Breaking the Rules (26 page)

The front door opened and three men entered. One assumed an instant prone position on the floor when a blue toy car flew from beneath his foot and bounced off the wall.

“Dr. Bryant!” Aghast, Georgeanne rushed through the swinging door that separated her from the waiting area and knelt beside him while Dr. Gant and Dr. Baghri gazed down in paralyzed horror. “Are you all right? Oh, this is all my fault. I didn't see that car when I straightened the office this morning. I'm so very sorry.”

“It's not your fault, Georgie,” Dr. Gant, a tall, thin man with graying hair said in stunned tones. “Cleaning the office isn't your job in the first place.”

Georgeanne winced. That meant the clinic's regular cleaning woman, who was at home nursing her sick mother at Georgeanne's insistence, might be in trouble. If only she could learn to think before she spoke.

“My apologies, doctor.” Vijay Baghri, a short Indian man, joined Georgeanne in kneeling beside Zane Bryant's prone figure, and his small dark hands joined Georgeanne's efforts in assisting Dr. Bryant. “Dr. Gant will perhaps hire a new cleaning person.”

“Not on my account, please,” Dr. Bryant said. “The truth is, I was born clumsy.”

Georgeanne gave a sigh of relief. There lay a rare man indeed, a young good-looking doctor who wasn't so stuck on himself, he sought revenge on anyone who placed him in a ridiculous position.

“It was my fault,” she said in firm, no-nonsense tones. “That truck wasn't there this morning when we opened, or I'd have been the one on the floor. Here, Dr. Bryant. Let me — ”

Then Georgeanne met the fallen doctor's gaze and found herself as breathless as if she had taken the fall herself.

Laid out full-length on Dr. Gant's blue carpet, his black hair disarranged by the fall and tumbled across his forehead, Dr. Bryant lay perfectly still and stared up at her. The way his smoky, gray eyes focused on her in such a dazed fashion, she feared a concussion.

Oh, he was a stunningly handsome man all right, but handsome men were as litigious as ugly men, especially when an incident involved damage to their self-image.

He kept staring at her, and Georgeanne felt the full focus of his attention with an unprecedented, purely feminine sensation she found almost as disturbing as her fears of concussion.

She took herself in hand. Dr. Bryant had come to learn about Dr. Baghri's Saturday Clinic. Her job was to promote the clinic with every fiber of her being. Nothing else mattered.

*

Zane Bryant rolled over and looked up from his nose-down position on the floor. He found himself face-to-face with a goddess. Or an angel. He wondered if more than the breath had been knocked out of him by the unexpected fall.

She was almost as tall as he was, and she had soft, candid, dark-brown eyes framed with incredibly long, curling lashes that reminded him of a doe's eyes. She had skin like that of a porcelain doll, all pink and white, and full red lips that needed no lipstick.

Moreover, she was soft with lush feminine curves, and the hands that supported his shoulders were long and strong and slender, the hands of a woman who wasn't afraid of work. She looked like a woman who valued people more than she valued intangibles. Or a career, he added in his mind.

In spite of many self-lectures about the folly of imagining virtues into a woman just because of the letters and emails she wrote, Zane knew he was guilty of exactly that.

He didn't really know her yet, he reminded himself. That's why he was here.

Zane came to himself at last and realized he still lay on the floor like an idiot. He let them assist him to a sitting position and tried to gather his wits.

“Miss Hartfield?” he wheezed. Damn, but he'd taken quite a fall. He wished he wasn't so clumsy. Talk about making a miserable first impression on a beautiful woman.

She smiled and looked relieved. “Yes, I'm Georgeanne Hartfield. This isn't the way we wanted to welcome you, Doctor.”

“I can assure you, I'll never forget my first sight of you.” Zane smiled and placed one hand over his heart while he remained seated on the floor. She smelled of lilies. Zane decided lilies were his favorite flowers. “Keep your cleaning woman, Dr. Gant. She just did me a great favor.”

Georgeanne laughed. Zane considered the warm glow of gratitude in those gorgeous brown eyes an unexpected reward.

“The doctor does not need our help to get himself to his feet,” Dr. Baghri said in his humorous, broken English. “Our Georgie will lift him up by his heart.”

Georgeanne blushed. “Hush, Doctor. You'll have our guest thinking I do heart transplants on the side.”

Zane Bryant stared again in spite of his fear that Georgeanne might consider him rude. This magnificent creature actually blushed. If she was the Georgeanne Hartfield who had been corresponding with him on Vijay Baghri's behalf for the past few weeks, his good fortune looked too incredible to be true.

He rolled to his feet and reached down to help Georgeanne up. She stood only a few inches shorter than he did.

Splendid
, he thought.

He wasn't aware that he still held her hand and gazed at her face until Dr. James Gant cleared his throat in a meaningful way.

“Thank you, Dr. Bryant.” Georgeanne withdrew her hand with a startled look. “I'd better get back to work. Dr. Baghri's letters are almost ready to go out. We're dedicating the new clinic location in a couple of weeks.”

“I hope I'm invited,” Zane said.

Georgeanne gave him a swift, impersonal smile. “Of course you're invited. If you'll stop by my desk on your way out, I'll see to it that you get your invitation this afternoon.”

Zane wondered if he could get out of touring the Saturday Clinic so he could get to know Georgeanne. Or better, if he could talk Georgeanne into acting as his tour-guide.

Georgeanne directed another smile in his direction and hurried back to her desk where the telephone sounded an insistent appeal.

While Zane pretended to listen to Dr. Baghri's discourse, he noted that Georgeanne apparently reached the phone too late, because it stopped ringing. She looked at it in a regretful way and reached for some papers on her desk.

A dignified black woman in a white nurse's uniform appeared at the counter behind Georgeanne's desk. Georgeanne looked up with a warm smile. Zane wished she would direct all her smiles at him.

“Who was on the phone?” he heard Georgeanne ask.

“Mrs. Miguez is holding for Dr. Baghri,” the black woman said. “Tammy's asthma is acting up again, and she's panicking.”

“Oh, dear.” Georgeanne looked distressed and stood at once. “Dr. Baghri says she may have to be hospitalized this time. I'd better put him on immediately.”

“Have you seen my copy of
Faking It
?” the nurse asked. “I thought — there it is. You put your papers on top of it.”

Georgeanne glanced at the book on her desk and turned scarlet. Zane searched his memory but couldn't immediately place the title. He resolved to look into the matter further. Anything that caused this incredible woman to blush interested him.

“What is it with you?” the nurse asked. “Every time I so much as mention this book, you do an imitation of a boiled lobster.”

“We have a visitor,” Georgeanne said, almost choking. “Would you mind getting that silly book off my desk?”

“What for?” the nurse asked, grinning. “Are you afraid the visiting doctor might see it and make a few assumptions?”

Georgeanne ignored that and hurried out of her office cubicle. She approached the doctors and spoke a few sentences in Dr. Baghri's ear.

Zane watched her approach, smiled at her, and wished she would come close enough to speak in his ear. To his intense interest, she returned his smile and hurried back to her desk.

The telephone rang, and Georgeanne answered it without looking up when Zane crossed the room and glanced around her small cubicle.

“Yes, Mrs. St. George,” she said. “Yes, that's the one. Thank you for telling me.”

Zane watched the smile that crept over her face with deep interest. She laughed, and Zane found himself equally fascinated by her full, rich chuckle.

“The article is based on my observations from working in a children's clinic for several years,” she went on. “I'm so glad you enjoyed it.” She listened a moment. “Well, someday I hope to have children of my own, of course. One of these days, when Mr. Right comes along.”

Zane's mind filled in the other side of the conversation. Georgeanne had written an article. That didn't surprise him at all, considering the way he'd been pouncing on her epistles for the past few weeks.

What did surprise him was the image that rose in his mind of Georgeanne with a dark-headed baby at her breast. In his years as a pediatrician, he had seen many, many women with babies at their breasts, but none of those real images rocked him the way the vision of Georgeanne did.

All he had to do to make it come true was convince Georgeanne she had at last met Mr. Right.

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