by Diana Palmer
He glanced down at her worried face and his fingers contracted. “Stop brooding. I promised not to seduce you.”
“I know that!”
“Unless you want me to,” he chided, chuckling at her expression. “I’m a doctor,” he added in a conspiratorial whisper. “I know how to protect you from any consequences.”
“Damn you!”
She jerked away from him, furiously. He laughed at her fighting stance.
“That was wicked,” he acknowledged. “But I do love to watch you lose that hot temper. Are you Irish, by any chance?”
“My grandfather was,” she muttered. She dashed a strand of blond hair out of her eyes. “You stop saying things like that to me!”
He unlocked her door, still smiling. “All right. No more jokes.”
She slid into the leather seat and inhaled the luxurious scent of the upholstery while he got in beside her and started the car. It was dark. She sat next to him in perfect peace and contentment as they drove out to his ranch, not breaking the silence as they passed by farms and ranches silhouetted against the flat horizon.
“You’re very quiet,” he remarked when he pulled up in front of the Spanish-style adobe house he called home.
“I’m happy,” she said without thinking.
He was quiet, then. He helped her out and they walked a little apart on the flagstone walkway that led to the front porch. It was wide and spacious, with gliders and a porch swing.
“It must be heaven to sit out here in the spring,” she remarked absently.
He glanced at her curiously. “I never pictured you as the sort to enjoy a porch swing.”
“Or walks in the woods, or horseback riding, or baseball games?” she asked. “Because I like those things, too. Austin does have suburbs, and I had friends who owned ranches. I know how to ride and shoot, too.”
He smiled. She’d seemed like such a city girl. He’d made sure that he never looked too closely at her, of course. Like father, like daughter, he’d always thought. But she was nothing like Fielding Blakely. She was unique.
He unlocked the door and opened it. The interior was full of Spanish pieces and dark furniture with creams and beiges and browns softened by off-white curtains. It had the look of professional decorating, which it probably was.
“I grew up sitting on orange crates and eating on cracked plates,” he commented as she touched a bronze sculpture of a bronc rider. “This is much better.”
She laughed. “I guess so. But orange crates and cracked plates wouldn’t be so bad if the company was pleasant. I hate formal dining rooms and extravagant place settings.”
Now he was getting suspicious. They really couldn’t have that much in common! His eyebrow jerked. “Full of surprises, aren’t you? Or did you just take a look at my curriculum vitae and tell me what I wanted to hear?” he added in a crisp, suspicious tone.
Her surprise was genuine, and he recognized it immediately. She searched his face. “This was a mistake,” she said flatly. “I think I’d like to go…”
He caught her arm. “Lou, I’m constantly on the defensive with women,” he said. “I never know, you see…” He hesitated.
“Yes, I understand,” she replied. “You don’t have to say it.”
“All that, and you read minds, too,” he said with cool sarcasm. “Well, well.”
She drew away from him. She seemed to read his mind quite well, she thought, because she usually knew what he was going to say.
That occurred to him, too. “It used to make me mad as hell when you handed me files before I asked for them,” he told her.
“It wasn’t deliberate,” she said without thinking.
“I know.” His jaw firmed as he looked at her. “We know too much about each other, don’t we, Lou? We know things we shouldn’t, without ever saying them.”
She looked up, feeling the bite of his inspection all the way to her toes. “We can’t say them,” she replied. “Not ever.”
He only nodded. His eyes searched hers intently. “I don’t believe in happily ever after,” he said. “I did, once, until your father came along and shattered all my illusions. She wouldn’t let me touch her, you see. But she slept with him. She got pregnant by him. The hell of it was that she was going to marry me without telling me anything.” He sighed. “I lost my faith in women on the spot, and I hated your father enough to beat him to his knees. When you came here, and I found out who you were…” He shook his head. “I almost decked Drew for not telling me.”
“I didn’t know, either,” she said.
“I realize that.” He smiled. “You were an asset, after I got over the shock. You never complained about long hours or hard work, no matter how much I put on you. And I put a lot on you, at first. I thought I could make you quit. But the more I demanded, the more you gave. After a while, it occurred to me that I’d made a good bargain. Not that I liked you,” he added sardonically.
“You made that perfectly clear.”
“You fought back,” he said. “Most people don’t. They knuckle under and go home and fume about it, and think up things they wish they’d said. You just jump in with both feet and give it all you’ve got. You’re a hell of an adversary, Lou. I couldn’t beat you down.”
“I always had to fight for things,” she recalled. “My father was like you.” Her face contorted and she turned away.
“I don’t get drunk as a rule, and I’ve never hurt a woman!” he snapped.
“I didn’t mean that,” she said quickly. “It’s just that you’re forceful. You demand, you push. You don’t ever give up or give in. Neither did he. If he thought he was right, he’d fight the whole world to prove it. But he fought the same when he was wrong. And in his later years, he drank to excess. He wouldn’t admit he had a problem. Neither would my mother. She was his slave,” she added bitterly. “Even her daughter was dispensable if the great man said so.”
“Didn’t she love you?”
“Who knows? She loved him more. Enough to lie for him. Even to die for him. And she did.” She turned, her face hard. “She got into a plane with him, knowing that he was in no condition to fly. Maybe she had a premonition that he would go down and she wanted to go with him. I’m almost sure that she still would have gone with him if she’d known he was going to crash the plane. She loved him that much.”
“You sound as if you can’t imagine being loved that much.”
“I can’t,” she said flatly, lifting her eyes. “I don’t want that kind of obsessive love. I don’t want to give it or receive it.”
“What do you want?” he persisted. “A lifetime of loneliness?”
“That’s what you’re settling for, isn’t it?” she countered.
He shrugged. “Maybe I am,” he said after a minute. His blue eyes slid over her face and then averted. “Can you cook?” he asked on the way into the kitchen. Like the rest of the house, it was spacious and contained every modern device known to man.
“Of course,” she said.
He glanced at her with a grin. “How well do you do chili?” he persisted.
“Well…”
“I’ve won contests with mine,” he said smugly. He slid out of his jacket and vest and tie, opened the top buttons of his shirt and turned to the stove. “You can make the coffee.”
“Trusting soul, aren’t you?” she murmured as he acquainted her with the coffeemaker and the location of filters, coffee and measuring spoons.
“I always give a fellow cook the benefit of the doubt once,” he replied. “Besides, you drink coffee all the time, just like I do. That means you must know how to make it.”
She laughed. “I like mine strong,” she warned.
“So do I. Do your worst.”
Minutes later, the food was on the small kitchen table, steaming and delicious. Lou couldn’t remember when she’d enjoyed a meal more.
“That’s good chili,” she had to admit.
He grinned. “It’s the two-time winner of the Jacobsville Chili Coo
koff.”
“I’m not surprised. The corn bread was wonderful, too.”
“The secret to good corn bread is to cook it in an iron skillet,” he confessed. “That’s where the crispness comes from.”
“I don’t own a single piece of iron cookware. I’ll have to get a pan.”
He leaned back, balancing his coffee mug in one hand as he studied her through narrow eyes. “It hasn’t all been on my side,” he remarked suddenly.
Her eyes lifted to his. “What hasn’t?”
“All that antagonism,” he said. “You’ve been as prickly as I have.”
Her slender shoulders rose and fell. “It’s instinctive to recoil from people when we know they don’t like us. Isn’t it?”
“Maybe so.” He checked his watch and finished his coffee. “I’ll get these things in the dishwasher, then we’d better get over to the hospital and do rounds before the Christmas concert comes on the educational channel.”
“I don’t have my car,” she said worriedly.
“We’ll go together.”
“Oh, that will certainly keep gossip down,” she said on a sigh.
He smiled at her. “Damn gossip.”
“Was that an adjective or a verb?”
“A verb. I’ll rinse, you stack.”
They loaded the dishes and he started the dishwasher. He slid back into his jacket, buttoned his shirt and fixed his tie. “Come on. We’ll get the chores out of the way.”
The hospital was crowded, and plenty of people noticed that Drs. Coltrain and Blakely came in together to make rounds. Lou tried not to notice as she went from patient to patient, checking charts and making conversation.
But when she finished, Coltrain was nowhere in sight. She glanced out the window into the parking lot. His car was still there in his designated space. She went to the doctors’ lounge looking for him, and turned the corner just in time to see him with a devastating blond woman in a dress that Lou would love to have been able to afford.
Coltrain saw Lou and he looked grim. He turned toward her with his hands in his pockets, and Lou noticed that the woman was clutching one of his arms tightly in both hands.
“This is my partner,” he said, without giving her name. “Lou, this is Dana Lester, an old…friend.”
“His ex-fiancée.” The woman corrected him in a sweet tone. “How nice to meet you! I’ve just accepted an appointment as nursing director here, so we’ll be seeing a lot of each other!”
“You’re a nurse?” Lou asked politely, while she caved in inside.
“A graduate nurse,” she said, nodding. “I’ve been working in Houston, but this job came open and was advertised in a local paper. I applied for it, and here I am! How lovely it will be to come home. I was born here, you know.”
“Oh, really?” Lou said.
“Darling,” she told Copper, “you didn’t tell me your partner’s name.”
“It’s Blakely,” he said evenly. “Dr. Louise Blakely.”
“Blakely?” the woman queried, her blue eyes pensive. “Why does that name sound so familiar….” She suddenly went pale. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, that would be too coincidental.”
“My father,” Lou said coolly, “was Dr. Fielding Blakely. I believe you…knew him?” she added pointedly.
Dana’s face looked like rice paper. She drew away from Coltrain. “I…I must fly, darling,” she said. “Things to do while I get settled! I’ll have you over for supper one night soon!”
She didn’t speak to Lou again, not that it was expected. Lou watched her go with cold, angry eyes.
“You didn’t want to tell her my name,” Lou accused softly.
His face gave away nothing. “The past is best left alone.”
“Did you know about her job here?”
His jaw clenched. “I knew there was an opening. I didn’t know she’d been hired. If Selby Wills hadn’t just retired as hospital administrator, she wouldn’t have gotten the job.”
She probed into the pocket of her lab coat without really seeing it. “She’s pretty.”
“She’s blond, too, isn’t that what you’re thinking?”
She raised her face. “So,” she added, “is Jane Parker.”
“Jane Burke, now.” He corrected her darkly. “I like blondes.”
His tone dared her to make another remark. She lifted a shoulder and turned. “Some men do. Just don’t expect me to welcome her with open arms. I’m sure that my mother suffered because of her. At least my father was less careless with women in his later years.”
“It was over a long time ago,” Copper said quietly. “If I can overlook your father, you can overlook her.”
“Do you think so?”
“What happened between them was nothing to do with you,” he persisted.
“He betrayed my mother with her, and it’s nothing to do with me?” she asked softly.
He rammed his hands into his pockets, his face set and cold. “Are you finished here?”
“Oh, yes, I’m finished here,” she agreed fervently. “If you’ll drop me off at my car, I’d like to go home now. We’ll have to save the TV Special for another time.”
He hesitated, but only for a minute. Her expression told him everything he needed to know, including the futility of having an argument with her right now.
“All right,” he agreed, nodding toward the exit. “Let’s go.”
He stopped at her car in the office parking lot and let her out.
“Thanks for my supper,” she said politely.
“You’re welcome.”
She closed the door and unlocked her own car. He didn’t drive away until she was safely inside and heading out toward home.
Dana Lester’s arrival in town was met with another spate of gossip, because there were people in Jacobsville who remembered the scandal very well. Lou tried to pay as little attention to it as possible as she weathered the first few days with the new nursing supervisor avoiding her and Coltrain barely speaking to her.
It was, she told herself, a very good thing that she was leaving after the first of January. The situation was strained and getting worse. She couldn’t work out if Dana was afraid of her or jealous of her. Gossip about herself and Coltrain had been lost in the new rumors about his ex-fiancée’s return, which did at least spare Lou somewhat. She couldn’t help but see that Dana spent a fair amount of time following Coltrain around the hospital, and once or twice she phoned him at the office. Lou pretended not to notice and not to mind, but it was cutting her up inside.
The night she’d had supper with her taciturn partner had been something of a beginning. But Dana’s arrival had nipped it all in the bud. He’d turned his back on Lou and now he only spoke to her when it was necessary and about business. If he’d withdrawn, so had she. Poor Brenda and the office receptionist worked in an armed camp, walking around like people on eggshells. Coltrain’s temper strained at the bit, and every time he flared up, Lou flared right back.
“We hear that Nickie and Dana almost came to blows the other night about who got to take Dr. Coltrain a file,” Brenda remarked a few days later.
“Too bad someone didn’t have a hidden camera, isn’t it?” Lou remarked. She sipped her coffee.
Brenda frowned. “I thought… Well, it did seem that you and the doctor were getting along better.”
“A temporary truce, nothing more,” she returned. “I’m still leaving after the first of the year, Brenda. Nothing’s really changed except that Coltrain’s old flame has returned.”
“She was poison,” Brenda said. “I heard all about her from some of the older nurses at the hospital. Did you know that at least two threatened to quit when they knew she was taking over as head nurse at the hospital? One of the nurses she worked with in Houston has family here. They said she was about to be fired when she grabbed this job. Her credentials look impressive, but she’s not a good administrator, regardless of her college background, and she plays favorites. They’ll learn that her
e, the hard way.”
“It’s not my problem.”
“Isn’t it?” Brenda muttered. “Well, they also say that her real purpose in applying for this job was to see if Copper was willing to take her back and try again. She’s looking for a husband and he’s number one on her list.”
“Lucky him,” she said blithely. “She’s very pretty.”
“She’s a blond tarantula,” she said hotly. “She’ll suck him dry!”
“He’s a big boy, Brenda,” Lou returned imperturbably. “He can take care of himself.”
“No man is immune to a beautiful face and figure and having a woman absolutely worship him. You take my word for it, there’s going to be trouble.”
“I won’t be here to see it,” Lou reminded her. And for the first time, she was glad. Nickie and Dana could fight over Coltrain and may the best woman win, she thought miserably. At least she wouldn’t have to watch the struggle. She’d always known that Coltrain wasn’t for her. She might as well accept defeat with good grace and get out while she could.
She went back to work, all too aware of Coltrain’s deep voice in one of the cubicles she passed. She wondered how her life was going to feel when this was all a bad memory, and she wouldn’t hear his voice again.
Drew invited her out to eat and she went, gratefully, glad for the diversion. But the restaurant he chose, Jacobsville’s best, had two unwelcome diners: Coltrain and his ex-fiancée.
“I’m sorry,” Drew said with a smile and a grimace of apology. “I didn’t know they’d be here or I’d have chosen another place to take you for supper.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” she assured him. “I have to see them at the hospital every day, anyway.”
“Yes, see them being the key word here,” he added knowingly. “I understand that they both avoid you.”
“God knows why,” she agreed. “She’s anywhere I’m not when I need to ask her a question, and he only talks to me about patients. I’m glad I’m leaving, Drew. And with all respect to you, I’m sorry I came.”
He smiled ruefully. “I’m sorry I got you into this,” he said. “Nothing went as I planned.”