Coltrain's Proposal

by Diana Palmer

  He slammed the opened envelope down on the table in front of her. “What the hell do you mean by that?” he demanded in a dangerously quiet tone.

  She raised her dark, cold eyes to his. “I’m leaving,” she explained and averted her gaze.

  “I know that! I want to know why!”

  She looked around. The café was almost empty, but the waitress and a local cowboy at the counter were glancing at them curiously.

  Her chin came up. “I’d rather not discuss my private business in public, if you don’t mind,” she said stiffly.

  His jaw clenched, and his eyes grew glittery. He stood back to allow her to get up. He waited while she paid for her salad and coffee and then followed her out to where her small gray Ford was parked.

  Her heart raced when he caught her by the arm before she could get her key out of her jeans pocket. He jerked her around, not roughly, and walked her over to Jacobsville’s small town square, to a secluded bench in a grove of live oak and willow trees. Because it was barely December, there were no leaves on the trees and it was cool, despite her nervous perspiration. She tried to throw off his hand, to no avail.

  He only loosened his grip on her when she sat down on a park bench. He remained standing, propping his boot on the bench beside her, leaning one long arm over his knee to study her. “This is private enough,” he said shortly. “Why are you leaving?”

  “I signed a contract to work with you for one year. It’s almost up, anyway,” she said icily. “I want out. I want to go home.”

  “You don’t have anyone left in Austin,” he said, surprising her.

  “I have friends,” she began.

  “You don’t have those, either. You don’t have friends at all, unless you count Drew Morris,” he said flatly.

  Her fingers clenched around her car keys. She looked at them, biting into the flesh even though not a speck of emotion showed on her placid features.

  His eyes followed hers to her lap and something moved in his face. There was an expression there that puzzled her. He reached down and opened her rigid hand, frowning when he saw the red marks the keys had made in her palm.

  She jerked her fingers away from him.

  He seemed disconcerted for a few seconds. He stared at her without speaking and she felt her heart beating wildly against her ribs. She hated being helpless.

  He moved back, watching her relax. He took another step and saw her release the breath she’d been holding. Every trace of anger left him.

  “It takes time for a partnership to work,” he said abruptly. “You’ve only given this one a year.”

  “That’s right,” she said tonelessly. “I’ve given it a year.”

  The emphasis she placed on the first word caught his attention. His blue eyes narrowed. “You sound as if you don’t think I’ve given it any time at all.”

  She nodded. Her eyes met his. “You didn’t want me in the practice. I suspected it from the beginning, but it wasn’t until I heard what you told Drew on the phone this morning that—”

  His eyes flashed oddly. “You heard what I said?” he asked huskily. “You heard…all of it!” he exclaimed.

  Her lips trembled just faintly. “Yes,” she said.

  He was remembering what he’d told Drew Morris in a characteristic outburst of bad temper. He often said things in heat that he regretted later, but this he regretted most of all. He’d never credited his cool, unflappable partner with any emotions at all. She’d backed away from him figuratively and physically since the first day she’d worked at the clinic. Her physical withdrawal had maddened him, although he’d always assumed she was frigid.

  But in the past five minutes, he’d learned disturbing things about her without a word being spoken. He’d hurt her. He didn’t realize she’d cared that much about his opinion. Hell, he’d been furious because he’d just had to diagnose leukemia in a sweet little boy of four. It had hurt him to do that, and he’d lashed out at Morris over Lou in frustration at his own helplessness. But he’d had no idea that she’d overheard his vicious remarks. She was going to leave and it was no less than he deserved. He was genuinely sorry. She wasn’t going to believe that, though. He could tell by her mutinous expression, in her clenched hands, in the tight set of her mouth.

  “You did Drew a favor and asked me to join you, probably over some other doctor you really wanted,” she said with a forced smile. “Well, no harm done. Perhaps you can get him back when I leave.”

  “Wait a minute,” he began shortly.

  She held up a hand. “Let’s not argue about it,” she said, sick at knowing his opinion of her, his real opinion. “I’m tired of fighting you to practice medicine here. I haven’t done the first thing right, according to you. I’m a burden. Well, I just want out. I’ll go on working until you can replace me.” She stood up.

  His hand tightened on the brim of his hat. He was losing this battle. He didn’t know how to pull his irons out of the fire.

  “I had to tell the Dawes that their son has leukemia,” he said, hating the need to explain his bad temper. “I say things I don’t mean sometimes.”

  “We both know that you meant what you said about me,” she said flatly. Her eyes met his levelly. “You’ve hated me from almost the first day we worked together. Most of the time, you can’t even be bothered to be civil to me. I didn’t know that you had a grudge against me from the outset…”

  She hadn’t thought about that until she said it, but there was a subtle change in his expression, a faint distaste that her mind locked on.

  “So you heard that, too.” His jaw clenched on words he didn’t want to say. But maybe it was as well to say them. He’d lived a lie for the past year.

  “Yes.” She gripped the wrought-iron frame of the park bench hard. “What happened? Did my father cause someone to die?”

  His jaw tautened. He didn’t like saying this. “The girl I wanted to marry got pregnant by him. He performed a secret abortion and she was going to marry me anyway.” He laughed icily. “A fling, he called it. But the medical authority had other ideas, and they invited him to resign.”

  Lou’s fingers went white on the cold wrought iron. Had her mother known? What had happened to the girl afterward?

  “Only a handful of people knew,” Coltrain said, as if he’d read her thoughts. “I doubt that your mother did. She seemed very nice—hardly a fit match for a man like that.”

  “And the girl?” she asked levelly.

  “She left town. Eventually she married.” He rammed his hands into his pockets and glared at her. “If you want the whole truth, Drew felt sorry for you when your parents died so tragically. He knew I was looking for a partner, and he recommended you so highly that I asked you. I didn’t connect the name at first,” he added on a mocking note. “Ironic, isn’t it, that I’d choose as a partner the daughter of a man I hated until the day he died.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked irritably. “I would have resigned!”

  “You were in no fit state to be told anything,” he replied with reluctant memories of her tragic face when she’d arrived. His hands clenched in his pockets. “Besides, you’d signed a one-year contract. The only way out was if you resigned.”

  It all made sense immediately. She was too intelligent not to understand why he’d been so antagonistic. “I see,” she breathed. “But I didn’t resign.”

  “You were made of stronger stuff than I imagined,” he agreed. “You wouldn’t back down an inch. No matter how rough it got, you threw my own bad temper back at me.” He rubbed his fingers absently over the car keys in his pocket while he studied her. “It’s been a long time since anyone around here stood up to me like that,” he added reluctantly.

  She knew that without being told. He was a holy terror. Even grown men around Jacobsville gave him a wide berth when he lost his legendary temper. But Lou never had. She stood right up to him. She wasn’t fiery by nature, but her father had been viciously cruel to her. She’d learned early not to show f
ear or back down, because it only made him worse. The same rule seemed to apply to Coltrain. A weaker personality wouldn’t have lasted in his office one week, much less one year, male or female.

  She knew now that Drew Morris had been doing what he thought was a good deed. Perhaps he’d thought it wouldn’t matter to Coltrain after such a long time to have a Blakely working for him. But he’d obviously underestimated the man. Lou would have realized at once, on the shortest acquaintance, that Coltrain didn’t forgive people.

  He stared at her unblinkingly. “A year. A whole year, being reminded every day I took a breath what your father cost me. There were times when I’d have done anything to make you leave. Just the sight of you was painful.” He smiled wearily. “I think I hated you, at first.”

  That was the last straw. She’d loved him, against her will and all her judgment, and he was telling her that all he saw when he looked at her was an ice woman whose father had betrayed him with the woman he loved. He hated her.

  It was too much all at once. Lou had always had impeccable control over her emotions. It had been dangerous to let her father know that he was hurting her, because he enjoyed hurting her. And now here was the one man she’d ever loved telling her that he hated her because of her father.

  What a surprise it would be for him to learn that her father, at the last, had been little more than a high-class drug addict, stealing narcotics from the hospital where he worked in Austin to support his growing habit. He’d been as high as a kite on narcotics, in fact, when the plane he was piloting went down, killing himself and his wife.

  Tears swelled her eyelids. Not a sound passed her lips as they overflowed in two hot streaks down her pale cheeks.

  He caught his breath. He’d seen her tired, impassive, worn-out, fighting mad, and even frustrated. But he’d never seen her cry. His lean hand shot out and touched the track of tears down one cheek, as if he had to touch them to make sure they were real.

  She jerked back from him, laughing tearfully. “So that was why you were so horrible to me.” She choked out the words. “Drew never said a word…no wonder you suffered me! And I was silly enough to dream…!” The laughter was harsher now as she dashed away the tears, staring at him with eyes full of pain and loss. “What a fool I’ve been,” she whispered poignantly. “What a silly fool!”

  She turned and walked away from him, gripping the car keys in her hand. The sight of her back was as eloquently telling as the words that haunted him. She’d dreamed…what?

  For the next few days, Lou was polite and remote and as courteous as any stranger toward her partner. But something had altered in their relationship. He was aware of a subtle difference in her attitude toward him, in a distancing of herself that was new. Her eyes had always followed him, and he’d been aware of it at some subconscious level. Perhaps he’d been aware of more than covert glances, too. But Lou no longer watched him or went out of her way to seek him out. If she had questions, she wrote them down and left them for him on his desk. If there were messages to be passed on, she left them with Brenda.

  The one time she did seek him out was Thursday afternoon as they closed up.

  “Have you worked out an advertisement for someone to replace me?” she asked him politely.

  He watched her calm dark eyes curiously. “Are you in such a hurry to leave?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said bluntly. “I’d like to leave after the Christmas holidays.” She turned and would have gone out the door, but his hand caught the sleeve of her white jacket. She slung it off and backed away. “At the first of the year.”

  He glared at her, hating the instinctive withdrawal that came whenever he touched her. “You’re a good doctor,” he said flatly. “You’ve earned your place here.”

  High praise for a man with his grudges. She looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes wounded. “But you hate me, don’t you? I heard what you said to Drew, that every time you looked at me you remembered what my father had done and hated me all over again.”

  He let go of her sleeve, frowning. He couldn’t find an answer.

  “Well, don’t sweat it, Doctor,” she told him. “I’ll be gone in a month and you can find someone you like to work with you.”

  She laughed curtly and walked out of the office.

  She dressed sedately that evening for the Rotary Club dinner, in a neat off-white suit with a pink blouse. But she left her blond hair long around her shoulders for once, and used a light dusting of makeup. She didn’t spend much time looking in the mirror. Her appearance had long ago ceased to matter to her.

  Drew was surprised by it, though, and curious. She looked strangely vulnerable. But when he tried to hold her hand, she drew away from him. He’d wanted to ask her for a long time if there were things in her past that she might like to share with someone. But Louise was an unknown quantity, and she could easily shy away. He couldn’t risk losing her altogether.

  Drew held her arm as they entered the hall, and Lou was disconcerted to find Dr. Coltrain there. He almost never attended social functions unless Jane Parker was in attendance. But a quick glance around the room ascertained that Jane wasn’t around. She wondered if the doctor had brought a date. It didn’t take long to have that question answered, as a pretty young brunette came up beside him and clung to his arm as if it was the ticket to heaven.

  Coltrain wasn’t looking at her, though. His pale, narrow eyes had lanced over Lou and he was watching her closely. He hadn’t seen her hair down in the year they’d worked together. She seemed more approachable tonight than he’d ever noticed, but she was Drew’s date. Probably Drew’s woman, too, he thought bitterly, despite her protests and reserve.

  But trying to picture Lou in Drew’s bed was more difficult than he’d thought. It wasn’t at all in character. She was rigid in her views, just as she was in her mode of dress and her hairstyle. Just because she’d loosened that glorious hair tonight didn’t mean that she’d suddenly become uninhibited. Nonetheless, the change disturbed him, because it was unexpected.

  “Copper’s got a new girl, I see,” Drew said with a grin. “That’s Nickie Bolton,” he added. “She works as a nurse’s aide at the hospital.”

  “I didn’t recognize her out of uniform,” Lou murmured.

  “I did,” he said. “She’s lovely, isn’t she?”

  She nodded amiably. “Very young, too,” she added with an indulgent smile.

  He took her hand gently and smiled down at her. “You aren’t exactly over the hill yourself,” he teased.

  She smiled up at him with warm eyes. “You’re a nice man, Drew.”

  Across the room, a redheaded man’s grip tightened ominously on a glass of punch. For over a year, Louise had avoided even his lightest touch. A few days ago, she’d thrown off his hand violently. But there she stood not only allowing Drew to hold her hand, but actually smiling at him. She’d never smiled at Coltrain that way; she’d never smiled at him any way at all.

  His companion tapped him on the shoulder.

  “You’re with me, remember?” she asked with a pert smile. “Stop staring daggers at your partner. You’re off duty. You don’t have to fight all the time, do you?”

  He frowned slightly. “What do you mean?”

  “Everyone knows you hate her,” Nickie said pleasantly. “It’s common gossip at the hospital. You rake her over the coals and she walks around the corridors, red in the face and talking to herself. Well, most of the time, anyway. Once, Dr. Simpson found her crying in the nursery. But she doesn’t usually cry, no matter how bad she hurts. She’s pretty tough, in her way. I guess she’s had to be, huh? Even if there are more women in medical school these days, you don’t see that many women doctors yet. I’ll bet she had to fight a lot of prejudice when she was in medical school.”

  That came as a shock. He’d never seen Lou cry until today, and he couldn’t imagine her being upset at any temperamental display of his. Or was it, he pondered uneasily, just that she’d learned how not to show her wounds t
o him?

  Chapter 3

  At dinner, Lou sat with Drew, as far away from Coltrain and his date as she could get. She listened attentively to the speakers and whispered to Drew in the spaces between speakers. But it was torture to watch Nickie’s small hand smooth over Coltrain’s, to see her flirt with him. Lou didn’t know how to flirt. There were a lot of things she didn’t know. But she’d learned to keep a poker face, and she did it very well this evening. The one time Coltrain glanced down the table toward her, he saw nothing on her face or in her eyes that could tell him anything. She was unreadable.

  After the meeting, she let Drew hold her hand as they walked out of the restaurant. Behind them, Coltrain was glaring at her with subdued fury.

  When they made it to the parking lot, she found that the other couple had caught up with them.

  “Nice bit of surgery this morning, Copper,” Drew remarked. “You do memorable stitches. I doubt if Mrs. Blake will even have a scar to show around.”

  He managed a smile and held Nickie’s hand all the tighter. “She was adamant about that,” he remarked. “It seems that her husband likes perfection.”

  “He’ll have a good time searching for it in this imperfect world,” Drew replied. “I’ll see you in the morning. And I’d like your opinion on my little strep-throat patient. His mother wants the whole works taken out, tonsils and adenoids, but he doesn’t have strep often and I don’t like unnecessary surgery. Perhaps she’d listen to you.”

  “Don’t count on it,” Copper said dryly. “I’ll have a look if you like, though.”

  “Thanks.”

  “My pleasure.” He glanced toward Lou, who hadn’t said a word. “You were ten minutes late this morning,” he added coldly.

  “Oh, I overslept,” she replied pleasantly. “It wears me out to follow the EMTs around looking for work.”

  She gave him a cool smile and got into the car before he realized that she’d made a joke, and at his expense.

  “Be on time in the morning,” he admonished before he walked away with Nickie on his arm.