From House Calls To Husband

by Christine Flynn

  He didn’t want to deal with dating, period. Katie was fairly certain of that. Since his divorce following his move from Portland eighteen months ago, he hadn’t expressed an interest in going out with anyone at all. At least, he hadn’t to her.

  “So what is it you want?” she asked, at a loss.

  “I want you to go with me.”

  She stared at the challenge in his jaw.

  “You know,” she said, wondering if he knew how defensive he looked, “for someone who knows his way around the inside of a chest, you don’t know squat about how to touch a girl’s heart. But, hey, a free dinner? A chance to wear something someone hasn’t thrown up on?” She shrugged. She and Mike always had a good time together. “Why not?”

  She was a little surprised by how relieved he looked. “Thanks, sport.” He curved his hand over her shoulder and gave her a little squeeze. “I owe you one.”

  “Yeah, you do,” she muttered good-naturedly, and walked with him to the door.

  She turned left for the med room.

  Mike turned right, heading for the unit’s wide double doors. Moments later, he was jogging down the stairwell, preferring movement to waiting for an elevator. Taking all three flights and a short hall to the street in less than a minute, he left the hospital with its familiar sounds and antiseptic smells, and strode into the gray drizzle that was winter in the Northwest. There might be days when that drizzle turned to a downpour or to sleet or, occasionally, to snow, but from October to June, some sort of precipitation invariably seemed to be falling from the cloud-filled sky.

  He wanted sunshine. Just a day of it, he thought, then dismissed the wish as a waste of mental energy. Even if the clouds did decide to depart, he wouldn’t have time to take advantage of the break.

  He had one less concern to deal with at the moment, however. He could forget about having to scrape up a date for the hospital auxiliary’s annual charity fund-raiser. The necessity was hardly a priority. The event was a month away, but he’d seen no point in letting the matter nag at him. He’d known it would, too. And the thought of having to spend an evening being attentive to someone he barely knew while mingling with the movers and shakers who could help shape his career, held all the appeal of a toothache. Even if the evening hadn’t been important from a career standpoint, he really didn’t want to ask someone out and have her think he was interested in pursuing a potential relationship. Since his divorce, he’d had no desire to throw himself back into that briar patch again. There wasn’t much of anything he even missed about not having a special woman in his life. Except sex.

  His dark eyebrows jammed together, the thought catching him off guard as he finally reached his car and then jockeyed the black Lexus through the early-morning rush-hour traffic. He’d been so busy he hardly even thought about sex anymore—which should have told him right there that he was working way too hard.

  Frowning past the windshield wipers swiping at the rain, he headed toward the complex of modern medical offices eight blocks away. It wasn’t that he didn’t think about sex at all, he reminded himself. He was a healthy, thirty-four-year-old male who responded predictably to an attractive woman. He just wasn’t into casual sexual relationships. Not that he’d found himself tempted by one lately, he had to concede. Or, not so lately, for that matter.

  That thought failed to provide the encouragement he was looking for. It also made him consider that there were times, sex aside, when having a girlfriend would be handy. For a nice dinner out. A quiet evening by the fire. For occasions like the Heart Ball. Thanks to Katie, though, he didn’t have to concern himself about that last one. Even though she’d given him a hard time about it, he’d known he could count on her. She was like family that way.

  Mike didn’t question the faint smile that came and went with the thought. His mind was already racing ahead as he turned down the parking ramp under the two-story office complex and pulled into the space marked Michael J. Brennan, MD. He had follow-ups with two bypasses and an atrial defect, and work-ups with three referrals whose records he’d studied until midnight. After a quick lunch, he had a leaky mitral valve to repair.

  If all went well, he could check on his other hospitalized patients, hit the gym for a quick workout, run back by the hospital to check on the valve, grab takeout and be home by nine-thirty. Unfortunately, that would be a little late to ask Katie if she’d go over the discrepancies he’d found in the data collection for his research study. Having hit her up for one favor today, he’d been reluctant to mention wanting her help with that, too. Maybe she could do it tomorrow if it wasn’t her night at the free clinic. If she balked, he could bribe her with dinner. If that didn’t work, he could always bring up the time he’d beat up his kid brother for her, but he liked to save the big guns for when he really needed them.

  Chapter Two

  “You know, Michael, if I wasn’t your friend, you’d have waited until we were at work tomorrow to ask me to do this.”

  “But you are my friend, and I like taking advantage of you.”

  “At least you’re honest.”

  “So,” he said, shutting the door and closing out the steady drum of rain while she shook water droplets from her curls, “are blood pressures being taken at the prescribed intervals after the drug is administered, or is someone getting sloppy? The readings I’m getting are all over the place.”

  Slipping off her burgundy raincoat, she eyed Mike evenly. He stood with his back to the massive, carved oak entry door, a navy T-shirt hugging his chest and gray, drawstring sweatpants hanging loosely on his narrow hips. He’d obviously had time to get comfortable. She needed the same.

  “First things first.” She’d just spent the three hours since she got off work trying to scrape up more volunteers for the free clinic. She needed a break. She needed food. “You said we’d order takeout.”

  “Already done. I called Wangs. Two orders of mu shu pork and a large house special fried rice are on their way.” Taking her coat, he flicked a glance over the long, cocoacolored sweater and leggings she’d changed into between work and...work. “You get the glasses. I’ll get the wine.”

  Pulling off her wet shoes so she wouldn’t track up his parquet-tiled floors, she watched him lay her coat over the long, empty planter that served as a divider between the spacious entry and the more spacious dining room before he headed through the foyer for his kitchen. She knew he couldn’t hang the garment in the guest closet. It didn’t have any hangers. Like the empty planter, there wasn’t much of anything in the obscenely spacious house at all.

  Hoping that was about to change, she glanced past a pair of long, black snow skis and a set of poles propped against one of the white entry walls. Her eye was immediately drawn to the cathedral-ceilinged living room. The walls there were mostly glass. Black glass, since it was seven o’clock at night. But the room’s focal point was the striated rock fireplace that stretched from floor to ceiling like the side of a narrow, jagged cliff.

  The huge room was magnificent, but not a single stick of furniture broke the sweep of neutral wall-to-wall carpeting. The only object in the soaring space was a telescope on a tripod. It stood like a sentry where two of the glass walls met, its long, tubular shape pointed toward infinity.

  “Where are the fabric samples?” she asked, entering the almost equally austere kitchen. This room was blinding white. But at least it sported a few signs of life. A toaster. A gleaming black coffeemaker. The water bottle from Mike’s gym bag.

  Mike was bent in front of the open refrigerator. From what she could see from where she’d stopped at a cabinet, the pickings inside it were pretty slim.

  He reached for the bottle of wine between the orange juice and the milk. “The what?”

  “Fabric samples.” Crystal clinked as she removed two goblets from his meager collection of glassware. “You didn’t cancel your appointment with that interior designer your mom recommended, did you?”

  “No,” he muttered blandly. “I didn’t cancel. I sent
her away.” The door closed with a nudge from his hip. “The woman had barely walked in when she started talking about how the house was ‘speaking to her.’ When she got to the dining room and started waxing poetic about how perfect it would be with an Isfahan hunting tapestry on the wall, bowls of pussy willows on a sideboard and chairs with open, vase-form splats, I told her I had an emergency and that we’d have to cancel. I had the feeling she was more interested in how the place would look in a magazine spread than in what I might want.”

  Katie could tell he expected an argument. Or, possibly, defense of the designer’s artistic abilities. He wouldn’t get either from her. She might have championed the idea of a designer, but after hearing the part about communicating with the house, she’d have sent the woman packing herself. “With open what?”

  “Vase-form splats. Apparently that’s designer-speak for a vase-shaped back on a chair. Like the Chippendales at my folks’ place.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “I didn’t, either. And personally,” he added, pulling a corkscrew from a drawer, “I didn’t care.”

  “She obviously doesn’t know she’s supposed to be working with your tastes, not hers. You should call someone else.”

  “I’m not calling anyone,” he informed her flatly. “The only reason I called to begin with was because you and Mom kept nagging at me. The place is fine the way it is.”

  “Michael, this house is as sterile as a surgical suite. You’ve been in here six months—”

  “Five,” he corrected, refusing to let her exaggerate.

  “Fine. You’ve been in this house five months and the only room you’ve furnished is your office.”

  “I have a bed.”

  “Have you bought a bedroom set yet?”

  “I don’t need one. The closet has plenty of drawers in it.”

  She couldn’t argue with that. She’d seen his enormous walk-in closet when he’d given her the grand tour after he’d moved in. It had more drawers than she had in her entire duplex.

  “Well, you need furniture everywhere else,” she insisted, wondering how he kept from going mad in all this echoing space. “You need something comfortable to sit on. You need tables. You need pillows.” She motioned behind her. “You need something in that entryway.”

  “There is something in the entryway.”

  Katie eyed him patiently. “You need plants. You need art. Those,” she said, vaguely indicating the skis propped against the wall, “do not constitute art. They’re sporting equipment.”

  “Those are there because my brother is picking them up sometime this week. I meant the little paper bird my niece made for me. It’s sitting in the niche by the front door.” He gave her a smug look and hoisted the unopened bottle. “Do you want this now, or do you want to wait until the food gets here? We can eat while we go over the data.”

  He was changing the subject. He wasn’t being particularly subtle about it, either. Not that he ever was with her.

  Katie picked up the glasses. For some reason that totally eluded her, Mike was peculiarly obtuse about furnishing this place. She knew he’d bought it because he couldn’t stand the confines of the apartment he and Marla, his ex-wife, had moved into when he’d returned to Honeygrove. Yet, once he’d moved in the few things Marla hadn’t taken when she’d left, he’d done nothing else. She didn’t know if he simply wasn’t into aesthetics, or if making the place more livable had psychological consequences he wasn’t sharing. What she did know was that this house was not a home.

  Apparently he caught the grinding of her mental wheels. “This bothers you more than it does me, Katie,” he informed her, clearly wishing she’d drop the subject. “Forget it. Okay?”

  “I just think you’d be happier if it was more comfortable.”

  “I’m not here enough to be uncomfortable. And I’m not unhappy.”

  Moving beside him, she set the goblets on the counter and indicated that he should pour. He might think he wasn’t uncomfortable, but she wasn’t ready to give up yet. “Maybe you should ask your mom to do it herself. She’d be thrilled.”

  The creases bracketing his mouth deepened with a grimace. The expression spoke volumes.

  “You’re right,” she conceded, watching his hands as he deftly worked the corkscrew from the bottle. He had beautiful hands. Strong, capable and far too masculine for the delicate work she knew he did. “I can’t picture you living with oriental rugs and gilded mirrors. You’re definitely more the natural colors and tactile fabrics sort. Maybe a few pieces of marble sculpture here and there. And a place for your car in your bedroom. Guys love their cars.

  “You could always do it for me.”

  She brightened. “You’d give me carte blanche with your checkbook?”

  He was teasing. So was she. Yet his blue eyes suddenly went dead serious.

  “You’re probably the only woman I would trust with it.” He handed her a freshly filled goblet, filled the other for himself and snapped a wine saver onto the bottle before he stuck it back in the fridge to keep it chilled.

  “Come on,” he murmured, picking up his glass, “we’ve got a few minutes before dinner gets here. We can get started on that data.”

  He took two steps before the phone rang. “Please don’t let that be the hospital,” he said on a sigh, and snatched up the phone under the counter.

  Katie could tell immediately that he didn’t get his wish. Not wanting to eavesdrop—not once she’d figured out that the patient he was discussing wasn’t anyone she knew, anyway—she took her wine and moved into the foyer. For a moment she waited to see if Mike had to go back to the hospital, but then she kept going, stepping into the living room, rather than heading back to his office with its walls of books, photos of rafting and sailing trips and the computer on his desk that linked him to the hospital.

  She was thinking of what he’d said moments ago about trusting her, and feeling oddly touched by the thought, when she stopped beside the telescope in his living room. There was no way to see anything through the powerful scope. Not with the heavy clouds tonight. But she stood by the instrument anyway, trying to judge the direction it was pointed, and trying to figure out what star or constellation Mike had been looking at the last time he’d used it. She wondered if he actually made time to use it anymore. Or if it was only a pastime he resorted to on restless, and cloudless, nights.

  Thinking of Mike being restless conjured an image of him leaving his bed and standing where she was, looking out at the night sky. The thought of him being unable to rest was what bothered her, but thinking of him naked except for his briefs or whatever he slept in, disturbed her in other ways entirely. She was sure the image had formed only because of the little inventory she’d taken the other day, anyway—the mind’s habit of recalling odd bits of memory. So, she banished the errant thoughts and listened to the muffled rumble of his voice while she sipped her wine and remembered the first time she’d ever looked through a telescope herself.

  She’d been nine years old. Mike had just turned thirteen.

  “Can I look through your birthday present, Mike? Can I? Please?”

  The tall, skinny boy with the unruly dark hair didn’t move from his perch on the redwood deck. Keeping his back to her, he sighed with impatience. “It’s dark. You’re not supposed to be out here.”

  “Mom said I can be because you are.”

  The word he muttered was one he wasn’t supposed to use. Katie would have told him so, too, but he’d turned around to frown down at her. It wasn’t a frown, really. Not the kind his younger brother Tommy gave her. He didn’t slug her the way Tommy did, either. But then, Tommy hadn’t slugged her all summer. Mike had belted him the last time he’d done it and they both got grounded.

  Tommy got grounded yesterday, too. He’d locked her in her dad’s garden shed during a game of hide-and-seek, and then forgotten about her. Mike had rescued her. Probably because he’d heard her screaming.

  “One look, then you go home.”
<
br />   “I don’t have to go home. Mom and Dad are inside with your parents.”

  The Brennans and the Sheppards lived next door to each other, their Tudor-style homes separated by an expanse of lawn and a low hedge with an iron gate. The adults liked to spend time together on Saturday nights, but Mike and Tommy didn’t want her hanging around much anymore—except when they wanted her to watch their baby brother for them so they wouldn’t have to do it. It wasn’t like it used to be when they’d shared the play pool in their underwear when they were younger. Mike and Tommy had turned into...boys.

  Katie could forgive them for that as long as they didn’t tease her and make her cry. Since Mike never did, she liked him better. “What are you looking at?”

  “A star.”

  “Which one?” she asked, climbing onto the redwood deck to stand by him.

  “The North Star.”

  “I know where that is.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “I do!”

  He stepped back from the tripod. “Show me.”

  She did. Not with the telescope, because she didn’t know how to use it. She tipped her head to the velvet black summer sky and pointed straight to the Little Dipper and the bright star in the end of its handle. She thought stars were fun because there were stories that went with the constellations—legends of hunters like Orion and pretty ladies like Cassiopeia. She’d learned them from her Aunt Claire, her mom’s sister. Aunt Claire had taught her a lot of things, like ballet positions and how to whistle through her teeth.

  Mike already knew how to whistle through his teeth, and he thought ballet was for girls, but her knowledge of the constellations kept him from making her go away. He already knew quite a few of the formations himself, and once he showed her how to focus the telescope, something that had her grinning like a Cheshire cat, they took turns looking at the brightest stars in the constellations they knew. She liked that he didn’t treat her like a dumb little kid. But then, Mike had always been nice to her. It was almost as if he looked out for her sometimes.