“Having slept together?” he suggested.
She pulled a breath, and slowly blew it out. Something about the way he said the words, the hint of memory in his eyes, pooled heat low in her stomach. “Yeah. That,” she agreed, wanting to pace but having nowhere to go. “I’m just not totally sure how that happened.”
Mike said nothing for a moment. He just stood with his hands in his pockets, the way he sometimes did when he was with a patient. He watched her—much as he might a patient, too—as if he needed to hear what she had to say about where the discomfort was before he could decide the best way to proceed.
“Does it matter?”
“No,” she quietly replied, unwilling to expose any more of herself than she already had. She didn’t want him digging too much. She didn’t want to dig much more herself, for that matter. “It doesn’t.”
“Then maybe you shouldn’t worry about it.”
She gave a little nod, clutching at the advice. He didn’t seem to think it mattered why things had gotten so out of hand. Either that, or he’d already figured out the reason on his end and he was too much of a gentleman to tell her there wasn’t anything all that complicated about the human sex drive.
The problem now was where they went from here.
He seemed to be trying to figure that out, too, as his glance skimmed her mouth, then immediately jerked to her eyes.
He cleared his throat. “Are we all right? With each other, I mean?”
As questions went, that one was loaded. It asked everything from Do you hate me? to What do you expect from me now? But, with the hospital operator paging an orderly over the PA, and a parade of people constantly passing the window behind him, he didn’t seem any more comfortable with getting specific than she did. He was only performing triage—a quick assessment of the damages to determine how serious the problem was, and what needed to be done immediately to keep the situation from getting worse. All she cared about just then was that he didn’t seem to want things screwed up between them, either.
“I’m okay...if you are.” She pushed her fingers through her hair, the motion showing more agitation than she’d wanted him to see. “Why don’t we just chalk last night up to a brief moment of insanity. Or the movie. Or the wine,” she quickly added, though they both knew that hadn’t been the case at all. “Okay?”
With anyone else, Mike would have breathed a sigh of relief at her willingness to dismiss the incident as of no consequence. He thought he should have with Katie, too. And he did. In a way. As close as he could figure, what had happened last night had simply been the result of two people who’d been deprived too long and who’d trusted each other with their physical needs.
He could live with that explanation. It was honest, neat and as uncomplicated as he could make it, under the circumstances. And Katie seemed all right with her own rationalizations, despite the fact that they rang more of “excuse” than explanation. Still, if she was willing to go on as if nothing had happened, then that was what he’d do, too, even though making love with her had done nothing but make him want more. The mere thought of how she’d responded to him, of the mindless passion that had erupted between them, made him want to back her up against the counter and lose himself completely in her heat. But she clearly wasn’t comfortable with the idea of a repeat performance. And the last thing he wanted to do was ruin the best relationship he’d ever had by pushing for something she didn’t want.
There was no mistaking the faint tension filling the air in the moments before he finally said, “Okay,” and reached for the door. But they were saved having to let that tension escalate by the abrupt rap of Cindy’s knuckles against the window.
Pulling the door open, Mike stepped back.
“Excuse me,” Cindy said to him, slipping past. Soles squeaking on the beige linoleum, she headed for a box on the end of the counter, grabbed a handful of alcohol pads and dropped them into her pocket. “Are you tied up now?” she asked Katie.
Pretending she was only smoothing the front of her scrub top, Katie pressed a hand to the knot of nerves in her stomach. “No. I can help. I was just getting some tubes.”
“She’s taking readings for me for your study,” Cindy pointed out good-naturedly, oblivious to the strain snaking between the attractive surgeon by the door and the woman he cautiously watched. “I just heard Dr. Carlisle tell Dr. Chapman that you may be asked to present a preliminary paper on it at a conference.
“They did dozens of drug studies at the hospital I worked for in Salem,” she continued, opening and closing doors in her search for whatever she was looking for now, “but this is the first one I ever heard of that actually has doctors excited.”
“Thanks,” Mike murmured, since she obviously intended her remarks as a compliment. “It’s nice to know it might have some merit.”
Mike had mentioned the possibility of the conference to Katie the evening she’d helped him input his data, and being asked to present to one’s colleagues was an enormous compliment. But she was fairly sure he wasn’t really thinking about his paper at the moment. If he had been, she was certain he would have reminded her that she’d promised to help him organize his materials, and asked what nights she was free this week. All he did was give her a lingering look she couldn’t decipher at all before he told them both he had to go and headed out the door.
Cindy wasn’t as slow on the uptake as she’d first appeared. Watching Katie release a long, low breath, her glance bounced to the door and back again. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. Sure.” Avoiding the curiosity etched in the other nurse’s face, she asked, “Why?”
“Because I have a strange feeling I just interrupted something.”
“Not at all,” Katie assured her, trying for nonchalance as she picked up the tray of supplies she’d come in for. “We were just talking.”
“You and Dr. Brennan are friends, right? Old friends from what I hear.”
“We lived next door to each other when we were kids.”
“Oh.”
“Ready?”
Skepticism ran rampant over the woman’s freckled face, but Cindy was too busy to indulge in any further speculation. Katie didn’t doubt, however, that had the woman had time, she’d have poked a little more. There was nothing certain members of the staff liked more than gossip, and Cindy fit right in with that crowd. Katie, however, wasn’t about to give her any grist for the mill. Once the hospital grapevine started feeding a rumor, it took forever for it to die. She and Mike would get past this. They simply had to.
Some decisions were a snap to make. It was the execution that posed the problem.
Because Katie finally had some time off, she didn’t see Mike for the next couple of days. She didn’t hear from him, either. Neither was unusual. They could go weeks seeing each other only at work or at Granetti’s. But the unease that had hung between them like a wall when they’d parted in the med room wouldn’t allow her to shake the feeling that his silence wasn’t a good sign. She didn’t think it a good sign, either, that her heart skipped every time the phone did ring. Until she’d gone to bed with him, she wouldn’t have even thought about him calling—much less lain awake at night trying to figure out why he wasn’t.
Her next day back at the hospital was Sunday. Since Mike didn’t work weekends unless he was on call, which he wasn’t, she didn’t see him then, either. But Monday morning, as she hurried into the nearly deserted cafeteria to grab a bagel, he was standing at the beverage counter next to the cold sandwich station.
He was in green surgical scrubs, the tucked-in top and drawstring pants doing more for his wide shoulders and impossibly narrow hips than a custom suit would do for most men. Judging from the snug green surgical cap covering his hair, it seemed that he was between procedures.
Her first thought when her footsteps faltered was that she could leave before he saw her. Her second thought was that the first was ridiculous.
Determined to act as normal as...normal, she strolled ov
er to the tall, silver urns and snagged a foam cup for herself from the stack. On the outside, she was fine. Inside, the sudden, anxious knot in her stomach had effectively canceled the need for solid food.
“Did you do anything exciting this weekend?” she asked, watching him fill his cup with strong black coffee.
He’d been preoccupied, totally unaware that anyone had come up beside him. At the sound of her voice, he hesitated an instant before he cut a glance toward her. Eyes the color of a fathomless lake scanned her face, quick and assessing, before he turned his attention back to his cup.
Despite the quirk of a smile that had come too late to be anything but an afterthought, there was infinitely more caution than welcome in his expression.
“I wired new speakers to my stereo,” he replied, moving farther down the line for a white plastic lid. “And I went up to Mount Hood with my brother,” he added, hitting the highlights.
“To ski or to look at the cabin he wants to buy?”
“To look at the cabin.”
“What did you think?”
“It needs work.” The lid snapped on with a quiet click. “You were out late last night.”
His tone was remarkably conversational. It was the observation itself that threw her.
“Not really. I got in about eight-thirty,” she told him, wondering how he’d known she hadn’t been home. “Did you come over?”
“I called. I take it you didn’t check your messages.”
“There weren’t any.”
“Well, I left one. I asked you to call me back if you got in before ten.”
Frowning, she held her cup under the hot cocoa dispenser. “Spike must have erased it.”
She halfway expected Mike to give her one of his tolerant looks and mutter something like, “That’s original.” Or to give her a bad time about blaming her cat. All he did was give her a sidelong glance that said she’d have to do better than that.
“I mean it,” she insisted, wondering if he thought she’d purposely ignored his call. Until three days ago, he never would have doubted her. But then, until three days ago, she wouldn’t have hesitated when she’d first seen him—or felt such ambivalence over the fact that he’d tried to reach her.
“Sometimes he steps on the Play Messages bar when he’s walking across the end table and the messages play back. He does,” she stressed when he said nothing, hating that she felt she had to defend herself. “Was it something important?”
“Nothing that couldn’t wait,” he conceded. “Cameron is selling Girl Scout cookies. She wanted me to ask if you’d buy some.”
Cameron was his niece, his brother Tom’s daughter. Katie didn’t doubt for a minute that the diminutive sevenyear-old with the dark hair and Brennan blue eyes had asked her Uncle Mike to hit her up for a sale. The little girl had already unloaded a calendar, a magazine subscription and six chocolate almond bars on her this school year alone. But the question was one Mike could have posed the next time he saw her—which made Katie wonder if there hadn’t been another reason he’d wanted to talk.
“That kid’s going to break me,” she informed him, trying for their old ease. “It’s too bad you didn’t call before I left. I could have taken orders from everyone at the meeting.”
“The meeting?”
“For the free clinic. That’s where I was. I’m on the expansion committee.”
Like lightning, his dark eyebrows bolted together. “You said you were cutting back on your hours there.”
“I did. On the hours I work in the clinic, anyway. I’m only giving them one night a week instead of two. And this expansion thing will only last a couple of months, so it’s not like it’ll take much more time than it has in the past.”
She didn’t believe for a minute that her tendency to overextend herself mattered that much to Mike. He’d just been the person who’d listened to her complain for months now about how she felt she was working herself into a rut, stagnating, turning into an old maid with a cat. After listening to her moan and complain, he was the one who’d encouraged her to cut back on her volunteer hours and use the time to take a class, or smell the flowers, or do whatever it was she wanted to do that would expose her to new people and new experiences. He’d even pointed out that when a person spent all day and a couple evenings a week taking care of others, she didn’t have to feel guilty about taking a little time for herself.
Because he’d been so supportive was precisely why she’d avoided mentioning how she’d wound up with this commitment a couple of weeks ago. She simply hadn’t wanted to hear another lecture about how she would never have time for herself if she didn’t say no once in a while. At the moment, however, she would gladly welcome his logic, practicality and exasperation. They would be familiar, comfortable, and those were things she wanted badly to feel with him again.
“It’s only for a couple of months,” she defended, deliberately encouraging criticism. He said she rationalized more than anyone he’d ever known. “I wasn’t all that keen on the yoga class it’s too late to sign up for now, anyway.”
There was no lecture. Mike didn’t even comment on the lack of steel in her spine, much less get that faintly annoyed frown that said her logic completely escaped him. He just gave her a steady look she couldn’t read at all.
“You’d better move,” he advised a moment later.
“What?”
She was wondering if he’d given up on her, her heart sinking at the thought, when she felt his hand slip under the edge of her short sleeve. With his fingers circled firmly above her elbow, he moved her out of the way so the woman behind them could get to the sugar.
She thought he’d let her go. Instead, he pulled her a little closer so the woman’s companion could move past, too. His palm seemed to burn into her cool flesh, his heat searing into her in a grip that suddenly felt more possessive than perfunctory. But it was the motion of his thumb moving slowly up and over her bicep that sensitized her nerves. With nothing more than that tiny concealed caress, he demanded a response from her body that she wanted badly to deny.
Thinking it would have been easier to deny her next breath, she cautiously met his eyes. Now that she was intimately familiar with the feel of his hands, it seemed all he had to do was touch her to create instant havoc.
He seemed to have felt that same, unnerving jolt. There was no mistaking the tension etched in his compelling features—or his quick displeasure. His jaw locked and his hand fell. Just as it did, someone dropped a metal tray. The reverberating clang jolted her so badly she jumped.
“Watch it.” His hand darted out again, steadying the cup in her hand. Seeing that it was secure, he immediately pulled away. “You don’t want to burn yourself.”
Unnerved, she managed to say something appropriately inane in agreement. They were in a place where any of a dozen people could see their every move. That alone would have caused him to let go of her as quickly as he had. But Katie was dead certain he’d have broken that evocative contact just as fast had they been alone. The fact that they were not alone was what took some of the sting from his abruptness.
“Hey, Mike.” A tall, reed-thin anesthesiologist in surgical greens walked past with a plate of toast. “Rumor has it you’re on the shortlist to present at the cardiovascular conference in Seattle. Prestige like that can’t hurt when it comes to funding a new surgical wing around here.” He lifted his toast in a salute. “I sure hope they ask you.”
Mike’s smile was easy, his manner remarkably unaffected as he accepted his colleague’s good wishes. From what the other doctor was saying, Katie gathered it wouldn’t be long before the medical conference panel decided which new studies and procedures merited exposure through their enormously respected forum. That he was even under consideration had truly surprised Mike. All he’d planned to do with his study results, if they proved worth writing about, was submit them for publication, something that was often done to share information. But Dr. MacAllister, the chief of staff, had brought the study to
the attention of the panel and now it held the potential to make Mike widely known among his peers—and bring the reflected glory to the hospital.
“You never expected it to get this big, did you?”
Katie posed the observation quietly as the other doctor walked off. She wanted nothing more than to get beyond the awkwardness of the past several moments, and the subject the interruption raised had provided the perfect diversion.
Already uncomfortable with the notoriety, Mike turned back to her with a shrug. “I think we know by now that some things just have a way of getting out of hand.” He motioned her ahead of him, stepping back as if to keep from taking her arm again. “Let’s get out of here. There was another reason I called you last night.”
If it was his intention to keep her off guard, he succeeded beautifully. In the space of a minute, he’d gone from sensitizing her nerves to knotting them. He didn’t looked pleased. He also looked as if he were now in a hurry as they dealt with the cashier and then headed for the exit.
The wide, brightly lit corridor outside the cafeteria branched in three directions. A middle-age couple—visitors, Katie assumed—looked around as if uncertain where they were going. Two women in white lab coats walked past, pushing their way through the cafeteria’s doors. A nurse from pediatrics, identifiable by the teddy bears on her scrub top, ambled behind them, her nose already buried in the romance novel she apparently intended to read on her break.
Mike motioned Katie toward the stairwell door and pushed it open for her to pass. They’d both be taking the stairs to get to their respective floors. But right now, the bright, beige-walled space with its long flights of brown, skid-proofed stairs would also provide a modicum of privacy. And privacy was what he was after.
He didn’t like feeling at a disadvantage. It made him defensive. And he liked that feeling even less. What he really didn’t care for, however, was the unease he sensed in Katie when he’d touched her.
That discomfort was still there when she turned to face him. He could see it in her body language as she held her cup close to her stomach, her opposite hand worrying the plastic tab on the lid. He could see it in her eyes, by the way they refused to meet his for longer than a couple of seconds.
From House Calls To Husband Page 9