by Lori Wilde
She returned to her stool and her instrument tray.
Not long afterward, the patient, a sixty-five-year-old retired construction worker who’d suffered a heart attack, arrived on a gurney, and their work began in earnest.
Lacy tried to focus on her job, handing Pam, the circulating nurse, the equipment she needed to prep the patient—antiseptic swabs, sterile towels, bags of saline. On automatic pilot, she moved through the activities she performed with experienced ease several times a day. Her mind restlessly toyed with thoughts of Dr. Sheridan.
Calm down, Lacy.
She couldn’t afford to make rash assumptions. Too much was at stake. She needed to give her emotions a chance to cool off. Maybe this is only happening because her twenty-eight birthday was looming, and her biological clock is ticking.
It sounded good, anyway. Her rational mind tried to slacken the stampede racing through her stomach, but her heart wasn’t buying one word of it.
He’s the one, he’s the one, he’s the one. Her blood sang through her veins.
Helplessly, her eyes sought him again. She observed Bennett from behind as he spoke in low tones with the anesthesiologist, Dr. Grant Tennison.
She admired how the material of his scrub pants stretched across his backside. She noticed that the hair poking out from the back of his surgical cap and trailing a short distance down his neck was thick, wavy, and black.
More validation. Lacy had always pictured herself with a black-haired, brown-eyed man.
I want to curl up on the sofa and read the Sunday paper with him, she thought.
She wanted to roll over in bed every morning and find him snoozing on the pillow next to mine. She yearned to go to the supermarket with him and pick out favorite comfort foods together. She hungered to feed him ice chips from a spoon when he has a fever. She ached to learn how he brushed his teeth and put on his shoes and buttered his bread. She longed for him to ask her opinion—does this tie go with this suit? Or should he grow a mustache? She wanted him to worry when she wasn’t home in time for dinner.
This man was everything she had ever wanted and so much more.
Drop dead good looks, stellar career ahead of him, a come-on-over-to-play-at-my-house smile, and most of all...
Fireworks.
Peering into his eyes had shown her a glimpse of what lay in store. An earth-rocking sensation she could not deny. Red-hot-chili-pepper sparks that took her breath and promised so much more.
Rapture skipped through her as she thought of kissing him. How would it feel to have his full, firm lips snuggled flush against hers? His tongue eagerly exploring her mouth?
Bennett turned and gave her an I-know-what-you’re-thinking-you-naughty-woman expression.
Swiftly, Lacy feigned intense interest in her work. She repositioned the instruments on the tray stand and breathed in stale air through her mask. The powerful lights beaming down on them seemed hotter than normal, stirring the flutters in her tummy.
Now that she had found him, how was she going to convince him that she was his Miss Right?
Her innate shyness had often hampered her in nursing school, and it was the main reason she worked in surgery. Here, she never dealt directly with the patients. She could help people without interacting with them too much.
It had taken her months to develop the working relationship she had with the surgeons and the other nurses. Her co-workers occasionally teased her about her introversion, but after six years, she had at last become comfortable in her job.
She must overcome this accursed shyness. She absolutely must. Otherwise Bennett Sheridan, aka the thunderbolt, would complete his residency at Saint Madeleine’s and be on his way without anything more having passed between them than a few meaningful glances.
Lacy could not let Mr. Right march out of her life. She had to do something to get his attention, had to force herself to conquer her natural reticence with the opposite sex.
But what?
And how?
“Great-Gramma, it’s me, Lacy.”
“Drahy! Is that you?”
“Yes.”
“You sound so far away.”
“I’m on my cell phone at work.” Lacy glanced over her shoulder to make sure she was alone in the locker room before speaking freely.
She had a few minutes between surgeries and instead of taking a coffee break in the lounge, she’d felt compelled to give her great-grandmother a quick call. As if there was such a thing as a fast phone conversation with her family.
“Oh, my dear girl, I’m so glad you called. I’m missing you.”
“I miss you, too.”
“Have I got a story for you.” Her great-grandmother’s rich laughter rolled easily across the miles. “Frank Sinatra munched your cousin Edward’s undershorts right off the clothesline. You should have Edward’s face. Beet red!”
Frank Sinatra, whose eclectic diet consisted of everything from spray starch cans to potato vines, was Great-Gramma’s favorite ram, named after her favorite singer. She raised a small herd of Tennessee fainting goats, who were known for their odd defense mechanism of fainting at the first sign of danger.
Except Old Blue Eyes’ namesake was so ornery he rarely fainted anymore. Nothing seemed to scare him. Not even Great-Gramma chasing him with her marble rolling pin she used to make kalaches.
“Gramma, I don’t have time to talk about Frank Sinatra. I’ve got something very important to tell you.”
“What has happened?” Immediate concern tinged her great-grandmother’s voice. “Something is wrong.”
“Nothing is wrong.” Lacy took a deep breath. She could almost see the tiny ninety-two-year-old woman hunched over the phone in the family’s eight-hundred-square-foot kitchen in West, Texas. “Something is very right.”
“Don’t tell me....” She inhaled sharply.
“Yes.” Lacy nodded. “It’s happened.”
Great-Gramma gasped. “The thunderbolt?”
“Uh-huh.”
Her great-grandmother let out another laugh. “At long last. But wait, let me call to your mother and your grandmother Nony. They’ll want to hear this, too.”
“Gramma, I only have a few minutes.”
But it was too late. Great-Gramma had already laid the phone down. Lacy heard the receiver clank against the antique oak kitchen table that had been passed down through five generations, and a wave of homesickness washed over her.
Just then the locker room door opened, and Pam sailed in.
“Don’t forget, the next surgery starts in twenty minutes,” the circulating nurse said before disappearing into the adjoining bathroom.
Rats.
Even with a closed door between them, Lacy was afraid Pam might overhear her rather private conversation. Pensively, she studied her locker. Hmm. She was small enough to fit.
Casting a glance over her shoulder to make sure no one else had come into the lounge, she opened her locker, wedged herself inside, and closed the door behind her. A spare lab jacket brushed against her face, and she had to balance on top of the street shoes she wore to work.
Inside the locker it was black as midnight and hot and stuffy. Just when she decided this was a dumb idea, her great-grandmother came back on the line.
“Now, drahy, we are all here. Tell us all about the thunderbolt.”
“Hang on, Gramma.” Lacy heard her mother’s voice in the background. “Let me put her on speakerphone.”
“These newfangled gadgets,” Great-Gramma muttered.
“I can’t talk long,” Lacy reminded them. “I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Sweetheart, this is your mama.”
“And your Nony,” Lacy’s grandmother chimed in.
“Hi, everyone. I had to tell you I’ve been struck by the thunderbolt.”
All the women on the other end of the phone rejoiced, laughing and telling her, “Congratulations!” Even long distance they were overwhelming.
As quickly as she could, Lacy filled them in on the
details.
“So what’s the problem, drahy?” Great-Gramma asked. “You got hit by the thunderbolt. That’s all you need to know.”
“I don’t know how to approach him. You know how I get when I’m around men that I like. And this is ten times worse. I say stupid things. I fall down. I drop stuff. What can I do not to look like a fool?”
“You do nothing,” Great-Gramma advised.
“He will come to you,” Her grandmother Nony promised.
“Listen to your grandmothers. It will all work out,” Lacy’s mother said.
“But how can you be so sure?”
“Trust in the power of the thunderbolt!” all three chimed in unison. “It will never lead you astray.”
“Okeydokey. Thanks so much. I love you guys.”
“We love you, too,” Grandmother Nony said.
“Bring your thunderbolt to see us soon,” Great-Gramma said. “We want to meet him.”
“Enjoy being in love,” her mother said. “You deserve it, darling.”
“Goodbye.” Lacy severed the connection and leaned back in the locker, her heart pounding.
Love.
Was she really, truly in love at first sight? Maybe she was reading more into this feeling than she should. Maybe it was just sexual chemistry and not the thunderbolt at all.
That thought gave her serious pause.
She heard the locker room outer door close, and she figured Pam had left. Time to get back to work. Lacy pushed against the locker door.
It didn’t open.
She fumbled in the darkness, her fingers grazing over the cool metal. No handle on this side of the door.
This was just ducky. She was going to be late for the next surgery. Pam would have her hide. Not to mention that she’d placed herself in a very embarrassing situation.
“Help,” she said in a small voice. “Is there anybody out there?”
Silence.
She tried the door again without success. She would never live this down. She’d be the laughingstock of the OR.
The outer door creaked on its hinges. She heard footsteps.
“Hello?” she tried again.
“Hello?” A deep male voice rumbled. “Am I having a conversation with a talking locker?”
“Uh, could you open the door for me? I sorta got locked in.”
“Lacy?”
“Yes.” Then, to her utter chagrin, she recognized the voice.
The door swung open, and she looked into Bennett’s laughing eyes. He diplomatically hid his smirk behind a palm.
She wriggled her fingers at him. “Hi.”
“Should I ask what you’re doing in there? Or is it better if I don’t know?”
“Just making a phone call.” She stepped from the locker and held her head high as if it were perfectly normal to sequester yourself inside your locker.
“I’ve got a news flash for you, Supergirl,” he teased. “That’s not a phone booth.”
She held up her cell phone as proof that she had indeed utilized the locker as a phone booth, but not before wishing the floor would crack open and swallow her up whole.
“Thanks for letting me out.”
“Anytime.”
“Well,” she said, slipping her phone into the pocket of her lab coat and kicking her locker door closed with her foot. “I better get back to work.”
“Ditto.” He was still grinning.
Lacy inched toward the door.
“See you,” she said.
“We’re doing the same operation. I’m right behind you.”
“Oh.”
Feeling like a hundred shades of fool, Lacy turned tail and bolted down the hallway before she did something really stupid, like trip over her own shoelaces and go down in a heap at his feet.
3
“It’s hopeless,” Lacy moaned to her closest friends, CeeCee Adams and Janet Hunter.
“Hopeless?” CeeCee asked. “How?”
“Bennett’s been at Saint Madeleine’s for five weeks, and I haven’t worked up enough courage to speak to him outside the operating suites. Not only that, but I’m sure he thinks I’m a complete idiot. And I could swear he’s purposely been avoiding me.”
It was late Friday afternoon, and the women were in Lacy’s living room at the River Run apartment complex. CeeCee lived across the courtyard and Janet’s apartment was directly above Lacy’s.
River Run was a moderately priced development only three blocks from the hospital where they all worked.
Lacy had lived here for the six years since she’d been out of nursing school, and until the past few months, she’d loved her little corner apartment with the great view of Washington Park. But lately she’d grown restless.
Suddenly, she had a desire for more space. A house to call her own. A front yard where she could plant flowers and grow vegetables. A place to raise a family.
Except she had no one to raise a family with, and unless she did something drastic to defeat her shyness, she might never get the opportunity.
She would spend the rest of her life in this tiny one-bedroom apartment, a lonely old lady who had missed out on her Mr. Right because she had been too paralyzed with fear to pursue him.
Try as she might to reassure herself that she was simply following the advice of the women in her family and letting the thunderbolt to take its course, in her heart, Lacy knew she’d embraced the path of least resistance.
Deep down inside she’d known all along that nothing was going to happen between her and Bennett unless she got brave enough to open her mouth and have a conversation with him. She had to make this happen. That’s what was so scary.
“It’s not hopeless.” Janet reached for an apple from the fruit bowl on the coffee table.
Tall and willowy, with chin-length dark hair and inquisitive indigo eyes, she was Lacy’s physical opposite. Janet had lived at River Run for less than a year.
Janet had recently completed her pediatric residency and was hoping to get in with the group of renowned pediatricians on Blanton Street whose offices were adjacent to the hospital.
“I’m proof of that.” Janet smoothed imaginary wrinkles from her tailored gray slacks.
“What do you mean?” Lacy leaned forward. She and Janet sat on the sofa while CeeCee lay on the carpet doing crunches.
A physical therapist, CeeCee was fanatical about staying in shape. It paid off. In Lacy’s opinion, red-haired CeeCee had a figure that could rival any movie star’s and a sparkling personality to match.
“I used to be shyer than you,” Janet told Lacy.
“Nobody’s shyer than me.”
Janet snorted. “Oh, yes. In med school, before I could work up the courage to go into my first patient’s room, I had to stand in the hall and give myself a twenty-minute pep talk.”
“It took me thirty minutes,” Lacy confessed.
“See? If there’s hope for me, there’s hope for you.”
“I would never have taken you for a shy person,” Lacy said. “You’re so self-assured.”
“It’s all an act. Or at least it was in the beginning. Perceiving, behaving, becoming. If you believe you’re competent and outgoing, then you’ll become that way, and once you get over being shy, you’ll never go back. Right, CeeCee?”
“Don’t ask me.” CeeCee huffed as she lifted her shoulders off the carpet and rolled forward. “I was born to socialize.”
“I wish I could be like that,” Lacy said wistfully. “I hate crowds and parties. It’s tough thinking of things to say. I much prefer curling up with a good book any day of the week to the pressure of having to make small talk with strangers.”
Lacy observed her friends. They brightened her life like fresh-cut flowers on the windowsill or homemade bread hot from the oven, slathered with butter, or soothing classical music on the stereo. She treasured them, and yet she envied them, too.
How she wished she could be more like breezy, fun-loving CeeCee or no-nonsense, down-to-earth Janet. Instead, she was a cl
umsy, meek wimp. Too shy to come out of her shell but hating her self-imposed isolation.
If it hadn’t been for CeeCee stepping across the courtyard three years ago looking for a cup of alfalfa sprouts, Lacy would still be friendless in Houston.
It had also been CeeCee who, ten months before, had invited Janet to join them for a run in the park. Since then the three of them had been inseparable. Currently, none of them had boyfriends. And until Lacy had met Bennett Sheridan, she’d been content with her life.
After she’d first laid eyes on him, she’d been unable to think of anything else. She’d confided her interest in Bennett to her friends but fearing their ridicule in her belief in love at first sight, she hadn’t told them about the thunderbolt.
CeeCee believed that you made your own magic no matter what partner you were with, while cynical Janet didn’t believe in romantic love at all.
“Lacy needs our help,” Janet reminded CeeCee. “Got any great ideas?”
“Makeover!” CeeCee shouted gleefully.
“Makeover?” Anxiously, Lacy reached a hand up to pat her honey-blond hair, which hung in a single braid down her back, and she glanced at her loose-fitting cream-colored floral jumper. “What’s wrong with the way I look?”
“No offense, sweetie.” CeeCee drew her knees to her chin in a characteristic gesture. She was wearing black Lycra leggings, ballet slippers, and a stretchy pink crop top. Her tomato-red curls flowed like a flame across her shoulders, free and unfettered. “But you don’t dress to attract the male species.”
Lacy winced at her friend’s honesty. True enough. She purposely picked outfits that would not draw attention—no flamboyant colors, no short skirts or plunging necklines.
She preferred sensible clothing. Flats to high heels, stud earrings to dangly hoops, clear nail polish to scarlet. Yes, the more conservative her attire, the more secure she felt.
Except when it came to her undies. There she indulged herself, allowing her fantasies free rein. She could afford to splurge on panties, teddies, and bras. She had nothing to be afraid of. Men never saw her underwear.
“Why do I have to call attention to myself?” She frowned.
