For a moment Kate couldn't beheve she had actually done it. The commitment she had just made to this man was going to change her life, and she waited for the panic, the regret, the second thoughts. None came. There was nothing but confidence in her tone as she sealed their bargain with her own handclasp. ''We're going to be good together, Jeff."
They both laughed as she realized that her statement had sounded like anything except a business deal, and Jeff winked at her as he turned to go. "And our children will have blond hair. I'll be in touch before I come back down. You'll let me know how Mr. Kensington progresses, won't you?"
Mr. Kensington was the patient on whom he had done emergency surgery in her examining room. "Yes, I will." Her eyes were still dancing warmly as he picked up his raincoat and opened the door. "I'll see you in two weeks. Drive carefully."
When he was gone, Kate leaned against her desk and thought about what she had done. It was incredible what the past twenty-four hours had brought. If anyone had told her that in such a brief time she would survive a natural disaster, treat over one hundred patients—including assisting at an ether-anesthetized surgery and setting her father's broken leg—witness her house fall down around her ears and take a virtual stranger into permanent partnership in her practice, she would have replied quite calmly, "Not in this lifetime." She hadn't the stamina, the physical skills or the temperament to deal with such outrageous demands from life. And she was certain that when she looked back on the experience, she would find that another woman had taken over her body, for very little in her behavior of late reminded her of anything that was Kate Larimer.
The day had been a busy one, and it was only half over. Fortifying herself for the worst, Kate left her office to inspect the damage to her own house.
It was a sad sight. Kate had never considered herself a sentimental person, but standing in the street, looking at the caved-in roof, the scattered glass, the one shingle hanging forlornly by a corner on the front window, Kate felt a low sinking in her stomach. She had loved that house. It wasn't large or pretentious or architecturally original; it wasn't very old or very valuable, and she had only lived in it for five years, but it was hers. She had decorated every inch of it herself, lavishing her spare time and her creative instincts on hanging wallpaper and building window seats, choosing handmade rugs and original art, shopping antique stores and galleries for just the right accessories. Until this very minute she had never realized how much of herself had been invested in a place to live, and it hurt her, deep inside, to see it so desecrated.
But worse had happened to her in the past day, and she squared her shoulders and took a breath as she made her way carefully up the littered walk and through the front door.
The first thing that struck her was how much worse it looked through the clear eyes of reason than it had last night in the blur of panic. It wasn't just the dining room's bay window that was broken, but two of the living room windows, as well. Beams and plaster littered the floor; a broken water pipe hung wantonly from the ceiling. Pictures had been thrown from the walls, and crushed bric-a-brac was scattered everywhere. The west wall bowed inward from the weight of a tree that had fallen on the roof, and a magnificent crack ran the length of the ceiling as far as she could see. The second thing she realized was that she would have to find some other place to spend the night.
The enormity of the cleanup task that lay before her was overwhelming, and she could only deal with a small portion at a time. The first thing she had to do was board up the windows against more inclement weather. She stripped off her lab coat and tossed it over a broken chair, then went to the storage shed in search of tools, giving the tire of her crushed car a disgruntled kick as she passed.
As was typical of the random damage caused by tornadoes, her small aluminum storage shed was untouched, while her house, her car, even the chain-link fence that bordered her backyard, were in shambles. Inside the shed she found some scraps of lumber she had collected over the years and dragged them to the house, returning for the stepladder and a hammer and nails. She set up the stepladder outside the dining room first and went immediately to work covering the hole that used to be the window.
That was where Kevin found her fifteen minutes later. "You have pretty legs, Katie," he drawled from beneath her.
Kate was certain the light skipping rhythm of her heart was from no more than surprise, and she replied without turning, "That's very adolescent, Dawson." She banged in another nail. "Standing under a ladder just to look up a girl's skirt."
"I am not standing under the ladder," he protested. "I'm standing beside it. And..." He grinned as she glanced at him. "I can't see all the way up your skirt. Just enough to tell you have pretty legs."
Kate positioned another nail and dropped it as she drew back the hammer. "Then make yourself useful and hand me that nail. What are you doing here, anyway?"
"I've been here a couple of times today. I thought you'd need some help getting your things together. Now, come on down from there. You're making me nervous."
She turned on the ladder and saw he was extending his arm to her. She also noticed that he had shaved and changed clothes and was no longer wearing a sling. A collarless knit shirt was tucked into stylishly loose-fitting white pants; he wore black suspenders and white sneakers. The placket buttons of his shirt were undone at the throat, and the elasticized waistband of the high-fashion pants emphasized his lean, lazy form. He looked tanned and healthy and as sexy as a television commercial, and under the circumstances Kate should have resented his expensive good looks. Instead, she found him enormously and unaccountably appealing.
"Why aren't you wearing your sling?" she asked.
"Your dad said I should try to use my fingers, and I couldn't very well do that with my arm bound up. Are you coming down or not?"
She could hardly argue with her father's prescription, as much as she might have liked to. So she merely replied, with as little ill grace as possible, "If you rip out my stitches, I'll make you put them back in yourself.''
"Yes, ma'am. But if you don't get off that ladder, I'm going to be forced to volunteer to do the job myself, and that wouldn't be very good for either my shoulder or my ego. I'm not exactly an expert with nails," he confessed, and Kate grinned in spite of herself.
She glanced at her boarding job and decided it would hold for now. She backed carefully down the ladder, Kevin's hand, light upon her waist, guiding her. "I'll have to find some more lumber tomorrow," she said, absently nudging a narrow piece of plywood away with her toe, "to fix the other windows."
"Easier said than done," Kevin pointed out. "The early birds got the lumber today, sweetie. It's going to be hard scrounging up a toothpick around here for the next couple of weeks."
Kevin's hand was still light and protective on her back as she picked her way back into the house over shattered glass and broken shelves toward the living room. Once there, she stopped, letting the full impact of it sweep over her, just once more. Despair was heavy and gripping.
"Oh, Kevin," she said softly, "just look at this."
His hand came up to caress her neck gently, a warm gesture of caring and support. "I know, Katie," he said simply, quietly. "I'm so sorry."
He could have offered encouragement or platitudes; he could have reminded her how lucky she was to be alive and how less fortunate some of her neighbors were; he could have minimized the damage or made some blithe comment about insurance coverage. Had the positions been reversed, Kate was certain she would have resorted to some of those meaningless tactics to lighten the moment. But Kevin did not. He simply said, "I'm so sorry," and she knew he meant it. He understood, and knowing that he shared the loss with her, in however small a way, strengthened Kate to face it.
She reached up and touched his hand lightly and tried to smile. Then she moved away from him, threading her way through the rubble, compelled to see what could be salvaged.
She moved aside an end table that had been deposited atop a watercolor landscape.
The frame was broken, and the canvas was punctured. But even as she reached, with a stab of sadness and anger, for the destroyed painting, her attention was caught by something else. She knelt on the floor and picked up a fragment of hand-painted porcelain. She looked at it for a long time.
It once had been part of a candy dish delicately painted with butterflies and daisies. Artistically speaking, it was no great treasure and might even have been considered tacky by some, but it had been one of her mother's first experiments with a kiln and paint back during what Kate and her father had laughingly referred to as her mother's "sculptress phase." It was the only thing Kate had taken from her parents' house after her mother's death.
Kevin was standing above her, close and comforting. He said, "I remember that. It used to sit on your mom's coffee table, and she always kept it filled with divinity."
Kate subdued a quick flash of tears, and she wasn't certain whether they were prompted by sorrow or grateful wonder for the fact that there was someone in her life who shared her memories, someone who, despite the changes and movements of the years and even this final great devastation, was connected to her and all she had experienced. Kevin had been there, raiding her mother's divinity dish. Kevin had been there after the funeral, when Kate took the dish home with her. And Kevin was here now, saying goodbye.
There was something very, very special in that.
Kevin knelt beside her, his arm going warmly around her shoulders. With his other hand, he took the fragment of porcelain from her and laid it on the table. "Katie," he said gently, "you probably don't want to hear this now, but after you think about it, I think you'll realize that as bad as all this is, there's some good, somehow... I mean, sometimes you have to wipe out the past to get a good grip on the future. Starting over, sometimes, can be the best thing in the world... and the best way to do it is without anything from the past dragging you down. Do you understand what I mean?"
His eyes were so earnest, so caring, that Kate felt another sting of moisture in her own. The truth was she didn't entirely understand what he meant, nor was she inclined to try at this moment, but she was moved by his concern and deeply grateful. She made an attempt to smile, but the corners of her mouth turned down instead of up, and the expression was reluctantly wry. "Philosophy, huh? I'm impressed, but if you don't mind, I'd really rather feel sorry for myself a little while longer."
"I mind," he said firmly, and he grasped her hand and pulled her to her feet. "Come on; let's get out of this cave before the rest of it falls in on us. You're spending the night with me."
She stared at him, and he gave her a half-apologetic grin. "You probably don't want to hear this now, either, but my place is completely untouched. Still no electricity but plenty of hot water for baths and a dry bed to sleep on. Just throw your things in a suitcase and let's go."
She dismissed it without a thought. "Don't be silly, Kevin. I'm not spending the night with you."
"Oh, yeah?" He regarded her patiently. "Just where were you planning to stay?"
She hesitated only a moment. "With my dad, I guess."
"Bad idea." His fingers closed around her arm, and he guided her toward her bedroom. "For one thing, his place isn't secure—the windows are broken, and the door is sagging. For another, he's not there."
She stopped at the entrance to the bedroom, turning to him in shock and suspicion. She hadn't seen her father since morning. "Where is he?" she demanded.
He replied complacently, "With Iris."
Disbelief and confusion registered on her face. "Iris? What's he doing there?"
Kevin assumed thoughtfulness. "Well, considering the shape his leg is in, probably just watching television and sleeping on the couch. But I don't imagine that will last very long once he's up and moving around."
Kate scowled at the implication, not in the least amused. "You have a filthy mind, Dawson."
He only laughed and gave her a gentle shove mto the bedroom. "This storm is going to make stranger bedfellows than that, Katie. Where's your suitcase?"
"I'm not going home with you." But it was said absently as she noticed, with great relief, that the damage in this room wasn't too extensive. A sheer paneled curtain was caught haphazardly against a shard of broken glass that protruded from the window, and there was a dark stain on her ceiling from a broken pipe, but otherwise everything seemed to be in shape.
Kevin strode over to the closet and opened the door. "Fear not, fair damsel; your reputation is safe with me. iSomehow I suspect the Victoria Bend Gazette will have more than enough copy for their next issue without reporting on who Kevin Dawson slept with while he was in town. Besides, it seems to me your choices are limited. So..." He dragged down her overnight bag one-handed from the closet shelf and tossed it on the bed. "Pack. And take enough for a few days. You shouldn't come back here until someone has been in to shore up the roof.''
Once again, irritably and absently, Kate started to protest, but then the logic in his offer descended on her. Where else was she to go? The thought of spending another night at the clinic did not appeal to her in the least, and the motel was too far away.
She didn't understand why she should be so reluctant about spending the night at Kevin's house, anyway. She thought about the many times Kevin had stayed at her house until three and four o'clock in the morning, eating her popcorn, watching her television and tying up her telephone. Or the marathon Monopoly sessions in which he rooked her father while Kate fell asleep on the couch, waking at dawn to find the two of them still at it. She had never worried about what people would say then. And if she had begun her determined effort to kick Kevin out at midnight, it had been through a sense of impatience, not propriety. Why should this be any different?
She said hesitantly, "You have hot water?"
He regarded her with a confident gleam in his eye. "Uh-huh. Gas water heater."
A bath. She couldn't think at that moment of anything she wanted more.
"Well..." Reluctance was evident in her tone. "Maybe just one night."
He drew a sober face. "I think you've made the right decision, Doctor."
She gave him a playful nudge with her fist as she moved past him toward the closet, and he grinned.
''My clothes are wet!" she exclaimed in dismay, running her hand over the neat row of blouses in her closet.
Kevin glanced up at the ceiling. ''Water pipe," he observed. He pulled open a bureau drawer and looked inside. "Well, these are dry." He scooped up an armload of lingerie and dumped it into the suitcase, then returned for more.
Kate watched him, laughing. "Well, if I want to change my profession from physician to centerfold, I'll be well dressed." She removed the pile of underwear from her overnight bag and tossed it back into the drawer. "When I was six," she remembered, and the chuckles dissolved into a wistful, sparkling smile, "I decided to run away from home, so I packed my suitcase with every pair of panties I owned and nothing else, reasoning that since my mother always told me to wear clean underwear, I was going to be prepared."
Kevin was watching her as she rearranged the clothing in the drawer, and the smile in his eyes was indulgent and pleasured, and as Kate glanced up at him, she thought she caught a glimpse of something else, something that left her half breathless as he lifted his hand as though to caress her or draw her close and then made her feel silly when all he did was slap her lightly and most irreverently on the backside.
"If that's your way of telling me I pack like a six-year-old, you're on your own. I'm going to see what I can scavenge from the kitchen."
He left her feeling immeasurably lighter than she had when she had come to the house less than an hour ago and absurdly pleased with her decision to stay with him tonight. She didn't want to be alone tonight in some motel room or in the uncomfortable confines of her office, with its nightmarish memories. She wanted to relax in the company of someone who was familiar and comforting, someone who understood what she was feeling because he had lived through it with her, yet who was caref
ree enough to allow her to escape, for just a short time, from all that was waiting for her. She didn't want to be alone. She wanted to be with Kevin.
She packed her overnight bag with a change of underwear, a nightshirt and her toiletries, hoping that by tomorrow she would be able to find a place to launder her wet clothes. Kevin met her at the door with a sack of groceries salvaged from her cabinets. "We're in luck," he said, gesturing her back toward the kitchen, where another brown paper sack waited. "Some of the stuff in your refrigerator was still cold. I couldn't salvage the milk, but we've got plenty here for dinner, and for breakfast tomorrow."
She chuckled lightly, shaking her head as she went into the kitchen to get the other sack. "You're really into this roughing-it stuff, aren't you?"
"Old Colt would be proud," he agreed cheerfully, and opened the door for her as she struggled through with the grocery sack and her bag.
Kevin had borrowed a car somewhere, and automatically he started toward it. Kate protested firmly, "No way, hotshot. You can barely drive with two good arms, much less one. Whoever loaned you that car should be brought to trial for endangering the public safety, anyway." She gestured him toward her father's car. "I'm driving."
"Coward," he shot back, but made no further argument as he helped her store the packages in the back and got into the passenger seat beside her.
His eyes twinkled as he slid his hand across the back of the seat and grasped a strand of Kate's hair at the nape, tugging gently. "I'm fixing dinner," he announced. "Prepare yourself for an adventure."
"One adventure a year is my limit," she informed him, switching on the ignition. "And last night filled my quota for five years to come."
"Child's play," he scoffed, "compared to a night with Kevin Dawson."
"I'm beginning to think this is a big mistake," Kate grumbled as she put the car in gear.
After The Storm (Men Made in America-- Mississippi) Page 11
