouldn’t be long and closed the door behind her.
Jenny stared at the carved panel of dark wood. She hoped desperately that she’d done the right thing coming here.
Wishing the nerves in her stomach would stop jumping, something she’d been wishing now for weeks, she slowly faced the neat and comfortable space. Across from her, the sunshine spilling through the slatted wooden window blinds cut a pattern of shadow and light over a maple pedestal table and four bow back chairs. A coffee mug sat on the table near stacks of open medical books. At the other end of the room, a large maple desk sat in front of a wall of bookcases and a hanging fern.
Between the warm woods, the colorful braided rug beneath the table and the old furniture, the room looked much as it always had. Quaint and rather charming in a reassuring, old-fashioned sort of way. It was only the laptop computer on the table by the books, the dish of peppermint candies on the painfully tidy desk and the wall of photos and certificates that gave any hint of the new doctor’s personality. If she were pressed for a quick assessment, she would say that the new doctor was far neater than the old one had been. More open to technology. And that he apparently possessed a sweet tooth.
That small weakness would have made her smile had she not felt so anxious. Too restless to stand still, wondering how long she would be left to pace, she moved toward the desk with its single file neatly centered on the blotter and pens standing upright like good little soldiers in their holder. As she did, she absently pushed back her bangs, and promptly bumped into the bandage Bess had more or less slapped onto her forehead.
With everything else she’d had on her mind, the abrasion and her bruises truly had been of the least consequence. In no time the soreness would go away. The scrape and bruises would heal. The other damage done to her life felt infinitely more immediate and would take far longer to remedy.
She couldn’t believe Greg had actually asked Bess to check on her. With her faith in the human species, men in particular, sorely shaken, she’d almost forgotten that every man wasn’t out just for himself.
That’s just the kind of man he is. If someone needs help, he sees that he gets it.
She let her hand fall. It had seemed so much easier to ignore what had happened to her yesterday morning without the chunk of white gauze that undoubtedly made the little injury that much more noticeable. It had been as if by ignoring the abrasion and bruises, she could ignore the incident. She knew she was playing ostrich, but she simply didn’t have the mental energy to deal with the assault and thwarted robbery on top of everything else. Not when she was trying so desperately to focus her energy on something—anything—positive.
Needing to focus on something positive now, she thought about Dora Schaeffer. Dora, bless her, had given her back her old part-time job at the café. She was feeling exceedingly grateful to the older woman when she turned to the wall beside her.
The ivory-colored wall was covered with a collage of photos. Many were large, matted photographs of the area’s flaming fall foliage, stands of bare birch trees in pristine fields of snow, apple trees blossoming in the spring. Most were photos of the local Little League team and individual players with gap-toothed grins. Snapshots of babies, some held by their proud parents, obliterated a bulletin board. A child’s handmade Valentine, its paper lace doily curling, dangled from one corner.
A black-framed diploma hung near the edge of the wall. Its placement by a state medical board certificate and a medical license seemed almost incidental, as if it were displayed only because convention or law required it.
It seemed that Gregory Matthias Reid had been awarded his medical degree from Harvard.
She was definitely impressed. A Harvard education was not only academically challenging to obtain, it cost a fortune. She knew. She’d heard brokers she’d worked with complaining about it, either because they were paying it off for themselves or their offspring.
His alma mater surprised her, too. The Harvard men she’d met wouldn’t have spent more than a weekend in this remote and rural community, and then only for one of the quaint local festivals. There were no ski lodges nearby, no reliable cell phone service, no latte machines, martini bars or night life. But then the only Harvard graduates she’d known were hungry MBAs clawing their way to the top of the shark tank. Those who swore to beat the stock market undoubtedly possessed less compassion per gene than those who swore to beat injury and disease.
Shaking off her thoughts before they could move to one MBA in particular, her glance dropped to the shades of coral and orange in a small gold-framed photograph. The photo sat askew among the books and files jammed along the credenza. In it, the good doctor stood with a view of the Eiffel Tower at sunset in the distant background—and his arm around a drop-dead-gorgeous blonde.
The woman was tall, built like a model and had been blessed with long, corn-silk-colored hair that flew in the breeze. Jenny couldn’t tell the color of her eyes, but her smile was wide, her teeth perfect. It wasn’t the per
fection, however, that had Jenny picking up the picture. It was the air of utter self-assurance the woman seemed to exude.
With her own self-confidence having disappeared along with her life as she’d known it, Jenny was wondering if she would ever feel certain about anything again when the door opened and Greg walked in.
Chapter Three
A dark-blue sling covered Greg’s left arm. Much of it was hidden by the white lab coat he wore open over a forest-green golf shirt and tan khakis, but there was no hiding that he’d been injured. Even if one side of the coat hadn’t been draped over his shoulder, the bruising she’d seen last night would have given him away. It had darkened to the color of a Bing cherry and now crept to almost an inch above his collar.
It was the rest of him that had the bulk of her attention, though.
Even with his arm bound in a sling, there was nothing about him that hinted at any sort of vulnerability. Nothing to indicate how dependent he had been on her less than twelve hours ago. Beneath the dark slash of his eyebrows, his gray eyes smiled at her with a quiet intensity that weighed and assessed and put strange little flutters in her stomach.
Without the pain he’d dealt with last night, he was more than an attractive man. He was a man who looked big, capable and totally in control of himself and everything around him.
That quiet power seemed to radiate toward her, drawing her in as he looked to what she held.
Aware that she’d just been caught with one of his photographs, Jenny’s guilty glance fell before she smiled and turned to set the picture back in its place.
“I don’t suppose she’s a relative.”
Seeing which picture she’d had, he hesitated. “She’s…a friend.”
Wondering at that slight pause, thinking maybe her innocent interest had just caught him off guard, Jenny left the photo exactly as she’d found it. Of course he had a “friend,” she thought, stepping aside as he passed her to drop the file he carried onto his desk. The man was gorgeous. He was caring. He was a doctor.
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