The M.D. Courts His Nurse (10 page)

“Becky!”

She looked back over her shoulder. He had to lock the front doors, so he'd been the last one out of the building. Now he stood in the gathering darkness, an indistinct form watching her.

Her heart cooled and froze into a ball of ice.

She didn't want another rejection like she'd had with Brian. She couldn't endure another set of hopes crushed and broken. She'd been foolish to have succumbed to John Saville simply for the fact that the rejection was sure to come. And she should have known it going in.

She was not his equal, not in social status, nor in education. He was a handsome doctor in the peak of his vigor. It was only natural that he would want to play the field for a few years more. He would need to take his time choosing the wife who would enhance his lifestyle and career. There was no reason to rush into a relationship and saddle himself with a nobody. He would never pick her. It was all so brutally obvious she couldn't believe how stupid she'd let herself be.

So fool me twice, shame on me, she thought bitterly to herself.

“Yes?” she asked him, her voice cool, pleasant and even.

“This morning—what happened between us, I—that is, we're only human, you know. These things can get out of hand, I suppose and—”

“Don't worry about it. I enjoyed it,” she answered, her tone a model of detachment. “Sorry if you were disappointed. I don't have the experience of some women, you know.”

“Are you kidding? In fact, I…”

But his words fell away. He stood there in silence. Just watching her.

“Good. I'm so happy that you were satisfied,” she answered like a clerk at a counter. Then she got into her car and drove away.

She didn't once look back. Her heart hammered her ribs. Even now she meant what she'd just told him. It wasn't their lovemaking she regretted, only its horrid but oh-so-logical aftermath.

However, she suspected she knew what he had started to suggest in the parking lot: couldn't they perhaps continue a convenient little secret affair? A no-hassles sexual liaison. The good doctor could grab himself a “nooner” now and then, something to tide him over until he selected the proper rich debutante wife. Perhaps his weekend getaways with Louise, or whomever, weren't quite enough to contain his raging testosterone.

For a few awful moments she recalled the cold, impersonal note that Brian had sent her when he dumped her and left for his new practice outside New York City: “I'm not cut out for this provincial life. You like it here just fine among the cattle and rednecks you grew up with, but I want more out of life than this place can offer.”

And even though John had chosen, for whatever secret reasons of his own, to settle here in Mystery Valley, he was probably the same arrogant, social-climbing creep Brian had proved to be.

“You can go straight to hell, John Saville,” she announced out loud, a brittle smile on her face. But the defiance in her tone was a far cry from the aching despair in her heart.

“G
irls, I just don't understand it for the life of me,” Lucinda Shoemaker confided to Rebecca and Lois on Wednesday morning. “Several friends have told me, quite rudely, that my makeup is all wrong. And I could feel Dr. Saville staring at my face during our appointment. Should I perhaps try a different shade for the eyeliner?”

Lois had to struggle to keep a straight face, and normally Rebecca would have been cracking up, too. Lucy had a reputation as a harmless eccentric, and her downright ghoulish makeup jobs had been a standing joke around town for years now.

It was a shame, actually, because the fiftyish widow was quite attractive, with regal bone structure in her face. But her hideous war paint only scared away potential beaux.

This morning, however, Rebecca had no heart to join Lois in her mirth. Oddly, seeing the huge, full-color photo of John and her on the front page of this morning's
Mystery
Gazette
had only deepened her depression and made her regret posing for it. It seemed to mock her true plight by creating the impression they were a “good team.” Which they were, medically speaking—but
only
medically speaking.

“Perhaps you need a better makeup light,” Lois suggested, her tone tactful.

“Light?” Lucy blinked a few times while she tore a check from her leather wallet and handed it to Lois. “No lights on my vanity table, thank you. These days I apply my makeup by candlelight only, dear. After all, that's the light we gals need to look best in.”

“By candlelight?” Lois repeated, astonished. Again her amused eyes met Rebecca's, and the latter had to force a grin.

Any other time, Rebecca would have found this admission absolutely hilarious. Today, however, nothing seemed funny.

“But if you apply it in candlelight,” Lois explained, “it will clash horribly with other lighting. You can't truly tell how much you're putting on—especially rouge,” she added in a not-so-subtle hint, for Lucy's cheeks were practically caked with it.

“Do you think so?” Lucy tried to sound politely interested, but a little sniff gave away her true skepticism. “If so, then it's up to the rest of the world to burn more candles. At my age others must compromise to keep the illusion of my beauty alive.”

“It's not an illusion,” Lois assured her. “You have beauty, all right. It's simply mismanaged.”

After Lucy had left, still unconvinced her system was faulty, Lois turned her amazed face toward Rebecca.

“Do you believe that woman?” she demanded, convulsing in laughter.

“She's a space cadet, all right,” Rebecca agreed, looking
up from a patient file on her computer screen and trying to muster a smile.

Her halfhearted acting, however, did not fool Lois. The latter had noticed all morning how worry molded Rebecca's face when she thought no one was looking.

“What's wrong?” Lois demanded with frank concern. “Usually Lucy makes you break up with laughter.”

“I guess I'm still a little off-kilter from the accident Monday night,” she fibbed. “You know, lost sleep and all that.”

Lois was a good friend, not just a fellow employee, and Rebecca had often confided in her when troubles weighed on her mind. But right now she still felt overwhelmed with misery she couldn't even begin to discuss. She had returned to the office this morning to find the relaxed, affectionate John Saville of yesterday returned to his cold vinyl-boy self. It was weird, like being whisked back in time.

The complete reversion to his former personality made her feel even more uncomfortable with her memory of making love with him. Like a woman riding on a train who dreamed about a woman riding on a train, she felt confused about what was real and what was just imagination.

Only yesterday, yet it already seemed like a distant, blurry memory, not a recent event. At moments she could even believe it had never happened. As if she really had gone home alone and simply dreamed about making love with him.

Lois's voice jarred her back to the present. “Funny—the good doctor, too, is ‘off-kilter' this morning.”

“Oh? I hadn't noticed,” Rebecca replied lamely.

Lois watched Rebecca from speculative eyes. “He hardly spoke when he came in, and he's been camped back in his office.”

“Is that right?” Rebecca replied absently, feigning great interest in the patient history on her screen.

When sadness wasn't making her feel like weeping, anger made her want to march right back to his office and slap his face.

True, she had just recently been initiated into the ranks of those who'd had sex, but now she could see how the experience had temporarily washed away all her common sense. She now knew the most valuable lesson about men: they were wonderfully intense in the throes of lust, but then, their passion spent, they ran like a river when the snow melts.

The phone on Lois's half-moon desk burred.

“Dr. Saville's office,” she answered. After listening a moment, she said, “No, this is the office number. Hang on and I'll transfer you to his private line.”

Lois transferred the call. “‘May I pleeeze speak with Jooohn?'” she repeated, exaggerating her enunciation. “This gal talks like a speech therapist to the nobility.”

Rebecca paid little attention to her friend, busy finding the lab results John Saville had requested on one of his patients. She printed it out and headed back to his office. There was a file folder taped to his door; she was grateful she didn't have to face him.

She dropped the printout into the file and started to turn away.

Abruptly, however, John's voice rose a few decibels, as if in mild irritation.

“Look, sure I can make it this weekend. No problem. But
please
don't call me at the office. You've got my home number, haven't you?”

She felt a sharp pang behind her heart. It was the woman Lois had just transferred to his line. Louise Wallant had a precise, somewhat stilted enunciation, indicative of her snobbish, superior personality.

Misery crushed her all over again. The idea that John could make love to her yesterday, seeming to be so pas
sionate, then set up another tryst for this weekend, was as devastating as she feared it would be. Nor could she fail to feel the irony of her present misery. In the beginning, his “secret weekends” had enhanced the mystique, the enigma this man seemed to be, as did his reluctance to talk about his past or what he was up to. In fact, it had been her curiosity about
who
the real Dr. John Saville was that first put her on the path to falling in love with him.

Now, however, she had the sinking conviction that the “mystery man” was simply slinking off to a clichéd sordid sexual liaison. Barbara Wallant's comment about the “celebration” for Louise's new bed and breakfast opening up only strengthened Rebecca's conviction.

Even in the depths of her despair, however, she cautioned herself against putting the noose before the gavel, as Hazel called it. She already knew John was spending weekends with Louise, for example. How could she blame him now for something that was going on before she had even met him?

She returned to the front office, still lost in the moil of troubled, conflicting thoughts.

“I wonder,” Lois speculated, “who that is on the phone? She wasn't trying to make an appointment.”

“Who cares who she is?” Rebecca snapped, clearing her computer screen.

Astonished, Lois stared at her for a long moment, her eyes narrowing at her friend's tight-lipped frown.

“Evidently,” she replied in a mild tone, “one of us cares very much.”

 

Toward the end of Wednesday afternoon, Hazel went out back to the main barn to check on Pavlov's cows as she called the Lazy M's experimental breeds.

She flicked a toggle switch mounted on a panel, and the big front doors slid open on their greased tracks. The smell
of cows and sweet new hay wafted to her nostrils. Mellow sunlight flooded inside, making tiny dust motes glitter like galaxies and revealing a long, twin row of stalls.

“Hello, Marie,” she called out, stopping beside one of the stalls.

The cow watching her from placid, pretty brown eyes had been given a French name in honor of her breed, the cream-colored French Charolais, popular for crossbreeding since the 1930s. Hazel's first ancestors had bred only the tough and self-sufficient longhorn cattle, driven north from deep in Texas and first brought to America by Spanish explorers. Later had come the shorthorn, the white-faced Hereford, the black Aberdeen Angus and several others. Hazel was trying every possible crossbreeding combination to produce heartier animals and better-quality meat.

“Well, the bull has done his job, Mama,” she said, patting the animal's broad brow. “Now you're preggers, and Hazel's gonna be with you all the way. We're going to deliver a healthy calf, and I'll be there at your side when you lick its eyes open.”

Most people assumed cows were stupid, but Hazel had seen how they learned to bond with humans. When her line riders came down from summer pasture and separated from the herd after four months with them, the critters just stood there and bawled for hours, they missed the cowboys so. And a few honest cowboys even admitted they missed the cows, too.

“I can make a cow love a cowboy,” she thought aloud, “but I'm having six sorts of trouble pairing Becky with John. Maybe I've lost my touch as a master matchmaker, Marie.”

As she turned to go back outside, however, Hazel's glance fell on the tack-room door at the far end of the barn. And suddenly, just like that, the rough outline of a plan sprang into her mind—followed by a wide, mischievous
grin on her weather-seamed face and a canny twinkling in her Prussian-blue eyes.

“It'll have to be my last-ditch effort,” she told herself. “But if all else fails, I'll give it a shot.”

Those two stubborn, hard-headed youngsters belonged together, she was still sure of it. They just didn't know it yet, was all. And after all, hadn't she succeeded in the difficult case of rodeo champ A. J. Clayburn and Southern socialite Jacquelyn Rousseaux? Those two got along like cats fighting, at first. Now they were expecting their second child and still acted like newlyweds on their honeymoon.

And she'd played Cupid to her dear friend Connie Adams. She sure hadn't expected to snare her a renegade lawman, but all in all Quinn Loudon made Connie a mightly fine match, and Hazel liked to think she had a reining hand in that happiness, too.

These thoughts reminded her the workday was over and that John Saville might be at home by now.

Think I'll give him a call, she decided, and see if he'll give me a ride in that fancy race car of his. That handsome young fool needed another lesson in how to spark a woman, and she meant to tutor him until he got it right.

Besides that, she had a question to ask him about something very curious she had just learned today.

 

“So how are you feeling, Hazel?” John asked, holding the Alfa Romeo's passenger door open for her.

“I'm right as the mail,” she assured him, spryly lowering herself into the brown leather seat. “It's mighty nice of you to agree to give me a ride in this beauty. I've been wanting to ever since I first laid eyes on her.”

“Heck, you can drive if you want.”

“Thanks, but this way I can look around more. It's a beautiful day.”

“Well, you don't need to thank me. I was glad you called—I can use a relaxing drive myself.”

He closed her door, crossed to his side and got in, then fired the old race car's engine to rumbling life.

“Got a lot on your mind?” she inquired with seemingly casual interest as they followed the Lazy M's long, meandering driveway. Hazel, her hair restrained by a scarf of poppy-colored silk sewn with sequins, waved at a few hands who had stepped out of the bunkhouse to admire the gleaming red classic auto.

John's cobalt eyes glanced at her for a moment before he answered.

“Professionally speaking, not really. But personally speaking,” he admitted, “I sure have plenty on my mind.”

“Now, now, Doctor, I don't like that tone. Might get you sick.”

“Get a horse, Doc!” one of the cowboys shouted as they drove past, and John tooted the horn at him.

They were out on the main road now, and he raised his voice above the throbbing roar of the exhausts. “Hey, who's the doctor here?” he objected playfully.

“You're the medical doctor. But you're only thirty and I'm…well, a woman of a certain age. That makes me the doctor of philosophy.”

His strong white teeth flashed in a grin. “I guess it does, at that. And don't play coy with me, I know your age exactly. You told me yourself you were born the same year this car rolled off the assembly line. And you're running just as strong.”

“If you take Canyon Drive,” she suggested, “we'll be able to see the entire valley at sunset. The view takes your breath away. I haven't seen it for years from up in the mountains.”

“Then Canyon Drive it is.” John downshifted and turned
left onto a smaller asphalt road that ascended into the nearby granite peaks in a series of looping switchbacks.

Hazel knew, of course, that it was Rebecca who weighed on the young man's mind. But she also knew that men, unlike women, were not as comfortable discussing those feelings closest to their hearts. So she decided to come at her real topic indirectly.

“I found out something very interesting today,” she remarked casually. “You see, one of my favorite charities is the Montana State Native American Scholarship Fund. They just sent me a wonderful letter thanking me for my annual contribution. And lo and behold, among the names on the letterhead, the honorary board members, I see a Dr. John Saville.”

He nodded. “Yep. I've been on the board for five years now.”

“Well, good for you. It's a wonderful organization. Native Americans in Montana haven't prospered as well as some tribes elsewhere. The McCallums, you know, inter-married with the Northern Cheyenne, and I'm one-eighth Indian myself. In fact, that's where I get my stunning good looks. Do you have Indian blood, too?”