by Janice Lynn
What she said registered and he laughed, pulling back and pretending to check her.
Taylor’s hands stilled at his neck, where she’d been twisting his hair around her fingers. “What are you doing?”
“Checking for blood because I’m pretty sure that admission mortally wounded you.”
She rolled her eyes, but the effect was lost as she was smiling. “Don’t press your luck, Jack.”
His arms already around her, his hands at her lower back, he hugged her. “In all seriousness, Taylor, I’m glad you miss me. I want you to miss me so much that, for the next two months, you can’t stay away.”
Her eyes took on a sparkle he’d not seen since Rockin’ Tyme, other than when she’d been talking about her sculpting.
“Sounds a little creepy.”
He laughed again. “There she is.”
“Who?”
“The woman who captivated me during a music festival.”
“Who do you think you had dinner with last night?”
“Someone who refused to let herself relax and enjoy being with me.”
She closed her eyes. “Okay, I’ll admit it. I don’t want to want you, Jack.”
“I know.”
Her eyes opened. “Actually, the truth of the matter is wanting you at Rockin’ Tyme thrilled me. It had been so long since I’d felt anything regarding the opposite sex. But now that I do feel, well, attracted...” she sighed, her warm breath caressing against the curve of his neck, “...it’s inconvenient and doesn’t fit with who I am or the life I want to make here. So, I want you but I don’t like it.”
There was so much sincerity, so much emotion in her voice it made his heart hurt for her. Made him want to protect her from ever adding to her leeriness or pain.
“We don’t have to do this.” Although convincing his body wouldn’t be easy when she was melted against him so completely. “I was serious when I said we could be friends.”
“I guess we’ll see.” She gestured beyond him. “The waitress has almost finished taking everyone’s orders. We should join them.”
* * *
Taylor wasn’t sure who’d pulled what strings, but Amy was her orientation trainer. Amy had been an excellent nurse when they’d graduated. Her skills had only become more fine-tuned over the years since then and working with her was informative and enjoyable.
Working with Amy meant being on the same schedule as Jack.
Something Taylor was taking one day at a time.
Over a week had passed since their dance. A week in which she’d seen him more days than not, but always at work or in a social setting with others, sometimes just Amy.
Amy, who had bounced around with excitement and squeals of “I knew it!” when Taylor had confessed the truth about Rockin’ Tyme.
Currently, Amy had gone to the lab to drop off a vial of blood she’d drawn as the phlebotomist had been tied up with another patient. She’d sent Taylor to assist Jack on a thirty-something man who had a laceration requiring closure.
Working with Jack was almost as awesome as working with Amy. He brought the same laidback professionalism to the emergency room that she’d gotten used to at the music festival. He didn’t get overly excited no matter what drama was unfolding, but was always on top of things medically. He treated everyone, staff and patients, with care and consideration.
He really was a great guy and a gifted physician.
“You want to finish closing this wound?”
Surprised at his question, Taylor glanced up to see if Jack was teasing.
He wasn’t.
She’d only sutured a few times and none over the past few years as the opportunity hadn’t arisen in the intensive care unit where she’d been working.
Did she want to? Not really. Especially not with Jack watching. But she wasn’t going to say no to a learning opportunity and Jack was a great teacher.
With trembling hands, she took the needle holder from him.
Following the pattern he’d made along the man’s gashed arm, she positioned the needle, then looked at Jack.
“Perfect,” he reassured her as she pushed the curved needle into the man’s anesthetized skin and out the other side of his wound.
Pulling the thread through, she released the needle, wrapped the ethilon around the tip of her needle-nosed holder multiple times, then tied off a knot. She repeated the knot-tying process several times. She wrapped one direction one time and the opposite the next, to make sure the knot didn’t work loose as the man returned to his normal activities of daily living and increased tension was placed on the sutures.
“Beautiful stitch,” Jack praised.
Glancing up, Taylor smiled.
“It is, isn’t it?” she teased, pleased with both his praise and the suture.
She put the next three stitches in, getting faster with the last one.
“Excellent. Don’t you think so, Ralph?” Jack asked their patient, who’d been talking a mile a minute about his logging business and how this same thing had happened a few years back.
Ralph glanced down at his closed cut. “Looks good to me. This mean I can go home now?”
Jack laughed. “Soon. Taylor is going to dress your wound, give you a tetanus vaccination, and print out wound-care handouts for you. When she’s done, I’ll write discharge orders. Then you can go home.”
Taylor finished cleaning the man’s more minor cuts and scratches. Really, the guy had been lucky. He’d been cutting timber and, unexpectedly, a tree had fallen near him. Some of the branches had left nasty cuts. The one on his left arm had been the worst and the only one requiring sutures.
“Nice job in there,” Jack commended when she returned to the nurses’ station where he sat with Amy.
“Thanks.” She gave him a smile she hoped conveyed her true appreciation of his patience and praise. “It’s been a while since I’ve sutured so I was nervous.”
“You did fantastically. You can assist any time on my patients, Nurse Hall.”
“Thank you, Dr. Morgan.” She met his gaze, wondering how any woman could ever resist the shimmering joy in his eyes. How she’d ever thought she could resist?
“Listen to you two being all normal co-workers,” Amy teased, standing up from the nurses’ station where she’d been charting. “There’s another new patient in Triage. I’ll attend to him.”
Taylor watched her go and fought sighing.
“She’s persistent. You have to give her that,” Jack mused, not sounding upset by Amy purposely leaving them alone.
“And as subtle as a ton of bricks.”
“Speaking of which, this is the weekend she’s out of town. She made me promise to make sure you didn’t sit home alone.”
“We both know what happened the last time she made you promise to watch out for me.”
He shrugged. “I liked what happened last time.”
She had, too, but that didn’t mean it should happen again. Getting all tangled up with a man was not on the agenda of her new life. It just wasn’t.
She glanced down to read the information on the patient Amy was triaging. A four-year-old with shortness of breath with suspected asthma. She pointed it out to Jack and he left to take a quick peek at the boy.
When he returned, he dropped in an order for a nebulizer treatment. “Amy took a verbal and has already gotten the treatment started. She said to tell you she’d let you know if she needed you.”
Next to him at the nurses’ station, Taylor studied Jack as he documented his physical examination of the child.
“Do you like kids, Jack?” The question popped out of her mouth as quickly as the thought had hit her. Her throat dipped somewhere in the vicinity of the pit of her stomach.
Pausing at the computer, he turned toward her. His eyes sparkled as he said, “All except the whiny ones.”
“Only child? That makes you spoiled rotten, right?” he teased.
“Ha. Hardly, Mr. Also-an-Only-Child.” She shook her head. “My parents were in their forties when they got pregnant with me. They’d not planned to have kids, so I was a surprise they didn’t want and didn’t know what to do with once I arrived. I mostly did what they expected of me, stayed quiet and kept to myself as not to disturb them too much.”
If she ever had children, she’d make sure they never felt that way.
“That doesn’t sound like fun.”
“Fun was not a word in the Hall household.”
“Poor Taylor.”
“Don’t mock me,” she scolded. “I didn’t say I had a bad childhood, just not a fun one. My parents were strict. Not quite military-school strict, but I imagine they got close. They weren’t mean or cruel. I was always taken care of. Never without food, clothes, shelter, books to read. I certainly didn’t have it bad. Just not the stuff of Normal Rockwell.”
He studied her a moment, then confessed, “I was home-schooled.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “We traveled too much for me to attend regular school so my mother provided my education. It was interesting, to say the least.”
Taylor lifted one shoulder. “You went to med school so she must have done something right.”
“She did a lot right and got lucky that I liked to learn and was a good student.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Wasn’t what?” he asked.
“A good student,” she admitted, a little embarrassed that she felt compelled to do so.
“I find that difficult to believe.”
“Oh, don’t misunderstand. I made good grades,” she clarified. “I just had to work really hard for them. Amy could party all night, go to class the next morning and ace a test. Not me. I had to put my nose to the books and learn the material inside out.”
“Everyone learns differently.”
“Yeah, some of us do things the hard way over and over.” Glancing around the emergency room bay, which was rather quiet at the moment, restlessness overtook Taylor. “Guess I should see if Amy needs help.”
“She’s going to say she doesn’t because she prefers you to be doing exactly what you are doing right this moment.”
“What’s that?”
“Talking with me.”
Taylor sucked in a deep breath. “Jack.”
He grinned. “I like it when you say my name.”
“Yeah, well, I should say Dr. Morgan.”
He shook his head. “No matter what happens, I’m always Jack to you. Always.”
* * *
Amy left on Friday morning and Taylor’s phone buzzed before ten a.m. with a text from Jack. She’d been up for a while, working on catching up on her laundry.
Staring at her phone, she sighed. Oh, Jack. What am I going to do about you?
She’d been clinging to what she’d overheard as an excuse to put distance between them. She recognized that just as she recognized the truth in what he’d said. She and Jack had no future together. Spending time with him set her up for heartache, but not spending time with him seemed impossible.
At least for as long as she was paired with Amy for orientation she’d be on the same work schedule as Jack. And, for at least as long as Amy had breath in her body, her friend seemed determined to push them together.
Jack’s position at the hospital would be ending before long. Then she wouldn’t see him. At all.
Just the thought of that made her heart squeeze.
Maybe she was only hurting herself by refusing him when she could be having sex with Jack. He missed her and wanted her. He’d told her so. Spending the next few weeks with Jack wouldn’t derail her goals. She wouldn’t depend on him or expect anything from him.
He was leaving. She knew he was leaving. She didn’t want him to stay.
She’d be fine.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
TAYLOR’S HAIR WAS blowing about her face crazily as she and Jack rode in ‘Jessica’, his nickname for his Jeep. The sun beat down on top of her head. The radio was cranked up and could be heard over the wind noise.
Raising her arms above her head to let the wind blow through her fingers, Taylor laughed.
Jack glanced over at her and grinned. “Having fun?”
Between the air with the top off, the radio, and the engine, the Jeep wasn’t conducive to having a conversation, so Taylor nodded her answer.
This was fun.
And a lot more relaxing than she’d have imagined.
They drove around on Tennessee back roads for more than an hour before Jack pulled over near a bridge.
“You want to walk down and play in the water?”
Taylor stared at him as if he’d lost his mind. “What?”
His eyes were full of challenge. “You heard me.”
“I didn’t bring clothes for playing in the water.”
He waggled his brows. “Where’s your sense of adventure?”
Good question.
“I was born with a genetic deficiency of that particular sense.” But was working on developing it.
He laughed, grabbed his backpack from behind his seat, then climbed out of the Jeep. “Come on. If we hike just a short way, there’s a cool waterfall. It’s not big, only about six or seven feet, and flows down rather than being a straight drop, but it’s a beauty with the way the water moves over the rocks.”
“Do I even want to know how you know that?”
“I’ve been here before.”
With a woman? she wondered.
Coming around to her side of the Jeep, he held out his hand. “One of the times Greg was in town, Amy, Greg, and I checked this place out. Amy is a treasure trove of off-the-beaten path places.”
Taking his hand, she stepped out of Jessica. “Now I know why she’s pushing us together.”
“Why’s that?” he asked, leading the way down the embankment to where the small river ran.
“So you’ll quit being the third wheel on her dates with Greg.”
He laughed. “You might be right.”
Making it to the water’s edge, Taylor took in the bubbling water with the big flat rocks scattered about. Small purple flowers grew along the banks, as did Queen Anne’s Lace and Black-Eyed Susans. Beyond the bank was a field that led into woods. Everything in sight was absolutely gorgeous—the man included.
Tossing his backpack onto the grass, Jack kicked off his shoes and waded out into the water, which came just above his ankles.
“When will I get to meet Greg?” she asked as she sat down on the bank and began taking off her sandals. She had to at least dip her toes into the water. “I’ve been here a couple of weeks. They talk on the phone and text often enough, but I figured I’d have met him by now. He’s only an hour away, right?”
“Amy would know better than me,” Jack admitted. “But I imagine we’ve not seen him since you’ve moved in to give you two time to catch up. He’ll probably drive up during Amy’s next four days off. He was here almost weekly prior to your move.”
She hadn’t really thought about how her living at Amy’s place impeded her friend’s dating life. Amy had repeatedly invited her to move back in, but maybe her being there was an imposition?
“Good. I’m glad he’s coming.” Once she’d met him, she’d make herself scarce. “I need to make sure he’s good enough for my best friend.”
Holding his hand out to her as he waited for her to step into the water, he asked, “Turnabout is fair play
?”
“Oh, Amy’s not trying to make sure you are good enough for me. She gave her stamp of approval long before I’d ever met you.” Taylor’s eyes widened at how cold the water was. Her skin goose-bumped. “Wowzers, where are the ice cubes coming from?”
Jack chuckled. “This is fed from an underground spring about a mile from here and is a bit brisk when you first step in. You’ll get used to it and it’ll feel good in this heat.”
The water temperature was definitely a direct contrast to the late morning sunshine, but Jack was right in that the longer she was in the water, the more she adjusted to the temperature.
A step ahead of her, Jack stopped walking, let go of her hand, and bent down to study the water in a semi-shallow spot where the creek bed was readily visible.
“Tell me you’ve not found a snake,” she ordered, trying to see what he was looking at and not spotting anything. She took a step back, just in case.
“No, but it is possible we might see one. If we do, just don’t panic. Odds are it’ll be more scared of you than you are of him.” At her look of alarm, he grinned. “No worries, Taylor. If anything tries to bother you, I’ll rescue you.”
“Yeah, yeah, but who’s going to rescue me from you?”
He waggled his brows. “You have all the power where I’m concerned.”
“What’s that mean?”
“That whatever you say goes. That’s why I haven’t pushed this past week. Nothing will happen between us until you give the word that you’re ready.”
She was still pondering his comment when he reached down in the water and scooped up something with his hands.
Something that was alive.
“Don’t throw that at me or I may never forgive you.”
“I won’t but come and see.”
Taylor carefully made her way across the rocky creek bottom to stare into Jack’s cupped hands.
“Is that a baby lobster?”
Looking up at her, he grinned. “I take it you’ve never seen a crawdad before?”
She shook her head. “Is that what that is?”