Читать книгу With A Little Help - Valerie Parv, Valerie Parv - Страница 11

WHAT THE HELL? STANDING IN front of him, slim but curved in all the right places and barely reaching up to his chin, Emma looked like a terrier ready to take on a rottweiler. Her workout clothes were rumpled from sitting on the grass, and her skin glowed with recent exertion. Her hair was carelessly twisted at the back and caught up in a tortoiseshell clip, making him want to undo the golden mass and send it tumbling to her shoulders. The red-gold strands curling around her ears and nape teased at him like a promise of things to come.

He pushed the thought away. Somehow she’d gotten the idea that he wanted more from her than her catering skills. Unfortunately, she wasn’t entirely wrong. He’d felt the attraction between them from first meeting. He’d seen her brother slip the vodka into her drink, but hadn’t known until later that it wasn’t her idea, intrigued to think she needed Dutch courage to approach him.

Since then he’d relived the memory of her kiss more times than was good for him. Her approach had been naive, fueled by the party mood, but the taste of her had awakened a desire for more. When Cherie had suggested he talk to Emma about his birthday dinner, he’d felt like a nervous teenager.

Unlike the model types he usually dated, Emma wasn’t beautiful in the runway sense. Her looks were too distinctive, her nose a fraction too sharp, and her mouth a touch wide for perfection. But when she smiled or gave her infectious laugh, she was stunning. A pang of jealousy still gripped him when he thought of her laughing with another man at her parents’ function. She hadn’t ever laughed with Nate like that.

Her sea-green eyes shone now and she clasped her hands together, her expression daring him not to take her seriously. “You’d better explain what you mean, because I seem to have missed a step or two.”

“I doubt you’ve missed a step in your life, Dr. Hale,” she said. “Did my mother suggest I might be part of the package if you hired me?”

His patience was becoming strained. “I can’t deny it’s an attractive thought. But if anyone put that idea in my head, it was you.”

She looked taken aback. He was almost sorry to see some of the fire fade from her eyes. Anger was a pure, honest emotion, stripping a person of artifice. What you saw was what you got. And in Emma’s case, what he saw was enough to raise his blood pressure several points.

“Really?” She sounded skeptical. “We’ve had only one business meeting.”

“And another meeting that was pure pleasure.” For him, anyway. It was hardly his fault if she felt embarrassed by the encounter. He’d go back for seconds anytime.

Color bloomed in her cheeks. “I might have known you’d bring that up. I made one mistake…”

“Are you sure it was a mistake?”

“It—it had to be. I didn’t want…”

Her stammered denial was enough to convince him that she’d been as affected by their brief kiss as he had. He was tempted to see if the chemistry he recalled was still potent and leaned close enough to feel her breath whispering across his mouth before he caught himself. His shoulders felt stiff as he pulled back, and a growing discomfort told him they weren’t the only part of him hardening. He was going to end up proving her right about scheming to have her as part of the package.

“You have some rigid ideas about doctors’ lives,” he said. “I invited you along on this walk to show you we aren’t all the same. If you and I are going to work together, it will be easier if you stop treating me as the enemy. You can’t deny that’s what you’ve been doing.”

She let her hands drop to her sides. “Any ideas I have are based on long experience.”

“Not with me.”

“No.”

But her tone said she reserved the right to toss him in with all the other medical people she knew. What had they done to her to prejudice her so thoroughly against an entire profession? Most people thought of doctors as valuable members of a community. Emma treated them as arrogant bastards who were out to make her life unpleasant. Maybe while she worked for him, he could ferret out the reasons for her hostility. He realized he wanted to do that very much. Did he think that once he overcame the hurdle, whatever it was, he’d have a chance to get to first base with her? That seemed selfish. Yet the more he tried to convince himself he wanted to help for Emma’s sake only, the hollower it sounded.

His own psychoanalysis could wait, he decided. There was still that blasted party he didn’t want, but which his friends clearly expected him to make happen. He found he also didn’t want to do it without Emma. Afterward, he could worry about where they went next.

EMMA’S THOUGHTS WERE IN turmoil as they set off again down the wide path past Timbrell Park, where a family group was enjoying a ball game. Seeing a father chase after his toddler, she felt an unexpected pang. What would it be like to have a man give you children, then cherish you both the way this man obviously did?

The child giggled as he was scooped up and carried shoulder-high back to his mother. The sight made Emma smile. What a contrast to her own father, rigid with anger, returning his four-year-old Emma to her mother in Gramma Jessie’s kitchen.

Emma’s smile faded. No loving warmth for her, only disapproval over the worry she’d caused. Emma’s cuts and scrapes had been treated with clinical care, but her emotional distress had been completely ignored. As an adult, she still suffered occasional nightmares about being lost in a dark, forbidding place as a result of that experience, but apart from Jessie’s interest, her family had never mentioned the incident again.

She dismissed the memory and focused on Nate’s assertion that she was the one putting ideas into his head. One impetuous kiss at a party didn’t amount to an open invitation. Had she sent subtle signals of her interest to him in other ways she hadn’t been aware of, or was he simply confirming her belief that doctors made their own rules?

The solution was to be as clinical as her parents in her dealings with Nate. From now on there would be no casual meetings in gardens, on walking trails or anywhere outside their respective offices. He would soon get the message that their dealings were to be strictly business.

Nate looked equally deep in thought as they paced out the remaining distance back to the Iron Cove Bridge. She’d read that the bridge had replaced an earlier one from the eighteen-eighties that had once carried trams, and tried to imagine the now busy suburbs when horses and carts had ruled the roads.