Dr. Dad

by Judith Arnold

  Her eyes slowly regained their focus. Toby looked nowhere near as stunned as she felt. His eyes were luminous, searching her face, attempting to read a yes in her expression.

  She wanted to say yes. She wanted him to wrap his arms around her and cover her mouth with his, to fill it with his tongue. She wanted to feel his body pressed to hers, hard and hungry. She wasn’t used to wanting that kind of thing—and certainly not with this kind of man.

  Her neighbor, she reminded herself. The father of a vulnerable young girl. A wholesome doctor. Basic and honest and undemanding—except for the blatant demand in his gaze, the subtle demand in his kiss, the promise in his hands cupped around hers.

  She shouldn’t give in to those demands—but she wanted to. Just for one blissful minute longer, she wanted to be kissed by Toby Cole.

  She tilted her mouth up and he took what she offered, releasing her hands not to hug her but instead to slide his own hands up her arms, along her shoulders to her cheeks, digging his fingers into the strands of hair that had unraveled from her braid and holding her head steady for his kiss. His mouth opened over hers, and she tasted beer on his lips, felt passion in his tongue pressing against her teeth and then thrusting deep. She heard a guttural sigh—his or hers, she couldn’t say—and moved her tongue against his. The sigh must have come from him, she realized, because she could scarcely breathe—and didn’t really care.

  Kissing him felt too good. Too heavenly. Too outrageously erotic. So nourishing she didn’t need to breathe. So gratifying she felt tears gather along her eyelashes. She closed her eyes and leaned into him, her hands wedged between his body and hers, the weights still tight in her fists. His chest was warm and solid, safe and not safe. If she hadn’t been holding the damned weights, she could have slid her fingers up and inside his collar to touch his skin. She could have made him sigh again, made him as breathless as she was.

  Instead, he touched her. His thumbs stroked the edge of her jaw and his fingers skimmed underneath her braid to her nape, sending shivers of heat down her spine. She wished he would slide his fingers under the ribbed neckline of her sweatshirt to graze her shoulders, dance across her upper back. She wished he would kiss her harder, deeper. She wished he would touch her all over—

  “Daddy? Can’t I watch just a little more TV?” The whiny plea floated down the stairs and into the hall.

  Susannah would have sprung back if Toby had let her, but he didn’t. He continued to hold her close, easing his mouth from hers and tucking her head against his shoulder, where she took desperate gulps of air. “No,” he shouted up the stairs in a perfectly calm voice. “No more TV tonight.”

  “Mercy Hospital is on tonight.”

  “And you’ve got the VCR set up to tape it. Go to bed, Lindsey. I’ll be upstairs to tuck you in in a minute.”

  “I don’t want you to tuck me in!” she hollered, punctuating the sentiment by slamming her door.

  Silence resonated in the wake of her outburst. It sank around Susannah, as damp and chilly as the night air. She pulled back and peered up into Toby’s face. He looked vexed, a sad smile twisting his lips.

  “It’s not easy having a sex life when you’ve got a ten-year-old daughter,” he murmured.

  Sex life? He’d only kissed her, hadn’t he?

  But he’d wanted more. He’d wanted to touch her the way she’d wanted to be touched. And maybe it was just as well that Lindsey had interrupted them. Susannah wasn’t ready for this.

  She’d come to Arlington to get away from relationships, obligations, placing everyone else’s needs before her own. And no matter what Toby wanted with her, he had to put his daughter’s needs first. He was too good a father not to.

  “I should be going,” she mumbled, her voice nowhere near as steady as his. She stepped back and lowered her arms, feeling the weights tug down on her elbows. A draft enveloped her as Toby released her. She wanted to tell him that while she had enjoyed the kiss—more than enjoyed it, she’d savored it, adored it, been utterly caught up in it—she didn’t think she could handle having a relationship with a man who could use the phrases “sex life” and “ten-year-old daughter” in the same sentence.

  But she couldn’t bring herself to say that, so she only twisted the knob on the screen door and slipped outside, into the cold night.

  A PILE OF PAPERWORK sat on the desk in the study, awaiting his attention, but he ignored it. Armed with another beer, he slumped into the easy chair in the den, pressed the remote control and stared at the television screen. To watch a show at ten o’clock, when he ought to be working, seemed an extreme indulgence, but he didn’t care.

  He couldn’t have concentrated on his work anyway. Not after the evening he’d had with Lindsey, the class he’d taken at the Daddy School and Susannah. Especially Susannah.

  Maybe it was masochistic to tune in to her TV show after she’d walked away from him. She regretted the kiss—he knew that. But he didn’t. He’d loved every minute of it, and he wanted to kiss her again. He wanted a hell of a lot more than just a kiss.

  But she didn’t. She hadn’t had to spell it out; he could tell. She’d enjoyed the kiss, but it had made her uneasy. Fair enough. There were plenty of good reasons for him to steer clear of an involvement with her, and only one good reason not to: he wanted her.

  So he’d have her on the television, a small, two-dimensional view of her. The VCR clicked on as the an announcer’s voice said, “Previously on Mercy Hospital,” and a series of disjointed snippets flashed across the screen. He wondered if he would be unable to follow tonight’s episode, not having seen those previous episodes, but he decided it didn’t matter. He wasn’t watching the show to follow the dramatic narrative. He was watching it because Susannah was in it.

  There she was in the opening credits, a glimpse of her darting down an E.R. corridor in a white coat and an improbably short skirt as her name appeared at the bottom of the screen in white block letters. Doctors would never wear miniskirts to work, especially not in an E.R. They’d wear comfortable, machine-washable slacks for E.R. work, and maybe longer skirts if they were making rounds. Patients didn’t place their trust in doctors who dressed like flirts.

  Her hair was loose, too—another implausible choice. A doctor with long hair would want it out of her face. If she spent a day observing Toby to get a feel for genuine medical practice, he would explain these things to her.

  But her hair looked good flowing past her shoulders, and her legs were gorgeous below the hem of her abbreviated skirt. And when she turned to the camera, he remembered how beautiful she’d looked standing before him in the front hall, her eyes so blue he could feel their color as much as see it, her lips so sweet he tasted them still.

  He hadn’t exaggerated when he’d said it was hard to conduct a sex life when you were the single father of a sensitive daughter. He’d dated over the years, but with extreme caution and more tension than he’d liked. He’d seen one woman for close to a year, but he’d told Lindsey she was only a friend because he hadn’t wanted Lindsey to become attached to her before he knew how deeply he felt about her—and she’d resented his telling Lindsey she was only a friend. She’d wanted to be much more, and she’d pushed it, and he’d reacted by ending the relationship.

  In the show, Susannah’s character found herself cornered in an empty patient room by a polished young man, also in a physician’s white coat, a stethoscope looped around his neck. She snapped angrily at him, referring to something that must have happened on an earlier show, and he disputed her, and abruptly they were kissing. Toby should have been thinking how absurd it was for two doctors to have the time to be kissing like that during a tour of duty in the E.R., and how much more absurd it was to find an empty room in a bustling hospital—but his attention was riveted by the kiss. It was a television kiss, openmouthed and juicy and curiously fake looking. Watching Susannah kiss someone else didn’t turn him on.

  That wasn’t Susannah, he reminded himself as he swallowed some beer. That w
as a character—Lee Something—and the way she was kissing the actor was nothing like the way Susannah had kissed Toby. Their kiss had been hot but not greedy, the desire intensely personal, not played for an audience. What he’d felt during that kiss was deep and profoundly pleasurable, a sip from a magic potion that slaked his thirst while simultaneously making him thirstier.

  He wanted another sip. A long, quenching drink. He wanted that potion to flood his body, to drench every cell.

  Instead, he was drinking a beer and watching the woman he desired on a television show.

  Maybe this was the most he could hope for right now. Lindsey was asleep upstairs, loathing him. Somehow he would raise her. She would grow up, God willing, and forgive him for everything he’d ever done wrong, and she would get on with her own life, liberating him to live his. And then—if he could wait that long—he would be able to pursue a woman freely, without hesitation, without a child shouting down the stairs and slamming doors.

  For now, he would have to settle for a television show.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “DOES SHE EVER look out her windows?” Amanda asked. She was kneeling on Lindsey’s bed, using Lindsey’s Jurassic Park binoculars to scrutinize the house next door.

  Lindsey had gotten permission from her father for this meeting of the Susannah Dawson Admiration Society. She’d asked him last night, and he’d said that Lindsey could invite two friends over after school, as long as they were Amanda and Meredith and no one else. He’d lectured that he was placing his trust in her, and if she didn’t live up to it he would have a hard time trusting her ever again, so he really hoped she and her friends would behave well and not abuse the privilege.

  Like anything was going to screw up with Meredith and Amanda visiting. They’d taken Lindsey’s bus home from school with her, prepared a bag of popcorn in the microwave, and were now holding their club meeting in Lindsey’s bedroom, which offered the best view of Susannah’s house. Meredith and Lindsey were eating the popcorn, but Amanda was more interested in viewing Susannah’s house through the binoculars than eating.

  Not that there was much worth viewing. “I’ve seen her in Cathy’s room sometimes, especially at night,” Lindsey told her.

  “Which one’s Cathy’s room?”

  “The one with the windows facing ours. She’s got her office in there now.”

  “Her office?” Meredith asked. “Why does she need an office?”

  Lindsey shrugged. “She’s got a computer in there, and a desk and stuff. I think she’s writing something.”

  “Her memoirs,” Meredith guessed. “A book about all her Hollywood affairs.”

  “I don’t think so,” Lindsey argued, mostly because she was annoyed that Meredith had come up with such a good theory. “She doesn’t like talking about Mercy Hospital. I don’t see why she’d want to write about it.”

  “Maybe she doesn’t like to talk about it because she is writing about it,” Meredith suggested. “You know, like, she doesn’t talk about it because she wants you to go out and buy her book.”

  Amanda swiveled on her knees until she had her back to the window. “She’s been in more than just Mercy Hospital, you know. It said in People—or maybe it was Entertainment Weekly or the Enquirer, I don’t remember, one of those…Anyway, last summer, there was this article about her. It said that she started making commercials when she was thirteen. That’s not much older than us.”

  “What commercials?” Meredith asked.

  “I’m trying to remember. My sister reads all those magazines. I woulda stole the magazine from her room if I knew Susannah Dawson was going to move into town and we were going to have a club and everything.” She crossed her legs, rested her elbows on her knees and propped her chin in her hands. Then she screwed her face into a frown that Lindsey took to mean she was thinking hard. “McDonald’s, maybe. Or Burger King.”

  “We need to know which one,” Lindsey said. “Because I think, as the Susannah Dawson Admiration Society, we need to honor Susannah by eating only at the one she made the commercial for. If she was in a McDonald’s commercial, I for one don’t want to be buying my fries at Burger King.”

  “Good point,” Meredith said, and Lindsey instantly stopped being annoyed with her. “We have an obligation as club members.”

  “If my sister didn’t throw out that magazine, I’ll get it,” Amanda promised, plucking a single piece of popcorn from the bowl on the edge of the bed and chewing it thoughtfully. “Susannah Dawson did guest roles in some shows, too. And then, before she got the part of Dr. Lee Davis, she had parts in some made-for-TV movies. She was in one where she played this rapist’s innocent sister who keeps sticking up for him even though he’s way bad, and then she ends up getting killed.”

  “Wow,” Meredith murmured.

  Lindsey was pretty impressed, too. When she grew up and left Arlington, she had every intention of playing lots of exciting roles like that in movies. She bet that if she got to play the innocent sister of an evil rapist, she could die just as dramatically as Susannah.

  “What else did this article say about her?” Meredith asked, devouring a handful of popcorn and then snatching the binoculars from Amanda. She crawled across the bed to the window and peered out. “Did it say she was planning to move to Connecticut?”

  “I don’t remember everything,” Amanda admitted.

  “It said she was personally involved with Stephen Yates, the actor who plays Lucien Roche on Mercy Hospital.”

  “Really?” Lindsey climbed onto the bed, as well.

  “Susannah is actually Stephen Yates’s girlfriend?”

  “There was a picture of them together.”

  “Oh, wow,” Meredith sighed.

  “He is so cute,” Lindsey added.

  “I’ve gotta find that magazine. I think it was Entertainment Weekly. Or maybe the Star.”

  “Yes,” Lindsey demanded. “You’ve got to find that magazine. This stuff is important.” Very important, she added. If Susannah was Stephen Yates’s girlfriend, was Dr. Dad going to get in trouble for being friendly to her? That was the way he was—friendly and helpful, Mr. Nice Guy. Lindsey had known he would hang Susannah’s mirror for her, because that was the way he was. He did stuff for people.

  Sometimes Lindsey wished he did less stuff for her. Like visiting her teacher or fussing over her grades. But Susannah, far from home, far from the majorly gorgeous Stephen Yates, needed someone like Lindsey’s father to lend her a hand and make her feel at home in the new neighborhood.

  That was one of the things Lindsey liked about Susannah—she distracted Dr. Dad from Lindsey a little, so he wasn’t spending every waking minute worrying about whether she was working up to her potential in math.

  “Omigod. I saw her,” Meredith whispered.

  “Where?” Amanda squealed, elbowing Meredith to one side of the window so she could look.

  “Don’t be so obvious,” Lindsey warned them, joining them on the bed and pushing down on their shoulders so they weren’t as visible through the window.

  “She’s in the office,” Meredith said. “In Cathy’s old room.”

  “I don’t believe it!” Amanda’s voice rose another octave. “Oh, God, she’s so pretty!”

  From their vantage point, they could hardly see Susannah’s face. Her long blond hair was visible, and her profile, but she was far enough away that even with the binoculars, Meredith would only catch a hint of how beautiful Susannah was. And Amanda would only be able to imagine.

  “She really is beautiful,” Lindsey confirmed, trying not to sound too superior about the fact that she’d spent so much time with Susannah and Amanda and Meredith had never even seen her in person.

  “We need to do something,” Meredith decided, relinquishing the binoculars reluctantly when Amanda grabbed for them. “Like take pictures of her or something.”

  “You’d need one of those big lenses to get a picture of her,” Lindsey pointed out. “A tele-something lens.”

  “
Telephoto,” Meredith said.

  “Maybe we could lure her outside,” Amanda suggested. “Like, maybe you could phone her and say her house is on fire or something.”

  Meredith and Lindsey both gave her contemptuous looks. “Like she’d ever forgive me for doing that,” Lindsey muttered.

  “Well, you’ve met her. What could you say to get her to come outside?”

  I could tell her my dad’s here, Lindsey almost blurted out. Susannah would come over if her father asked her to. She’d come over the other night in those stretchy exercise pants and her wristbands and all, just because Dr. Dad had invited her. They’d gone out to the porch and talked. Lindsey had wanted so badly to join them, but her father had treated her like a baby. “Go to bed,” he’d ordered her. He probably wanted Susannah to think of her as a baby, too.

  She wasn’t a baby. Susannah never treated her like one, especially when her father wasn’t around. She treated Lindsey like a pal.

  And as her pal, Lindsey understood she shouldn’t pester Susannah or trick her into coming outside. Susannah was kind of a private person, not like you’d expect of a showbiz type. She kept a low profile. Out of respect for her, Lindsey shouldn’t do anything to lure her out of her house.

  But Meredith and Amanda were her pals, also. Now that Cathy was gone, they were as close to best friends as anyone she had. If she didn’t do something to get Susannah outside, they might not like her as much. They’d think maybe she’d exaggerated about spending an afternoon inside Susannah’s house and talking to her and having dinner with her and stuff.