Tina smiled and for the umpteenth time he was struck by how she seemed to light up the entire room every time her mouth curved.
“I’d like that,” she told him. “I have to swing by the diner anyway. Lupe and the others are taking care of Bobby jointly today.”
Olivia had been Bobby’s main caretaker, sharing duties with the waitresses at the diner only when she was out on calls. But since her sister had had her own baby, Tina thought it only fair to leave her lively little firecracker with someone more up to being able to handle him right now. For the time being, Olivia had her hands full learning how to be a full-time mother—and the learning process could be overwhelming.
Familiar with the situation, Dan nodded. Yesterday he’d done something he would have never dreamed of doing. He paid an actual house call. He stopped by Olivia’s house to do a routine check on her and the baby. While doing well, Tina’s sister wasn’t up to anything very strenuous yet. And as he’d observed, caring for Tina’s son could, at times, be exceedingly strenuous. Just a little more than one, Bobby was very advanced for his age. Fueled by energy and curiosity, he got into literally everything.
“I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Why don’t you bring him here with you tomorrow?”
She looked at him, stunned. And then her smile grew even wider. Even more warming. “You wouldn’t mind?” she asked.
Ordinarily, telling someone it was all right to bring their baby to the office wouldn’t have even occurred to him. And, under those circumstances, if it had been suggested by someone else, he would have vetoed it. But this wasn’t an upscale hospital in the middle of one of the most urban cities in the world. This was a small medical clinic in Forever. A diminutive, almost fairy tale-like town that was nothing if not laidback and relaxed.
As it was, every morning when he woke up and came downstairs to the clinic, part of him half expected the theme song from The Andy Griffith Show to begin playing the moment the first patient walked through the door. Having a little boy in the office getting into everything somehow seemed in keeping with the atmosphere.
“I wouldn’t have suggested it if I minded,” he told her. “Ready?”
Switching off her computer, Tina rose to her feet. Her eyes smiled at him. “Ready.”
“WELL, LOOK WHO’S HERE,” Miss Joan declared as Dan walked in with Tina. She turned around to look at the clock on the wall. “And early, too. Run out of sick people?” she asked with a throaty laugh.
“For now,” Dan answered. He and Tina each took a seat at the counter. “Got any of that cherry pie left over from yesterday?”
“For you?” Reaching over, Miss Joan patted his hand. “Always. Saved you a piece,” she said with a wink, then pretended to become stern. “But you’re not getting it until you’ve had your dinner.”
She was acting like a mother. It felt really odd, at this point in his life, after having done without one for so long. But he knew the woman meant well.
“Whatever you say, Miss Joan.” He didn’t bother looking at the menu propped up in front of him, tucked against the napkin dispenser and the salt and pepper shakers. It was easier to go straight to the source. “What looks good tonight?”
Miss Joan smiled wickedly. “She’s sitting right next to you.”
Could the woman be more obvious? Tina thought, struggling to keep a flush of color from creeping up her cheeks. “Miss Joan,” she hissed, a warning look in her eyes.
The older woman merely shrugged, unfazed by the embarrassed reproach in Tina’s voice. “Just stating the obvious, Baby Girl. He did ask,” Miss Joan pointed out. “And I call ’em as I see ’em.”
“How about the fried chicken?” Dan asked, wanting to spare Tina any more embarrassment. “Is that any good?”
Miss Joan squared her shoulders. “Doc, it’s always good,” she informed him. “Nobody ever came away from my diner complaining about the food.” She tossed her head. Her red hair, weighed down with hair spray, remained perfectly stationary. “It’s just a matter of degrees of good,” she added.
“And where does the fried chicken come in on that chart?” Dan asked.
“Right at the top,” Miss Joan said without hesitation. The recipe for the chicken was her own and she was quite proud of it.
“Okay, fried chicken it is,” Dan said.
Tina slipped the menu back into its place. She’d taken it out of habit. It gave her something to do. “Make that two,” Tina told the older woman.
“Love seeing young people agree,” Miss Joan confided. Making the proper notation on her order pad, she tore off the sheet and placed it on the counter for the short order cook in the rear of the diner to pick up.
“I’m sorry about that,” Tina murmured under her breath the moment the other woman had turned away. “I don’t know what’s gotten into her.” She didn’t bother to mention that the other evening, Miss Joan had extolled all of his virtues for a good half hour.
“Don’t give it another thought. Some people feel they’re born matchmakers.” One of his friends’ mothers when he was in medical school had felt she had the calling. She’d tried to match him up several times before she finally gave up. “Her choice could have been a lot worse,” he added. “At least for me.”
Tina felt his eyes slide along her body and found herself struggling not to blush again, even as her body hummed in anticipation of the night that lay ahead.
Chapter Fourteen
Tina was amazed how much her life had changed in a short space of time. From the middle of July to now, the end of September.
Ten weeks.
Dr. Dan Davenport had been part of her life and part of Forever for the past ten weeks. Not exactly a huge amount of time unless measured in seconds. But then, it felt as if he’d been part of her life forever.
It felt as if she’d suddenly come to life in that space of time, she reflected with a smile as she sat down at her desk and switched the computer on to start her work day. For the first time, she was really alive as a woman.
Oh, she’d be lying if she didn’t admit that tiny smattering of fear still lingered within her. Having been with someone like Don made trusting another man not exactly the easiest thing to accomplish. Every now and then, that old fear would raise its head, whispering, What if you’re wrong? What if Dan isn’t what he seems? What if he breaks your heart just like Don did? Can you stand it again?
The answer was no, because this time, though she’d tried very hard to stop it, her heart was invested all the way. She’d done a lot of thinking, a lot of weighing, before allowing herself to surrender her heart. This time, because of all the initial hesitation and soul-searching, Tina knew she loved that much harder. That much more completely.
This time, she’d committed to love as an adult, someone who’d been around a time or two. She wasn’t that wide-eyed kid anymore, she was a woman, a mother, and that made all the difference in the world.
This commitment, she’d silently promised herself, was the one that would stick.
And, in that very same heart that had been so reluctant to open up, she knew that Dan felt the same way about her. Oh, he hadn’t come out and said the words, but he’d come close. He’d told her that she made him happy and when he looked at her, she felt everything light up inside. You didn’t feel like that, didn’t have that kind of a connection, with someone who didn’t care about you.
As for her, she’d come close to telling him she loved him several times in the past couple of weeks. As recently as last night, the words had hovered on her tongue. But she’d forced herself to hold them back. That was one area where she was old-fashioned. She wanted Dan to say “I love you” first. The last thing she wanted was for him to echo the words only because she’d said them to him. Or worse, not say anything at all.
All he had to do was to tell her he loved her and her own emotions would come pouring out.
For now, it was worth the wait. Blinding happiness always was, she thought, thinking of her parents’ marriage. Her parents
had not only loved each other but had remained in love until the day they died. And she could see that Olivia and Rick loved each other a great deal. It was all there for the world to see, in the small, everyday details of living.
She wanted that and she knew now that it was out there for her.
Or rather, in here for her, she thought as she heard Dan coming down the back stairs. With no one else in the medical clinic to offer a distraction, she was able to make out the sound of Dan’s shoes with their hard heels hitting the stairs and then the wooden floors as he approached the front of the clinic.
She smiled to herself. If the man was going to be a Texan and not a New Yorker, she would have to work on his Western makeover. First thing he needed was a pair of boots.
She tried to picture him in just that—and maybe a Stetson—and her smile widened considerably.
Dan paused to glance around as he came into the reception area from the rear.
“No patients yet?” he remarked, surprised and oddly pleased. It would be nice to take the day at a slower pace than he’d been doing.
“Haven’t unlocked the front door yet,” Tina pointed out, putting the first few files out on the side of her desk. “You still have fifteen minutes before your office hours start.”
His hand on the back of her chair, he turned her around, bent his head down and brushed his lips against hers. His eyes were pure mischief as he regarded her closely.
“Fifteen minutes, huh? There’s fresh paper covering the exam tables,” he told her, an incredibly sexy, come-hither smile on his lips.
Tempted though she was, Tina knew that once she got started, everything else would be blocked out—and what if a patient came knocking on the door early? Then what?
So when he took her hand, she gently pulled it away while shaking her head. “Oh, no, I want much more than just fifteen minutes with you,” she answered, a wicked grin taking the place of her innocent smile.
Dan laughed, amused. “Ah, the woman’s getting greedy now, is she?”
“The ‘woman’ doesn’t want to just settle for crumbs,” she countered.
“Crumbs is it?” he echoed, giving her a longer, deeper kiss before backing away. “Did that feel like a crumb?” he challenged.
She struggled to catch her breath and then forced herself to gulp in air. “No,” she managed to say with a tiny bit of dignity. “It didn’t.”
Satisfied, he backed away. She was, after all, right. Something told him that if he got started making love with her, he wasn’t going to want to keep one eye on the clock—or stop that soon. “But your point is well-taken,” he admitted. “Besides, it gives me something to look forward to at the end of the day.”
She would have said, “Me, too,” if she hadn’t found herself suddenly wanting him with an urgency that all but took the rest of her breath away. Each time they made love, she just wanted Dan that much more.
Was that normal? she wondered, then decided she didn’t care if it was or not. Feeling this was wonderful and that was all that counted to her.
About to ask him a question regarding his preference about billing statements, she stopped abruptly when someone began pounding on the front door.
Looking toward the urgent sound, Dan commented, “I thought you told me that I still had fifteen minutes before we opened.”
“Fourteen now,” Tina automatically corrected, walking to the door. “And you do.”
Pushing the curtain away from the side window, she was about to tell whoever it was to calm down and wait. But the instant she saw the frantic face of Jacob Lyons, she flipped back the lock and opened the door. The retired ranch hand, who now made a living as the town’s all around handyman, was not one to get alarmed easily and he clearly looked that way now.
“You gotta come, Doc,” he declared without preamble. “I think he broke his leg or something.”
Jake turned around and was about to lead the way back. Thinking fast, Dan caught hold of the wiry man’s shoulders to keep him anchored in place. “Hold it. Who broke his leg?”
Even as he asked, Dan had the uneasy feeling the cowboy could be talking about a horse. From what he’d heard, the man tended to be closer to horses than most of the people in Forever. The town vet, Mona, the sheriff’s sister, was out of town for several days. But that didn’t mean that he could jump in, despite the fact that some people around Forever thought that a doctor was a doctor and that a vet and a regular doctor could do the other’s job in a pinch.
To his relief, Jake was talking about a person.
“Murphy. George,” he clarified in case there was some doubt. “Nobody’s heard from him in days so I went over. Had to almost break down the door—” He grew impatient to get going. “I can tell you all this on the way over,” he urged.
There might be some reason for concern at that, Dan thought. George Murphy was getting on and he was not in prime condition. “Tina, get my bag, please,” he requested, then added, “And hold down the fort until I get back.”
Moving quickly, Tina was in and out of the medical clinic faster than anyone he’d ever seen. Had to be some kind of a record, he mused. Jake had barely gotten out three incoherent sentences in the time it had taken Tina to make the round-trip in and out of the clinic to get his bag.
He also noticed that she’d pulled the door firmly shut behind her.
“Nothing in the fort to hold down,” she informed him. The patients, when they arrived, could just wait out here for the time being. “And if you think I’m not coming with you, you don’t know me.”
“But I’m willing to learn,” he murmured to her. Opening the door of his sedan, he turned to look at the man beside him. He gestured for him to get into the back. “Okay, Jake, let’s go see if we can find George.”
At the time, it was said to humor the older man. But once they arrived before George Murphy’s small, wood-framed two-story house and he opened the front door, Dan realized that finding his patient might actually not be the easiest of missions to accomplish. “What is this?” Dan asked, stunned as he found himself looking at mounds of what appeared to him to be junk. Three and four and five feet high piles of things that were hard or completely impossible to identify, or utterly useless pieces of junk.
Miss Joan had told her all about George Murphy shortly after she and Olivia had returned to Forever. The man’s house brought out the industrial cleaner in her.
“The accumulation of a lifetime,” Tina told him. “Mr. Murphy’s never been known to throw anything out, at least not willingly,” she added.
“I make him throw things out every month,” Jake announced proudly, wading into the virtual filth. “But somehow, he always seems to bring twice as much in.” There was more than a note of frustration in his voice.
Dan nodded. “A hoarder.”
Jake stopped, as if he couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “Did you just call him a whor—”
Dan quickly cut him off. “No, a hoarder,” he enunciated carefully. “That’s someone who keeps unnecessary, useless things no one else wants, saying that they might come in handy sometime.”
The hoarding was done to unconsciously feed a deep psychological need to feel insolated and protected from the world, but Dan judged that might be more information than Jake needed to hear or absorb right now.
Jake nodded his head solemnly. “Yeah, that. A hoarder,” he repeated. “That’s George all right.”
“It’s a medical condition,” Dan informed the former ranch hand. A condition he’d never encountered firsthand until just now, he thought. “It’s a form of OCD—”
“Obsessive-compulsive disorder,” Tina explained. She saw the stunned look on Dan’s face. “I’ve been reading up on medical terms,” she told him. She was doing it in an effort to be more of a help to him, more a part of his world. The pleased expression that came over his face told her that she was succeeding.
“Yeah, whatever you say,” Jake mumbled dismissively. “But I heard him yell out in pain when I came loo
king for him this morning and opened the door.”
“Why didn’t you try to find him?” Tina asked.
“Couldn’t. Didn’t want to waste time, not with George screaming like he was being gutted, so I came to get the doc,” Jake answered.
Cocking his head, Dan listened. And heard nothing. “I don’t hear anything now,” he said, turning toward Jake. “What makes you think he broke his leg?”
Jake looked at him as if he’d just asked a simpleton question. “’Cause he was yelling out, ‘my leg, my leg, it’s busted.’”
“That would definitely be a clue,” Tina agreed, the corners of her mouth curving as she looked at Dan.
It would have been funny under other circumstances. But Murphy was no longer yelling. He might have passed out from the pain—or from blood loss, in which case the situation was critical. Dan looked around at the debris. He’d never encountered anything remotely like this. And it was damn near overwhelming.
“He could be anywhere.”
“Murphy, can you hear me?” Jake shouted. When there was no answer, he raised his voice, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Murphy. George Murphy! Can you hear me?”
“He might have passed out from the pain,” Tina suggested.
Dan looked at her and realized she was aware of the other alternative but hadn’t said it to spare Murphy’s friend. Dan started to say something, then stopped. He held his hand up to keep anyone from talking as he cocked his head to listen more closely.
He could have sworn he’d heard a faint cry. Another one followed on its heels, a little louder, a little more filled with pain.
“I hear it, too,” Tina told him, answering the silent question in his eyes.
“I think it’s coming from over there.” Dan pointed to a particularly cluttered section.
Pushing through the mounds of rotting newspapers and discarded garbage like someone making his way through impeding everglade waters, Dan followed the sound of the man’s cries. Jake and Tina were right behind him. Excited, Jake managed to circumvent Dan and the older man took the lead.
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