An Engagement for Two

by Marie Ferrarella

  His mouth curved in a teasing smile. “Maybe. How’m I doing?” he asked.

  “Keep going,” Mikki encouraged him. “I’ll let you know.”

  “Nothing I like better than a challenge,” Jeff told her, leaning over Mikki just before he brought his mouth down to hers.

  It was just at that very heated, intimate moment that the phone suddenly rang. It was the landline rather than her cell phone, and the shrill sound shattered the air as it wedged its way into what was the beginning of another beautifully romantic interlude.

  Jeff drew back. He looked at the landline accusingly. “Can you ignore that?”

  Mikki sighed. “No.”

  He moved aside, resigned, as he allowed Mikki to sit up so that she could get to the telephone. “I didn’t think so.”

  Reaching for the receiver, Mikki picked it up and brought it to her ear. “Hello, this is Dr. McKenna.”

  As he watched, Mikki transformed from the desirable woman he was about to make love with for a second time to the very efficient doctor he’d seen in action earlier at the clinic.

  Mikki listened in silence, then said, “Yes, of course, I’ll be there as soon as I can. Watch his vitals,” she instructed the person on the other end of the line just before she hung up. She looked at Jeff. “I have to go.”

  “I kind of figured that out,” he said wryly. And then he remembered something. “I thought you had someone covering for you.”

  “I do. But this is an extenuating circumstance,” she explained, getting up from the sectional. She saw that Jeff was waiting for an explanation. “I operated on this man a little over a week ago. He was discharged.”

  “What went wrong?” he asked as they both began picking their clothes up from the floor and getting dressed.

  Jeff could tell by her voice was she was trying not to sound irritated. “My patient decided he didn’t have to take it easy for a few weeks the way I told him to. He was in his garage, trying to fix something, when he tripped over a box of tools and fell. He ripped open some of his stitches, and his wife panicked and drove him to the ER. He asked for me, telling the doctor on duty that he wouldn’t let anyone else touch him.”

  Mikki sighed as she pulled up the zipper on her jeans. Finished dressing, she looked at Jeff, disappointment suddenly welling up within her. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?” Jeff asked. “For being you? Hey, I understand.” He knew exactly what he had signed on for when he had begun thinking of her in a romantic light. She was a doctor, and this came with the package. “I have a feeling that my mother probably feels the same way about you that this guy in the ER does.” Jeff put his shoes on and stood up again. “Want me to drive you to the hospital?”

  “That’s really nice of you to offer,” Mikki answered, “but you should go home. At least one of us should get some rest. Besides,” she added, “until I see the amount of damage he’s done to himself, I have no idea how long this is going to take.”

  “And no one else can sub for you?” Jeff asked in one last-ditch attempt to prolong their evening.

  “If I was incapacitated or unreachable, they could probably come up with someone. But a doctor-patient relationship is really important to me, and it takes time to build up. Since he specifically asked for me, I wouldn’t feel right about letting my patient down.”

  Jeff nodded, making his peace with the situation. “I guess I should just be glad that the hospital didn’t call any sooner.” Leaning over, he lightly brushed his lips over hers. “Sure I can’t drive you?”

  “I’m sure—but I really do appreciate the offer.” She realized that she was guilty of rushing him out. She didn’t want to come across that way, not after the wonderful evening she’d just had with him. “You can stay here if you like.”

  But Jeff shook his head. “I’m afraid that it just wouldn’t be the same without you.”

  He stood there, waiting for her to get her purse. When she was ready, he walked out with her and waited as she locked her front door. “I’ll call you,” he told her.

  Mikki nodded, telling herself not to cling to that. It wasn’t a promise. It was just something guys said after an evening was over, even a wonderful evening. If she held him to that and he didn’t call, she ran the risk of being crushed, just like her mother.

  Besides, Mikki reminded herself as she drove to the hospital, you don’t believe in commitment, or happily-ever-afters, remember?

  As far as happily-ever-after went, she had absolutely nothing to base it on or refer to as an example. None of her mother’s marriages had lasted. Not to mention that Veronica certainly hadn’t been happy during those marriages’ short lifespans.

  Maybe this was all for the best, Mikki told herself. One really fantastic night and now she was going back to life as she knew it, doing what she was really good at and was meant to do: be a doctor.

  She forced herself to loosen her death grip on the steering wheel as she drove into the hospital’s parking lot.

  Mikki found it difficult to refrain from being curt when she spoke to Mr. Miller, the returning gallstone patient who had inadvertently cut her evening short. She wanted to lecture him, not just because of her shortened evening, but because the man had wantonly ignored her instructions.

  The repercussions for that could have been very serious. Luckily, they weren’t.

  However, she found that it was difficult to be angry with her patient when he appeared so utterly relieved to see her.

  “You were supposed to take it easy, Mr. Miller,” she told him as she pulled on a pair of rubber gloves.

  Drawing back his hospital gown, she closely examined the extent of repair that needed to be done.

  Miller, a heavyset man in his sixties, shifted uncomfortably at the admonishment. “I didn’t mean to trip over that toolbox and fall down,” he said, as if that absolved him of his part in this.

  Mikki raised her eyes to his for a moment. “I’m sure you didn’t,” she answered.

  Miller’s wife cut in. “I told him not to go into that garage. I told him to sit in his recliner and watch that movie with me, but would he listen?” Mrs. Miller lamented. “No, he had to go try to fix the heating unit. Said he needed to feel ‘useful.’” Mrs. Miller laughed harshly. “I ask you, what do you do with a man like that?”

  Mikki could see how uncomfortable her patient was becoming as his wife harped on his less than sensible behavior. She smiled at the man before answering his wife’s question.

  “Just love him, I guess. And stitch him up,” Mikki added. Finished with her preliminary exam, she told her patient, “You didn’t do as much damage as you thought. You do need some stitches. But I need to clean this up first,” she said, nodding at the broken stitches and the dried blood around them.

  “I don’t have to stay here overnight, do I?” Miller asked, concerned.

  “What, you don’t like our accommodations?” she asked, doing her best to look serious.

  “It’s not that,” her patient assured her quickly. “I just want to go home.”

  She could understand that, Mikki thought. Who wanted to stay overnight in a hospital? “I think we can arrange that. Wait here while I have the nurse get a fresh suture kit.”

  * * *

  Although everything went off without a hitch, it was close to three o’clock before Mikki walked back through her front door again.

  The first thing that struck her was that the house felt oddly empty, even though there was never anyone else here when she got home. She didn’t even have a pet dog or cat, or a parakeet, to chase away the silence.

  Given that, why the emptiness seemed to seep into her this way tonight didn’t make any sense.

  Because she felt so drained, Mikki paused to sit down on the sectional to kick off her shoes.

  She knew she was probably imagining things, but she could have sworn that she detected
the scent of Jeff’s aftershave lotion. She was undoubtedly just punchy. Even so, she leaned over the cushion and took a deep breath.

  And then she smiled.

  It wasn’t her imagination, she thought. Picking up the cushion, she held it for a moment and took in another deep breath. It smelled just like Jeff. She could even feel things stirring within her.

  C’mon, get a grip. You’re a respected physician surgeon, not a twelve-year-old with her first crush.

  She was acting like some kind of an adolescent, Mikki upbraided herself. Worse than that, she was behaving like her mother every time her mother had been on the brink of yet another “love of her life” adventure. An adventure that always seemed to turn out to be another huge disappointment.

  Well, she wasn’t her mother and she didn’t need or want that, Mikki silently insisted, tossing the cushion back where it belonged.

  Come Monday morning, she would have the cushions dry-cleaned, she promised herself. As for now, she was going to go to bed and sleep—maybe even until Monday morning.

  The idea heartened her.

  Getting up from the sectional, she was about to head for the stairs and her bedroom when she saw a flashing light out of the corner of her eye. It caught her attention.

  It was the light on her landline—someone had left a message while she was at the hospital.

  Her first thought was that the hospital had called again, alerting her about another patient. But then, she decided, someone would have undoubtedly said something while she was there.

  Reevaluating the situation, she sincerely doubted that the message on her answering machine had anything to do with Mr. Miller and his stitches.

  Maybe it was her mother, calling to tell her “wonderful news, darling!” which was the way all Veronica’s announcements about a new man in her life started out.

  Well, if that was it, it could wait until morning, Mikki thought. She wasn’t in the mood to try to humor her mother.

  The next moment she realized that the message on her phone couldn’t have been from her mother. While the woman still stayed up until all hours of the night, she had never known her mother to call after midnight.

  “Stop guessing, idiot, and play the message,” she ordered herself. “Maybe, if you’re lucky, it’s a wrong number or some prince, offering to leave his entire fortune to you—all you need to go is send him a cashier’s check for a nominal sum and the rest will all be yours.”

  Lord, she was beyond punchy. Sitting down on the sectional again, she pulled the phone over to her and pressed the play button.

  At first, all she heard was jarring static, followed by a spat of nothing. And the metallic voice on the machine informed her in a formal tone that was the end of the message.

  As she started to push the phone back to its original position on the side table, she heard the answering machine go through the motions of queuing up a second call.

  There had been two of them?

  As she stared at the device, a second message came on.

  “Sorry, that last call was me. I hung up because I didn’t want you to get the idea that I was, well, stalking you.”

  Mikki straightened, at attention and hardly breathing.

  That was Jeff’s voice.

  “But I really want to know that you got back safe. I know, I know, you’ve been doing this forever, but well... I just want to make sure you got in all right. Am I being out of line? Yeah, probably, but in my defense, I’m my mother’s son and there’s this recessive gene she passed on to my siblings and me. It’s called the worry gene, and sometimes it kicks into high gear. When it does, the idea of getting any sleep goes right out the window.

  “I’m rambling,” he apologized. “Ignore what I just said. Except for this part: I had a really great time tonight—or more accurately, I guess, last night. I just wanted you to know that. Hope everything turned out okay with your patient—how can it not, right? You’re his doctor.

  “I’d better hang up now before I put my other foot into my mouth or say something even more stupid. Oh, and this isn’t what I meant when I said I’d call you. It just happened.” He sounded as if he was uncomfortable with the way he had to be coming across and cleared his throat. “Good night, Mikki. I hope that you managed to get some sleep.”

  The dial tone followed after the message ended. And then the metallic voice informed her that there were no more messages.

  Mikki smiled to herself as she looked at the now silent answering machine.

  She changed her mind about going up to her bedroom. Instead, she curled up on the sectional and pulled the cushion closer to her.

  She rested her cheek against it.

  In a few minutes, she’d fallen asleep that way.

  Chapter Seventeen

  It was a first.

  Ordinarily, she was a very light sleeper. But the sound of ringing slowly registered in Mikki’s head in small increments. When she first became aware of it, she thought it was just part of her dream.

  Eventually, she realized that it wasn’t and she reached for the telephone on the side table next to the sectional. It was only when she heard the dial tone against her ear while the ringing continued that she realized it wasn’t her phone.

  Someone was ringing her doorbell.

  Mikki was on her feet before she managed to completely banish the fog from her brain. Maybe she was getting old, she thought, struggling to focus. There was a time when she could go almost two days straight without any sleep and still function.

  As she made her way to the front door, Mikki dragged one hand through her hair in a semiattempt to somehow neaten it a little.

  Reaching the door, she looked through the peephole—and then blinked to make sure that her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her.

  Stunned, she didn’t open the door immediately. “Jeff? What are you doing here?”

  “Right now, standing on your doorstep with groceries that are getting progressively heavier.” He shifted the bags to get a better grip. “Mind if I come in?” Rather than answer his question verbally, Mikki unlocked the door, opened it and stepped back so he could enter.

  “Thanks.” Shifting the bags again, Jeff walked in.

  “I’m sorry, did we talk about this and I forgot?” she asked, confused.

  Jeff headed straight for her kitchen. “No, but I thought you might be hungry after going back to the hospital last night. Don’t forget, I got a glimpse of the inside of your refrigerator. There was nothing in it except for that bottle of rosé.

  “I can’t stay long,” he told her, unpacking the four bags of groceries he’d brought in, haphazardly placing the items on the kitchen table before organizing the contents according to type. “I’ve got to be at the restaurant early today, but I thought I’d make you breakfast before I went.”

  When he turned around to look at her, he saw the expression on her face. Mikki didn’t appear to be upset, but she did look rather conflicted. “Did I do something wrong?” Jeff asked.

  “No,” she answered a bit too quickly. “No, you didn’t.” What was wrong with her? She should be happy that he was being so nice. “You’re being kind, and caring and, in a word, terrific.” She paused, running her tongue along her lips, searching for the right words. “And that’s just the problem.”

  He was doing his best to understand what she was trying to tell him. “I can scowl while I’m making breakfast,” he offered. “Better yet, I could burn the toast. Would that help?”

  He must think she was crazy. Not that anyone would blame him. She tried again.

  “I’m sorry. It’s just that this whole thing is wonderful and I know what happens when things are wonderful.”

  Jeff waited for her to continue. She was obviously having trouble expressing what was bothering her. He couldn’t pretend to understand, but after last night, he was certainly more than wi
lling to try.

  “I’m listening,” he told her. It was getting late and he didn’t have all that much time. “Would you mind if I put the groceries away while I listened?” he asked, not wanting her to think that he wasn’t paying attention to her, or that he was just humoring her by saying he was listening while he was doing something else.

  “You probably think I’m crazy,” she told him, at a loss as to how to explain any of this to a man for whom most women would kill to have in her life.

  “No,” Jeff answered patiently. “I think that maybe you’re having ambivalent feelings. And I’m probably contributing to that by coming on so strong. I have a habit of doing that when I feel so keenly about something.”

  He didn’t want to crowd her or risk losing her because she felt smothered. He wanted her to take all the time in the world—as long as she eventually came up with the right answer.

  “Look, why don’t I just make you breakfast and then go so you can eat in peace?” he suggested.

  “No,” Mikki protested. This wasn’t turning out right.

  Jeff opened one cabinet after another, looking for a couple of frying pans. “You want to eat in chaos?” he deadpanned.

  “I don’t want to chase you away—” she protested. However, he deserved to hear the truth. “But I don’t want to fall in love with you, either.”

  Finding the pans, he almost dropped them before he finally put them on the stove. Was she falling in love with him? He tried not to react to that and instead said, “Mind if I ask why?”

  “Because if I fall in love with you,” she said in despair, “it’s all going to fall apart.”

  He glanced at her over his shoulder. It was really getting hard trying to keep the conversation light. But he was determined not to frighten her off and to get to the bottom of what she was trying to tell him. “You read the fine print?”

  “Stop making jokes,” Mikki lamented. “I’m being serious.”

  “That’s why I’m making jokes,” he told her. “Because that’s my way of coping with something I don’t understand.” He sighed as he rolled the matter over in his head. In a way, he kind of understood what she was trying to say. “Okay, how about this. I’ll make breakfast, then you eat that breakfast while I go to my restaurant to catch up on some things and also get the place ready for the Strausses’ fiftieth wedding anniversary party. And after I’m finished—and you’re finished—we’ll take things as slow as you want. How’s that?”