Healing Dr. Alexander

by Tracy Wolff

  Noah picked that moment to come thundering back into the room, Kyle right behind him. “We’re ready for ‘Taco Tuesday,’ Mom! Let’s go.”

  She glanced at Jack. “You’re welcome to join us.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” He looked vaguely horrified at the suggestion and it amused her, despite the fact that she’d been in tears a few minutes before.

  “Aww, come on. It’ll be good for you.”

  “I beg to differ,” he told her archly. “Tacos are not exactly known as health food.”

  She did laugh then. When Jack forgot to brood, he really was quite charming. She’d forgotten that in the past few days, as every time she’d run into him he’d been wearing the blackest of scowls. “No, but they are comfort food.”

  “Not if you grew up in Boston.”

  “Please, Dr. Jack,” Kyle begged. “You have to come to dinner. What if my brains start to leak out my eyes? Who’s going to stop them?”

  Sophie had absolutely no idea what her son was talking about, but whatever it was, it must have worked because Jack ended up grinning from ear to ear. “I guess I’m stuck, then.” He held his good hand out for Kyle to high five. “Taco Tuesday it is.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  AFTER THEY STUFFED themselves on chicken tacos, tortilla chips and more queso than any two boys should be able to consume in five meals, Kyle and Noah ran off to the restaurant’s playscape, leaving Jack and Sophie alone at their table on the patio. As she watched her boys run away, he couldn’t help a wary glance at Sophie’s face¸ trying to gauge what kind of mood she was in. It was humiliating to admit that he was a little afraid of a woman who barely hit five foot three, but he was. The last thing he wanted was a rehash of the other night, when she’d tried to get him to talk about his hand. Some things were better left alone.

  But Sophie seemed surprisingly mellow, despite the ten-minute lecture she’d delivered to the boys over dinner about how they were supposed to call her if anything like this afternoon ever happened again.

  “Thanks again,” she said to him as Noah made a running leap for the monkey bars. “I don’t know what I would do if anything ever happened to them. They’re my everything.”

  “I understand.” For a second he thought of Amanda, of how she’d fallen apart when her daughter had died of cancer. “Being a parent is a scary thing.”

  “It’s an amazing thing.” Sophie’s voice was more fierce than he had ever heard it. “Before the boys came, I spent my whole life wandering from place to place with no real focus. But when they were born, everything changed. They became my whole world. Nothing is more important than they are.”

  “What about their father?” The words came out before he could stop them, before he even knew he was going to ask about the man. He hoped she took the question in the vein he meant it, a simple exchange of information and nothing else, as he wasn’t the least bit interested in her romantically. Not in her sparkling sense of humor or her crazy red hair or the insane curves that had drawn the eye of every man in the restaurant at least once since they’d arrived.

  Her smile slowly faded. “He died in Afghanistan four years ago. The boys don’t remember him. Even Noah, who was four when he died. But he’d been gone so much of Noah’s life—a year in Iraq and almost a full tour in Afghanistan before he was shot…It’s been just me and the boys almost since the beginning. He never even saw Kyle.”

  Jack started to apologize, to voice the mindless platitudes that one said in situations like these, but the knowing look in Sophie’s eyes had the words freezing on his tongue. He suddenly understood that this was why she’d pushed him the other day, why she hadn’t pretended his injuries didn’t exist. She had scars, too. They might be on the inside, where the only people who could see them were the ones she told about them, but that didn’t make them any less real. Or any less painful.

  How many people had treated her with pity since her husband had died?

  How many people had made her feel like less because she no longer had a husband to father her children?

  No wonder she’d refused to back away from his pain. She, too, knew what it was like to lose a huge portion of her life overnight.

  The knowledge that she understood should have made him easier with her, more relaxed. Instead, it freaked him out. Made him feel like everything inside him was on display. He’d worked hard these past few months to keep his pain under wraps. The last thing he needed was some beautiful woman with a savior complex to come along and try to protect him from himself.

  “You’re doing a good job with them,” he told her. “They really are great kids.”

  Her smile was blinding. “I think so, too.” She took a couple more bites of her last taco, then leveled those serious blue eyes of hers straight at him. “So, tell me more about this clinic you’re working at. Where is it? What’s it like?”

  “Why is it I always feel like I’m being interrogated when you talk to me?”

  “Sorry.” She blushed a little. “It’s the effect of being a lawyer, I guess.”

  “You’re a lawyer?”

  “You don’t have to sound so surprised.”

  It was his turn to flush. “Sorry. You don’t really fit the picture I have in my head of a lawyer.”

  “There are all kinds of lawyers.”

  “I know. And I say that as a compliment. I hope you take it like that.”

  She popped a chip in her mouth. “I’ll consider it. If you answer my questions.”

  He sighed. “The clinic is good. In some ways it’s really different from what I used to do and in other ways, it’s exactly the same.”

  “Is that good or bad?”

  He laughed uneasily, wished for a second that the boys would come back and interrupt them. “You don’t ask the easy questions, do you?”

  “Easy questions have easy answers. Where’s the fun in that?”

  “I have no idea.” He paused, trying to gather his thoughts. “Africa is…Africa is challenging on a soul-deep level and it’s hard to understand if you aren’t in the middle of it. It’s a beautiful continent, and for the most part, is filled with truly beautiful people. Kind. Warm. But they have so many strikes against them that so often, when I’m there, it feels like everything I do is triage. You know?

  “Like I’m slapping a bandage on a wound that a little care, a little money, could have prevented. And the bandage is too small, the antibiotics nonexistent. Soon, a cut that never should have happened gets infected, turns fatal, and there’s nothing I could do about it. Nothing anyone could do.

  “Here it’s not like that. Even at the clinic, which exists to serve low-income families without insurance, there’s hope. There’s enough medicine on the shelves, enough doctors and nurses to go around. Enough food to make sure children don’t starve to death right in front of you. It’s—” He cringed, embarrassed when he realized how much he’d said. And how much he’d revealed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to monopolize the conversation.”

  She reached for another chip, ignored his apology. “Are you going to go back? To Africa?”

  “Absolutely,” he told her, deliberately ignoring the sick feeling he got in his stomach simply saying the word. It was normal to feel a little apprehensive about going back to where he was shot, he reminded himself. There was no reason to make a big deal out of it. As soon as he was back in Somalia things would get back to normal.

  “When?”

  “I haven’t decided yet.” Hadn’t let himself decide yet. “I need a few more months of physical therapy before it’s even an option.”

  She nodded, but he had the distinct feeling that she didn’t believe him. Or maybe that was his own emotion rubbing off on her. And blinding him to the truth. “I think it’s great, actually, the way you’re getting a new start here. New beginnings makes it easier to move pa
st the pain. You can forget who you were before and concentrate on who you are now.”

  “What if I liked who I was before?” Jack froze as soon as the words crossed his lips. It was bad enough to think them in the privacy of his own head.

  “Never mind.” He pushed back from the table, crossed the patio to the playscape. He shoved his hands deep in his pockets and stared at the structure—and the children on it—with blind eyes. What was he doing here? he wondered bitterly. What was he trying to prove to himself…and to her?

  “I’m sorry.” He heard her speak from behind him. Her hand rested on his shoulder. “I have a habit of sticking my foot in it regularly. Another by-product of my profession, I suppose.”

  He didn’t answer right away, just turned her words over in his head. Yes, she’d poked at him but hell, he’d probably deserved it. He’d poked at enough open wounds that this was probably payback.

  “I thought we had an unspoken agreement about holding off on apologies,” he finally said, forcing a grin he was far from feeling.

  “Yeah, well, that only counts if the person apologizing didn’t act like a total and complete ass. Which, I did. So, I’m sorry. Feel free to tell me to mind my own business anytime I cross the line.”

  “Okay. Mind your own business.”

  “I’m planning on it.” She held out a hand for him to shake. “Friends?”

  “Friends,” he said, pressing his palm against hers and shaking. It wasn’t until after Sophie had withdrawn her hand and gone to call the kids that he realized that, for the first time since he’d been shot, he’d touched someone with his wounded hand without worrying about what they were going to say or how they were going to react.

  As they walked out of the restaurant, he tucked the knowledge deep inside himself. He didn’t know what it meant, didn’t know if there was anything for it to mean. But it felt good, nonetheless, and for now that was enough.

  * * *

  A WEEK LATER, Sophie barely resisted the urge to slam her phone down, hard, as frustration welled up inside her. She’d been working at home for the past few afternoons, trying to find an alternate method of daycare for her boys since Grace obviously had to go. But nothing was working out the way it was supposed to.

  She’d put an ad up at the local community college—which was where she had found Grace and her predecessors—but so far she hadn’t gotten any bites. Which, frankly, she was almost okay with. It’s not like any of the three girls she’d hired so far this year had worked out sparklingly well. Admittedly, Grace was the only one who had completely failed to show up without any warning or notice, but Michaela and Simone had each come with their own problems.

  She wished she could afford to pay more, either for a certified child-sitter service or for one of the after-school daycares in the neighborhood. But for the two boys, either choice would run close to fifteen hundred dollars a month and she didn’t have that. It was hard enough to scrape together the eight hundred dollars she paid her regular babysitters. She was still paying off student loans from law school, plus the mortgage and the car payment and all the other expenses that went into running a home. The death settlement she’d gotten from the army after Jeff passed away had already been used to pay down her mortgage so that it was more manageable on a single income.

  A little voice in the back of her head whispered that she could afford to pay more if she got a job at a real law firm instead of working for a local network of battered women’s shelters. If she went over to corporate America and pulled down a solid, six figure income, she could afford to pay any kind of child care she wanted.

  But she wouldn’t be happy and she wouldn’t be making a difference. She could live with the first, if that meant a better life for her children, but it was difficult to accept the second. She didn’t want to charge wealthy people thousands of dollars for a few hours of her time. She wanted to work with people who couldn’t afford to buy their way around the system, people who needed help but who had all but given up hope on ever receiving it. People like the girl she’d once been. People like her mother, who had died at the hands of her drunk and abusive boyfriend when Sophie was barely three years old.

  People like Annabelle, the woman whose case she was supposed to be going to court with tomorrow. Annabelle had spent the past five years of her life being beaten regularly by her bastard of a husband. She’d called the police on him twice, had tried to leave him three times, but since he was a policeman himself, he always found a way to get around the charges she filed.

  This last time, when she’d taken their daughter and left him, he’d stalked her for weeks before nearly running her down with his car. He did it at night, on a side street where she was walking on her way home from her waitressing job, and because there were no witnesses—it was her word against his—the cops had once again let him go. The fact that Annabelle was covered with scratches and bruises from where she’d dived into a huge, thorny rose garden to get away from him, meant absolutely nothing. The policemen who took her statement said she could have done it to herself to make her husband look bad.

  It had been six long months since they’d requested a court date to divorce the loser, and now that the date was finally here, the last thing Sophie wanted to do was postpone it. Annabelle was already a nervous wreck, so freaked out at the idea of facing her husband that she had literally made herself sick with it.

  No, they needed to get this over and done with. Quickly. Before he had the chance to go for her again and before she got cold feet and chickened out. Which meant Sophie was going to have to figure out what to do with her boys tomorrow, even if it meant springing for a service that charged forty dollars an hour to watch two kids.

  She was picking up the phone to do just that—she could eat peanut-butter sandwiches for a couple of weeks to help off-set the cost—when her attention was attracted by the sound of a lawn mower sputtering to life. She glanced out the window and nearly choked when she saw Jack mowing the grass.

  He was dressed in worn jeans that cupped his butt very nicely, and also had a couple of strategic tears over both thighs. His T-shirt was sweaty—he must have been outside for a while before starting up the mower—and molded to his powerful chest and back in all the right places.

  She closed her eyes for a second, wondering if it was possible for her retinas to actually be on fire. She might not be in the market for a man, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t appreciate a gorgeous specimen when she saw one. Even if he was supposed to be just a friend and a project.

  She was a little surprised that he was home at—she glanced at the clock—three fifteen in the afternoon. Sophie set aside her case file and decided it was time for a break. She’d baked cookies for the boys that morning and had set aside a small plate for Jack, as well. He might be well-muscled, but he was also too skinny. Being shot had taken a lot out of him, obviously, and it was time for him to start getting some of it back.

  She gave him a few minutes to finish up the front lawn. Then, carrying the plate of cookies in one hand and a glass of lemonade in the other, she went out to meet him.

  “You have time for a break?” she asked, waving the cookies in front of his nose. She’d had a couple herself and while she’d never be Betty Crocker, even she had to admit that they were pretty good.

  “You baked?” he asked, eyebrow raised. His surprise showed how well he’d gotten to know her in the past few weeks.

  “They came out of a package. All I had to do was pop them in the oven.”

  “Still, I’m impressed.” He grabbed one and bit into it, a smile on his too-handsome face. She felt her knees start to tremble a little at the sight, but reminded herself she wasn’t the swooning type. Especially not over a friend who was due to go back to Africa in very short order.

  “Not as impressed as I am. A full day of work under your belt and you still have the energy to be out here mowing
?”

  “Actually, I haven’t been to work yet. We’re switching schedules around at the clinic, trying to figure out which way is the most efficient, so I’m on nights for the next couple of weeks.”

  She felt a completely irrational stab of disappointment at the knowledge that she wasn’t going to be seeing much of him for a while. “Wow!” she said to disguise what she was actually feeling. “That should be different for you.”

  He shrugged. “Not really. I worked nights in Africa all the time.”

  “And days, too, I bet.”

  “There were a lot of people who needed help.”

  And Jack was not one to turn someone away when they needed him. It was one of the qualities she considered so admirable about him.

  He stowed the lawn mower in the garage, then nodded to his front porch. “You want to sit down for a couple minutes?”

  “Just a couple. The boys are playing upstairs. It was peaceful when I ducked out here, but who knows how long that will last.”

  “About ten more seconds,” Jack said.

  She laughed. “Probably.”

  “No, really about ten seconds.” He nodded behind her and she turned in time to see Noah barreling out of the house, soft dart gun in one hand and a plastic grenade in the other. Kyle soon emerged and Styrofoam darts were suddenly flying in all directions.

  She sighed. “I have no idea what I did to have such bloodthirsty children.”

  “You gave birth to boys.”

  “Is that your expert medical opinion?”

  “Yes, it is.” He gestured for her to sit, and though Sophie knew she should go break up the war before someone got shot in the eye, she decided to give the boys a chance. Maybe they’d pleasantly surprise her.

  “So, how goes the great babysitter hunt?” he asked, picking up another cookie.

  “Terrible. It wouldn’t be so bad if I didn’t have court the rest of the week, but I’m in Judge Davies’ courtroom and he’s notorious for running us until six o’clock every night.”