Читать книгу The M.D. Meets His Match - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 10

The temperature change registered immediately as the night air briskly embraced April, cooling her skin. The temporary heat of the afternoon had gone as if it had never existed, a cold snap settling in. She’d forgotten how cold it could be in Hades despite the calendar.

Running her hands up and down her arms, April looked up at the sky. The stars were out in full regalia, framing a moon that was full and bright. Less than a handful of streetlights dotted the area, their illumination paling in comparison to the moon’s.

The last time she’d stood here like this, there hadn’t been anything but darkness. This was progress, she supposed. As everything else in Hades, it came slowly.

When she felt a hand gently settle on her shoulder, April jumped and swung around. Her breathing steadied slightly as her eyes looked up at Jimmy’s face, still flush from the warmth within the saloon.

The man obviously couldn’t take no for an answer.

Her eyes asked him what he was doing out here after she’d said she wanted to be left alone.

“Like she means it,” he repeated, echoing his sentiment from only moments earlier.

It took her a second to remember. And then she frowned. “I meant it. What, I didn’t sound convincing enough to you?”

In deference to the chill, he buttoned the top two buttons of his workshirt. “Not to my ears.” Amusement glinted in his eyes. “Must have been all that noise inside,” he told her innocently. He saw that wasn’t going down so well. “Where I come from, it’s not polite to tell the guest of honor to get lost.”

She laughed to herself, thinking of the crowd inside the Salty. “I hate to break it to you, but you’re more of the excuse of honor than the guest of honor.”

He shrugged, unfazed. “As long as it involves honor, I’m all right with it.”

“Oh, and honor means a lot to you, does it?”

The grin abated just a little, his manner growing ever so slightly serious. “It has its place in my life.”

Suddenly his serious mood was gone. Jimmy hunched his shoulders against the wind, wondering if he’d seem like a hopeless tenderfoot if he opted to go inside for the jacket he’d left slung over the back of his chair. April seemed to be faring well in just a simple blouse. A simple blouse that was hugging curves guaranteed to make a man’s mouth water. The button just at her chest level strained against its hole every time she took a breath. He tried to not stare. His fingers itched to help coax the separation.

Shoving his hands into his pockets only partially for warmth, he looked up at the moon. “So, what does a person do around Hades for excitement?”

“Leave.”

He looked at her. “Seriously.”

April inclined her head. “Seriously.”

Jimmy couldn’t tell if she was deadpanning or not. “My sister seems pretty content.”

April had made her own judgment about nurse Alison LeBlanc and found herself liking the woman, although they had little in common. “Your sister belongs to that amazing fraternal club of people who give of themselves and feel that they actually have a calling in life to tend to the sick and the needy.”

Alison had always been a caretaker, even though she was the youngest. And there was no denying that her heart was in the right place. But Jimmy had a little bit of trouble with April’s assessment of the townspeople. He nodded toward the closed door behind them. “That didn’t strike me as a needy bunch in there.”

April’s mouth twitched. “You should see them around closing time.” And then the would-be smile faded. “Actually, I meant ‘needy’ as in needing. My sister June decided to remain in Hades after she graduated. She could have had her pick of careers, but she opened up a car repair shop of all things. Said the place needed one and since she’d always been so handy when it came to fixing things, it was a good match.” Her frown indicated what she thought of that idea. “When he was growing up, my brother Max dreamed about joining the FBI. Now he’s content to be the only law around here.” She shook her head, his decision mystifying her. “Not that there’s any crime in Hades in the conventional sense of the word.”

Her wording intrigued him. “What’s unconventional crime?”

“When Victor, one of the Inuits, kept springing Simon Gallagher’s traps so he couldn’t catch any beaver.” She couldn’t help feeling that her brother was wasting his life here, but it was his to waste she supposed. “Max certainly can’t keep busy handing out speeding tickets and the last murder here was—” She stopped to think and realized that if there had been a murder in Hades, she certainly had no knowledge of it. “I don’t know when.”

Jimmy smiled at the scenario she was unconsciously painting for him. He and his family hailed from Seattle where crime was an everyday event. He could think of several people who would more than welcome life in Hades.

He looked at her. “Sounds like a nice place, actually.”

“Bland,” April corrected firmly. “It sounds bland.”

There was nothing bland about facing the hardships he was sure this place afforded. That took courage and fortitude. But he saw no point in getting into a discussion over it with her. So he humored her instead. “And you crave excitement.”

She looked out over the terrain, asleep except for the party in the building behind them. There wasn’t much to see and what there was of it was dark. Even the theater was closed. Since everyone in town was at the Salty, there had been no reason to keep the theater open tonight. She could remember all those years, aching to get as far away from Hades as possible.

“What I crave,” she told him, “is something with a pulse.”

The grin on his lips was warm, inviting as he held up his hand for her to examine. “I have a pulse.”

A smile began to bud on her lips. April could only shake her head. He’d gotten her again. “I have to learn to pick my words more carefully around you.”

He moved a little closer to her as the wind rose. “Does that mean you’ll be around me?”

He was too close, but to back away would imply that she was afraid, or wary, and that wasn’t the sort of image she cared to project. So she stood her ground and ignored the feelings taking place inside of her. “There you go again.”

He liked the way her eyes snapped, and the way she smelled when the wind shifted, bringing the scent of her perfume to him. Ever since he could remember, he’d always paid attention to women. All women. The pretty ones he paid a little more attention to.

Inspired by the subtle nuances he was picking up, Jimmy decided to make another pitch. “You can’t be postmistressing all the time. I mean, a place like this can’t get that much mail—seeing as how there aren’t that many people here. You have to have some free hours, what do you do then?”

Stepping to the side, she moved away from him. “Take care of my grandmother.”

A high-pitched laugh reached them from within, escaping through the fraction of an inch where the window sash failed to meet the sill. They turned and April could see her grandmother was standing right next to the window. From all appearances, she was vamping the socks off the gray-bearded man she was with. Jimmy, eyeing Yuri Bostovik, noticed that he looked almost besotted with April’s grandmother.

Nothing he liked better than to see seniors enjoying their lives. Jimmy grinned and looked at April. “Looks to me like your grandmother is taking care of herself.” More than a touch of admiration mingled with his amusement.

The way April saw it, Gran was doing the exact opposite. She should have been at home, resting, not out at the saloon. The woman had angina, for heaven’s sake. But there had been no talking her out of coming. Gran had been insistent. Until this moment, despite Gran’s blatant allusions to Yuri, April had thought it was to insure her coming here. Now she wasn’t so sure.

She watched the older couple move and meld into the crowd. April shook her head. “Gran’s headstrong. She absolutely refuses to let me take her to Anchorage—to the hospital there.”

The woman looked healthy enough, even glowing, but Jimmy knew how deceptive appearances could be.

“Can’t Shayne treat her? Alison says he’s the best.” He remembered feigning jealousy when Alison had told him that, but they’d both known he’d been kidding. He hadn’t an envious bone in his body. And he knew that while Alison was kind, she wasn’t recklessly lavish with her praise. She called them as she saw them.

“I’m sure he is for the common everyday things, but it’s her heart—”

“What about her heart?”

Because they’d been preying on her mind ever since she’d received June’s letter, the words were out before she realized that she was sharing them. “She has angina and Shayne suggested an angiogram to see if there’s any sort of blockage. Her EKG looks good, but an electrocardiogram is almost useless in determining the actual condition of a heart—and she’d been having these pains.”

Jimmy wondered how much was true and how much had been fabricated by Ursula Hatcher for April’s benefit. From what Alison had told him, he had a hunch the crafty-looking woman on the other side of the pane had exaggerated her condition to get something she wanted—her granddaughter in the area. “What kind of tests have been done?”

Interest mingled in with her suspicion. “What kind of a doctor are you?”

“A good one, I’d like to think.” He regarded Ursula’s profile with interest before turning back to one that interested him more at the moment. “I can take a look at her for you if you’d like.”

“I don’t need her looked at, I need her scanned.”

Jimmy laughed. “You make her sound like some sort of digitalized cartoon character.”

“No, she’s a person,” April said softly as she watched her grandmother shamelessly flirt. “A very precious person.”

Jimmy watched as moonbeams tangled themselves in April’s hair. Urges whispered softly through him. It was hard keeping his mind on the conversation. “She’d have to be, to get you to come back to a place you hate so much.”

April didn’t like having things presumed about her, or having words put in her mouth. “I never said I hated Hades.”

Was she serious? He looked at her expression, clearly challenging him, and realized that she was. Very serious. “In every way but to actually use the word,” he contradicted.

She opened her mouth to put him in his place then closed it again, deciding the argument wasn’t worth the effort. Not when he was right. It was just that she didn’t like having someone read her so well, not a stranger at any rate.

Shrugging, she looked away. “It’s just that I find it stifling here, confining.”

“Oh, I don’t know. When something’s unformed like Hades, there’s a world of possibilities in that vastness. You can do anything, be anything. It’s like a huge empty canvas you can paint on.”

He’d said he was visiting, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe he was checking things out. “You sound like somebody who’s fixing to make a monumental move.”

Not hardly, he thought. He had everything set up for him at the hospital back in Seattle. That had taken some doing. Besides, Kevin was having enough trouble with Alison being so far away. His older brother would seriously flip out if two members of his family were more than an hour away by regular route. Jimmy supposed, after sacrificing so much for them, Kevin felt he deserved to be part of their lives once those lives took shape.

Jimmy shrugged casually. “No, just somebody who’s always got his eye out for possibilities.”

“I would have thought that someone like you would have restricted his possibilities to women.”

“There’s that field, too.” His grin was wide and it tugged at her, pulling her in against her will. “But not restricted, never restricted.”

When he looked into her eyes like that, she found she had trouble thinking. Good thing she’d stepped out for some air when she had. She’d definitely been in danger of light-headedness. “So, where do you practice—medicine, I mean.”

“I don’t have to practice,” he told her, his voice low, moving slowly around her, hypnotizing her. “I have it down pat—medicine, I mean.”

April shivered, trying to snap out of the trance she felt herself falling into.

“Cold?”

It was as good an excuse as any. “Yes. Spring here is only a little warmer than winter at times.”

Too late she realized it was the wrong thing to say because he slipped his arm around her shoulders, then shielded her against the wind with his body. “Maybe we’d better get you inside.”

She’d gotten good at rejecting men who came on to her. She could do a put-down with just a well-aimed glance. There was no doubt in her mind that James Quintano was definitely coming on to her. She could feel it in every bone in her body. But when she turned her head toward him, no words came, no well-honed, belittling glance found its way into her eyes. Instead, she felt a definite pull toward this man she didn’t know.

“Maybe,” she agreed, her voice hardly above a whisper.

Reaching around her, he put out his hand to push open the door. And wound up wrapping that same hand around her other side instead. Pulling her to him.

He’d meant to be on his best behavior, he really had. But when she looked at him like that, with the moonlight caressing her face and moonbeams getting lost in that tangle of hair that invited his fingers to touch it, he felt something stronger than his good intentions stir within his gut.

Before he quite knew what he was doing, natural born instincts had him cupping her cheek and tilting her face up to his. Had him touching his mouth to hers to break the spell because nothing could taste as good as her lips looked.

He was wrong.

They could.

Maybe it was because he’d been at loose ends ever since Melinda had canceled out on him, begging off from the cruise because of some personal emergency at home that now eluded his brain.

The real emergency, he’d had no doubt at the time, was that she’d had marriage on her mind and he’d had nothing more serious than a pleasant interlude on his. It wasn’t that he had anything against marriage in general, just nothing for it in particular when it came to himself. He reasoned that he saw enough dying at the hospital, he didn’t need to be part of something that, no matter what, had a finite lifespan. His parents had driven that lesson home long before he’d ever put on his first pair of scrubs.

But that belief in no way made him monastic. For him, relationships lasted as long as they were mutually beneficial, comforting and light. While he was involved, he could be counted on for emotional support, a kind word and to be summoned in the middle of the night in case of a breakdown—as long as he wasn’t on call. Even after a relationship had run its course, he usually remained on good terms with the woman. But he’d made it a rule never to meet the woman’s family or to discuss anything more romantically serious than pending plans for the weekend. He didn’t believe in committing himself to anything longer than that.