Fisting her fingers in the fabric of his jacket, she pushed herself back. She was scared to death of losing her friend. And she wanted him more than anything she’d ever wanted in her life. But not the way he was proposing.
“Being careful isn’t always enough.” If it were, she wouldn’t have a pregnancy test sitting in her bathroom at that very moment. “And I won’t sleep with you just because we don’t have anyone else.”
“It wouldn’t be like that,” he said, stopping her when she turned away.
“It would be exactly like that,” she countered, weary, disappointed. Hurt. And when it was over, she thought, they’d be left with nothing.
“It’s late,” she whispered, before she reached blindly for the door handle. “You don’t have to walk me to the door.” Catching his arm when he started to get out anyway, she managed what almost passed for a smile. “I’m not a real date, remember?”
She had the door open and was halfway up the walk before Mike could decide whether or not to follow her. By the time he sank back in his seat, she’d opened her front door, slipped inside and turned out the light.
There was something wrong. Something more than just the mess their relationship had turned into. He wasn’t certain how he knew that. He just did. The same way he sometimes knew that he couldn’t believe the results of tests just because they were pointing toward a particular diagnosis. It was an instinct he’d learned to trust implicitly over the years.
He looked down at his hands, feeling as if something precious was slipping through them, and finally reached for the ignition. He knew now why she’d wanted to pretend nothing had happened. There was nothing to say that didn’t just make the situation worse.
Chapter Eight
“Should I keep these or toss ’em? Toss ’em? Fine.”
A pair of jeans that had never fit well but had been a heck of a buy landed on the pile of clothing on Katie’s bed.
“How about these?” She held up a pair of pants that had never gone with anything, not sure why she’d bought them, either. “Should they go, too?”
The white cat with the Halloween colors marking his back lay curled like a spoiled sultan on her pillow. He eyed the pants with disdain.
“Good decision.”
The pants joined the pile. So did a half-dozen shirts, a jacket she’d worn to death and an assortment of belts, purses and shoes that should have been culled years ago. She rarely got rid of anything. Her old Girl Scout badge sash was stowed in a box on the shelf above her collection of dead corsages and every letter and birthday card she’d ever received. She had her grade school set of encyclopedias and mementos from vacations up there, too—which was why there was no room for anything else in her closet. But this cleaning was symbolic. She’d started it at 6:00 a.m. because she hadn’t been able to go back to sleep. Two hours later, she was still at it.
“Have a slipper,” she said to Spike, tossing him a mateless, pink bunny-bootie to bat around.
Spike’s ears immediately perked up, but he ignored the offering that landed on the white eyelet comforter. Green eyes alert, he sprang from a coil to leap onto the floor. One more surge of feline muscle and he was perched on her windowsill, his dark tail slowly swaying.
Katie had barely turned to see what had caught his attention when she heard a car door close. The sharp report hit her like a jolt to the chest. She’d opened the eyelet curtains to let in the morning light. Between the open slats of her blue miniblinds, she could see the front fender of a black sedan.
Catching a glimpse of herself in her dresser mirror, she shoved her hopeless hair back from her face and tugged at the stretched-out neckline of her baggy gray sweats. It was totally unfair of Mike to show up when she looked like the aftermath of a storm. Especially when, inside, she felt the same way.
When she opened the front door to let him in, she noticed he looked only marginally better than she did.
“Morning,” he murmured, a mountain of hesitation in a cabled burgundy sweater and jeans. He had a shaving nick on his jaw, and his hair looked as if he’d combed it with his fingers a dozen times on the way over. “I come bearing bagels.”
He held up a sack, his blue eyes steady on hers. Even in an uncertain situation, he exuded confidence. She used to admire that about him, tried to fake it herself. Faced with his quiet determination as he stepped inside, she simply found it unsettling.
Preferring he didn’t know that, she closed the door and turned her attention to the cat mauling her shirt to get down.
“I wasn’t expecting you.”
“I know.”
Without waiting for an invitation, he headed for her kitchen, tension radiating from him in waves as his glance moved from the boxes by her open front closet to the tennis rackets, hand weights and collapsible rowing machine between her dining table and the sofa.
“I would have called, but I didn’t want to give you a chance to come up with an excuse not to see me.” Paper rustled as he set the sack on the table. “What are you doing?”
His frown darted to the hallway and the mess visible on the end of her bed. The narrow slash of black velvet she’d worn last night hung on her bedroom door. Next to the door was another box. “Are you moving?”
Had Katie not been so busy trying to figure out why he’d shown up so early, she might have paid more attention to the concern behind the question. She wasn’t into subtleties at the moment. All she could consider as his agitation crept toward her, was that less than nine hours ago, he’d made it quite clear that he wouldn’t mind a little sex along with their friendship.
“I’m just cleaning,” she replied, still shaken by his very practical logic. They wanted each other. They liked each other.
She was convenient.
He hadn’t exactly said that last one, but the implication had been there. With her, he wouldn’t have to go through the dating routine, the hassle of getting to know someone. He didn’t want a real relationship. How many times had he told her that?
“I figured it was time I started doing some of the things I said I want to do instead of just talking about them. Cleaning closets was on my list of New Year’s resolutions.”
“This year’s, or last?”
“This.”
She hadn’t even tried to smile.
Neither had Mike. He stood six feet away, his jaw working as he studied her face. When Katie was under strain, the natural blush faded from her cheeks and shadows beneath her eyes dimmed their usual spark. He’d always been able to tell how good or bad things were with her simply by looking at her. He’d never consciously considered that before. But he did now. And from the shadows marring her translucent skin as she began fiddling with the fringe on a sofa pillow, he doubted she’d slept well lately at all.
Being careful isn’t always enough.
Her softly spoken words still echoed in his head. He’d been staring at his bedroom ceiling, trying to figure out just where he stood with her, when those words had first drifted into his thoughts. Piling on top of them like cars of a crashing train were thoughts of how preoccupied she’d seemed most of the evening, how she’d declined anything alcoholic to drink, her strange silence after he’d unloaded on her about wanting his life to stay as it was.
He’d sat bolt upright, feeling as if he’d been kicked in the gust The same feeling was there now as he walked over to where she continued fussing with the fringe.
He started to touch her, partly to make her look at him, partly because he ached for the contact. Not trusting the latter, he kept his hands to himself.
“Katie?” he began, his voice raw. “Are you pregnant?”
Her head snapped up. “No.” The denial came too quickly for the question to have surprised her. “No,” she repeated, abandoning the pillow to cross her arms tightly beneath her breasts.
“I thought I might be. I’d had that sore throat, and antibiotics can interfere with birth control pills,” she explained, figuring he could fill in the blanks in her explanation. “
But I took a test last night.” She hugged herself tighter. “It was negative.”
Expert that he was at concealing his thoughts, she couldn’t begin to read Mike’s reaction. And her own had thrown her completely. She’d expected to feel relieved by the results as she’d stood in her bathroom staring at the little white stick that had come in the box. But what she’d felt hadn’t been relief at all. Just the possibility that she could have been pregnant had fully awakened the yearning she’d always had for a child. That the child could have been Mike’s only compounded the totally unexpected, totally irrational sense of loss that filled her even now.
Rational or not, the disappointment had left a void she could almost hate him for creating.
Staring at the toes of her socks, she forced a disbelieving little laugh. “I can’t believe how disappointed I am over something that would have totally upended both of our lives. But being realistic, we’re lucky we didn’t get caught. We were never meant to be lovers,” she continued, her voice softening with regret. “We have too many differences.”
“We didn’t have them before.”
“Sure we did. They just didn’t matter.”
She thought it odd that he still looked every bit as tense as he had when he’d arrived. She’d told him he was off the hook. Yet, there was no mistaking his disquiet as his glance moved over her face, and settled below her crossed arms.
The handsome lines of his face were devoid of expression, his thoughts shuttered as he drew a deep breath and slowly let it out.
His glance flicked back to hers. “What would you have done had the result been positive?”
The quiet question knitted her brow. “What difference does it make? It wasn’t.”
“Humor me. What would you have done had you been pregnant?”
“The only thing I could do,” she replied, wondering what alternatives he thought there were for someone who’d picked out her children’s names when she was ten. “I’d have had the baby.”
“Then what?”
“I don’t know what you want, Mike. There isn’t any point—”
“Just answer me. You’d have had the baby. Then what?”
“If you’re asking if I would have expected anything from you, the answer is no. You don’t want a family. I do. I’d have raised it by myself.” She lifted one hand as if to ask what other reasonable alternative she would have had, and immediately crossed her arms again. “I didn’t let myself think about it beyond that.”
It seemed to him that she’d thought it through well enough. “You surprise me,” he said mildly, wondering at how little she must think of him. He might not have sought such a commitment, but he’d never turn his back on his own child, let alone on her. “You’re the one who blames her dad for never being around, yet you’d deliberately deprive a child of his father.”
“There’s a difference between depriving a child of your time and protecting him from being hurt.” They were talking hypotheticals. Katie forcibly reminded herself of that even as his veiled attack fed the knot in her stomach. “You said yourself you don’t have time for any more commitments. You’re a doctor, Mike. Half the time even your free time isn’t your own. And most of your free time,” she pointed out, “you spend on clinical research. You don’t have any more time for a child than he did.”
“Are you saying I’m like your father?”
Something had shifted. Katie wasn’t sure what it was, but she suddenly felt as if she were standing on an ice floe with a giant crack racing toward her, not knowing which way to jump. As much as Mike admired her father, it would hardly be an insult to admit there were a few similarities between the men. Dedication. A love of medicine. Veiled dispassion in his dealings with certain people. But Mike also knew how much distance there was between sire and offspring.
It was the distance between her and Mike that concerned Katie, though. Like the crack in that floe, it seemed to be growing wider by the second.
“I don’t know why we’re even discussing this,” she said, wishing desperately for the ease with him that she could scarcely remember. “We’re talking about a situation that doesn’t exist and things that don’t matter.”
“You said they do now.”
“What matters is that we want different things. The rest of it would only make a difference if we were involved with each other. But we can’t be. Not that way,” she said, her eyes begging him to understand. She couldn’t invest herself like that, then just walk away when it was over. And it would be over, too. Sooner or later. She needed more than a strained friendship and incredible sex from him. She wanted the family he didn’t seem to need and the commitment he didn’t want. She needed the whole package. He only wanted parts.
He held her glance while he reached to the back of the sofa to scratch Spike behind his pointed little ears. The gesture was deceptive in its ease. As he considered what she’d said, defensiveness stole over him like a shadow.
“You’re right,” he finally said, the simple phrase somehow encompassing everything she’d said. “This isn’t getting us anywhere.”
He blew a breath, looking very much as if he wished he’d never raised his questions. Or, perhaps, his wish was that he hadn’t pushed for the answers. “I’m sorry. About all of it. About last night, and about what happened a few weeks ago. We both know it was a mistake.” Shoving his hand into his pocket for his keys, he headed across the room. “I promise, it won’t happen again.”
She whirled around to follow him, the need to protect herself colliding with the need to keep him from slamming the door between them. “Mike, please. You were the one who said we should be able to figure out a way around all this. We just need to...”
“To what?” he prodded, when her voice trailed off. “Fix it?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
At the demand, she went silent. Her delicate features were shadowed with the same sense of hopelessness he felt. She had no answers.
He had only one. “I think on this particular consultation we’ll have to go with your first course of treatment. The only one I could come up with nearly killed the patient.”
His dark head dipped toward the mess behind her. “I’ll let you get back to your cleaning,” he said, the corner of his mouth twitching in a parody of a smile. “You don’t want to lose your momentum.”
Avoiding Katie’s eyes, he looked back to make sure the cat stayed put and let himself out. He’d known exactly what he wanted when he’d walked up to the door. Answers. Well, he had them. In spades.
She wasn’t pregnant. There were thanks to be offered for that, he was sure. And gratitude to the patron saint of disastrous complications, whoever she was, sat high on his list at the moment. So did relief. As alienated as he and Katie were becoming, he couldn’t imagine the pressure a pregnancy would put on their relationship. Yet the thought that Katie could have been carrying his child had caused him to feel something far less definable than relief or gratitude.
Taunted by the feeling now, he deliberately blocked it. He’d wanted her in his bed, as well as in his life, but it was as clear as a specimen slide that a physical relationship with him held no interest for her at all.
Wanting to think the hurt in his chest was only a bruised ego, he felt another bolt of self-protection kick into place. He had his paper to finish and then he had the rest of the afternoon free. He would ignore the fact that he’d wanted to spend it with Katie.
“I knew I should have stayed in bed this morning. I can’t believe I did this. He thinks I’m an idiot.”
Jan, the thirty-something nurse who’d turned the staff green with her pictures of Hawaii, peeled off her gloves, her waist-length auburn hair flying as she hurried past the nurses’ station.
“What’s that all about?” Alice wondered aloud.
From the computer behind the counter, Katie swallowed her own agitation and watched Alice’s ebony eyes narrow behind her glasses. The frames were pumpkin orange today. So was her pantsuit.
Having noticed the other nurse’s distress herself, Katie cleared the screen. “I’ll go see.”
Jan was headed for the med room.
Holding the bell of her hot pink stethoscope so it wouldn’t bounce, Katie jogged up behind her. “Are you okay?”
“I’ve only assisted with that procedure once before,” the distraught nurse stressed, still hurrying. “It’s not like we have the same kind of experience up here that they do downstairs. But he made it clear he didn’t want me back in there after I get him another setup. He looked at me as if I didn’t have an active cell in my brain.”
“Dr. Aniston?”
“Dr. Brennan.”
“Mike?”
“He’s in 306 putting in a central line.”
“Why’s he upset with you?”
“I contaminated his field.”
Ouch, Katie thought, rounding the corner into the med room behind Jan. “That might frustrate him a little, but Dr. Brennan doesn’t get upset about—”
“I did it twice.”
Grabbing the phone, the pretty young nurse punched the number for Central Supply and ordered another central line tray. Stat. A supply runner would have it there in two minutes, but when a surgeon was standing at a patient’s bedside waiting for something that should already be there, those two minutes could feel like eternity.
“He needs another pair of sterile gloves, too. After my hair brushed the tray, I bumped his glove with mine.”
Katie eyed the fabulous length of enviably straight hair cascading down the back of the woman’s blue scrub top. Jan always wore it clipped back from her cherubic face and, usually, well out of the way. But Katie had seen it slide from her shoulder sometimes when the woman bent over, and she could easily imagine it causing a problem if the sterile field was over a hospital bed. There were reasons operating tables were narrow, just as there were reasons surgical personnel covered their hair and their bodies with caps and gowns. They didn’t perform that many sterile procedures in the unit. Still, it didn’t matter if only one strand had touched the corner of only one instrument. Contaminated was just that.
From House Calls To Husband Page 14
