The M.D. Courts His Nurse (15 page)

He snapped quickly into action. “Just a second, Becky,” he called behind his departing nurse. “I'll help you look.”

The moment he, too, had left the bedroom Hazel sat up in bed and pulled a wireless phone out from under the covers. She quickly tapped in a number.

“Get your rear in gear, Russ,” she ordered the hidden cowboy in the barn. “They're on their way out.”

J
ohn caught up with Rebecca even before she left the house. It was apparent to him that her concerns about her friend's health outweighed any suspicions she had of Hazel's motives.

“What is it, John?” she asked the moment they left the house. “Her heart?”

“If so, it's nothing I can tell without an EKG,” he replied, promising himself he would tell no lies even though Hazel was deceiving them. “Her heartbeat is regular and strong, and her blood pressure is 130 over 80.”

“Well…did she describe her symptoms to you?”

He recalled Hazel's evasive talk of “flutters” and “twitches.” It was hard to keep a straight face when he replied. “Not too clearly.”

Rebecca sent him a quizzical glance. “Does she still have a slight fever?”

“No fever at all.”

“No fever?” They were halfway to the barn now, twilight gathering around them. “But she told me her temp was up slightly.”

“Maybe it was, but it's fine now.”

“I wonder,” she mused, more to herself than John. Hazel's phone call had left her with stretched nerves. If it turned out she was playing another one of her little matchmaking games, Rebecca was going to read her the riot act.

They reached the cavernous main barn, and she flipped the toggle, opening the sliding doors. Overhead lights winked on automatically. She shivered slightly as a chilly breeze whispered around them, suddenly very aware of John's nearness.

“The tack room's toward the back,” she told him as they moved inside. “The living quarters Hazel mentioned are used as a storage room now. We'll have to go through the tack room to reach it.”

“You know plenty about the ranch, don't you?” he remarked as they strolled through the long barn. Cows of various breeds watched them from placid eyes.

“I could run the place,” she admitted. “The Lazy M was my second home. Especially after my mom died and with my dad gone so much.”

“Yeah, I can relate to that,” he assured her. “I spent a lot of my childhood on the Blackfoot Indian reservation.”

“You did?” His remark genuinely surprised her, for it did not fit her preconceived ideas about his youth.

But before she could ask him about it, they'd reached the tack room. The familiar, pleasant smell of leather, saddle soap and horse liniment reminded her she'd been away too long from this life. She pointed to a closed door midway in the rear wall.

“That's the entrance to the foreman's quarters. I hope Hazel left it unlocked.”

The door opened when she turned the knob. She flipped
the wall switch, and light flooded the interior. They both stepped inside. This first room was the kitchen, brightly painted and cozy.

“What in the world?” she wondered aloud, startled at what she saw.

“This place is hardly a storage room,” John pointed out, looking all around them. “It's neat as a pin. Is someone still living here, you think? Anybody home?” he added, raising his voice.

No answer from within. There was no sign of dust or cobwebs, either, and the entire apartment had a fresh, clean-scrubbed smell. The old but serviceable appliances gleamed.

“If it's not used any longer,” John said, “why is the refrigerator plugged in and humming?”

They moved into a small dining room off the kitchen. Both of them gaped in astonishment when they saw a two-branched gilt candlestick on the small gateleg table—candles already lit.

“This is kind of spooky,” he remarked. “Those candles have hardly burned. Somebody must have lit them in the past few minutes.”

“
Spooky
isn't quite the right word,” she countered as it began to sink in what Hazel was pulling off here.

Lit candles weren't the half of it. A small wooden tub on a nearby sideboard was filled with ice, barely beginning to melt, and a magnum of champagne. An oval wicker basket on the table held bunches of fragrant red and white carnations. Becky read the card beside them, written in Hazel's distinctive hand: “For the flower girl.”

Her eyes met John's. She felt suddenly defensive, afraid he'd think
she
was part of this deception. “We've been had by a mastermind.”

He nodded, an amused smile replacing his baffled look. “Look—the table's even set for us. You ever get the feel
ing, around Hazel, that you're just a chess piece being moved around?”

“Do I ever. But it's
not
going to work,” she vowed, turning to leave. “Hazel presumes too much on her white hairs. This time she's gone too far. Well, she can cry wolf about being sick. But she can't make me stay here if I don't want to.”

“Hey, where you going?”

“Where do you think? I'm going to march right back to the house and give her a piece of my mi—”

She abruptly fell silent when, halfway back into the kitchen, she spotted the closed door.

“Did you shut that?” she demanded of John.

“No. And spare me that dirty look,
I'm
not playing any tricks on you. Maybe the door just swung shut behind us.”

Rebecca then discovered, with a sinking feeling, that the thick, solid wood door refused to budge.

His denial just now struck her as sounding a little staged. She whirled around, glowering at him as her suspicions suddenly widened. “
Did
the two of you plan all this?”

Angry resentment hardened his handsome features. “There you go again, giving vent to your unlimited ego. I'm not so desperate for female companionship that I need to trap women in barns.”

“
My
unlimited ego? Don't make me laugh. I'm not the one who needs to carve notches on my bedpost to ‘validate' myself.”

“Just what the hell does that mean?”

“Did you and Hazel cook this up?”

“I told you no. So get over it, okay? I was sucked in just like you were. I admit I guessed, just before you arrived, that Hazel was faking the illness, all right? But I did
not
know about any of this.”

Rebecca believed him, but in her irritation she didn't
care. She pounded on the door, her fist making pitifully little sound on the thick heart pine.

“Help!” she cried out. “Help, somebody! We're locked in.”

“I'll try the phone,” John suggested, seeing one on the wall near the door.

Not surprisingly, though, it was dead.

“Is there another door?” he demanded.

She shook her head in helpless frustration. “No windows, either, since it's all an interior apartment. The place has ventillation shafts for fresh air, but they're too small for a person to fit in them.”

“That lock should be pretty old,” he reasoned. “Got a bobby pin?”

She slid one from her hair, and he bent it open, then knelt before the door and began working on the lock. However, after about fifteen minutes with no luck, he gave up.

“Well then, we might as well face it,” he told her, his own voice resigned. “Hazel didn't go to all this trouble just to lock us up for a few minutes. We won't get out until she
wants
us out. So why injure your hand beating on the door? We might as well make the best of it.”

“Meaning what?” she demanded.

He shrugged, heading toward the refrigerator. “Suit yourself. I'm hungry. I'm going to see what our captor has given us for supper.”

“I can take an informed guess,” she predicted sarcastically as he opened the refrigerator. “Chicken Kiev in a casserole dish, ready for warming in the oven. With a little note from Donna taped to it—twenty minutes at 325 degrees.”

He glanced inside, eyes widening in surprise when he spotted the casserole dishes, three of them, with the very note taped to one.

“Sounds like you know the drill around here, all right,”
he speculated quietly, watching her with eyes narrowing. “Besides the chicken Kiev, there are steamed asparagus tips and boiled new potatos. You
sure
you're not in cahoots with Hazel?”

“Why not?” she riposted, her tone rising in anger. “We gold diggers and guilt trippers will stop at nothing to trap our prey.”

“I didn't go
that
far,” he taunted, as if enjoying her little tantrum. “But I'm glad you thought to include fresh eggs—for breakfast.”

The hit scored, and his sudden laughter left her speechless with indignation.

How dare he assume she would stoop to…to…

But she lost the thought as renewed anger at Hazel surged into her thoughts again. Rebecca had forgiven her for other unwelcome intrusions and trickery; this, however, was simply outrageous. Hazel had gone over the line this time, and she needed to be told that.

“She played on our concern for her,” she fumed.

“When all along she was just luring us in like…like bugs to a zap light.”

He laughed at her comparison as he popped the casserole into the small electric oven and set the temperature.

“You should preheat the oven,” she remarked absently.

“Bachelor doesn't mean stupid,” he teased. “I set the timer for an extra few minutes. Is it really that bad?” he added.

“What?”

“Having to be here with me?”

He turned from the stove and crossed his arms over his chest, watching her with a sexy, sly smile that stirred heat and desire within her. He wore a short-sleeved khaki shirt, and she admired his muscular forearms and the fine, dark-brown hairs covering them.

Even as she felt her ardent, needful response to him,
however, she reminded herself how ideal this situation was for him. He could have a little fun until Hazel sprang them loose, then wave bye-bye and head to Deer Lodge.

She had no desire whatsoever to accuse him of anything, only to ignore him as best she could.

So her next outburst surprised her as much as him.

“I guess you wouldn't mind a little spur of the moment trysting.” The words sprang out of her. “I won't be keeping you from Louise, will I, or any of your more deserving and qualified lovers?”

“Louise?” he repeated uncertainly. “Man, you just lost me on that one.”

Horrified at her outburst, she had determined to just shut up. But she could not remain silent.

“You know good and well I mean Louise Wallant,” she said softly.

Recognition dawned. The expression on his face set. “Look, Louise and I are friends, sure. We know each other from way back. That's no illicit secret.”

“No, maybe not. But where you spend every other weekend seems to be a secret. It's only logical that you've been spending it with her.” Rebecca's heart was numb. She slowly lowered herself to a chair. “Look, Louise Wallant and you really don't concern me. It's none of my business. It's just—just—well, things got out of hand between us that one time. We did things we shouldn't have. I see now I want more from a man than a couple of dates whenever he's decided to stay in town for the weekend.”

“I don't spend every other weekend at Deer Lodge with Louise Wallant, if that's what this is about.”

He didn't seem to be lying, she realized, despite her growing confusion. He was too sincere, and besides, lies would be too easy to expose. All she had to do is ask Louise.

“But you said you had specific reasons for coming to
Mystery, for settling here,” she reminded him. Looking away, she added, “I figured it was a woman.”

“It's not a woman. Not yet, anyway,” he added cryptically. “I came here because it was the nearest place to the Bitterroot Valley that needed a surgeon. I wanted to be close enough so that I could drive to Bitterroot Valley on weekends.”

He took her arm and drew her up from the chair. Slowly his arms encircled her. “I'm not having an affair with anyone, Becky. I volunteer my time at the children's hospital on the reservation. They have no funds for extra surgeons but plenty of need.”

“That's something to be proud of…. Why in the world would you keep it a secret?”

This time his smile was a little more wistful. “The heart is a lonely hunter, remember?”

He stared hard at her for a long time, as if trying to assess whether he could trust her or not.

Finally, when he seemed to have made up his mind, he said, “I know this might sound dumb to others. But I didn't want anyone to know because one of the reasons I do it is that my own family was so dirt poor and dysfunctional. I'm not whining when I tell you this, just being honest. My dad was a broken-down failure who abused the hell out of me, my mother and his liver—alcohol killed him.”

His frank, calm tone made it clear he didn't want pity, he wanted just to get it off his chest. “The Indian families near me sort of adopted me, just the way Hazel adopted you—not in court, maybe, but in everyday fact. No matter how many times my old man booted me out in a drunken rage, I never wanted for a place to sleep or a hot meal. Now I just want to give back something to them for all they gave me, you know what I mean? I just don't talk about it because to explain my deep relationship to the
reservation requires me to explain my relationship with my father—and I'm sure as hell not proud of that.”

She stared up at him, not sure, not yet willing to hope. “Okay, that explains what you do with your time. It doesn't explain how cold you've been to me when every socialite in town purrs on your arm.”

He laughed so hard he almost roared. “That's a great observation, Becky, and it's true. I can make those kind of women purr. I know them so well. What surgeon doesn't? All you have to do to make those kind happy is give them a costly trinket and a designer handbag. They're no mystery at all. They don't confound me.”

He wrapped her in his arms and looked down at her. “But then there's Rebecca, with the wild untamed hair and spirit to match. You're nothing but a mystery to me, and if I've come off cold, it's just that I've found myself out of my element with you. I don't know what will make you happy, or if I'm the guy to do it.”