Great! Angelina thought. They’ll probably only cost a million dollars each.
“What kind of dog is Princess?” Lily asked on the way home.
“I’d say she has a little cocker spaniel, a little springer spaniel and a lot of fence jumper in her,” Angelina speculated.
“Is that a good kind?”
“The best,” Angelina assured her.
* * *
MIKE LOOKED OVER the head of his patient at the concerned pet owner. “Agatha’s not ill, Mrs. Anderson,” he said. “She’s just obese.”
“Agatha’s not...obese,” Mrs. Anderson replied with an offended air. “Her fur just sticks out.”
Mike grinned. “The scale doesn’t lie, Mrs. Anderson. I’m afraid that long hair is hiding a bit of blubber. I’m going to recommend special food for her, and I want you to measure the portions every day. You should notice a difference in her energy level within a couple of weeks. And no people food.”
“Not even tuna?” Mrs. Anderson asked, her chin quivering as she cast a sympathetic look at her pampered gray Persian. “Agatha loves tuna.”
“Not even water-packed tuna,” Mike told her sternly. “The mercury in the tuna tends to make cats lethargic, even if Agatha could handle the calories—which she can’t.”
“Poor Agatha,” Mrs. Anderson cooed as she scooped the stocky cat into her arms. “Is the mean old doctor putting you on a diet?”
“The mean old doctor is trying to make sure Agatha enjoys every one of her nine lives,” Mike said drolly. Leaning out the door of the examining room, he called for Suzie.
“Whatcha need, Doc?”
“Give Mrs. Anderson a starter sample of Svelte Cat for Agatha, please.”
“Sure thing, Doc,” Suzie said, reaching out to give Agatha a pat. “Watching your waistline, eh, Agatha?”
Turning, she opened the door to the supply closet, and told Mike, over her shoulder, “Your last patient’s waiting in room two.”
“I live to serve,” Mike mumbled, hoping his last case of the day didn’t involve any complicated procedures. He was already running ten minutes past his normal closing time. With a final nod to Mrs. Anderson, he lumbered into the next examination room.
His first impression was that the room was empty. Then he spied the child sitting in the plastic chair on the far side of the stainless steel examining table, a beautiful little girl with large green eyes and dark curly hair. She was clutching a spotted puppy to her chest.
“Hello,” he said as genially as possible, hoping to put the girl at ease.
The greeting was met with a subtle hunching of the shoulders and a wary, tight-lipped expression. Picking up the file card Suzie had left on the corner of the counter, Mike scanned it briefly, then knelt next to the child. “Is this Princess?” he asked softly.
Eyeing him distrustfully, the girl hugged the puppy tighter. “Uh-huh.”
The seriousness in the set of the child’s cherubic features made Mike want to pull the frightened child into his arms and comfort her, but he didn’t want to risk frightening her even more. If she started screaming, he’d find himself faced with a mother convinced her ‘little darling’ had fallen into the clutches of a child molester.
He saw her throat convulse as she swallowed before asking, “Are you going to give my puppy a shot?”
Mike had to bite his tongue to keep from chuckling. So that was at the bottom of all that angst. “I’m afraid so, sweetheart.” He risked a tentative smile. “You wouldn’t want your puppy to get sick, would you?”
She shook her head solemnly.
“What’s your name?” he asked, petting the dog, hoping to establish a rapport with both animal and owner.
“Lily.”
“Well, Lily, my name’s Dr. Mike Calder. You can call me Dr. Mike.”
Lily gave a grudging half nod.
“I’ve got to give Princess her checkup now,” he said, easing the dog from her arms. She let him take the puppy, but watched him guardedly.
“Maybe you could stand next to the table and keep her calm while I’m examining her,” he suggested.
“Okay,” she said, moving to the table’s edge where she could reach her puppy.
“I’m going to look at Princess’s eyes and ears,” Mike said, switching on his flashlightlike scope. “This doesn’t hurt at all.” He examined one ear, then rotated the dog’s head so he could see the other one. “I’ll bet your doctor does this when you go to see him, doesn’t he?”
“Uh-huh,” Lily agreed. “But my doctor’s a lady, not a man.”
Mike feigned a surprised expression. “A lady! Are you sure? I didn’t know girls could be doctors.”
Catching his playful tone, Lily giggled. “Yes.”
Mike sheathed a thermometer in a sterile plastic casing and lubricated it. “I’m going to take Princess’s temperature now.”
“Why do you have all that gooey stuff on the thermometer? Won’t it taste yukky?”
Mike smiled, thinking that Lily was going to love what happened next. Kids always did.
“Dogs can’t hold thermometers in their mouths,” he explained. “They bite them and break them. I need her other end.”
He watched Lily’s jaw drop in disbelief as he lifted the dog’s tail and inserted the thermometer.
“I’m going to tell my mother what you did!” she snapped, outraged, as soon as she’d recovered enough from the surprise to speak.
“I’ll bet your doctor or your mommy took your temperature this way when you were a baby,” he said calmly.
Lily shook her head. “Uh-uh.”
Mike grinned. “Ask her.”
After a silent moment, he removed the thermometer and read it. “Just right. You must take very good care of Princess. She’s a very healthy puppy.”
“Uh-huh,” Lily agreed, apparently over her shock.
“Is your mother out in the waiting room?” he asked as he palpated the dog’s abdomen. The next thing on the agenda was the s-h-o-t, and he thought it might be less traumatic to the child, the dog—and not least of all, the veterinarian—if he did not have to vaccinate the puppy in front of the child.
Lily sighed. “She came in to fill out all the papers, but then she had to go back and fix the tire.”
Mike didn’t get a good feeling from that little revelation. Knowing he shouldn’t ask, he nevertheless did. “What tire?”
“The tire on the car,” she said. “It was flat.”
A woman in his parking lot changing a tire. That was great. Just great. A damsel in distress. He made a concerted effort to squelch the urge to rescue her, reminding himself that he had sworn off the role of knight-errant. His days of slaying dragons and banishing villains were over—along with his habit of being suckered in by needy females. He’d made a promise to himself, and he was going to stick to it.
“Is your daddy working on the tire with her?” he asked hopefully.
“We don’t have a daddy anymore.” The pain that crossed the child’s face as she spoke ripped at his heart. He’d seen that look all too often. Always before, it had been his cue to dash into the role of substitute papa—just as he had with Shelly.
And look where it got you—and where it left Shelly, he thought, recalling with a pang of regret the heart-rending letter he’d received from the child who felt abandoned and betrayed. It read:
Dear Mike
Lady and Tramp got here just fine, but they’re sad because they’d rather be at your house. I wish they still lived there so I could visit them again.
Love, Shelly
Mike forced himself back to the present. “Have you ever had a shot?” he asked as he filled the syringe.
The child’s, “Uh-huh” was almost a whisper.
He turned around slowly. “Then you know that it only hurts for a second or two. No longer than it takes to say Tippecanoe. Can you say Tippecanoe?”
Lily repeated the word.
“Excellent,” Mike said. “Now I want you to say it again
as I give Princess her shot, and by the time you’ve said it, the whole thing will be over. Ready?”
Lily’s chin quivered as she nodded.
“Okay. Now close your eyes and say the magic word.”
Lily squeezed her eyes shut and grimaced. “Tippecanoe,” she said through clenched teeth.
Mike did the dastardly deed. Princess gave a token yelp, and Lily’s eyes flew open. By that time, though, Mike was removing the needle. “All done,” he announced with a reassuring smile. “Princess gets a puppy cookie for being a good doggie. Do you want to give it to her?”
Lily nodded, took the biscuit he offered her and fed it to the dog.
“We’re all finished here,” Mike said, scooping up Princess and handing her to Lily. “You can go back to the waiting room and talk to Suzie while I go see if your mommy needs any help with that tire.”
A flat tire, he told himself. That’s all it was. No more. No less. Simple courtesy dictated that he offer to help. The apprehension raising prickles on the back of his neck was an overreaction. He had no reason to worry. So the waif’s mom had no man to fix her flat tire. So what? He was worrying about phantoms. After all, he hadn’t even seen the woman. She was probably leaning against the front fender of her Mercedes or BMW, waiting for the auto club man.
Even if he were willing to let himself get pulled into a...situation—which he wasn’t—she probably wasn’t even his type. She was probably as homely as a bar of soap—
With a daughter who looked like a cherub? No way, Calder. No, a worm of intuition told him she was not going to be homely, and past experience told him she was not going to be leaning against the fender of a Mercedes or BMW.
He steeled himself for the inevitable and opened the door. The sun blinded him as he stepped outside and he paused a moment, squinting, while his eyes adjusted to the brightness.
It was not difficult to pick out Mrs. Winters’s car; his van and Suzie’s hulking Buick were the only two other vehicles in the small lot. Mrs. Winters’s car was not a Mercedes. It was not a BMW. It was an aging domestic compact.
Mrs. Winters was too engrossed in loosening lug nuts to notice him. Although his vantage point did not allow him to see her face, he surmised immediately that Mrs. Winters was not homely.
It’s a test, he thought, taking in the rich, dark hair curling in profusion at the top of the collar of a white, slightly sheer blouse, through which he could see the vaguest impression of some lacy little underthing with narrow straps. Fate was testing him.
The blouse was tucked into a dark gray skirt that hugged voluptuous hips. A wide black belt separated the two pieces, defining a narrow waist.
Her shoulders vibrated with a sigh as she raised her right arm to wipe her forehead with the back of her wrist.
Resolving anew to remain uninvolved with this woman in any way beyond offering to help with the tire, he strode over to her and cleared his throat. “Mrs. Winters?”
She cocked her head back to look up at him curiously. Oh, yes, he thought. He was definitely being tested. Her dark brown eyes were large and expressive, her face oval, her mouth—
He forced himself not to dwell on her mouth. “I’m Dr. Calder. I just met your daughter and your puppy. Lily told me about the tire. Maybe I could give you a hand.”
Lace-armored breasts rose beneath the soft folds of her blouse as she drew in a deep breath. “You don’t have to—I couldn’t impose—”
“Don’t be silly,” he said, kneeling beside her and grinning charmingly as he divested her of the wrench. “Despite the current frenzy for political correctness, there are still situations where brawn triumphs over brains.”
“The screws are on really tight,” she conceded.
You’re telling me, sweetheart! Mike thought. But he said, “I’ll see what I can do—as soon as I put something behind those back wheels.”
“Oh?” Her mouth formed a perfect oval, framed by full lips.
Mike swallowed. “I’ve got some two-by-fours in my van.”
He fetched the boards and wedged them beneath the good tires although, he observed, in this case the term good was relative. It did not mean good so much as not flat. Either she didn’t know she needed tires, which was scary, or she couldn’t afford them, which was worse.
Needy women! he thought, using the exertion of loosening the lug nuts as an outlet for his frustration.
“Do you have a jack?” he asked.
She nodded. “Uh-huh. I...it’s under the... whatchamacallit. Like the illustration shows.”
A whatchamacallit? It was a good thing he’d sworn off helpless women, Mike mused, because this one was truly helpless. The whatchamacallit! He got the jack, then squared it and pumped it up. She would have probably been crushed under the car when she worked the wheel off—that is, of course, in the rare event that she’d ever managed to get the lug nuts loosened.
“What made it go flat?” she asked as he rolled the tire aside. “Can you tell?”
Aside from the fact that it was worn-out? he thought uncharitably. Still, he rolled it slowly, examining what was left of the shallow treads. “Here it is,” he said, pointing out a circle of metal. “Classic case. You picked up a nail.”
She bent at the waist to examine the nail head, giving him an eye-level view of stockings shredded from the knee down, great calves, nice ankles, standard black pumps. “Just leave it in there,” she said. “The last time it happened, the man at the filling station fussed at me for taking it out because it made it harder to find the hole.”
He could smell her. Her cologne or whatever it was she wore was delicate and floral. Had he not been so close to her, and had it not been so warm, he probably would not have noticed it at all.
“You’re not planning on patching it, are you?” he asked incredulously, trying to ignore that subtle scent. There was a smudge of tire black on her forehead, her wispy bangs had coiled damply and her cheeks were slightly flushed from the heat.
“What do you mean?” she asked. “Of course I have to fix it. The spare is one of those little temporary things.”
“How long has it been since you had one patched?”
She sniffed impatiently. “A year, I guess. Maybe closer to a year and a half. It was right after—” She stiffened suddenly. “A year and a half. Why?”
“Because your tire might have been worth patching a year and a half ago, but it’s almost bald now. You really should replace it.”
“I need a new one?”
“You need four new ones.”
He watched the information sink in, weighting her shoulders, bringing the wet brightness of threatening tears to her big brown eyes, bullying her fabulous mouth into a frown. “I need new tires?” she asked, as though hoping she’d misunderstood the first time.
“These are a hazard. They’re almost bald. You’re lucky you haven’t had a blowout by now.”
“Great!” she said, her calm snapping. “Oh, that’s just great! Last month it was the fuel pump, and the mechanic said I need something called struts, and now you tell me the tires are worn-out.”
Mike shrugged. “Don’t shoot me. I’m only the messenger.”
Mrs. Winters sighed dismally. “I’m sorry. It’s just—”
Don’t cry! Mike thought desperately, fearing that it was a real possibility. Please don’t cry! Desperation was written on every one of her features. Her very pleasing, female features.
He felt himself slipping, sliding into the same old trap, wanting to comfort her, wanting to take care of her, wanting to wipe the tire black from her forehead and tease away her frown with nibbling kisses of reassurance.
You don’t even know her first name! he chided himself.
“You...uh, you could probably get by with just replacing the front ones for now,” he said, forcing himself to concentrate on aligning the holes of the spare with the lug nuts, “but I wouldn’t hold off too long on the rear ones if I were you.”
“They’re really that bad?” she asked, staring
at her filthy hands.
“‘Fraid so,” he said. “There’s a rest room inside where you can wash your hands,” he offered. “I’ll just finish up here and toss your tire in the trunk.”
“Thank you for helping,” she said. “I—”
“Brawn over brains, remember?” he said, grinning, hoping that she didn’t think he was flirting.
Hoping that he wasn’t flirting.
“But—”
“It was nothing, really. I’m just sorry about your tires—” About your tires, your aging car, your money troubles, that your little girl doesn’t have a daddy—
Most of all, he was sorry that he wanted so badly to take care of her when he knew how disastrous it would be if he tried.
Watching her walk away, he admired the female quality of her movements even as relief swept over him that she was leaving. Anxious to avoid any chance of encountering her or her fatherless waif, he reentered the clinic from the back entrance.
Mike Calder’s Minimum Requirements for a Woman stared him in the face as he scrubbed the grit from Mrs. Winters’s tires from his hands, and he was damned glad of it. For a while there, he’d almost weakened.
He allowed himself a moment of gloating triumph as he realized how sorely he’d been tested—and that he’d passed with flying colors. He’d given Mrs. Winters a helping hand, but he hadn’t even asked what her first name was.
3
“CAN YOU take a phone call?”
Mike, drying his hands, looked up at Suzie with a scowl of frustration. After the unsettling confrontation with the appealing but oh-so-wrong-for-him Mrs. Winters, he was in no mood for a closing-hour crisis. “Not unless a life hangs in the balance.”
Shrugging his churlishness into insignificance, Suzie outscowled him. “It’s Ms. Curry.”
“Ms. who?” Mike asked absently, tossing the paper towel into the waste can.
Suzie rolled her eyes. “How quickly we forget. Samantha Curry—rich, beautiful Samantha Curry who’s organizing the community rabies vaccination clinics. I imagine that’s what she’s calling about.”
Not This Guy! Page 3