“Yuck.” Zach leaned forward enough for the candlelight to bring his handsome features into focus. Callie caught her breath. His expression was comical. It was the exact replica of the one Brandon had made when a spoonful of the creamed kale and potatoes had been put on his plate.
She laughed, pleased that Zach could make fun of himself. She relaxed a little, even though the tingling in her nerve endings remained. “Brandon was a good sport about it. And there was the lure of homemade ice cream for dessert. We made it ourselves, just the two of us. I haven’t cranked an ice-cream freezer in years.”
“I can’t say I ever have. What flavor?” Zach asked, looking interested.
“Vanilla bean.”
“Sounds delicious.”
“We had all the fixings, too—homemade fudge sauce, homemade wild-strawberry jam, nuts, bananas.”
“Stop! You’re making me envious. What was Becca doing while you and Brandon were cranking away?”
“Talking to my mother,” Callie said. “Surprisingly Mom seemed to enjoy her company and Becca was interested in the spinning, which helped. I think Mom’s getting ideas for a blog entry on kids working with fiber.”
“How do you know?”
“From the way she watched Becca, the questions she asked.”
“Maybe she was just remembering doing those kinds of things with you when you were a kid?”
“She wasn’t into that kind of thing when I was young. That all came after she found herself.”
“I see.” He shoved his hands into his pockets, watching her from slightly narrowed eyes. “Not only were you bonding but maybe getting your first taste of sibling rivalry?”
She laughed. “I guess it might sound that way. I didn’t mean it to.”
“Or was it regret I heard?” His eyes were dark, shadowed like the porch, but somehow she understood he was speaking as much of the loneliness of his own childhood as of hers.
“We did a lot of fun things together when I was a kid,” she insisted, somewhat defensively. “She was a good mother in her own way.” But she didn’t want to talk about what had been, only what might be. “She offered to teach Becca to knit, but that was a step too far. Knitting is not cool, as far as Becca is concerned, although she might change her opinion one day. I took pictures. I’ll print them off at the clinic tomorrow.”
“Uh-oh.” Zach waggled his finger at her. “Wouldn’t that be unauthorized use of office supplies and equipment?”
“I plan to put money in the petty-cash drawer.”
“Yes, boss,” he said.
“I most certainly will.” Man, there she went sounding all starchy and humorless when everything had been going so well. She felt herself flush and stood up so quickly her chair skidded backward and hit the wall.
“Callie, slow down. Don’t get all fired up. I was only teasing.” He reached out and closed his hand around her wrist, just as he’d done that first day in the clinic. And just as it had done that first day, his touch threw her off balance.
“I know you were teasing. I overreacted. I seem to have misplaced my sense of humor, probably somewhere around the third year of medical school.”
“You’ve had a lot on your plate.”
“That’s no excuse. I’ve been rigid and humorless. That’s not the real me. Truly it isn’t. Do you know I agreed to this job and never even considered asking where I’d be living? I just showed up at the White Pine and expected my old room to be ready for me. How thoughtless is that?”
“Give yourself a break. You’ve been under a hell of a lot of stress for years. You’re bound to slip up once in a while. And why shouldn’t you assume there’d be a place for you at the White Pine until you get settled in? It’s your home.”
“And I never expected them to offer me the position permanently,” she said, brushing aside his excuses for her behavior to get at the heart of her dilemma.
His eyes narrowed. “Have they? Made a formal offer, I mean.”
“Well, no. Not yet. But Mac says they’re going to, and Mac is never wrong.”
“What are you going to say when they do?”
She lowered her eyes to his hand, still clasped lightly but firmly around her wrist. “I don’t know,” she whispered. “I just don’t know.”
“Callie.” His voice was a low, rough growl, more sensation than sound. It was late; there were no boats on the water to see them outlined by the candles’ glow, no one nearby to overhear their words, but he tugged her closer and into the shadows on his side of the porch anyway. “Do you want to stay here? Do you want to make this your home again, not just for now but forever?” His words sent shivers up and down her spine. He smelled of warm skin and cold lake water and a little of seaweed. He smelled just right.
“I want to fit in again. I want to be useful, to be respected. I want to help people, to heal them, and I want to be part of what goes on around me. I want my family to be strong and whole and happy. Is that all too much? Am I capable of all of that? Am I setting myself up to fail?”
“Family is always worth a big risk.”
“I hope so. I feel like a hamster on a wheel these days,” she said, trying to lighten the mood, to gain a little distance from her problems, from him.
“You’ve got a ‘yours, mine and ours’ thing going on that even the folks at Disney would have a hard time finding a happy ever after ending for.”
“Don’t make fun of me. You don’t know how hard it is.”
“You’re right. I don’t have a family. None. Nada. No one. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t try. Man, how I tried with every foster family they put me with.” His face hardened for a moment and his mouth snapped shut. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to go off on you like that.”
“No, I’m sorry, Zach. I should have never said that. You should have a family of your own, the one you deserve. I hope you do someday.”
He didn’t move a muscle. His expression didn’t change, but he drew her closer. “I do, too. I always have,” he said very low.
She swallowed hard to ease the sudden tightness in her throat. She could imagine him young and alone, trying to fit in with strangers, to make it work, to be one of them. Maybe he was right. Maybe she couldn’t spin all the separate ends of her family ties together into a long, strong yarn that could be woven into a whole, but she had to make an attempt. “I have to try,” she said, low but forcefully. To convince herself as much as him?
He lifted his hand and touched her lips, just a brush of his fingertip, but it felt as if her skin had been seared by fire. “I wouldn’t expect anything less of you. You want what’s best for everyone. That doesn’t always happen, Callie. And that’s not your fault. Sometimes you can’t make it all come out right. It doesn’t mean you’re a failure.”
Tears blurred her vision. She blinked them away. She didn’t want to be this vulnerable. She didn’t want her innermost hopes and dreams exposed to a man as perceptive as Zach Gibson.
She sensed what was going to happen next. He was going to kiss her. And dear heaven, she wanted him to even though she knew it would mean too much. “Zach, please—” She laid her hand against his chest, felt his heart beat strong and just a shade too fast beneath her palm. She had meant it to be a barrier, a warding off, but instead it seemed more like a caress.
“Shh—” he said and leaned into her hand.
She couldn’t move into his arms but neither could she pull away. It was too late to prevent what was going to happen next.
He lowered his mouth to hers. The kiss was long and sweet and the world tilted just a tiny bit on its axis, and she sensed she would never be quite the same again.
“Zach,” she whispered when he lifted his head. It sounded as though she were pleading even to her own ears. This was wrong. He knew exactly what she wanted, and she was too conflicted, too confused. Besi
des, workplace romances were bad news. They almost always ended badly. She’d seen it happen to friends and colleagues often enough.
“You’re right,” he said, reading her mind. “It won’t happen again. You have my word, but please, don’t expect me to say I’m sorry. I’m not.” He stared down at her in the near darkness for a long moment, his eyes the same dark blue as the lake before a storm, and then he smiled. “Sleep well. See you in the morning.” He touched his lips to her forehead, turned on his heel and left her alone.
CHAPTER NINE
HE HAD SCREWED UP royally. It was Friday again. D-day plus five, and he was still pinned down at the water’s edge taking heavy fire. He had thought he’d handled that out-of-nowhere kiss pretty well Sunday night, even though it had shaken him to the soles of his feet. No use denying it. He was falling for her, and it couldn’t be happening at a more inopportune moment.
It wasn’t that she was his boss. He suspected they could grow into a heck of a medical team with time and trust. But being a team meant staying together. He had no intention of leaving the town he’d come to regard as home, no matter what other opportunities might come his way. But Callie wasn’t as certain of her future as he was. He knew, and he suspected she did, too, that long-distant relationships didn’t work. So where did that leave them?
Plain and simple, kissing Callie Layman was playing havoc with his peace of mind and keeping him awake at night. But he’d managed a smile that wasn’t a grimace and kept it all as light and casual as humanly possible when he’d left her. He’d even convinced himself it had worked.
He’d been wrong.
She’d been gone when he woke up Monday morning. He couldn’t explain how he knew she wasn’t there, on the other side of the too-thin wall, but she wasn’t. And she’d stayed away as much as possible since, spending her evenings at the White Pine, or out at her mother’s place, or doing some shopping in Petoskey and at the town’s galleries with Gerry Seamann and even once with Ginger.
It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes to figure out what she was up to. He’d spotted her heading out of town toward her mom’s place after office hours with a basket of laundry under her arm. He’d glimpsed her climbing the outside stairs to the family quarters above the White Pine as he drove by in his truck. Two watercolors he’d previously noticed hanging in the gallery beside the bar and grill had appeared on her office wall. Since they were a pretty good size, in heavy rustic-style frames, he figured she’d asked her dad to help hang them.
Last night he’d watched from his porch as she and Becca and Brandon had canoed out to the raft to catch the heavenly light show of the Perseid meteor shower. He’d been watching the fire in the sky, too, from the shadows of the porch and saw them sneak down to the dock, flashlights bobbing, the twins arguing as usual, Callie shushing them with a silvery giggle that lifted the hairs on his arms and made him long to feel her lips beneath his again.
He’d been happy to see her getting along so well with the twins, but their little expedition gave rise to darker musings. Had that been her first trip to the raft? Or had she been out there before, maybe with her old high-school boyfriend or a lost love from college?
He didn’t know where she was every hour of the night when she wasn’t at the clinic. He just knew where she wasn’t—home.
In the office, it wasn’t a lot different. She wasn’t cold or unfriendly; she simply avoided him as much as humanly possible. Bonnie and Leola noticed the lengths Callie went to avoid being alone with him, though he was pretty sure none of the patients did.
And there had been a lot of patients over the past week. It was the time of year for high-school athletic physicals, so members of the football, basketball and volleyball teams, as well as cross-country runners, had Callie and Zach hustling to stay on schedule. If anyone caught them together in the hallway or jotting patient notes at the reception area, she always had something to say to him, a little joke to pass on or small talk, the kind strangers on a bus might share, otherwise he got the silent treatment. As for her patients, she was charm personified. She was working very hard at gaining the respect of the citizens of White Pine Lake, and she was doing an excellent job of it.
But did that mean she’d decided to stay when the position was officially offered, as he was convinced it would be? Did it mean he had a chance with her?
On that thought, her laughter drifted down the hall. He’d been standing in the reception area, reading lab reports. Bonnie was with his next patient, the White Pine High School’s Loggers quarterback, taking his vitals and medical history. Leola was checking the appointment log for someone she was talking to on the phone. She hadn’t seemed to notice the strain beneath Callie’s soft, rich laughter. But he did; and he realized he was going to have a lot of explaining to do. Soon.
Callie had just ushered an elderly couple in their late seventies out of one of the exam rooms. Eno and Miriam Amstutz had lived on a small farm outside White Pine Lake since Eno had returned from Korea with a bright-eyed, soft-spoken USO girl from Alabama on his arm.
“If you call him up in Arizona, your grandfather will tell you I’m speaking the gospel truth,” Eno was saying to her. “No one, including your grandfather old Jack Richard, would believe my Southern belle would last through that first bad winter.”
“But I did,” Miriam said with a sad, sweet smile that faltered a little and echoed the sorrow he saw lurking in Callie’s eyes. “Even though there was snow up to the eaves and no indoor plumbing and me with a baby on the way.”
“And she’s stuck it through sixty more since then,” Eno said with pride.
“I tried to call my grandparents yesterday,” Callie said, her tone bright, the distress she must be experiencing completely under control. “I got their answering machine. I forgot their euchre club meets on Thursdays.”
“Old J.R.’s been playing euchre since he was a boy. He’s hard to beat, especially when he teams up with your grandma.”
“I’m afraid I take after my mother when it comes to playing cards. The Layman cardsharp gene was left out of my DNA,” Callie said with a grin.
He should have talked to her about Eno and Miriam before this. He had figured they would want to be assigned to Callie’s care, but somehow he and Callie hadn’t discussed the couple that morning at the duplex, and that was his fault, too.
Eno and Callie’s grandfather had been friends for nearly seventy years. Their children had grown up with Callie’s father and her aunt, he’d learned from the couple. Callie had probably gone to school with one or two of their many grandchildren. It was the sort of intertwining of generations and families you found in small towns everywhere.
And Callie had just discovered Eno was dying. And very soon; most likely he would not be alive to celebrate another Christmas with his beloved Miriam and their large family.
Zach didn’t have to have been present in the exam room to guess what had happened. Callie would have opened the old man’s chart and glanced over the most recent blood-test results, and her brain would have given her the diagnosis in a matter of seconds: a chronic form of leukemia, caused by a gradual shutting down of the bone marrow.
It would have taken longer for her heart to come to grips with the evidence before her. So she would have bought herself a little breathing room by leafing through the past few months of test results, all the while aware two sets of wise old eyes were following her every move. And in Miriam’s eyes, a silent plea for Callie to tell her something other than what they all knew to be the truth. Then she would have asked Eno all the questions Zach himself had asked the old man every two weeks for the past several months: How was he sleeping, how was he eating, was he in pain? Eno’s answers were always the same: good, good, how could he not be eating with the best cook in White Pine Lake fixing his meals and no, he was not in pain. If his red-cell count was too low, Zach would make arrangements for an appointment with
the specialist in Petoskey for a blood transfusion. If the numbers were stable, Zach would send him home to sit on his porch and play with his dogs and his great-grandchildren for a few more weeks or months.
Through the door, Zach could see Eno leaning against the counter. He was a tall, stooped man with the telltale bruising and pale skin that telegraphed his illness to an educated observer. “When are your grandparents coming back this way?” he asked as Callie approached.
“In the fall.” Callie smiled, but Zach noticed the strain was beginning to wear on her. “He’s planning on being home for Thanksgiving and the opening of deer season. It depends on Grandma’s arthritis, though. She’s not used to the cold weather anymore.”
“We hope Evelyn’s well enough to travel,” Miriam said, lifting her chin as if defying anyone to contradict her. “We’re anxious to have them home again. Aren’t we, Eno?”
“Yes, dear,” he said, patting her shoulder. She shifted a few inches closer, her hand lightly touching his arm. “We’re always happy to see Jack and Evelyn. It’s like old times when they’re back in town.”
“Yes, and you two can remember the days when you were randy young bucks out chasing all the pretty girls in town,” Miriam teased.
“Those days ended for both of us the day we met the loves of our life.” Eno smiled down at her and in his eyes he obviously still saw the beautiful young Southern belle he’d fallen in love with so many years earlier.
“Save your breath, Eno. I’m too old to fall for that sweet talk at my age.” But she blushed as though she was still nineteen and ready to fall in love.
“You come along to visit, too, when Jack Richard and Evelyn come out to the farm,” she said to Callie. “Promise?”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” Callie said.
“We’ll see you around,” Eno said, then, noticing Zach, he lifted his hand in a half wave. “You, too, Doc.”
“Take it easy, Eno.” Zach gave the old man a two-fingered salute.
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