“Damn,” Hank muttered. “What about her roommate? Does she have a separate phone line?”
Sharon Lynn’s expression brightened. “Of course. Why didn’t I think of that? I’ll call Kelsey right this second.”
“Mind if I wait while you do?”
Sharon Lynn grinned. “Any chance I could stop you?”
Hank shrugged. “Doubtful,” he said, sliding onto a stool at the counter as she picked up the phone and began to dial. When she’d gotten the roommate’s number from Miami information, she dialed again.
“Hello, Kelsey? This is Sharon Lynn Adams, Lizzy’s niece.”
To his thorough frustration, Hank couldn’t hear what the other woman said. He glanced around to see if he could spot another extension of the store phone and saw one behind the pharmacist’s counter. He went over and grabbed it up just in time to hear Kelsey stammering some sort of an excuse about Lizzy being really busy lately.
“Is anything wrong?” she asked Sharon Lynn worriedly. “Nothing’s happened to her father, has it?”
“No, but he’s worried sick about her. So are the rest of us.”
“Wait,” Kelsey said. “She just walked in the door. I’ll get her for you.”
Hank heard her explaining to Lizzy that Sharon Lynn was on the phone. Lizzy’s reply was too low for him to catch, but a moment later she came on the line.
“Sharon Lynn? Is everything all right at home?”
“Other than all of us being worried sick about you, yes. What’s going on? Nobody’s been able to reach you for days.”
“School’s tough,” she said unconvincingly. “I’m spending all my time studying.”
“You’re sure that’s all it is?” Sharon Lynn asked, her skepticism plain.
“Of course,” Lizzy said. “What else could it be?”
“I’m glad to hear it. Wait a sec, there’s someone else here who’d like to say hi.” She gestured toward Hank.
“Hey, darlin’,” he said quietly.
“Hank?”
It sounded to him as if her voice trembled. “Yep, it’s me. I just stopped by Dolan’s, and Sharon Lynn and I decided to try to track you down.”
“I see.”
Her dull response, everything about the conversation sounded wrong to Hank. “Lizzy, what’s really up with you? And don’t try that bull about being too busy studying to call.”
“It’s the truth. I told you I wasn’t doing all that well in my classes before I left for spring break. I’m trying to catch up now.”
“And I’ve got a patch of swamp in the Everglades I’d like to sell you for an amusement park.”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic.”
“I think I do. Come on, Lizzy, talk to me. What’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
Hank’s frustration was escalating by the second. “Is it me? Are you having second thoughts about us?”
She sighed. “No, that’s not it.”
“But there is something?” he persisted, determined to drag it out of her.
“Hank, I’ve really got to go.”
That distant, cool note was back in her voice, and it was the last straw. “Go where?” he demanded. “You just walked in the damned door.”
“And I don’t need you yelling at me,” she shouted right back. “We’ll talk later.”
“When?” he asked, but he was talking to air. The phone clicked off in his ear.
Incredulous, he turned to stare at Sharon Lynn. “She hung up on me.”
“Something is definitely wrong,” Sharon Lynn said. “I heard it in her voice. Now the only question is which one of us is going to go to Miami to find out what it is.”
Hank thought of the problems that had been cropping up at his ranch, then dismissed them. Pete would stay on top of things. Lizzy was more important.
“I’ll leave first thing tomorrow,” he said.
“Jordan could fly you down. Maybe someone from the family should go along anyway.”
“No,” Hank said adamantly. “Something tells me that whatever’s wrong has to do with me. If she intends to dump me, I don’t want witnesses.”
“Lizzy wouldn’t dump you,” Sharon Lynn protested. “Not in a million years.”
Hank thought of the conversation they’d just had. “Well, she just gave a darned good imitation of it.”
* * *
Even after she’d hung up on Hank, Lizzy stood frozen in the middle of Kelsey’s room.
“Big mistake,” she murmured to herself.
Kelsey stared at her. “What was a big mistake?”
“Hanging up on Hank.”
“Why?”
“Because he’s probably already making reservations to come here.”
“I know you probably don’t want to hear this, but maybe that’s for the best. The two of you can talk about this face-to-face. If you don’t settle it, you’re going to wind up flunking out of school anyway. You haven’t been able to concentrate worth a darn ever since you found out you were pregnant.”
Lizzy sank down on the side of Kelsey’s bed. “But I still don’t have a plan.”
Kelsey reached for paper and pen. “Then we’ll make a list of all the options. We are both very smart women, which is why they admitted us to this med school. I’m sure if we brainstorm, we’ll be able to come up with something ingenious.”
Two hours later, they had crossed off everything except “marry Hank” and “flee to Paris.”
“Okay, we know I am not going to Paris,” Lizzy said, “tempting though it might be. That leaves us with one choice, to marry Hank and settle down in Los Piños.”
“You say it as if it’s a death sentence.”
“It is a death sentence for my medical career.”
“You don’t have a medical career, at least not yet.”
Lizzy scowled at her roommate. “Thanks for pointing that out.”
“I’m just trying to be realistic.”
“I could do with a heavy dose of fantasy about now,” Lizzy said plaintively.
“No, you couldn’t. You need real, logical alternatives. I still don’t see what’s so wrong with transferring back to Texas to attend school. You could take off the next year to have the baby, then start back the following fall.”
“I could,” Lizzy agreed. “It’s just that I’m terrified that once I drop out, I’ll never go back again. Hank is very distracting. Add in a baby, and I’m liable to turn into housewife of the year.”
“Then that will tell you something, won’t it? It’ll tell you that you don’t want this career as badly as you think you do.”
“But I do,” Lizzy protested. “I need to have my own identity and I love medicine. I’m good at it.”
“Then you’ll find a way to make it happen,” Kelsey said with confidence. “Now, go and get some sleep. You don’t want Hank to walk in the door and take one look at you and conclude you’re deathly ill.”
“I look that bad?”
“Worse, actually, but it’s nothing a little sleep and some of those outrageously expensive cosmetics of yours can’t fix right up.”
Lizzy started toward her own room on the other side of the apartment, then turned back. “What if I’m wrong? What if he doesn’t come, after all?”
Kelsey grinned. “I don’t think you need to worry about that. From everything you’ve told me about Hank Robbins, he is not the kind of man to take a brush-off lightly. He’ll be here. If not tomorrow, then the next day.”
And once he heard her news, Hurricane Andrew would seem like a mild weather system compared to the tornado Hank was likely to stir up.
11
All of Hank’s worst fears had been confirmed in that brief conversation with Lizzy. There was something terribly wrong. For a few days now, their talks had been tense, and more
often than not she ended them after little more than a hello and goodbye. It had been disconcerting, but not disturbing.
Then she had stopped taking his calls altogether. When she’d cut him off that afternoon practically in midsentence, he’d recognized that their relationship was in serious trouble. What was driving him nuts was why.
One minute, everything between them had been fine. The next minute, she’d been avoiding him and, just as inexplicably, everyone else back home. The latter made no sense at all, not if her problem was with him.
A less self-confident man simply might have interpreted her behavior as a kiss-off and taken the hint, but it only strengthened Hank’s resolve to get to the bottom of the change in her. He wasn’t walking away from what they’d found together, not without a battle.
He was pretty sure he knew what had happened. With a little space and perspective, she’d gotten scared of the deep emotions they’d discovered. Hell, the feelings had scared the living daylights out of him, too. Their passion was more powerful than anything he’d ever experienced before. But it wasn’t something he intended to turn his back on. Instead, he took the first flight he could get to Miami the following morning.
When he got to her apartment building, which was only a few minutes from the airport in the heart of the University of Miami’s Jackson Memorial Hospital medical complex, a young, pumped-up security guard stopped him before he could get to the elevator.
“Who are you here to see, sir?” he inquired politely, his accent surprisingly Southern, rather than the Cuban Hank had anticipated with his dark hair and olive complexion.
“Mary Elizabeth Adams,” Hank told him. “I know the apartment number. I’ll go on up.”
“Sorry. Guests need to be announced,” he said in a tone meant to cut off options. “Besides, Ms. Adams left for class a few minutes ago.”
Hank couldn’t hide his frustration. “What about her roommate? Is she there?”
“Nope, they have the same class this morning.”
Frustration turned to irritation. This kid couldn’t be a day over nineteen, but his uniform gave him a certain amount of smug self-confidence. Hank was not good with authority figures. He never had been, and to make it worse, this one was still wet behind the ears.
“You’re awfully damned familiar with their schedule,” he accused. “Why is that?”
The guard never even flinched under Hank’s penetrating glare. “I make it a point to get to know the tenants. It makes the atmosphere friendly and my job easier. I can spot trouble faster.”
Hank still didn’t like it, but he backed down at the sensible explanation. “I see.”
“You could wait here,” the guard suggested. “But I doubt either one of them will be back before lunchtime. I could show you where to go for a cup of coffee.”
“Maybe you could show me where their classes are instead. I’ll go wait outside the building.”
“I’d feel better if you just came back and waited here.”
Hank was getting really irritated with the man’s zealous protection of Lizzy, but then he thought about it. If the guard wouldn’t let him near her, then he wouldn’t let anyone else cause her harm, either. And in a city like Miami, that could be a very good thing indeed.
He smiled. “Look, I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve flown up here from Texas and I’m anxious to see her. I didn’t mean to take it out on you. I know you’re just doing your job. So where is this coffee you mentioned?”
The young man beamed at him. “You have your choice,” he said, and began gesturing toward a variety of hospital cafeterias and fast-food restaurants in the area. “If you’ve been cooped up in a plane, you might want to take a walk over to Bascom-Palmer. That’s the eye institute a couple of blocks east of here. They have a real nice cafeteria. You can get a decent cup of coffee and some nice blueberry muffins there, or there’s a deli in the main complex that has those fancy flavored coffees, if you’re into that sort of thing.”
Hank nodded. “Old-fashioned coffee, black, will do just fine. And you’re right, the walk will do me good. Can I bring you anything when I come back?”
The guard’s expression brightened. “If you wouldn’t mind, one of those muffins would be great. I used to work in that building and I surely do miss them.”
“You’ve got it,” Hank said, and took off in the direction the guard had indicated. He walked through the bustling complex with growing astonishment. It was like a small city with the tiny, original, pink stucco Miami City Hospital building—called the Alamo for reasons he couldn’t fathom—tucked in its center, surrounded by towering new structures. Patients in hospital gowns and robes, visitors and employees lingered on benches in the parklike setting around it.
He tried to envision Lizzy as a part of this and couldn’t. She’d grown up in the wide-open spaces of Texas. Wouldn’t all of this concrete make her as claustrophobic as it was making him? He was about to walk between two buildings when he noticed the sign on one declaring it the Rosenstiel Building, headquarters of the University of Miami School of Medicine. Instead of moving on, he found a bench nearby and settled down to watch the door. The protective security guard would just have to wait for his muffin.
With the constant ebb and flow of people around him and the mix of conversations in Spanish and English with an occasional bit of what was probably Creole thrown in, it was impossible to tell when classes might have let out. He kept his gaze glued to the door of the med-school building.
It was the better part of an hour before he finally spotted Lizzy. She was with a group of students, her expression animated as they debated something or other. Her beautiful, long hair was twisted into some kind of a neat knot on top of her head, and she was dressed in linen slacks and a silk blouse. The look was casual, but clearly dressier than what she usually wore on the ranch. She looked—he searched for a word—professional, he decided.
He knew the precise instant when she spotted him. Shock registered for just a moment in the depths of her eyes. Hank stood, but waited where he was, allowing her time to excuse herself from her circle of friends, rather than forcing introductions.
It seemed to take forever before she finally broke free and came his way, her expression wary rather than welcoming.
“This is a surprise,” she said.
Her unenthusiastic tone suggested it was anything but a surprise. Hank had the feeling she’d been expecting him and that her guard was already up. “Really?” he asked. “I would have thought you’d know that hanging up on me was practically an invitation for this visit.”
Guilt flickered in her eyes. “Okay, yes. I’m sorry about that. You could have just called back, though. You didn’t have to fly all the way over here.”
“I thought I did.”
“Why?”
“I missed you,” he said, and let it go at that for now.
“I wish you’d let me know you were coming.”
“Why? So you could tell me not to?”
She winced, then lifted her chin. “Yes, as a matter of fact, that is exactly what I would have told you. I have enough pressure with my classes right now. I can’t afford any distractions.”
Hank bit back an angry retort. With effort, he kept his tone mild. “Is that all I am, a distraction?”
“Here, yes,” she said.
He regarded her evenly, trying to guess what was really going on in her head. Her words were deliberately designed to push him away, but there was something in her eyes that contradicted it, a soft yearning perhaps.
Or was that only wishful thinking on his part? Was she so different here? Had this massive medical complex swallowed up his carefree, joyous Lizzy and replaced her with this studious, solemn woman? He was damned well going to find his Lizzy before he left.
“Can you spare time for lunch at least?”
“I only have an hour.”
“Fine. I understand there’s a good cafeteria at the eye institute. Shall we go there?”
She nodded at once, looking relieved. Had she been afraid he would suggest her apartment? Was she so terribly frightened of being alone with him? Why? Was it because she was not nearly as immune to him as she wanted to be?
If he’d thought she would relax during lunch, he was mistaken. She left the table in a rush twice and came back looking paler each time. Something was terribly wrong, and with a dawning sense of shock, he had a feeling he knew what it was. He recognized all the symptoms, including the mood swings she’d evidenced in their brief conversations. If his guess was correct, he wanted her to be the one to tell him. Confronting her with a demand to know if she was pregnant with his baby would only put her on the defensive and set them up for a royal battle.
“Lizzy,” he said quietly. “Talk to me.”
She made a feeble attempt to pretend she had no idea what he wanted to know. She quickly switched to small talk, asking about everyone back home, going through the list of relatives one by one.
“You just talked to Sharon Lynn yesterday,” he reminded her. “I suspect you probably checked in with your father last night, since she told you he was worrying about you. I know you know all of the news. Let’s get back to what’s going on with you.”
“Classes, studying,” she replied evasively. “You know what it’s like.”
“Actually, I don’t. I’ve been in ranching all my life. I never went after a college degree.” All of which she knew, he thought as he watched her face. There was a hint of panic now that she knew the safest topics were exhausted. He reached across the table and grasped her hand in his. Her skin was like ice. Obviously, his plan to draw her out wasn’t working. He might as well be direct and damn the consequences.
“Okay, darlin’, let’s get straight to it. Tell me about the baby,” he finally said.
With that, she burst into tears and ran from the cafeteria and the building, straight into a tropical downpour. Hank caught up with her on the sidewalk down the block. He put his hand gently on her shoulder. She turned, her eyes filled with tears, and then she was in his arms, sobbing against his chest.
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