Coltrain's Proposal

by Diana Palmer

  “You don’t know?” he taunted.

  She folded her arms over her breasts and leaned back against the edge of the desk. “There’s a terrible rumor going around the hospital,” she guessed.

  His eyebrow jerked, but the ice didn’t leave his eyes. “Did you start it?”

  “Of course,” she agreed furiously. “I couldn’t wait to tell everybody on staff that you bent me back over the hood of my car and ravished me in the parking lot!”

  Brenda, who’d started in the door, stood there with her mouth open, intercepted a furious glare from two pairs of eyes, turned on her heel and got out.

  “Could you keep your voice down?” Coltrain snapped.

  “Gladly, when you stop making stupid accusations!”

  He glared at her and she glared back.

  “I was drinking!”

  “That’s it, announce it to everyone in the waiting room, why don’t you, and see how many patients run for their cars!” she raged.

  He closed her office door, hard, and leaned back against it. “Who started the rumor?” he asked.

  “That’s more like it,” she replied. “Don’t accuse until you ask. I didn’t start it. I have no wish to become the subject of gossip.”

  “Not even to force me to do something about the rumors?” he asked. “Such as announce our engagement?”

  Her eyes went saucer-wide. “Please! I’ve just eaten!”

  His jaw went taut. “I beg your pardon?”

  “And so you should!” she said enthusiastically. “Marry you? I’d rather chain myself to a tree in an alligator swamp!”

  He didn’t answer immediately. He stared at her instead while all sorts of impractical ideas sifted through his mind.

  A buzzer sounded on her desk. She reached over and pressed a button. “Yes?”

  “What about the patients?” Brenda prompted.

  “He doesn’t have any patience,” Lou said without thinking.

  “Excuse me?” Brenda stammered.

  “Oh. That sort of patients. Send my first one in, will you, Brenda? Dr. Coltrain was just leaving.”

  “No, he wasn’t,” he returned when her finger left the intercom button. “We’ll finish this discussion after office hours.”

  “After office hours?” she asked blankly.

  “Yes. But, don’t get your hopes up about a repeat of Friday evening,” he said with a mocking smile. “After all, I’m not drunk today.”

  Her eyes flashed murderously and her lips compressed. But he was already out the door.

  Lou was never sure afterward how she’d managed to get through her patients without revealing her state of mind. She was furiously angry at Coltrain for his accusations and equally upset with Brenda for hearing what she’d said in retaliation. Now it would be all over the office as well as all over the hospital that she and Coltrain had something going. And they didn’t! Despite Lou’s helpless attraction to him, it didn’t take much imagination to see that Coltrain didn’t feel the same. Well, maybe physically he felt something for her, but emotionally he still hated her. A few kisses wouldn’t change that!

  She checked Mr. Bailey’s firm, steady heartbeat, listened to his lungs and pronounced him over the pneumonia she’d been treating him for.

  As she started to go, leaving Brenda to help him with his shirt, he called to her.

  “What’s this I hear about you and Doc Coltrain?” he teased. “Been kissing up a storm at the hospital Christmas party, they say. Any chance we’ll be hearing wedding bells?”

  He didn’t understand, he told Brenda on his way out, why Dr. Blakely had suddenly screamed like that. Maybe she’d seen a mouse, Brenda replied helpfully.

  When the office staff went home, Coltrain was waiting at the front entrance for Lou. He’d stationed himself there after checking with the hospital about a patient, and he hadn’t moved, in case Lou decided to try to sneak out.

  He was wearing the navy blue suit that looked so good on him, lounging against the front door with elegant carelessness, when she went out of her office. His red hair caught the reflection of the overhead light and seemed to burn like flames over his blue, blue eyes. They swept down over her neat gray pantsuit to her long legs encased in slacks with low-heeled shoes.

  “That color looks good on you,” he remarked.

  “You don’t need to flatter me. Just say what’s on your mind, please, and let me go home.”

  “All right.” His eyes fell to her soft mouth and lingered there. “Who started the rumors about us?”

  She traced a pattern on her fanny pack. “I promised I wouldn’t tell.”

  “Nickie,” he guessed, nodding at her shocked expression.

  “She’s young and infatuated,” she began.

  “Not that young,” he said with quiet insinuation.

  Her eyes flashed before she could avert them. Her hand dug into the fanny pack for her car keys. “It’s a nine-days wonder,” she continued. “People will find something else to talk about.”

  “Nothing quite this spicy has happened since Ted Regan went chasing off to Victoria after Coreen Tarleton and she came home wearing his engagement ring.”

  “There’s hardly any comparison,” she said, “considering that everyone knows how we feel about each other!”

  “How do we feel about each other, Lou?” he replied quietly, and watched her expression change.

  “We’re enemies,” she returned instantly.

  “Are we?” He searched her eyes in a silence that grew oppressive. His arms fell to his sides. “Come here, Lou.”

  She felt her breathing go wild. That could have been an invitation to bypass him and leave the building. But the look in his eyes told her it wasn’t. Those eyes blazed like flames in his lean, tanned face, beckoning, promising pleasures beyond imagination.

  He lifted a hand. “Come on, coward,” he chided softly, and his lips curled at the edges. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “You’re sober,” she reminded him.

  “Cold sober,” he agreed. “Let’s see how it feels when I know what I’m doing.”

  Her heart stopped, started, raced. She hesitated, and he laughed softly and started toward her, with that slow, deliberate walk that spoke volumes about his intent.

  “You mustn’t,” she spoke quickly, holding up a hand.

  He caught the hand and jerked her against him, imprisoning her there with a steely arm. “I must.” He corrected her, letting his eyes fall to her mouth. “I have to know.” He bit off the words against her lips.

  She never found out what he had to know, because the instant she felt his lips probing her mouth, she went under in a blaze of desire unlike anything she’d felt before. She gasped, opened her lips, yielded to his enveloping arms without a single protest. If anything, she pushed closer into his arms, against that steely body that was instantly aroused by the feel of her.

  She tried to speak, to protest, but he pushed his tongue into her mouth with a harsh groan, and his arms lifted her so that she fit perfectly against him from breast to thigh. She fought, frightened by the intimacy and the sensations kindled in her untried body.

  Her frantic protest registered at once. He remembered she’d had the same reaction the night of the Christmas party. His mouth lifted, and his searching eyes met hers.

  “You couldn’t be a virgin,” he said, making it sound more like an accusation than a statement of fact.

  She bit her lip and dropped her eyes, shamed and embarrassed. “Rub it in,” she growled.

  “My God.” He eased her back onto her feet and held her by the upper arms so that she wouldn’t fall. “My God! How old are you, thirty?”

  “Twenty-eight,” she said unsteadily, gasping for breath. Her whole body felt swollen. Her dark eyes glowered up at him as she pushed back her disheveled hair. “And you needn’t look so shocked, you of all people should know that some people still have a few principles! You’re a doctor, after all!”

  “I thought virgins were a fairy tale,” he
said flatly. “Damn it!”

  Her chin lifted. “What’s wrong, Doctor, did you see me as a pleasant interlude between patients?”

  His lips compressed. He rammed his hands into his trouser pockets, all too aware of a throbbing arousal that wouldn’t go away. He turned to the door and jerked it open. All weekend he’d dreamed of taking Louise Blakely home with him after work and seducing her in his big king-size bed. She was leaving anyway, and the hunger he felt for her was one he had to satisfy or go mad. It had seemed so simple. She wanted him; he knew she did. People were already talking about them, so what would a little more gossip matter? She’d be gone at the first of the year, anyway.

  But now he had a new complication, one he’d never dreamed of having. She was no young girl, but it didn’t take an expert to know why she backed away from intimacy like a repressed adolescent. He’d been baiting her with that accusation of virginity, but she hadn’t realized it. She’d taken it at face value and she’d given him a truth he didn’t even want. She was innocent. How could he seduce her now? On the other hand, how was he going to get rid of this very inconvenient and noticeable desire for her?

  Watching him, Lou was cursing her own headlong response. She hated having him know how much she wanted him.

  “Any man could have made me react that way!” she flared defensively, red-faced. “Any experienced man!”

  His head turned and he stared at her, seeing through the flustering words to the embarrassment.

  “It’s all right,” he said gently. “We’re both human. Don’t beat your conscience to death over a kiss, Lou.”

  She went even redder and her hands clenched at her sides. “I’m still leaving!”

  “I know.”

  “And I won’t let you seduce me!”

  He turned. “I won’t try,” he said solemnly. “I don’t seduce virgins.”

  She bit her lip and tasted him on it. She winced.

  “Why?” he asked quietly.

  She glared at him.

  “Why?” he persisted.

  Her eyes fell under that piercing blue stare. “Because I don’t want to end up like my mother,” she said huskily.

  Of all the answers he might have expected, that was the last. “Your mother? I don’t understand.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t need to. It’s personal. You and I are business partners until the end of the month, and then nothing that happened to me will be any concern of yours.”

  He didn’t move. She looked vulnerable, hurt. “Counseling might be of some benefit,” he said gently.

  “I don’t need counseling.”

  “Tell me how your wrist got broken, Lou,” he said matter-of-factly. She stiffened.

  “Oh, a layman wouldn’t notice, it’s healed nicely. But surgery is my business. I know a break when I see one. There are scars, too, despite the neat stitching job. How did it happen?”

  She felt weak. She didn’t want to talk to him, of all people, about her past. It would only reinforce what he already thought of her father, though God only knew why she should defend such a man.

  She clasped her wrist defensively, as if to hide what had been done to it. “It’s an old injury,” she said finally.

  “What sort of injury? How did it happen?”

  She laughed nervously. “I’m not your patient.”

  He absently jingled the change in his pocket, watching her. It occurred to him that she was a stranger. Despite their heated arguments over the past year, they’d never come close to discussing personal matters. Away from the office, they were barely civil to each other. In it, they never discussed anything except business. But he was getting a new picture of her, and not a very reassuring one. This was a woman with a painful past, so painful that it had locked her up inside an antiseptic prison. He wondered if she’d ever had the incentive to fight her way out, or why it should matter to him that she hadn’t.

  “Can you talk to Drew about it?” he asked suddenly.

  She hesitated and then shook her head. Her fingers tightened around her wrist. “It doesn’t matter, I tell you.”

  His hand came out of his pocket and he caught the damaged wrist very gently in his long fingers, prepared for her instinctive jerk. He moved closer, drawing that hand to his chest. He pressed it gently into the thick fabric of his vest.

  “There’s nothing you can’t tell me,” he said solemnly. “I don’t carry tales, or gossip. Anything you say to me will remain between the two of us. If you want to talk, ever, I’ll listen.”

  She bit her bottom lip. She’d never been able to tell anyone. Her mother knew, but she defended her husband, trying desperately to pretend that Lou had imagined it, that it had never happened. She excused her husband’s affairs, his drinking bouts, his drug addiction, his brutality, his sarcasm…everything, in the name of love, while her marriage disintegrated around her and her daughter turned away from her. Obsessive love, one of her friends had called it—blind, obsessive love that refused to acknowledge the least personality flaw in the loved one.

  “My mother was emotionally crippled,” she said, thinking aloud. “She was so blindly in love with him that he could do no wrong, no wrong at all…” She remembered where she was and looked up at him with the pain still in her eyes.

  “Who broke your wrist, Lou?” he asked gently.

  She remembered aloud. “He was drinking and I tried to take the bottle away from him, because he’d hit my mother. He hit my wrist with the bottle, and it broke,” she added, wincing at the memory of the pain. “And all the while, when they operated to repair the damage, he kept saying that I’d fallen through a glass door, that I’d tripped. Everyone believed him, even my mother. I told her that he did it, and she said that I was lying.”

  “He? Who did it, Lou?”

  She searched his curious eyes. “Why…my father,” she said simply.

  Chapter 6

  Coltrain searched her dark eyes, although the confession didn’t really surprise him. He knew too much about her father to be surprised.

  “So that was why the whiskey on my breath bothered you Friday night,” he remarked quietly.

  She averted her head and nodded. “He was a drunkard at the last, and a drug addict. He had to stop operating because he almost killed a patient. They let him retire and act in an advisory capacity because he’d been such a good surgeon. He was, you know,” she added. “He might have been a terrible father, but he was a wonderful surgeon. I wanted to be a surgeon, to be like him.” She shivered. “I was in my first year of medical school when it happened. I lost a semester and afterward, I knew I’d never be able to operate. I decided to become a general practitioner.”

  “What a pity,” he said. He understood the fire for surgical work because he had it. He loved what he did for a living.

  She smiled sadly. “I’m still practicing medicine. It isn’t so bad. Family practice has its place in the scheme of things, and I’ve enjoyed the time I’ve spent in Jacobsville.”

  “So have I,” he admitted reluctantly. He smiled at her expression. “Surprised? You’ve been here long enough to know how a good many people react to me. I’m the original bad boy of the community. If it hadn’t been for the scholarship one of my teachers helped me get, I’d probably be in jail by now. I had a hard childhood and I hated authority in any form. I was in constant trouble with the law.”

  “You?” she asked, aghast.

  He nodded. “People aren’t always what they seem, are they?” he continued. “I was a wild boy. But I loved medicine and I had an aptitude for it and there were people who were willing to help me. I’m the first of my family to escape poverty, did you know?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know anything about your family,” she said. “I wouldn’t have presumed to ask anyone something so personal about you.”

  “I’ve noticed that,” he returned. “You avoid sharing your feelings. You’ll fight back, but you don’t let people close, do you?”

  “When people get too clos
e, they can hurt you,” she said.

  “A lesson your father taught you, no doubt.”

  She wrapped her arms around her chest. “I’m cold,” she said dully. “I want to go home.”

  He searched her face. “Come home with me.”

  She hesitated warily.

  He made a face. “Shame on you for what you’re thinking. You should know better. You’re off the endangered list. I’ll make chili and Mexican corn bread and strong coffee and we can watch a Christmas special. Do you like opera?”

  Her eyes brightened. “Oh, I love it.”

  His own eyes brightened. “Pavarotti?”

  “And Domingo.” She looked worried. “But people will talk…”

  “They’re already talking. Who cares?” he asked. “We’re both single adults. What we do together is nobody’s business.”

  “Yes, well, the general consensus of opinion is that we’re public property, or didn’t you hear what Mr. Bailey said?”

  “I heard you scream,” he mused.

  She cleared her throat. “Well, it was the last straw.”

  He caught her hand, the undamaged one, and locked her fingers into his, tugging her out the door.

  “Dr. Coltrain,” she began.

  He locked the office door. “You know my name.”

  She looked wary. “Yes.”

  He glanced at her. “My friends call me Copper,” he said softly, and smiled.

  “We’re not friends.”

  “I think we’re going to be, though, a year too late.” He tugged her toward his car.

  “I can drive mine,” she protested.

  “Mine’s more comfortable. I’ll drive you home, and give you a lift to work in the morning. Is it locked?”

  “Yes, but…”

  “Don’t argue, Lou. I’m tired. It’s been a long day and we’ve still got to make rounds at the hospital later.”

  We. He couldn’t know the anguish of hearing him link them together when she had less than two weeks left in Jacobsville. He’d said that he’d torn up her resignation, but she was levelheaded enough to know that she had to go. It would be pure torment to be around him all the time and have him treat her as a friend and nothing more. She couldn’t have an affair with him, either, so what was left?