Big Sky Bride, Be Mine!

by Victoria Pade

  Yet as she closed the door, it wasn’t so much stopping the kisses that was still on her mind.

  Instead, she kept recalling the sensation of having Ian kiss her forehead and imagining that same sensation on lips that were hungering for him.

  Hungering for more than a kiss that was just a little peck between two friends.

  And who was she really kidding? she asked herself.

  Because if he had given her a kiss that was more than a little peck between friends there was no way she would have put a stop to it….

  Chapter Six

  The unusually warm March weather ended overnight, and on Thursday, late-winter temperatures returned with three inches of heavy, wet snow. It wasn’t near enough to slow things down in Northbridge, day or night, however. So the Bruisers—the local men’s sports team that pitted brothers and old friends against each other in whatever sport was in season—still played basketball that evening in the high-school gym.

  The weekly games were all in good fun and always drew a large crowd, most of which went from the game straight to Adz, the town’s most popular restaurant and bar. Adz was so popular that it had recently expanded for the second time, taking over an additional storefront and making it a game room.

  The pool table that had been added during the first expansion was moved into the game room and joined by a foosball table, a Ping-Pong table, an air-hockey game, two pinball tables, a Skee-Ball section and a wall that offered darts and another game call Ringing the Bull. There were also video games, penny-pitching games and a bookcase filled with board games that included checkers and chess.

  While Ian had sat beside Jenna at the Bruisers’ basketball game, when they’d arrived with everyone else at Adz, it had been impossible for them to stick together.

  The die-hard football fans spotted Ian the minute they walked in and demanded that he make good on his promise of the previous night to have a drink with them and talk football. And as one of the few medical professionals in Northbridge, it was difficult for Jenna to go anywhere and not meet a barrage of health questions.

  It wasn’t until Ian broke away from the football fans and inched Jenna into the game room that they could finally spend some time together. And even then they were only left alone if they played the games.

  Not that Jenna minded. In fact she had a lot of fun. She ordinarily didn’t have anyone to play with.

  “What’s the score?” Ian demanded after she beat him shooting pool.

  “I’m three for three here,” she said, not shy about her victories.

  “But I was three for three at air hockey,” Ian reminded her.

  “We tied at foosball. I won one more at pinball—”

  “But I cleaned your clock at Ping-Pong,” Ian boasted with relish.

  “You only beat me by two, and I had better aim at darts—where I cleaned your clock! And then there was Ringing The Bull….”

  Ringing The Bull was a game in which a genuine bull’s nose ring attached to a string was tossed by the string to hook onto a bull’s horn mounted on the wall.

  Ian laughed. “Yeah, how is it that you’re so good at that?”

  Jenna had no idea, but she wasn’t about to admit it. “I believe it’s pure talent,” she said with a heavy dose of mock superiority.

  “Uh-huh,” Ian said dubiously, laughing again. “And then there’s Skee-Ball…” he added, taking his turn at goading. “If I’m remembering right, that made us about even. What do you want to do to break the tie?”

  He said that with some salaciousness to his tone, and Jenna shook her head at him as if he were incorrigible. But all evening, their game playing had been full of the teasing and joking that they were both so quick with, and tonight it had more of a note of flirting to it than previously.

  It was more fun than Jenna had had in a very long time.

  Of course, it also hadn’t hurt that she’d had the opportunity to steal innumerable glances at Ian’s divine derriere in the jeans he was wearing. Or that she’d had the chance to watch his back, his shoulders, his muscular chest in action beneath his bulky fisherman’s knit sweater. Or that his hair had just the right amount of dishevel to it tonight and his handsome face was showing a hint of beard. Altogether, he looked ruggedly masculine with just a bit of scraggly charm.

  Still, before deciding what they should do to break their tie, she asked a passing waitress what time it was. The answer nixed any further fun and games.

  “I need to get home,” she said.

  “You said you put Abby to bed before you left tonight. The sitter is just sitting—”

  “But it’s a school night for my sitter and I promised I’d be back by eleven—it’s that now.”

  “So we just agree that we are worthy adversaries and save true conquest for another day.”

  Jenna laughed at his melodramatic declaration. “Was one of us going to conquer the other?” she inquired with her own hint of insinuation.

  Ian did nothing but wiggle his eyebrows up and down in answer to that.

  Then he said, “Okay, home it is,” and Jenna appreciated how good-naturedly he was taking her need to call such an abrupt halt to their fun.

  Getting out of Adz was no quick-and-easy task. Good-nights had to be said along the way, the football fans tried to nab Ian again, and Jenna’s medical expertise was called upon by three more people.

  But eventually, they made it to the coatrack and donned their coats before slipping out into the cold March air to Ian’s sedan, parked a few slots from the door.

  “It’s so quiet.” Ian marveled at the difference between the noise of Adz and the silence of a deserted Main Street.

  “Quiet and pretty, isn’t it?” Jenna chimed in, gazing at the dusting of snow that glistened in the glow of the wrought-iron streetlights that lined the wide avenue. “It’s almost pretty enough to stall my spring fever.”

  “But not quite,” Ian guessed as he unlocked the passenger door of his car and opened it for her.

  “No, I’m ready for spring,” Jenna conceded as she got in.

  Once she was securely inside, Ian closed the door, and Jenna watched him round the front of the Mercedes. He’d put on a peacoat over his sweater, and it had just added to his rugged appeal. So much so that she wasn’t sure if the shiver that rippled through her just then was in response to the cold seeping in through her own jeans, turtleneck sweater and wool coat, or if it was a reaction to just how good he looked.

  She tried to tell herself that it was the former and kept her eyes straight ahead as he got behind the wheel and started the car.

  “Sooo,” he said, “nurses don’t get to leave their jobs at the office either—if tonight was any indication.”

  Jenna shrugged that off with a smile. “No, not usually. Especially in Northbridge, where everybody knows me.”

  “And they come to you with the kind of stuff I’d see a doctor for. Even after hours, in a bar, when you’re socializing.”

  “People are less shy when they’re worried about some health issue. It’s okay, it comes with the territory.”

  “It’s okay to have some beefy guy pull up his pant leg to show you a boil just when you’ve taken a sip of your hot, buttered rum?” Ian asked with some squeamishness that amused Jenna.

  “Don’t tell me you didn’t see yucky stuff on the football field—broken bones, dislocated shoulders, bloody noses, cuts and scrapes. ’Fess up—you were the team fainter,” she teased him.

  Ian laughed. “As if that wouldn’t have made all the papers—‘Son of football legend Morgan Kincaid faints at the sight of blood,’” he said as if he were reading headlines. Then he added, “I can take my fair share. But I never had to have some guy’s blood and guts spilled on me while I’m eating French fries dipped in ketchup and drinking foamy drinks. You can’t tell me it isn’t unappetizing.”

  Jenna looked over at him and grinned, relishing the sight of his profile. “I can take it,” she said, as if the stamina for gore was yet another thing they
were competing about.

  Ian kept his eyes on the road and smiled. “Oh, I get it—this is the tie-breaker. Okay, fine, you win,” he conceded, as if it were no concession at all.

  But it delighted Jenna that they were so much on the same wavelength that he’d known what she was doing and gotten the joke, so she let him off the hook and returned to what had gotten them there in the first place—talk of people accessing her medical services tonight.

  “It’s no big deal that I get asked health questions everywhere I go. I don’t mind.”

  “Then there was that last woman,” Ian said, easily switching back to their previous subject, too. “The one who asked you to feel the lump on her husband’s neck—what was that comment she made about what a shame it was that you didn’t become a doctor? About how she’d never get over it?”

  “That was my old high-school chemistry teacher,” Jenna explained. “Being a doctor was what I planned to be way back when, and she knew it. Encouraged it. Did everything she could to help me. That was what she was talking about.”

  “Really? You wanted to be a doctor?” Ian said, intrigued.

  “Oh, yeah. From the time I was a little kid.”

  “When you got a doctor’s kit for Christmas?”

  “I asked for a doctor’s kit for Christmas,” she amended.

  “Then you seriously wanted to be a doctor? Even as a kid?”

  “I did. Like you playing Little League football—it started that early for me, too. Except it was my own idea, not something someone else wanted for me. I even shadowed the local doctor who was here then. He was just an old-fashioned country doctor, before progress came to Northbridge, and he took me under his wing. I’d go to his office after school and on Saturdays—because yes, he worked Saturdays, too—and follow him around. And do a few things here and there.”

  “You practiced medicine without a license? As a kid?” Ian teased her.

  “Mostly I just watched and listened—if the patient was willing, of course. But as I got older, I got to take out stitches, change dressings, write down histories—simple stuff that still gave me a little experience. Plus, by the time I was a teenager, I did some of the home-care visits that didn’t really require more than looking in on recuperating patients, making sure their wounds were healing, that they were taking their medications, that they were doing all right.”

  Ian did take his eyes off the road then to glance at her. “That was your after-school job?”

  “Oh, I didn’t get paid. I just did it. I babysat in the evenings to make money.”

  “So, the woman tonight who said you should have become a doctor knew what she was talking about.”

  “Mrs. Williams. She knew how much I wanted that. I took all of her classes along with every other science class that I could take, and she even got me into a special program my senior year that let me cross over to the college for some higher-level chem classes and an anatomy course.”

  “As a high-school kid you took college classes—that were basically pre-med—to get a leg up on going to medical school? You had to have been pretty sharp, too.”

  That embarrassed Jenna. “I did okay,” was all she said.

  “That’s what I call focused. But then you became a nurse instead?”

  “Right.”

  “How did that happen? Did you change your mind? Not get into any medical school anywhere? I know that can be nearly impossible….”

  Jenna gauged how much she wanted to tell him and then gave him only the thumbnail version. “I set aside my goals for someone else.”

  “A guy?” Ian guessed.

  “A guy. Love. Marriage. You know—that stuff,” she confirmed, trying to make light of it. “But it isn’t as if I don’t like being a nurse. I do. I love it, in fact.”

  “Still, it isn’t the same, and if being a doctor was what you wanted—”

  “No, it isn’t the same. But in a lot of ways I prefer the position I’m in as a nurse. People don’t put me on the same kind of pedestal they put doctors on, so they feel more free with me, more open. There’s a different connection, and I like that.”

  “So, no regrets?”

  “Oh, there are lots of those,” Jenna answered with a laugh.

  Ian took his eyes off the road a second time to give her a more somber look. “All kidding aside—do you have regrets?”

  “If I knew then what I know now? Would I have made the same choices, the same sacrifices?”

  “Yeah….”

  “I think I would have done things differently, yes. But it’s water under the bridge.”

  The man was even terrific-looking when he frowned—which he did before he turned his eyes back to the road.

  “Have you thought about going to medical school now?” Ian asked after a moment.

  She thought it disturbed him to know she had regrets.

  “I actually did think about it,” Jenna assured him. “But I’m at a different stage of my life now, I want different things, and—”

  “Abby?” he made another guess.

  “Abby, sure. But even before Abby—somewhere along the way I became less of a science geek and more of a caregiver,” she said. “The shift happened about the same time that I started to want kids.”

  “Which was when?”

  “About three years ago.”

  “So, completely before Abby?”

  “Yeah. I wanted kids of my own. I realized I was ready to have them.”

  “But…” Ian prompted carefully, as if he thought he might be treading on painful ground.

  “That was complicated. Not physically, just… It wasn’t something my husband and I agreed on,” she said. Which was more than she wanted to say.

  Ian must have gotten that message because he didn’t press further and instead continued with what they’d been talking about. “So you started to want kids a while ago, then things here fell apart more recently and…”

  “And after my marriage ended I considered medical school again, but putting my energies into my personal life was more what I wanted to do, so I decided against it. Then—boom! My mom had the heart attack, I came home and discovered things had fallen apart and…” She shrugged. “I ended up adopting Abby. But I adopted Abby because I wanted Abby. Not going to medical school now is not because of Abby.”

  “Okay, I think I get all that. But still you have regrets….”

  Jenna laughed. “Don’t you?”

  He seemed to consider that for a moment before he said, “I’ve made mistakes—that’s for sure. But I think I’ve learned some valuable lessons from them, so to say that I have regrets? Or would do something differently if I knew then what I know now? I don’t think so.”

  “Well, trust me, you learn from the things you end up regretting, too,” Jenna concluded. And she was tired of talking about herself, so she turned the tables and said, “What about those mistakes you made? Were they professional or personal or—”

  “Overlap,” he answered confusing her and fueling her curiosity. He took a right onto the road that led to her house. Then pulled to a stop next to her babysitter’s car.

  Rather than persuading him to clarify right at that moment, she said, “Do you want to come in?”

  “I really do,” he said. “But I also know that you have a six a.m. shift tomorrow, and it’s already nearly midnight.”

  He’d listened when she’d talked to Meg about bringing Abby over at dawn, and he was being considerate.

  Why couldn’t he do something—anything—that she could find fault with?

  Despite her early morning schedule, she was still disappointed that this was the end of her time with him.

  “I’ll walk you up, though,” he said as he put the car in park and got out.

  Jenna opened her own door, but Ian was there the minute she did, holding it to make sure it stayed open while she got out.

  It occurred to her as they went up the porch steps that it might have been better if he hadn’t walked her to her front door. B
ecause that was when she started thinking about good-night kisses again. About the one that had been so hit-and-run that she’d hardly registered it. And the one that had only happened on her forehead.

  Not tonight, she swore. Not at all. Not in any way, shape or form….

  She was determined not to set herself up for any of that tonight. She wasn’t even going to look at him when she said good-night.

  Except that he made that a little difficult when he reached the door ahead of her and stood in her way, his back to the house, looking at her.

  Studying her, in fact. And making it impossible for her not to elevate her gaze to that stunningly attractive face dusted in porch light.

  When he knew he had her attention, he smiled down at her. A small, ruminative smile.

  “You know,” he finally said, “I’ve been to two of the Bruisers’ games on my other visits here. And ended up at Adz with everyone else. But I have to say that tonight was the best time I’ve ever had doing that.”

  She felt the same way. But she didn’t want to let on, so she merely said, “I’m glad. Of course it helps that the Bruisers won….”

  Ian laughed. “They’re all Bruisers, they just divide up and play each other—they can’t lose.”

  Again, it was nice that he got her jokes.

  “I don’t remember seeing you at other Bruisers’ games,” she said. She had no doubt that she would have noticed him.

  “Maybe you were working,” he suggested.

  Or taking care of her father or Abby or not in the mood to socialize after her dad’s death. Admittedly, she hadn’t gone to many games since then. Or had too many nights out. But it seemed simpler to just agree. “Probably.”

  Ian went on studying her for another moment before he said, “I’m just glad you weren’t working tonight. Or tomorrow night for the dance and then the rehearsal dinner and the wedding,” he added, his voice quieter. “Looks like I’m in luck this trip.”

  Then he brought a big hand to the side of her face cupping its contours and tilting it up to look more intently into her eyes.