Dr. Dad (19 page)

Susannah blinked again. She didn't want to think Toby was wonderful. She didn't want to be so aware of everything about him—not just his long legs and chiseled features and those big male hands, but also his kindness and sensitivity to his daughter.
Please,
she implored him silently,
do something awful. Be obnoxious. Belch or launch into a boring monologue about sports. Do something offensive so I can stop liking you so much.

But he didn't belch, didn't comment on the way the baseball season was shaping up, didn't say he hoped Lindsey would stop daydreaming, didn't say he thought Susannah was actually quite selfish and ought to have continued supporting her family. He simply
drove home through the quiet streets of Arlington, an enigmatic smile curving his lips.

As she'd predicted, he walked her to her front door. They climbed the steps to the porch, and she noticed MacKenzie's silhouette filling one of the windows in the living room, where she'd left a lamp on. The impatiens she'd hung on the porch looked nearly white in the silver moonlight. The porch lamp spilled a cone of brighter light in front of the door.

“This was lovely,” she said, her heart thumping in anticipation, in dread. She wanted him to kiss her good-night, but not a real kiss, not a kiss that would entrance her. Not a kiss that would make her careless and mindless and eager to give too much. Just a peck on the cheek, because they were friends.

“We should do it again.”

“I'd like that.” She turned from him and inserted her key in the lock. Her pulse drummed in her ears. He stood so close behind her she could feel his warmth along her back, his breath against her hair.

She fumbled with the key. He reached around her and closed his hand over hers. His touch, just a brush of warmth, fingers against fingers, nearly undid her. He eased the key from her trembling fingers and unlocked the door for her.

“Thank you,” she whispered, feeling the way she imagined a typical sixteen-year-old would feel coming home from her first date with an awesome guy. Edgy, panicked and seized by a treacherous longing.

She could have sworn a million times that she didn't want him to take her in his arms. But he circled them around her, and her heart told her she truly wanted this, wanted it more than she should. Wanted it more than she could remember wanting anything in a long time.

For just one moment she would ignore the danger.

I
F ASKING
S
USANNAH
out had been a significant step in Toby's living his own life, kissing her seemed the most essential step of all. When his lips touched hers, he felt more alive than he'd ever felt before.

Dinner had been terrific. He'd enjoyed talking to her, listening to her, laughing with her. But this…This was unbelievable.

She tasted of wine and warmth, her mouth opening eagerly beneath his, her tongue darting out to touch his. As he pulled her closer she ringed his waist with her arms and nestled against him, as if seeking sex and safety at the same time.

He didn't want to offer her safety.

He moved his hands up and down her back, feeling the delicate angles of her shoulder blades, the narrow ridge of her spine, the weight of her hair against his knuckles. He roamed to her nape, then reversed direction, sliding down to the small of her back, to the swell of her hips. All the while he kissed her, deep, hungry, greedy kisses, drinking her in, absorbing her sighs.

His body hummed with energy. He felt hard all over, not just in his groin but in his chest, his thighs, his arms. His muscles tensed in delicious agony. If he and Susannah hadn't been standing on her front porch in full view of anyone who might come along, he would
have lifted her skirt and moved his hand between her legs, making her as ready as he was.

But they
were
on her front porch, and even though he had his back to the street, he was not in the sort of condition a man ought to be in while standing where his neighbors could see him. Behind her, the door was open. He'd unlocked it himself. All she had to do was invite him in.

She sighed again, then gasped as he tightened his hold and angled her hips to his. “Toby,” she whispered, her lips rubbing erotically against his as she spoke his name.

“Yes.” His voice sounded as breathless as hers.

She touched her mouth to his chin, then tucked her head into the hollow of his neck.

Ask me in,
he pleaded silently.
Tell me you want this as much as I do.

He felt her lips brush his throat. His fingers flexed against the soft curves of her bottom, rocking her to him.

“We can't…” She let out a broken breath, her body so snug against him he could feel the contours of her breasts pressing into his chest.

“We're outside. I know,” he murmured, his voice surprisingly calm given his anything-but-calm state.

She hugged him, her head nestled in the curve of his shoulder. She said nothing for a minute, and he willed himself to relax, to lower his expectations. But then she thrilled him by saying, “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

“Yes.” He had no interest in coffee, but he wanted to go inside with her. And that was what she was really talking about—not coffee but going inside.

Reluctantly, she eased out of his arms. She avoided
making eye contact with him as she turned away and twisted the doorknob. The door swung inward and Toby followed her into the front hall, closing the door behind him.

She still didn't look at him. He wondered why. Certainly, she couldn't have developed a sudden case of bashfulness. Her kisses out on the porch had hardly been bashful. What had changed between those kisses and now—other than their having moved indoors, where kisses could lead to something much more intimate?

Intimacy was impossible if Susannah wouldn't even look at him. He restrained himself from hauling her back into his arms, and instead watched her cautiously, remaining where he was while she started toward the kitchen. “I have both regular and decaf,” she said, her tone artificially bright.

“I don't really want coffee,” he told her.

She paused and glanced over her shoulder at him, though she didn't lift her eyes all the way to his face.

“I do,” she finally said, and headed down the hall.

Lacking a better idea, he followed her. He couldn't stay too long—Lindsey was home alone, after all—and Susannah might use up what time they had by lingering over her damned coffee. What he wanted so much his body nearly shook from the wanting was not going to happen. Not unless she was teasing him right now, pretending not to be aroused when she was actually in the same crazed state he was in.

But he didn't like games. One of the things about Susannah that appealed to him was that she didn't seem to be the game-playing type.

Her kitchen was brightly lit. The cat trailed them in, leaped onto a chair and eyed Toby arrogantly. Susan
nah opened and slammed cabinet doors, searching for a mug, then filters, then a can of coffee. The noise was jarring—and her silence was even more jarring.

“Did I do something wrong?” he asked. He'd never been a slick operator; he'd never learned any smooth moves. Maybe she'd wanted to be seduced more emphatically. Maybe she'd expected him to sweep her off her feet and carry her up the stairs like Rhett Butler in
Gone With the Wind.

“No.” Her hands trembled as she attempted to scoop coffee into the filter-lined basket.

“Then what's going on here? Why are you so nervous?” he asked. He heard impatience in his tone, reflecting the impatience that nibbled at the edges of his mind.

She pressed the button to start the coffeemaker, then spun around to confront him, her face set in a benign smile that he didn't believe for a minute. When her gaze locked with his, the smile faded slightly, becoming more genuine. “I like you, Toby,” she said. “But I'm just…” She sighed. He saw anguish in her eyes. “I'm trying to hold on to my independence, okay?”

Her independence? Did she think that making love with him would steal her independence away? Did she think he intended to enslave her?

She must have sensed his doubt. Even the cat seemed to sense it. He leaped onto the table and walked to the edge closest to Susannah, silently imploring her to pick him up. Susannah obeyed, gathering the cat into her arms and combing her fingers through his fur. “I'm not ready to get involved with anyone right now,” she explained.

He still didn't believe her, but he wasn't going to
argue. Her kisses had said yes, but her words were saying no, and he couldn't ignore her words.

“All right,” he said quietly, hiding his frustration behind a stoic facade. He stared for a minute at her fingers plowing deep into her cat's fur. They were slender yet strong, and it irked him that her cat was getting the caresses he wanted for himself. He took a step backward, as if a few more feet of distance between Susannah and himself might make him desire her a little less.

“It's not just me,” she went on, as though aware that he needed persuading. “There's Lindsey to think about. I mean, if we were to…well, whatever it was we were going to do—”

“Make love,” he said deliberately. Stoicism didn't suit him. He was seething, and he wanted Susannah to feel as uncomfortable as he did.

He didn't rattle her as much as he'd hoped. “Make love,” she agreed, still stroking the cat, her eyes crystalline as she lifted them to meet his. His anger only seemed to strengthen her resolve. “How would it affect Lindsey if we were to do that?”

“I've been trying really hard to stop basing all my decisions on how they'd affect Lindsey.”

A smile flitted across her lips. “Well, then…I guess this decision is going to be based on how it would affect me.” The hint of a smile vanished, and she returned her attention to the coffeemaker. “I'm not looking for a romance.”

“Just a friendship,” he deduced, his anger cooled by a splash of irony. “Isn't that what they say in Hollywood? ‘We're just friends.”'

“Do you mind being just friends with me?” she asked in a small, hesitant voice.

A dry laugh escaped him. “I think I can handle it.”

She turned back to him. “Because I treasure this friendship, Toby. I want us to stay friends. I want to come and observe you while you work. And I want to help you out with Lindsey if you need it. We can make a good friendship here, don't you think?”

A good friendship. He supposed he could use one of those. He would have preferred to have that good friendship with someone he hadn't kissed the way he'd kissed Susannah, someone who didn't turn him on simply by existing. Someone who didn't keep him up at night, in every possible interpretation of the phrase.

But if he couldn't have anything more than a friendship with Susannah, so be it. As his friend, she would still be his sounding board when he had concerns about Lindsey. And he'd still be able to help her with tasks that required a man, whether they entailed hanging a mirror or rescuing her from an avid crowd of fans. He could do that for her.

In the meantime, he'd better talk to Molly, his Daddy School teacher, and see if she had any good ideas about how he could live his own life—specifically, how he could live it without Susannah's guest-starring in it.

“Sure,” he conceded, feeling the last hot embers inside him die and fade to gray, feeling his disappointment chill to grudging resignation. “We can be friends.”

 

A
MANDA'S BEDROOM
was pink. Really pink. The walls were light pink, her bedspread was Barbie pink and the carpet was a kind of purplish pink, the color of raspberry sherbet. Her furniture was white with pink roses
painted on the drawers and pink scrolling on the headboard.

The funny thing was that the pink sort of clashed with Amanda. She had brown hair and tan skin. Meredith matched the room much better.

Lindsey had darker hair than Amanda, and lighter skin, so she wasn't sure whether she matched or not. It didn't matter. This was an emergency meeting of the Susannah Dawson Admiration Society, and she was glad that it was being held in someone else's house instead of hers.

Actually, she'd hoped they could have their meeting at the mall, so they could have bought stuff and treated themselves to ice-cream cones after the meeting was over, but Dr. Dad had vetoed that plan. So had Amanda's and Meredith's parents. None of the adults had felt like driving them all the way to the mall and then sitting around for an hour or two while the girls hung out.

But it was just as well that they were meeting at Amanda's house, because Amanda had her sister's magazine. It was one of those tabloids, the kind they sold at checkout counters in supermarkets, usually with an ugly picture of a famous person on the cover and a headline about some famous person's breast implants or mysterious pregnancy or heartbreak. Almost always, a famous person's heartbreak was featured on the cover: the famous person's heartbreaking final days, or the heartbreak of the famous person getting a divorce, or the famous person's heartbreak over drugs or bankruptcy or the childhood secret no one knew about. Except the tabloid knew about it, of course, and published it so the whole world would know about it, too.

Amanda had brought a bag of chocolate-chip cook
ies up to her room for them to munch on as they had their meeting. “So tell us about their date,” she said.

“It wasn't really a date,” Lindsey said. She was a little uneasy about telling the club about her father's dinner date with Susannah. Judging from Dr. Dad's mood when he came home Saturday night, she didn't think it had gone well.

He'd told her that he and Susannah had had a good time. At Lindsey's insistence, he'd described the food they'd ordered—“Yes, we had wine,” he'd said—and then he'd driven Susannah home and come home himself. Lindsey had still been awake, watching TV in the den, when he'd arrived. “We had a very nice meal, and we talked” was his summation of the evening.

Well, of course that was all they'd done: talk. Susannah Dawson could have her pick of any single man in the country, maybe the world. Lindsey bet
Mercy Hospital
was broadcast all around the planet. They probably aired the show in Italy and France and Japan, and Susannah would appear on the screen with Italian or French or Japanese coming out of her mouth in someone else's voice. Lindsey would bet lots of Italian and French and Japanese guys had big crushes on Susannah.

So there was no way she'd fall for Lindsey's father. He should have known that going in. If he had, he might not have been wearing such an expression of disappointment when he'd gotten home.

He'd definitely looked disappointed. Even when he smiled. Even when he told her he'd had a good time. Even the following morning, just hours ago, when Lindsey had found him in the kitchen, brooding over a cup of coffee and staring out the window at nothing.

“Where did they go?” Meredith asked.

“Dominic's.”

“Dominic's?” Amanda sneered. “He should have taken her someplace classy, like Reynaud.”

“I told him that,” Lindsey said.

“Well, it probably wouldn't do him any good,” Amanda said, flipping through her sister's magazine.

“Because if this is anything to go by, she's in love with Stephen Yates.” She found the page she was looking for and flung it toward Lindsey.

Meredith crowded behind Lindsey to read over her shoulder. There was a big color photo of Susannah and Stephen Yates, both of them dressed to kill. Susannah wore a designer gown, sleek and slinky, with spaghetti straps that showed off her shoulders and throat. Her hair was piled on top of her head and she had humongous diamonds dangling from her ears. Stephen Yates was in a tuxedo—one of those Hollywood tuxedos, way too stylish, with a black shirt with a banded collar underneath. They were holding hands, looking in opposite directions and smiling, as if they were greeting fans who surrounded them on all sides.