by Diana Palmer
“Yes, it’s true,” she muttered. “Oh, you idiot! You idiot…!”
He was kissing her, so she had to stop talking. Lou, a little embarrassed, edged out of the cubicle and moved away, only to find Coltrain right beside her as she left the emergency room.
“Maybe that will satisfy him,” he said impatiently. “Thank you for the fierce defense,” he added. “Hell of a pity that you didn’t believe a word you were saying!”
She stuck her hands into her slacks pockets. “I believe she loves her husband,” she said quietly. “And I believe that there’s nothing going on between the two of you.”
“Thanks for nothing.”
“Your private life is your own business, Dr. Coltrain, none of mine,” she said carelessly. “I’m already a memory.”
“By your own damn choice.”
The sarcasm cut deep. They walked through the parking lot to the area reserved for physicians and surgeons, and she stopped beside her little Ford.
“Drew loved his wife very much,” she said. “He never got over losing her. He still spends holidays with his in-laws because he feels close to her that way, even though she’s dead. I asked him how he’d feel if he knew that a woman was in love with him. Know what he said? He said that he’d pity her.”
“Do you have a point?” he asked.
“Yes.” She turned and looked up at him. “You haven’t really gotten over Jane Burke yet. You have nothing to offer anyone else until you do. That’s why I wouldn’t marry you.”
His brows drew together while he searched her face. He didn’t say a word. He couldn’t.
“She’s part of your life,” she continued. “A big part of it. You can’t let go of the past, even if she can. I understand. Maybe someday you’ll come to terms with it. Until you do, it’s no good trying to be serious about anyone else.”
He jiggled the change in his pockets absently. His broad shoulders rose and fell. “She was just starting into rodeo when I came back here as an intern in the hospital. She fell and they brought her to me. We had an instant rapport. I started going to watch her ride, she went out with me when I was free. She was special. Her father and I became friends as well, and when I bought my ranch, he helped me learn the ropes and start my herd. Jane and I have known each other a long, long time.”
“I know that.” She studied a button on his dark jacket. “She’s very pretty, and Drew says she has a kind nature.”
“Yes.”
Her shoulders rose and fell. “I have to go.”
He put out a lean hand and caught her shoulder, preventing her from turning away. “I never told her about my father.”
She was surprised. She didn’t think he had any secrets from Jane. She lifted her eyes and found him staring at her intently, as if he were trying to work out a puzzle.
“Curious, isn’t it?” he mused aloud. “There’s another curious thing, but I’m not ready to share that just yet.”
He moved closer and she wanted to move away, to stop him… No, she didn’t. His head bent and his mouth closed on hers, brushing, lightly probing. She yielded without a protest, her arms sliding naturally around his waist, her mouth opening to the insistence of his lips. He kissed her, leaning his body heavily on hers, so that she could feel the metal of the car at her back and his instant, explosive response to her soft warmth.
She made a sound, and he smiled against her lips.
“What?” He bit off the words against her lips.
“It’s…very…public,” she breathed.
He lifted his head and looked around. The parking lot was dotted with curious onlookers. So was the emergency room ramp.
“Hell,” he said irritably, drawing away from her. “Come home with me,” he suggested, still breathing roughly.
She shook her head before her willpower gave out. “I can’t.”
“Coward,” he drawled.
She flushed. “All right, I want to,” she said fiercely. “But I won’t, so there. Damn you! It isn’t fair to play on people’s weaknesses!”
“Sure it is,” he said, correcting her. He grinned at her maddeningly. “Come on, be daring. Take a chance! Risk everything on a draw of the cards. You live like a scientist, every move debated, planned. For once in your life, be reckless!”
“I’m not the reckless sort,” she said as she fought to get her breath back. “And you shouldn’t be, either.” She glanced ruefully toward the emergency room exit, where a tall blond man and a pretty blond woman were standing, watching. “Was it for her benefit?” she added, nodding toward them.
He glanced over her shoulder. “I didn’t know they were there,” he said genuinely.
She laughed. “Sure.” She pulled away from him, unlocked her car, got in and drove off. Her legs were wobbly, but they’d stop shaking eventually. Maybe the rest of her would, too. Coltrain was driving her crazy. She was very glad that she’d be leaving town soon.
Chapter 10
It didn’t help that the telephone rang a few minutes after Lou got home.
“Still shaky, are we?” Coltrain drawled.
She fumbled to keep from dropping the receiver. “What do you want?” she faltered.
“An invitation to Christmas dinner, of course,” he said. “I don’t want to sit in front of the TV all day eating TV dinners.”
She was still angry at him for making a public spectacle of them for the second time. The hospital would buzz with the latest bit of gossip for weeks. At least she wouldn’t have long to put up with it.
“TV dinners are good for you,” she said pointedly.
“Home cooking is better. I’ll make the dressing and a fruit salad if you’ll do turkey and rolls.”
She hesitated. She wanted badly to spend that day with him, but in the long run, it would make things harder.
“Come on,” he coaxed in a silky tone. “You know you want to. If you’re leaving town after the first, it will be one of the last times we spend together. What have you got to lose?”
My self-respect, my honor, my virtue, my pride, she thought. But aloud, she said, “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt.”
He chuckled. “No, it wouldn’t. I’ll see you at eleven on Christmas morning.”
He hung up before she could change her mind. “I don’t want to,” she told the telephone. “This is a terrible mistake, and I’m sure that I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.”
After a minute, she realized that she was talking to a piece of equipment. She shook her head sadly. Coltrain was driving her out of her mind.
She went to the store early on Christmas Eve and bought a turkey. The girl at the check-out stand was one of her patients. She grinned as she totaled the price of the turkey, the bottle of wine and the other groceries Lou had bought to cook Christmas dinner.
“Expecting company, Doctor?” she teased.
Lou flushed, aware that the woman behind her was one of Coltrain’s patients. “No. No. I’m going to cook the turkey and freeze what I don’t eat.”
“Oh.” The girl sounded disappointed.
“Going to drink all that wine alone, too?” the woman behind her asked wickedly. “And you a doctor!”
Lou handed over the amount the cashier asked for. “I’m not on duty on Christmas Day,” she said irritably. “Besides, I cook with wine!”
“You won’t cook with that,” the cashier noted. She held up the bottle and pointed to the bottom of the label. It stated, quite clearly, Nonalcoholic Wine.
Lou had grabbed the bottle from the wrong aisle. But it worked to her advantage. She grinned at the woman behind her, who looked embarrassed.
The clerk packaged up her purchases and Lou pushed them out to her car. At least she’d gotten around that ticky little episode.
Back home, she put the turkey on to bake and made rolls from scratch. Nonalcoholic wine wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, she told herself. She could serve it at dinner without having to worry about losing her wits with Coltrain.
The weather was sunny and ni
ce, and the same was predicted for the following day. A white Christmas was out of the question, of course, but she wondered what it would be like to have snow on the ground.
She turned on the television that night, when the cooking was done and everything was put into the refrigerator for the next day. Curled up in her favorite armchair in old jeans, a sweatshirt and in her sock feet, she was relaxing after her housecleaning and cooking when she heard a car drive up.
It was eight o’clock and she wasn’t on call. She frowned as she went to the front door. A gray Jaguar was sitting in the driveway and as she looked, a tall, redheaded man in jeans and a sweatshirt and boots got out of the car carrying a big box.
“Open the door,” he called as he mounted the steps.
“What’s that?” she asked curiously.
“Food and presents.”
She was surprised. She hadn’t expected him tonight and she fumbled and faltered as she let him in and closed the door again.
He unloaded the box in the kitchen. “Salad.” He indicated a covered plastic bowl. “Dressing.” He indicated a foil-covered pan. “And a chocolate pound cake. No, I didn’t make it,” he added when she opened her mouth. “I bought it. I can’t bake a cake. Is there room in the fridge for this?”
“You could have called to ask before you brought it,” she reminded him.
He grinned. “If I’d phoned, you’d have listened to the answering machine and when you knew it was me, you’d have pretended not to be home.”
She flushed. He was right. It was disconcerting to have someone so perceptive second-guessing her every move. “Yes, there’s room.”
She opened the refrigerator door and helped him fit his food in.
He went back to the big box and pulled out two packages. “One for me to give you—” he held up one “—and one for you to give me.”
She glared at him. “I got you a present,” she muttered.
His eyebrows shot up. “You did?”
Her lower lip pulled down. “Just because I didn’t plan to spend Christmas with you didn’t mean I was low enough not to get you something.”
“You didn’t give it to me at the office party,” he recalled.
She flushed. “You didn’t give me anything at the office party, either.”
He smiled. “I was saving it for tomorrow.”
“So was I,” she returned.
“Can I put these under the tree?”
She shrugged. “Sure.”
Curious, she followed him into the living room. The tree was live and huge; it covered the whole corner and reached almost to the nine-foot ceiling. It was full of lights and decorations and under it a big metal electric train sat on its wide tracks waiting for power to move it.
“I didn’t notice that when I was here before,” he said, delighted by the train. He stooped to look at it more closely. “This is an American Flyer by Lionel!” he exclaimed. “You’ve had this for a while, haven’t you?”
“It’s an antique,” she recalled. “My mother got it for me.” She smiled. “I love trains. I have two more sets and about a mile of track in a box in the closet, but it seemed sort of pointless to set all those trains up with just me to run them.”
He looked up at her with sparkling eyes. “Which closet are they in?” he asked in a conspiratorial tone.
“The hall closet.” Her eyes brightened. “You like trains?”
“Do I like trains? I have HO scale, N scale, G scale and three sets of new Lionel O scale trains at home.”
She gasped. “Oh, my goodness!”
“That’s what I say. Come on!”
He led her to the hall closet, opened it, found the boxes and started handing them out to her.
Like two children, they sat on the floor putting tracks together with switches and accessories for the next two hours. Lou made coffee and they had it on the floor while they made connections and set up the low wooden scale buildings that Lou had bought to go with the sets.
When they finished, she turned on the power. The wooden buildings were lit. So were the engines and the cabooses and several passenger cars.
“I love to sit and watch them run in the dark,” she said breathlessly as he turned on the switch box and the trains began to move. “It’s like watching over a small village with the people all snug in their houses.”
“I know what you mean.” He sprawled, chest down, on the floor beside her to watch the trains chug and whistle and run around the various tracks. “God, this is great! I had no idea you liked trains!”
“Same here,” she said, chuckling. “I always felt guilty about having them, in a way. Somewhere out there, there must be dozens of little kids who would do anything for just one train and a small track to run it on. And here I’ve got all this and I never play with it.”
“I know how it is. I don’t even have a niece or nephew to share mine with.”
“When did you get your first train?”
“When I was eight. My granddad bought it for me so he could play with it,” he added with a grin. “He couldn’t afford a big set, of course, but I didn’t care. I never had so much fun.” His face hardened at the memories. “When Dad took me to Houston, I missed the train almost as much as I missed my granddad and grandmother. It was a long time before I got back there.” He shrugged. “The train still worked by then, though, and it was more fun when the threat of my father was gone.”
She rolled onto her side, peering at him in the dim light from the tree and the small village. “You said that you never told Jane about your father.”
“I didn’t,” he replied. “It was something I was deeply ashamed of for a long time.”
“Children do what they’re told, whether it’s right or wrong,” she reminded him. “You can’t be held responsible for everything.”
“I knew it was wrong,” he agreed. “But my father was a brutal man, and when I was a young boy, I was afraid of him.” His head turned. He smiled at her. “You’d understand that.”
“Yes.”
He rested his chin on his hands and watched the trains wistfully. “I took my medicine—juvenile hall and years of probation. But people helped me to change. I wanted to pass that on, to give back some of the care that had been given to me. That’s why I went into medicine. I saw it as an opportunity to help people.”
“And you have,” she said. Her eyes traced the length of his fit, hard-muscled body lovingly. He was so different away from the office. She’d never known him like this, and so soon, it would all be over. She’d go away. She wouldn’t see him again. Her sad eyes went back to the trains. The sound of them was like a lullaby, comforting, delightful to the ears.
“We need railroad caps and those wooden whistles that sound like old steam engines,” he remarked.
She smiled. “And railroad gloves and crossing guards and flashing guard lights.”
“If there was a hobby shop nearby, we could go and get them. But everything would be closed up on Christmas Eve, anyway.”
“I guess so.”
He pursed his lips, without looking at her. “If you stayed, after the New Year, we could pool our layouts and have one big one. We could custom-design our own buildings and bridges, and we could go in together and buy one of those big transformer outfits that runs dozens of accessories.”
She was thinking more of spending that kind of time with Coltrain than running model engines, but it sounded delightful all the same. She sighed wistfully. “I would have enjoyed that,” she murmured. “But I’ve signed a new contract. I have to go.”
“Contracts can be broken,” he said. “There’s always an escape clause if you look hard enough.”
Her hips shifted on the rug they were lying on. “Too many people are gossiping about us already,” she said. “Even at the grocery store, the clerk noticed that I bought a turkey and wine and the lady behind me said I couldn’t possibly be going to drink it alone.”
“You bought wine?” he mused.
“Nonalcoholic wine
,” she said, correcting him.
He chuckled. “On purpose?”
“Not really. I picked up the wrong bottle. But it was just as well. The lady behind me was making snide comments about it.” She sighed. “It rubbed me the wrong way. She wouldn’t have known that my father was an alcoholic.”
“How did he manage to keep his job?”
“He had willing young assistants who covered for him. And finally, the hospital board forced him into early retirement. He had been a brilliant surgeon,” she reminded him. “It isn’t easy to destroy a career like that.”
“It would have been better than letting him risk other people’s lives.”
“But he didn’t,” she replied. “Someone was always there to bail him out.”
“Lucky, wasn’t he, not to have been hit with a multimillion-dollar malpractice suit.”
He reached out and threw the automatic switches to change the trains to another set of tracks. “Nice,” he commented.
“Yes, isn’t it? I love trains. If I had more leisure time, I’d do this every day. I’m glad we’re not on call this weekend. How did you manage it?”
“Threats and bribery,” he drawled. “We both worked last Christmas holidays, remember?”
“I guess we did. At each other’s throats,” she recalled demurely.
“Oh, that was necessary,” he returned, rolling lazily onto his side and propping on an elbow. “If I hadn’t snapped at you constantly, I’d have been laying you down on examination couches every other day.”
“Wh…what?” she stammered.
He reached out and brushed back a long strand of blond hair from her face. “You backed away every time I came close to you,” he said quietly. “It was all that saved you. I’ve wanted you for a long, long time, Dr. Blakely, and I’ve fought it like a madman.”
“You were in love with Jane Parker,” she said.
“Not for a long time,” he said. He traced her cheek lightly. “The way I felt about her was a habit. It was one I broke when she married Todd Burke. Although, like you, he seems to think Jane and I were an item even after they married. He’s taken a lot of convincing. So have you.”