Читать книгу The Doctor Delivers - Janice Macdonald - Страница 11

THE MARKETING MAN, caught momentarily off guard by the intrusion, rallied quickly. “Hey, that’s cool. No sweat, I’ll just mosey over there and check out the munchies.” He shot Catherine a parting wink. “Catch you later.”

Catherine watched him disappear into the crowd, then turned to Connaughton. A beer bottle in one hand, he wore a battered tweed jacket, some sort of collarless shirt under it and jeans. His reddish-brown hair fell untidily over his forehead, and his eyes were lined with exhaustion. But as she looked at him, all she could think of at that moment was how attractive he was—not handsome, or conventionally good-looking, but attractive: sexy, slightly disheveled, more than a little weary and, she suspected, completely unconcerned about the way he looked.

“Martin Connaughton,” he said as though perhaps she’d forgotten. “You’re looking for me?”

“I was looking for you. About four hours and five messages ago. You didn’t answer your page or your messages. Again.”

“Well, now I’m here.”

“How do you know you didn’t just barge into an important conversation?” A vestige of irritation lingered. Now he was ready to talk. “That guy might have been…I don’t know, the love of my life.”

He raised an eyebrow. “In that case you were managing to conceal it remarkably well. I’ve been watching you from across the room for the last…” He glanced at his watch. “Ten minutes. You looked bored stiff. Actually, I thought I’d do you a good turn by rescuing you.”

“You did?” Surprise deflated her anger like air from a balloon.

“I did.” A faint smile played across his face.

She stood there, momentarily robbed of words by an intense awareness of his physical presence. His height, the way his jacket fit across his shoulders, the slight shadow of beard. Maybe he’d come straight from the hospital, just changed from his scrubs. She felt weird, breathless almost. Everything around them seemed distant and unconnected.

“So?” His smile grew wider.

“So.” She felt her face color. “We need to talk.”

He caught her arm, shepherded her to an empty space by the door. “I suppose that this is the part where I throw myself on your mercy and tell you that it’s been a hell of a day so please accept my abject apologies for my earlier behavior.”

The remark, with its teasing undertone, once again caught her off guard. The cool, distant doctor had metamorphosed into a sexy guy who had a definitely disconcerting effect on her heart.

“You don’t really seem too abject.” She matched his tone. “I like a lot of groveling before I forgive.”

“Unfortunately, groveling isn’t one of my strong suits,” he said solemnly. “But supposing I did want to grovel my way into your good graces. How would I go about it? Could I redeem myself by talking to your pals out there?”

“My pals. You make it sound so frivolous.” She suppressed a smile and an errant thought: she could fall for him, big time. Her face felt warm. “As a matter of fact, you can meet them tomorrow. I’ve scheduled a press conference at ten.”

“You’ve already set it up?” Dark blue eyes widened slightly. “How did you know I’d do it?”

“Just a hunch.” She realized she was beginning to enjoy the exchange. “Can you be there?”

“There’s nothing I’d rather do. Just tell me what you want me to say.”

“We can work on that in the morning.” She leaned her shoulders lightly against the wall, her arms at her sides. Relief, but more than that, something about Martin Connaughton had completely transformed her mood. “Back to groveling though.”

“Yes?”

“Just this morning, I seem to recall you making some sort of comment about public relations. How did you put it?” A hand cupped to her chin, she pantomimed deep thought. “I think the word you used was puffery.”

“Temporary insanity on my part,” he replied with an obvious effort to maintain a solemn expression. “I retract everything I might have said. Public relations is a calling of the highest order.”

“You know something?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Not for an instant.” She smiled into his eyes. “So what produced the dramatic change?”

“I’ve got a project that’s very important to me.” The laughter left his face. “It’s called WISH. I’d like to talk to you about it.” He glanced around the crowded room. “Maybe we can find somewhere a little bit quieter.”

“SO THAT’S REALLY what WISH is all about,” he said after he’d given her the overview of what he was trying to do. “Drug counseling and adequate prenatal care can go a long way toward preventing tragedies like Kenesha Washington.”

Music and laughter from the hotel floated out to where they sat on a low stone wall. Above them a smattering of stars, ahead a narrow strip of beach and the dark ocean. What surprised him was how easily the words had flowed. The emotions that just that morning Dora Matsushita had urged him to unlock were right there as he explained, and he knew by Catherine’s expression that he’d touched her.

“And you’re hoping that administration will be so pleased with your glowing tribute to Western’s NICU that they’ll change their minds and decide to fund WISH after all? Is that your strategy?”

“Something along those lines.” He smiled. “As the PR expert, how does that sound to you?”

“As the practitioner of fluff and puffery you mean?”

“I already apologized for that, remember? Besides, you called me Scrooge.”

“And I apologized for that,” she replied. “Although you did seem kind of dark and gloomy this morning.” She glanced at him from under her lashes. “I figured that maybe it was typical Irish behavior. You know, all brooding and melancholy.”

He laughed. “That’s a myth. The truth about the Irish is that at any given time in history, half of them were starving. If they’d had enough to eat, they’d have been as bright and cheerful as yourself.”

“So you missed breakfast this morning? That’s your excuse?”

“There’s no excuse for me. I’m just cantankerous.”

“Yeah, I’d heard that,” she said. “A loose cannon was the way someone described you.”

Martin laughed again, well aware of his reputation at Western.

“About WISH though,” she said after a moment. “I’m kind of low on Western’s totem pole of influence, but I’ll do what I can to put in a good word.”

“Thanks.” Tempted to shift now to the personal and ask her more about her family, Martin reminded himself he was here for a purpose. And, if he’d read her correctly, she understood his concerns. In fact, her face, which seemed to register the slightest emotion, made her a fairly easy read. And if that didn’t give her away, he thought with amusement, her hands did.

“What’s the joke?” she asked. “You’re sitting there smiling to yourself.”

“I was just thinking that perhaps you had Italian somewhere in your ancestry.”

“Oh, the hands?” She grinned and her face colored slightly. “I know, everyone teases me about it. If I ever get rheumatism, I probably won’t be able to talk. There’s no Italian though. Irish on both sides.”

He said nothing, struck by an odd sense that he’d come home, that he knew this woman with her long plait of hair and blushing smile. Years away from Ireland had done little to dilute the strain of Celtic mysticism in his veins, and the feeling awed him. “Your children?” he said, finally giving in to his need to know. “How old are they?”

“Peter’s ten and Julie was six last week.” She grinned. “For her birthday cake, she wanted carrot and pineapple with chocolate frosting.”

“God.” He pulled a face. “That sounds revolting. Did she get it?”

“Yeah, I baked it myself. Birthday cakes are kind of my thing. Any cakes actually. Chocolate, apple, cheesecake, you name it. Don’t tell Ed Jordan—” she brought her face closer “—but I’d rather be home with my kids, frosting a cake, than doing public relations.”

“But then we wouldn’t be sitting here talking.”

“True.”

“How long were you married?”

“Nearly twelve years.”

“That’s a long time for a California marriage, isn’t it? I thought they all self-destructed after five years.”

She smiled. “It takes work, I guess. You both have to want it. In our case, I guess I wanted it more than he did. We had this really terrific house and sometimes I’d sit in the kitchen and the sun would be pouring through the windows, and there were cookies or something like that in the oven and the kids would be playing. I just remember feeling so happy. I mean, who needs a career? That was my career.”

“The perfect wife and mother, huh?”

“I guess not so perfect since we’re now divorced.”

“You didn’t want the divorce?”

“You could say that. When he told me he wanted to end it, I felt as though I’d been fired from the only job I’d ever wanted.” A quizzical smile on her face, she turned to look at him. “Do you have any idea why I’m telling you all this?”

“Probably because I’m asking.”

“But it’s all one-sided. What about you? Have you been married?”

“A long time ago.”

“Any kids?”

He shook his head. “So would you try it again?” he asked. “Marriage, I mean?”

“Probably not.” She frowned at her hands, folded in her lap. “It was a pretty powerless time in my life. I had no real stake in anything. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see it then. I just deferred to him without really thinking about it. Sometimes I’d decide I was tired of living under a dictatorship and complain. Then he’d do something really sweet and generous and I’d feel like a bitch.”

He laughed.

“It’s true. I don’t think I started out that way, it just happened gradually. A little compromise here, another one there.” She shrugged. “It’s an insidious thing. By the time we got divorced and I really looked at myself, I barely knew who I was anymore. I guess in a weird sort of way, I’m grateful to him for forcing the issue. It’s probably the only thing I am grateful to him for—except the children, of course.”

“And I was going to ask if it had left you embittered.”

“It shows, huh? Embittered and embattled. But wiser. I’ll never let myself be dependent on someone like that again.”

“But surely it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.” He wondered why it seemed important to convince her. “Marriage doesn’t have to mean giving up all your autonomy.”

She shrugged. “Maybe not. But I’m kind of gun-shy.”

A moment passed and neither of them made a move to leave. A breeze blew a wisp of hair across her face. He watched her push it away. Watched the silver charm bracelet she wore slide down her arm as she did. Leave, he told himself, but she was smiling at him and the breeze carried a whiff of her floral perfume. You’ve accomplished what you came here to do, he told himself, but the sky was sprinkled with stars and the moon was a pale crescent suspended above them. Leave. But each time he looked at her, he felt a yearning for a time when the future had seemed bright and full of promise and a small voice in his head asked, Well, why not again?

“This morning when I saw you in the lobby,” he finally said, “you reminded me of someone I used to know. Now though I can see that you’re not really like her, it’s just an expression you get.”

She watched his face. “Old girlfriend?”

“No.” He shook his head, felt her waiting for more. “No,” he said again.

Moments passed. The oleander bushes that lined the lawns trembled in the breeze.

He watched her face. She’d moved slightly so that she now sat in profile to him. Back rigid, bottom lip caught in her teeth. Vulnerable somehow. A wave of fierce protectiveness swept him, stunning him with its intensity. He wanted to put his arm around her, to pull her close, to promise that he’d prevent anything bad from ever happening to her. Sure, a voice in his head scoffed, like you promised Sharon. He glanced at his watch.

“It’s getting late.” She turned to face him. “I should probably go back in.”

Laughter floated out from the hotel, heels clattered on the flagstone pathway. Words clattered in his brain. Inside, the band started up again.

“Listen, Catherine,” he finally said. “I think you need to do something crazy.” He stood, held out his hand to her. “Let’s dance.”

She laughed. “I’m the world’s worst dancer.”

“Second worst. I guarantee.”

“Ed Jordan’s probably looking for me. I was suppose to listen to his speech.”

“Is that going to be a problem for you?”

“It might be. Tomorrow.” She took his hand. “Come on, let’s live dangerously.”

IF YOU HAD ANY SENSE, Catherine thought as she whirled around the room in Martin’s arms, when this dance is over you will thank him very nicely and make a quick exit. That would be the safe thing to do. The sort of thing that Julie and Peter’s mommy would do. The sort of thing that the Catherine Prentice she thought she knew would have done. But his arms were around her, and her chin rested on the rough tweed of his jacket and her lips were tantalizingly close to the skin of his neck, and the Catherine Prentice she thought she knew, the cookie-baking, homework-checking, PTA president Catherine, had gone AWOL. In her place was this strange, barely recognizable woman. A woman whose body turned into mush every time she looked into Martin Connaughton’s eyes.

“What do you think?” He pulled away slightly to look at her. “Pretty bad, aren’t I?”

“The worst.” She smiled up at him. “My feet will never be the same again.”

“Do you want to stop?”

“No.” Never, she thought as couples glided around them, shadowy and indistinct in the spangled light. She was bewitched. The evening had become this magical shimmering thing that much later she would unwrap and slowly examine like a precious gift. He pulled her closer, his long body hard against hers, hummed softly in her ear. Outside, as he’d asked about the children, the real Catherine had briefly returned to issue warnings, but he’d taken her hand and the words had melted like snowflakes in the sun. The music played on and, caught up in the dreamlike spell, they danced and danced. When the band played its last number and the lights were raised, she felt as though she’d awakened from a trance.

Minutes later, they were back out in the dark night, the air cool on her overheated skin. Reality slowly returned. As they stopped beside her pale blue Plymouth van, she felt like Cinderella. Her magic coach had turned back into a pumpkin.

“Very glamorous.” She grinned at Martin. “Probably couldn’t guess I had kids, huh?”

“What have you got in there?” He peered inside the window. “Toys and bikes?”

“Pretty much.” She unlocked the door and slid it open. On the carpeted floor were red and blue plastic crates of toys. One marked Julie, the other Peter. Two smaller cartons contained books. Pegs on the wall of the van were hung with jackets. She watched his face as he looked around, his expression rapt.

He turned to her. “It’s all so…organized.”

Catherine laughed at his interest. “Well, it’s easier that way. Keeps them occupied when we’re driving.” She reached under the seat and pulled out two smaller cartons. “See. Cookies. Pretzels. Sodas. Helps cut down on impromptu fast-food visits,” she said with a grin.

“You go on a lot of outings, do you?”

“We go to the beach. Camping. Sometimes we go up to the mountains. My mother has a cabin in Big Bear.”

“And do you have campfires? Cook marshmallows? That sort of thing?”

“Uh-huh. Sing songs, the whole shtick.” She laughed, suddenly self-conscious.

“What?”

“I’m just surprised that you find it interesting. I love doing this kind of thing, but…” She bit her lip, already sorry she’d embarked on the story. “Their father always made me feel that it was the only thing I was capable of doing. He used to call it my Becky-Home-ecky stuff. I guess it never seemed particularly interesting or valuable.”

“You’re wrong about that,” he said.

A moment passed and they stood together looking at each other and she realized she was holding her breath. The Martin Connaughton she’d first seen that morning was not the man with whom she’d spent the last few hours and she wondered who exactly the real one was. If it was the man standing before her now, with this look of tenderness on his face, she could be in big trouble. Very big trouble.

But a moment later, as if a curtain had been drawn, the look was gone.

“Ten o’clock tomorrow?” Unsmiling, he inclined his head slightly. “I’ll see you then.”

As she pulled out of the parking lot, Catherine felt as dazed as if she’d been hit on the head with a baseball bat.

BY THE TIME Martin drove into the Long Beach Marina, the bewitched feeling he’d had with Catherine was mostly gone, dissipated by the two messages he’d had from the unit. One was a new admission, the other an update on Holly Hodges, whom he’d twice caught himself calling Kenesha. Nothing about her condition reassured him. He had called for a neurological consult because he suspected that, in addition to all her other problems, she was bleeding into her brain.

Still a glow lingered, a small pinpoint of light in the dark. He stopped at the row of marina post office boxes to collect his mail and strode down the wooden gangway whistling.

Fog had fallen like a gray shroud over the water, cocooning the dense thicket of sailboat masts. Among them was his own dwelling, an old forty-foot Coronado sailboat. It had once provided diversion for weekend sailors on jaunts to Catalina and Mexico and needed some cosmetic work, but it suited his needs just fine.

It occurred to him as he jumped aboard that the way he’d felt as he’d talked to Catherine, he would have agreed to speak to the press, WISH or no WISH. The thought both exhilarated and unnerved him and was still on his mind as he bent down to put the key in the padlock. Then a movement behind him made him look up and do a double take.

Valerie Webb stood in the shadows watching him, a small smile on her face.

“Greetings.” Valerie moved into the marina light’s cool glow. A silvery veil of moisture covered her red hair and pale trench coat. “I was hoping you wouldn’t be too late. It’s a touch chilly out here.”

“Val.” Martin pulled himself up, the padlock still in his hand. “What the hell are you doing here?” His mind scrambled for an explanation, then he remembered that she’d done the press briefing. It seemed an unlikely reason for her visit, but he thanked her, apologized for not having done so earlier.