by Score, Lucy
It sounded a lot like Mack’s splits. Easy. No strings. No harm, no foul.
“Has he ever been serious about anyone?” Mack asked.
Ellen shook her head with a giggle. “Linc doesn’t have a serious bone in his body. He’s fun. You know? If he’s sending you flowers, you should go for it. No one has ever regretted a fling with Chief Sexy Pants.”
Fun.
Would it really hurt Mack to have a little fun while she was in town? Maybe not. But it would go against her new code. The New Mackenzie O’Neil was too busy finding herself and being admirably healthy to fall into bed with handsome acquaintances.
The New Mackenzie O’Neil was a real buzzkill.
Ellen’s phone rang shrilly from inside her purse. “Ugh. That’s Barry. Hang on. What do you want, Bare?”
Mack watched Ellen’s eyes roll dramatically. “No. I did not tell him that he could have cake for dinner. Don’t let him play you. You’re better than that, Barry.” No, he’s not, she mouthed.
Mack snickered.
Sophie swung out onto the patio, her hands full with their food. The patron who held the door watched her admiringly.
“Another round, ladies?” she asked, setting the salad, wings, plates, and napkins on the table.
Ellen nodded vehemently. “Calm down. Just make him nuggets and call it a night.”
Mack looked at her glass. “Sure.”
Sophie whirled away with their order and headed back inside.
“Ugh. Yes. I’ll go to the grocery store on my way home. But can you try to remember this stuff when I’m actually making my list next time? Make my life just a little bit easier for once? Hello? Hello?”
Annoyance crackling off her, she shoved her phone back in her bag. “He hung up on me. Can you believe that?”
Mack wasn’t sure if she could or not.
“This is why I’m so stressed. I can’t even get ten minutes to myself without someone needing something.” She reached into her bag and produced a pack of cigarettes.
Mack cleared her throat.
“Oh, hell. Okay. Fine. I lied. I’m stressed out.”
“Okay. So tell me about it,” Mack said, sliding half of the salad onto a plate.
They ate wings and speared vinaigrette-tossed lettuce while Ellen talked and Mack listened. She was getting a clearer picture. One she’d missed in the office because she’d been in a hurry to move on to the next appointment.
“Have you thought about anxiety meds?” Mack asked when Ellen seemed to have emptied out her stress tank.
“Thought about and rejected,” Ellen said cheerfully. “I’m cautious about what I put in my body.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way. I’m saying this as a friend and not a doctor. But are you really?” Mack looked pointedly at the wings, the cigarettes, the second fishbowl-sized margarita.
Ellen winced. “Don’t I deserve to have a vice or two…or three?”
“What you deserve is to feel good, to be healthy. Stress isn’t good for anyone.”
“What am I supposed to do? Sell a kid and get a divorce?”
Mack looked around them to make sure no one else was listening. “I am definitely not saying that. What I am saying is you have options. You can make some lifestyle changes, or you can consider prescriptions, or both. You don’t have to keep feeling like this. But you will if you keep doing what you’re doing.”
“Lifestyle like eating healthy and exercising? You sound like Dr. Dunnigan and Dr. Robinson, you know?” Ellen groaned.
“It doesn’t have to be torture,” Mack said. “What did you like to do before you had kids?”
Her dinner partner shrugged, looking morose. “I don’t know. Going on bar crawls and eating tacos at one in the morning?”
Mack laughed. “Anything else?”
Ellen’s face brightened. “You know what I used to love to do?”
“What?”
“Swim.”
“Really? That’s a great sport,” Mack said. “Why did you stop?”
“I started hating how I looked in a bathing suit.”
Honesty. Mack could work with that.
“Here’s what I propose. You take a month. Find a place to swim. Try a little harder on the food. Grab some ‘me time’ for yourself every single day no matter what. And for God’s sake, kick the cigarettes. We’ll meet back up and see how you’re feeling. Then we can go from there.”
“Another girls’ night?” Ellen was so excited that Mack felt an odd mixture of flattered, happy, and inexplicably sad for them both.
Mack shrugged. “Yeah. Sure.”
Ellen bit her lip. “Do you really think I can do this?”
“Of course you can. Look at everything else you already do. You’re raising kids, running a family, working, dealing with a husband and a father-in-law. You’re already doing the hard stuff. This is easier.”
Ellen was nodding. “I never really thought about it like that.”
“You’re just replacing bad coping habits with good ones.”
“Ooh! We can be accountability partners,” Ellen squealed, clapping her hands. “What do you want to work on?”
“Oh. Uh. Meditation? I guess.” Mack congratulated herself on not saying, “Talking myself out of sleeping with Linc.”
“That sounds amazing. Meditation is so, like, enlightened,” Ellen said to the interior of her purse. Her hands and face disappeared.
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Aha!” She triumphantly produced a notebook and a pencil decorated with teeth marks. “Okay. We’re writing these down. Oprah says if you’re going to set goals, they have to be measurable and specific.”
Well, if Oprah said so…
Ellen neatly scratched out her goals on the pad and pushed it across the table to Mack.
1. Swim or walk five days a week.
2. Have a salad for lunch every day.
3. Quit pork rinds.
“This doesn’t say anything about smoking,” Mack pointed out.
“That’s the pork rinds. In case Barry or the kids find the list. I fib to them too.”
“Fair enough.”
“Now add yours,” Ellen ordered. “We’ll make it official. Can I have one last cigar—”
“No,” Mack said firmly as she wrote: Meditate 10 minutes a day.
“Party pooper.”
Mack snickered and picked up a buffalo wing. “To accountability,” she said.
Ellen helped herself to another wing and tapped it to Mack’s. “To the sexy firefighter who’s headed this way.”
17
Linc had stopped in for a beer and some wings and instead found his sexy, reticent neighbor enjoying dinner with one of his old girlfriends.
“Ladies,” he said, strolling across the patio. “A little birdie bartender told me you were out here.”
It was getting closer to dusk. A server bustled out behind him to turn on the patio heaters and plug in the overhead string lights.
“We were just talking about you.” Ellen beamed up at him. “Pull up a chair, chief.”
He bent and gave her a peck on the cheek, then did as he was told. “All good, I hope. How are Barry and the kids?”
While Ellen filled him in on all the family news, Mack studiously avoided eye contact with him. But when his knee pressed against hers under the small table, she didn’t make any effort to move away from him.
“How was your day off?” Ellen asked, finally taking a breath.
He pulled his attention away from the feel of Mack’s leg.
“Good. Took Sunshine for a hike. She’s at my sister’s now.” He couldn’t stop looking at Mack. There was something about her that pulled him in. A magnetism, a pull, an orbit.
This wasn’t a normal, easy crush. There was a real hunger here. He’d felt it at the cookout last Friday when he’d seen the longing in her eyes as she observed the Garrison and Moretta clans.
“How was your day, doc?” he asked.
When she finally looked
at him, it was both a relief and a rush. Those cool green eyes held secrets he wanted to unravel one by one. He wanted to know how she got the scar under her eye. He wanted to know what her skin felt like under his hands. How he’d feel when he watched her lips part as he slid inside her.
Time slowed down when she looked at him. And his baser instincts were ringing a four-alarm bell.
He shifted in his seat, mindful of the hard-on that roared to life. Unfortunately, that pushed his leg more firmly into hers. If simple under the table leg-rubbing was pushing his buttons, he had a serious control problem.
“Fine,” she said finally.
The way she said it told him it was a deliberate brush-off. What secrets would she share while he worshipped her body?
Fuck. He was going to have to turn off his water heater to get through having her in his backyard yet still untouchable.
He became aware of Ellen looking back and forth between them like she was observing a Wimbledon match.
She noticed him noticing and nodded pointedly in Mack’s direction. “Dr. Mack, you’re not seeing anyone, are you?” she asked innocently.
“Uh. No,” Mack said with suspicion.
“You know, Linc here is a real catch,” Ellen said.
“So I’ve heard,” Mack said dryly.
“It’s true,” Linc said, snagging a cherry tomato off her plate. “You’d be doing yourself a disservice by not at least going out with me once.”
“Linc is the best at first dates. You know?”
He grinned at Ellen. This was, in his opinion, one of the best things about life in Benevolence. Even his old girlfriends were invested in his happiness.
“Uh-oh,” Ellen said, sending him a conspiratorial wink. “I think Barry’s calling me again. I should probably be getting home. Here, Linc. You can finish my drink.”
She stood up and heaved her giant purse onto her shoulder. It probably weighed nearly as much as his turnout gear, Linc guessed.
“I don’t hear your phone,” Mack said.
“Oh, I put it on vibrate.” She shook her bag. “There it goes again. Thanks for girls’ night, Dr. Mack. I’ll see you next month.”
“She did not just get a phone call,” Mack said, watching her go.
Linc picked up Ellen’s abandoned margarita, took a sip, and winced. “I think she was subtly trying to give us some alone time.”
“Are all of your old girlfriends this happy to fix you up with new ones?”
He thought about it and reached for a wing. Mack slapped his hand away. “Mine.”
Grinning, he helped himself to the last one on Ellen’s plate.
“Maybe not all of them. But a strong majority.”
“What was your ugliest breakup?” she asked.
“Uh-uh, Dreamy. That’s first date conversation.”
She polished off the wing while studying him.
“Why isn’t this a date?” she asked. “There’s food. Alcohol. We’re having a conversation. I’m valiantly trying to resist your flirtatious charm.” She ticked off the dating requirements on her fingers as she licked the hot sauce from them.
Linc was fairly certain he’d never been more turned on in his entire life. He picked up his beer to give his hands something to do besides ease the ache in his monster hard-on or reach out and touch Dr. Dreamy.
“This is the flirtation leading up to the first date,” he explained. “A Lincoln Reed First Date isn’t a spontaneous run-in. A Lincoln Reed First Date is a carefully curated experience designed for maximum enjoyment.”
She laughed loud and long and got impossibly prettier.
“Now I’m really curious,” she told him, cupping her chin in her hand.
“There’s only one way to find out what it’s like to date me,” he said, lifting his beer at her. “All you have to do is say yes.”
Her sigh was long. “I want you to know that I’m tempted. Very tempted. But.”
The word hung in the air between them. He wondered if she knew she was leaning into him, that her leg was pressing against his.
“But?” he prodded.
“That’s not why I’m here.”
“Why are you here?” he asked.
“I need a change of pace.”
Need, not want, he noted.
“Tell me?”
She paused and took a sip of her wine.
“You know the feel of a big call? When you’re in the middle of it, and it’s life and death and you’re on autopilot getting it done?”
He nodded. “Yeah. The buzz. That shot of adrenaline, and you’re like outside of time.”
“Exactly. I like it. No, that’s not true. I crave it,” she admitted, running an index finger around the mouth of her wineglass.
“We all do to some extent.”
“True. But for me, it’s a problem.”
He nodded, waiting.
“My hands started shaking,” she admitted. “Then I stopped sleeping.”
“Burnout.”
“Burnout. Adrenal fatigue. Worse, those highs were the only time I felt anything.”
He took a chance and reached for her hand. She didn’t pull away but sat there considering their intertwined fingers.
And damn did it feel natural.
“What makes you feel numb, Dreamy?”
She shook her head. “Uh-uh. That’s first date conversation.”
Hell. He was going to fall hard for this woman, and it was going to hurt.
“Okay,” he said. “So burnout comes knocking, and you decide a lifestyle overhaul is necessary.”
“And here I am.” She gestured with her free hand. “Goodbye, Afghanistan. Hello, Benevolence.”
“Trading hot zone trauma medicine for small-town country doctoring,” he summarized.
“Bingo. I couldn’t even stick it out a few more years for retirement. I processed out.”
He tightened his grip on her hand. “And that pisses you off.”
She shot him a small, rueful smile that had him staring at her lips again. “Yes, it does.”
“And you’re more pissed that you couldn’t hold up. You didn’t quit because it was your idea. You had to quit.”
He watched her suck her bottom lip into her mouth.
“It’s okay,” he told her. “You can tell me what I had for breakfast today if you want to.”
“Microwave breakfast burrito,” she said. “It’s less fun now that you know I can see into your place.”
“Speaking of less fun. Those curtains on your bedroom window are awfully thick.”
“Room darkening so I can sleep past dawn.”
“Do you?”
“Nope. Zero-five-thirty on the dot.”
The music on the speakers changed to a slow country number.
“Why fight it?” he asked, pulling her to her feet.
“What are we doing?”
“We’re gonna dance.”
“No one else is dancing,” she said, looking around the patio.
“I’m going to explain my idea to you, but it works better if we’re dancing.”
“Do small-town girls really fall for this shit?” Mack demanded.
He tugged her into his arms. “Big city doctors, too.”
She cocked an eyebrow but let him draw her closer. “Apparently.”
“Get a room, chief!” The same skinny guy in a dirty ball cap from the car on the street last week hooted from a table full of similarly suited softball players.
“Get a vasectomy, Carl,” Linc shot back with a grin.
Carl and his tablemates dissolved into laughter.
“Now, back to my idea.”
“If this idea involves us getting naked together, I’m still interested, but it’s still not going to happen,” she said.
“Hear me out,” he insisted.
She rolled those meadow green eyes. “Fine. I’m listening.”
“I’m gonna write you a prescription.”
“Hands off my prescription pad, buddy.”
> “A Chief Sexy Pants prescription,” he corrected.
“And what will this prescription entail? Orgasms?”
He pretended to consider the idea. “Those would certainly fall under the umbrella of this protocol. I’m ordering you to have fun.”
“Fun?” She said it as if it were a cuss word.
“Yeah. You know, like doing things that make you smile and laugh for no good reason?” he prodded.
She frowned up at him. “You’re joking, right?”
“I’m deadly serious,” he insisted. “I’m volunteering to be your fun coach.”
“This whole town is really weird,” she mused.
He squeezed her tighter. “Pay attention, Dreamy. This is a once-in-a-lifetime offer.”
“Okay. I’ll bite. What does a fun coach do?”
“You mean besides handing out orgasms?”
She gave him a withering look, and he grinned. “Remember to save that look for our kids. If the girls take after you, they’ll be handfuls.”
She purposely stepped on his foot.
In retaliation, he dipped her backward until her body arched toward the ground.
“Is this fun? I can’t tell,” she said snarkily.
“Honey, we’re dancing under a starlit sky on a Wednesday night with a bunch of people looking at us like we’re crazy. This is fun.” He swept her back up.
“Well, I mean. If this is the best you’ve got,” she teased.
“Ah, Dreamy. You just keep making me fall harder and harder for you.”
She held his face in both hands and peered into his eyes.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to check your pupil dilation.”
“I don’t have a head trauma.” Just a blood flow issue.
“Just making sure.”
They swayed together, moving seamlessly into the next song. Another couple joined them between the tables. Then another, until most of the occupants on the patio were dancing to Alabama Shakes.
Sophie poked her head out the door. “What the hell is going on out here? You having a prom? Does anyone need another round?”
“Yes!” the entire patio shouted.