The Unsung Hero (28 page)
“I’m sorry, but it’s not that big a deal. I didn’t want to worry you.”
“If it’s really not that big a deal, then when you told me about it, I wouldn’t be worried, would I?”
“Excuse me for thinking you had enough to worry about.” Tom couldn’t help it, his voice started getting louder, too.
“Great, except now all I’m going to do is worry,” Joe countered. “Because I know something bad happens to you, you’re not going to call me!”
“Look, I’m fine—”
“You were in the hospital and you didn’t tell me!”
“You were in the OSS and you won a fucking Medal of Honor, and you didn’t tell me!”
Silence. Even Charles kept his mouth shut after that one.
Tom pressed the tips of his fingers against his eyebrows, against the bridge of his nose. “Shit,” he swore softly, “I’m sorry, Joe. I’m just . . . I’m exhausted. I’ve had a tough night, and the last thing I want to do is go to some ER and get poked and prodded by some pain in the ass doctors all night long.”
“How ’bout I look you over, take your blood pressure? Does that qualify as poking and prodding?”
Kelly. Tom looked up to see her standing in the archway between the kitchen and the dining room. She was carrying her medical bag, and she came farther into the room, setting it down on the table. She was wearing what had to be her pajamas—an old Harvard T-shirt and red boxers that were about four sizes too big. There was nothing remotely sexy about it—except for the fact that she was wearing it. And that was enough. It gave a whole new meaning to the phrase “house call.”
“Jesus.” Tom sat back. “Don’t touch me. I really need a shower.”
She was undaunted, leaning over to look at him, to shine a little light from an ophthalmoscope into his eyes. “Just look straight at me,” she ordered, her fingers cool and firm beneath his chin.
He was still dripping with sweat, and it wasn’t that fresh, clean, healthy sweat that came with regular physical exertion. It was sick sweat, cold and nasty and profoundly foul-smelling. He couldn’t look into her eyes, he couldn’t bear to. Instead, he focused on her forehead, just above her gracefully arched left eyebrow.
She put down the scope and straightened up slightly, touching him with both hands, her fingers moving gently but methodically through his hair, across his scalp. “Did you fall at all tonight?” she asked. “Hit your head?”
“Not tonight.”
She wasn’t wearing a bra beneath her T-shirt, and as she reached around behind his head, Tom closed his eyes. He was definitely all right, his body returning to normal. Although that wasn’t something he wanted to advertise. Hey, look, Joe, I must be fine because once again, with Kelly Ashton standing directly in front of me, I’m unable to keep from thinking about sex.
“I’m going to ask you some stupid questions, okay?” she said. “Let’s start with your name.”
“Thomas J. Paoletti. You want rank and serial number, too?”
“Nope. But today’s date would be nice.”
“It’s 9 August. Minutes from 10 August.”
“Very good. You want to tell me Joe’s phone number?”
He rattled off the numbers, throwing in her private line at work for good measure.
Kelly looked up from wrapping the blood pressure cuff around his arm. “Very impressive.”
“I retain numbers. I still know the phone numbers and addresses of every apartment I lived in as a kid—and we moved around a lot. I’ll probably remember your work number when I’m eighty.”
“I’m hoping to retire before then,” she said as she pumped the cuff full of air. “Why don’t you plan to call me a few decades earlier? I mean, as long as you know the number, you might as well make use of it. Too tight?”
He shook his head. Was she actually flirting with him? As long as you know the number . . . That was definitely flirting, in public, too. And while he stank to high heaven.
Across the table, Joe had sat down again, but it was only on the edge of his seat. He looked as if he were dying to speak. Mallory and a weird-looking kid he didn’t really recognize but he vaguely thought might’ve been named David were hovering anxiously in the archway that led to the dining room. Charles sat with his arms folded, like the king that he was, actually wearing a satin smoking jacket, critically surveying all that he owned.
Kelly slipped the head of her stethoscope between the cuff and Tom’s arm, pressing his hand between her elbow and her hip. It felt good there. It would’ve felt even better if she’d been naked.
She slowly let the air out of the cuff, listening intently. When she was done, she did it all over again.
“Your blood pressure’s pretty close to perfect,” she finally told him, reaching down to take his pulse, her fingers against his wrist, her focus now on the face of her watch.
Joe couldn’t hold it in any longer. “He could barely walk in here when Mallory and her friend brought him home.”
“Pulse is strong,” Kelly reported.
“You should also know,” Joe continued, “that he was in the hospital for some kind of head injury not too long ago.”
Kelly looked at Joe. “It would probably be a good idea,” she agreed, “if Tom were to fill me in on the details of his previous injury, as well as exactly what happened tonight. But that’s up to him.” She turned to Tom. “Regardless of what you do or don’t decide to tell me, I’d like to talk to you privately. You feel up to tackling the stairs to the second floor?”
“No problem,” Tom lied. This was it. If he could stand up and walk up the stairs without falling on his face, all talk about dragging him to the ER would probably stop.
He stood and the world shifted slightly. “Mind if I take a quick shower first?” he asked Kelly, trying to draw her attention away from the fact that he wasn’t quite as steady as he’d thought, that he was holding on to the back of his chair.
“Nope.” She didn’t miss a thing. “As long as you think you’re up to it. I’ll be up in five minutes.”
She followed him out into the hall, as did Joe, and watched him every step up the stairs.
Finally, he reached the top and he looked down at her. He’d started to sweat again, but she was too far away to see that. “Ta da,” he said.
Or maybe she wasn’t too far away. Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Don’t lock the bathroom door. You’ve got five minutes. Be out of the shower by then or I’m coming in after you.”
“That a threat—or a promise?” he asked.
God, what was he doing, saying something like that to Kelly? He’d meant to disarm her, to draw her attention away from the fact that climbing the stairs had damn near wrung the last of his energy from him. It was a tactic that had worked for him with female doctors and nurses in the past, designed to fluster and embarrass.
“Sorry,” he said quickly. “That was . . . That wasn’t very nice. I beg your pardon.”
He beat a quick retreat before he could say or do anything else stupid.
Kelly took a deep breath as she stood outside of Tom’s bedroom door.
Mallory had described the way she’d found Tom staggering through the carnival, as if he were drunk or high. He’d started to come around as Joe had helped bring him into the cottage, and apparently his first coherent words once he was home were “No hospital, no doctors.”
When Tom realized Mal thought he was on drugs, he’d been quick to offer up the explanation of a relatively recent head injury and hospitalization, which had placated Mallory but sent Joe into a tizzy.
Throughout all this, at least after Kelly had made the scene, Charles hadn’t coughed once. His color was good and he actually seemed to be enjoying himself, the old sadist. Or maybe it was being needed. Apparently Joe had awakened Charles, asking for his help.
She’d have to keep that in mind. But right now she had to deal with Tom “No hospital, no doctors” Paoletti. She had to approach him as a friend, with the medical knowledge of a doctor, and convince him to go to a hospital. Not necessarily tonight—the fact that he was alert and coherent kept it from being a dire emergency—but certainly first thing tomorrow.
Kelly squared her shoulders and knocked on Tom’s door.
“It’s open.”
She turned the doorknob, and there she was, about to step inside, invited into Tom’s bedroom for the first time in her life.
There he was, too. Sitting on his bed in a pair of shorts and a fresh T-shirt, looking like a dream come true, all hard muscles and heavy-lidded eyes, his hair damp from his shower.
He watched expressionlessly as she came in and closed the door behind her.
Her heart was pounding as she glanced around the room she knew so well from her days of tree-house spying. It looked different from this perspective. Less exotic. Less mystical. His desk was small and bare. His dresser was freshly painted a gleaming white, his reading glasses, his wallet, a handful of change, and a comb on top. His closet door was tightly shut, his towel hanging on the outside knob. There was nothing on the floor besides his duffel bag in the corner—no clothes, no pile of books.
This wasn’t his room anymore. It was just a room he stayed in while he visited. She knew what that was like.
“Feel any better?” she asked.
He moved his head noncommittally.
God, she was nervous. She was used to patients she could charm with a stuffed animal or a funny hat. She was used to patients who didn’t have hair on their chests.
Patients she didn’t have a crush on.
She just had to be direct. To the point. “Who do you want me to be right now, Tom? Dr. Ashton? Or your friend Kelly?”
He smiled at that, a flash of those impossibly adorable dimples. “Are the two really separable?”
“No, not really. But while Dr. Ashton would politely pull up a chair and probably get nowhere in finding out what’s going on with you, Kelly would sit Indian style on the end of your bed and stay until she wrestled the truth from you.”
“That could take all night,” he said.
Kelly sat on the end of his bed. “Is that a threat or a promise?”
He looked over at her sharply as she flashed hot and then cold. Oh, God, had she really said that? What was she doing? Was she actually hitting on a man who’d barely been able to climb a flight of stairs on his own? Tom needed her, and this couldn’t be helping. She stood up again. “Sorry. Wow. Bad timing, huh?”
He was laughing incredulously. “Holy God. Are you, like . . .” He laughed again, shaking his head slightly. “You can’t be . . . serious, right?”
Kelly couldn’t stand the fact that he was laughing at her, and her embarrassment was replaced by a surge of indignation. “Why can’t I be serious? I’ve always found you . . .”
Oh, good grief, what was she saying? Her college roommate had had a word for men like Tom. Fuckable. Kelly and Evie had spent many nights near-hysterical with laughter, compiling a top ten list of men—mostly movie stars—who were one hundred percent fuckable. Which meant, they’d decided, that they’d fall into the arms and beds of any of those men without question, without comment, without objection. It was pure animal attraction, pure lust, pure sex.
Not that either of them had ever done such a thing. Not even close. Evie had been as cautious as Kelly when it came to men. But it had been fun to pretend to be so daring and bold.
And Tom Paoletti had been in Kelly’s top ten every single time. He wasn’t the kind of man a woman should dare to love. She’d learned that too well, all those years ago. But as far as that other verb went . . .
Kelly pretended to be engrossed in the view from his windows. She could see the tree that held her tree house from one, see her own bedroom balcony from the other. So this was what it looked like from here.
“You’ve always found me what?” Tom asked.
Oh, drat. “I suppose it’s too late to say never mind.”
He laughed. “Well, yeah. Unless this is a new doctoring technique. Giving the patient renewed will to live by increasing levels of curiosity and frustration.”
She turned to face him. “I’m here as your friend, not your doctor. I don’t want to be your doctor.”
“Great, then sit down.” When she started for the chair that was over by his desk, he added, “Over here. Friend.”
He was watching her with those incredible Paoletti eyes, those windows to that wild Paoletti soul. The heat she could see in them was off the chart and she nearly tripped on the throw rug.
It was like some kind of challenge, as if he were testing her to see just how real her vague, almost come-on had been.
So she sat on his bed. Not as far away from him as she could be, but not too close, either.
“You’ve always found me to be . . .” he said again.
“Extremely attractive,” she said briskly. “Big deal. You know what you look like. Let’s drop this, okay? Tell me about your injury. What happened? How’d you end up in the hospital?”
He was silent for a moment, just looking at her. But then he nodded as if he’d made up his mind to tell her the truth.
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