Kelly shook her head, her blond curls bopping around her shoulders. She forced her own grin now. “It’s nothing,” she said, shrugging. “Sorry. Bride stuff. I’m too on edge.”
“It’s fine. I get it.” I glanced around at the room full of middle-aged women in beige dresses. I stuck out in my bright pink shirt and gray skirt. “Remember how we used to be the ones sitting in the back together bitching about showers?”
Kelly and I used to have this running bit about how every friend who used to be at the back table with us complaining, promising that when it was her turn to be the bride, she’d never, ever make her friends and family sit through a boring wedding shower, eventually made her friends and family sit through a boring wedding shower.
Kelly sneered and folded her arms across her chest. “And now I’m one of those hypocritical women.”
“No,” I said, exasperated. “I meant nothing by it.” I shrugged. “It’s just…this is life, isn’t it? What goes around comes around. The hero lives long enough to see himself become the villain.”
“So, I’m the villain now.” Her nostrils flared like a bull’s. I really thought she was going to hit me.
I felt eyes on us. The women at the two tables nearby were hanging on every word of our exchange.
I backed away, holding my hands up in surrender. “I’m clearly incapable of saying the right thing at the moment, so I’m just going to say I’m sorry, and I hope we can talk later, maybe after the shower. You, me, and Yessi.” That was what we needed: a good, old-fashioned chat, just the three of us—no phones, no Mark, no my mother. We could be grown-ups, really hash it out.
Kelly’s cold eyes stared me down. “Oh, you can hang around?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m here for you. All messages are going to Tina. She’s not allowed to call me unless it’s a certified emergency.” I flashed a smile. “Those don’t happen that often.”
Kelly raised an eyebrow. “And she understands that doesn’t mean ‘text 911 to Annie if a Bears linebacker gets a splinter’?”
“Yes, Kelly.” A headache was starting to take shape in my brain. “I’m all yours.”
“Well, that’d be a first.” She bit her bottom lip.
“Are you ladies okay?” asked a woman at the table behind us.
“Yes,” Kelly and I barked in unison.
“What are you even talking about?” I asked. “I’m always there for you.”
“You’re there, and you’re not. I can’t even count how many of our conversations have been ended by your phone,” she said, rushed. Tension colored her tone.
“Kelly, you know how demanding my job is.”
“Yes.” Her shoulders dropped dramatically in faux exhaustion. She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead. “Dr. Annie is so important that she gets featured on the news.”
“That’s not fair.” My brow furrowed. “You know how tough things have been for me since Katherine retired.” I paused, weighing whether or not to go in for the kill. The anger boiling in my gut pushed me to go for it. “Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you were too busy getting engaged without telling me you were even dating someone.”
“I tried to tell you, Annie, but you could never give me your undivided attention.”
Yessi rushed over, eyes concerned. “Guys, stop it.” She pressed Olivia’s head to her chest, shielding her ears.
I racked my brain, trying to recall if I could remember her attempting to tell me about it. I supposed it was possible. My shoulders dropped. “Kelly, I’m sorry.”
“So sorry that you gave my room to some random bartender and his dog?”
“Wait, what?” Yessi said.
“You were gone,” I said. “You were getting married and moving to Galena, and I saw an opportunity to help someone who needed it.”
“How magnanimous of you,” Kelly said.
“And I…I was lonely.”
“You were lonely?” Yessi said. “What about Rob?”
“Rob?” Kelly said. “Boob Honker Rob?”
My phone buzzed in my purse. Shit. I froze. Maybe it was nothing—just a sales call or a reminder to call the dentist. The phone kept buzzing. “I’m sorry.” I turned away, reached into my purse, and fetched my phone. “Tina?” I said when I saw who was calling.
“I thought Tina was taking care of everything today,” Kelly said in a sing-song voice.
“Kelly, shut up,” Yessi said.
“What?” I said as the reality of Tina’s words registered in my mind. “Okay. I’ll be right there.” I hung up, suddenly emotionally numb and ready for action. “I’m so, so sorry, Kelly, but I really do have to go.”
Ignoring her pout, I rushed to grab my mother, take her back home, and then head to the hospital. Gayle Gale had had a stroke.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Long Quiz Goodnight
By the time I got home that night, it was almost eleven, and I was beat. Gayle Gale’s husband had noticed she was acting off earlier in the day. He’d called Tina, who told him to get her to the emergency room. It turned out she did have a stroke, but it wasn’t clear yet if there’d be any lasting damage.
I technically didn’t have to be there—the specialists were in charge of the situation—but I always showed up for my patients if something serious happened, to advocate on their behalf and to make sure everyone was on the same page and aware of medical histories and medications, and besides, when I initially joined the practice, Gayle had been the first of Katherine’s patients to call asking specifically for me. Everyone else would agree to see me reluctantly, if they had to, but Gayle believed in me from the start. I would not let her down.
Tonight, I left Gayle at the hospital in good hands, and I’d go back in the morning to check on her.
As I dragged myself up the front steps of the house, I checked my phone. Still no messages from Yessi or Kelly. My mom, however, had let me know that my nephew had lost his first tooth. Grinning at that bit of good news in a full-on shit day, I opened the door and tossed my phone on the table in the hallway. Joanne, who’d obviously been sleeping, padded over to greet me. I gave her a quick pat on the head.
A low piano note cut through the house, and I followed the sound into the front room. Dax sat at the piano, bathed in the moonlight from the big bay window, his left hand playing the low notes while his elbow rested on the high keys, his hand supporting his head.
“You had it tuned,” I said. “That sounds like actual music.”
He looked up. His eyes were puffy.
“What’s wrong?” I stepped over, my heart thumping. This day had been full of bombshells—what was one more?
Dax reached for a stack of papers on the music rack and handed them to me wordlessly. His eyes turned back to the piano, and he played a gloomy tune with his left hand.
I glanced down at the pages. “Divorce papers?” My eyes snapped to him. “Wait. You’re married?”
“Not anymore.” He sat up straighter and started playing something beautiful and melodic and sad.
“What happened?” I asked.
He shook his head.
I perched next to him on the bench and placed my hand on his right one, stopping his song. My fingers melted between his until our hands were interlaced.
He didn’t pull away, and neither did I. “Hey, talk to me.”
He glanced over at me, his usually intense blue eyes pink and puffy. “Not much to say—”
“Don’t do that.” My fingers squeezed his. “You’re obviously sad, and I’m here for you, if you want to talk about it.” And I would be here for him, especially after that nonsense Kelly had said about me at the shower today. Yes, I’d had a rough day, but it wasn’t as rough as the one Dax had. No one had served me with divorce papers. “How long were you married?”
“We got married when we were twenty and still in college,
” he said, playing a few quick notes. “So…seven? But we’ve been separated for two. We agreed to stay together for logistical purposes, like insurance, but I guess that’s over.”
“What’s her name?”
“Muriel.” His left fingers alternated between one black key and one white key. Dax didn’t normally talk this much, but I got the sense that the piano was like a security blanket, giving him the guts to unload. Or maybe he’d simply realized who he was talking to—the woman who never failed to spill all her beans to him, even about her embarrassing proposal text—and decided, what the hell, why not go for it. “She was going to be a famous opera singer.”
“And you were going to be a famous pianist,” I said, smiling. “Are.” I checked myself. “You are going to be famous.”
He turned his head slightly and glanced over at me. “After a few years of rejection and disappointment, she took a quote-unquote real job and gave up on her dream.”
“And you didn’t.”
He pressed the lowest note on the piano. “It was really kind of messed up. I was so broke when she ended things, I had to keep living with her because it was too expensive for me to move out, which was something she held over my head for a while.” Sighing, he repeated the low note. “And then, when the lease was up, I had the privilege of getting to feel even more pathetic—subletting rooms from my bandmates, moving in with my sister, and now…” He played a chord.
“And now you’re here, totally welcome and appreciated in this house.” I paused, waiting for him to say something else. “Dax, I’m so sorry.”
He, smiling sadly, turned his head toward me. “It’s all right, really.” He sighed. “I knew this was coming. I just didn’t expect it to arrive today.”
“Well, she’s a fool,” I told him.
“She’s not,” he said. “She has a point.” He pressed one of the keys. “I mean, I’m twenty-seven. How long do I keep doing this before it becomes pathetic?”
“First of all, twenty-seven is not the ‘I should panic and pack it all in’ age. You do it as long as you want,” I said. “As long as it makes you happy.”
“Says the doctor with the big, fancy house.”
“Says the daughter of a banker who never gave his dream a shot,” I said. “You’re welcome to stay here as long as you want.”
“One of the guys you’re promising to marry might have a problem with that.” He raised his eyebrows.
I chuckled. “Yeah, they might.”
Dax stood and stretched, revealing a toned bit of tummy under his T-shirt. “But seriously, Annie, I cannot possibly thank you enough for giving Joanne and me a place to stay.”
My stomach soured, remembering Kelly’s comments earlier today. She’d moved on with her life. I had every right to do the same with mine, including renting out the basement area where she used to live. “I have the room. I’m happy to help.”
He opened his arms, and I fell in for a hug, resting my cheek against his strong, hard chest. I took in his pure, soapy scent as our bodies breathed in unison. This was nice.
Too nice.
I pulled away and smiled sheepishly up at him as he peered down at me with sad eyes. “This day’s kind of sucked, hasn’t it?”
“What happened to you?”
“Eh,” I said, waving my hand. “Friend drama and—” A lump formed in my throat. “One of my favorite patients had a stroke.”
“Annie, I’m sorry.” He cupped my cheek in his hand, and my face melted into his palm.
I sighed. Even though I’d recently kissed Rob, this still felt like the most intimate thing I’d done in a while. I gazed up at Dax, whose eyes changed, darkened, and intensifed.
He felt it, too.
My body ached in a way normally reserved for Timothy Olyphant. Right, wrong, or foolish, I needed his hands on me tonight.
“I want you to kiss me.” There—I said it.
His thumb traced my lower lip, and my groin sent out an SOS signal to the rest of my body. “You don’t want that.”
“Yes, I do.”
“If I kiss you, then what?” His eyes focused on my lips.
“Then…we high five and go our separate ways.”
A smirk flashed across his face. “That’s not what would happen, and you know it.”
I stepped closer to him, our eyes locked. “You really want to know what we’d do?”
Good lord, what was I doing? I didn’t talk like this. But the pull I felt toward Dax tonight—the need inside me for connection, for someone to find me good and desirable and interesting, not just because I was an eligible doctor looking to settle down but because I was an attractive, sexy woman—overpowered the normally dominant rational part of my brain. Rob saw me as an acquaintance, Darius saw me as a business partner of sorts, but Dax was watching me tonight like I was the only woman in the world.
He smirked. “I want to find out if you’ll go through with telling me what you’d want me to do.”
A dare. Aha. This guy didn’t know who he was dealing with. Dr. Annie Kyle didn’t back down from a challenge.
A sly smile on my face, I kept my eyes locked on his. “Okay…I think we would kiss…and then…purely hypothetically…you’d lead me back over to the piano bench.”
His eyes lit up in surprise, like he couldn’t believe I’d actually said it. “The piano bench? Really?”
I’d been too embarrassed to kiss Rob in his neighbor’s backyard, but now I was talking about doing it in front of the huge window facing my own street. Eh, it was just talking. We weren’t actually doing anything…
“Okay, but I’m having trouble picturing this.” His top teeth pressed into his lower lip. “Go sit on the bench.”
“What?”
“Unless you don’t want to.”
Oh, I wanted to. I slowly, what I hoped was seductively, made my way over to the bench and sat.
“Now what?” He was watching me, amused, like he knew I’d give up and end this game soon, that he’d win our little round of sex chicken by default.
He underestimated me.
“Then you’d…unbutton my shirt slowly…methodically…” I reached for my own shirt and undid the top button…and the next. Dax’s eyes focused hard on my hands. When I’d unbuttoned my shirt to the waist, I slid my arms out and sat there in my bra, hands clasped around the edge of the bench.
His eyes didn’t—or couldn’t—leave my chest. “You just took off your shirt.”
I glanced at the large bay window off to the side, checking out my reflection. I didn’t look like me anymore. I’d changed. I was wild and free and shirtless and…happy.
I looked right at him. “Yeah, and?”
His eyes focused hard on mine. His brow flickered. “Then what?”
“Then you’d unhook my bra.” I reached behind me, hunting for the clasp.
He rushed over. “Let me.”
I nodded.
He knelt down in front of me, ran his hands up the length of my body, and undid my bra. He pushed the straps off my shoulders, freeing my breasts. The cold, air-conditioned atmosphere hardened my nipples immediately.
I swallowed. “Then—”
“I think I’ve got it from here.” Eyes firmly on mine, as if waiting for me to stop him, his lips made their way toward my chest. Finally he took my nipple into his mouth, and the sensation hit me everywhere. I moaned. With one final lick, he gazed up at me again. “Then?”
My entire body ached for him. I hadn’t felt this way in… I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt this way. Right now, I had this guy in my house ready and willing to do whatever I asked. I would not waste it. “You’d run your hands all the way up my legs.”
Dax’s large, strong hands made their way up my calves and my knees. He paused. “Keep going?”
I looked right at him. “I said, ‘All
the way up.’”
His hands ascended up my thighs, toward my core. “Keep going?”
My chest heaved, and again I glanced over at us in the window’s reflection—me, a half-naked woman with a man kneeling between her legs, ready to ravish her. My body ached at the idea that someone might see us. I’d been wrong. My libido could go zoom in risky situations. “Yes. Keep going.”
Feathery fingers touched the outside of my underwear. “More?”
My heart thumped loudly in my chest, and waves of heat pulsed across my skin. I’d lost all sense of right and wrong. The only things that mattered now was Dax’s hands on me. “Yes, more.”
He pushed my underwear aside, and one finger ran the length of me, wet, wanting. I quivered, throwing my head back.
A buzzing sound cut through the moment, taking me out of it for a second. Was that my phone?
“More?”
“Yes.”
One of Dax’s long digits penetrated me, filling me, completing me, and I moaned.
Buzzing. Again.
I thought of what Kelly had said earlier—how nothing else mattered if my patients needed me, if the job needed me.
Buzz.
I tried to ignore it—it was probably nothing—and I tried to focus on the beautiful man with his hands on me and in me, his lips trailing kisses up, up, up my inner thigh—
Buzz!
“Shit!” I jumped up, shutting my legs tight. “Sorry,” I said. “I’m sorry. It’s the—you know, my patient had a stroke.”
“It’s okay.” Dax stood and dusted off his knees. “I get it.” As I located my bra and buttoned up my shirt, he took my place on the piano bench and folded his hands in his lap.
“This was…” I couldn’t find the words.
He winced. “Weird.”
I flashed him a smile. “Yes, very weird. But also very fun. Maybe we can…” What? Do this again? I didn’t mean that. I never should’ve let it get as far as it did. I had two guys who were serious about settling down with me—
My phone buzzed again.
“Shit,” I said.
“Go.” He pressed a few keys on the piano.
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