He was tempted, but it still didn’t seem fair. “What about you? Aren’t you hungry?”
“I ate waiting for you,” she told him, which was partially true. Although she hadn’t been hungry when she got his food, that changed as she waited. So she’d had a candy bar that she’d found at the bottom of her purse, vintage unknown. It was a wee bit stale. “Go on, get in,” she coaxed. “Unless, of course, you’re afraid to let me drive.”
“Well, you got here in one piece without the keys. Which reminds me—take the keys.” Digging into his pocket, Dave retrieved his car keys and held them out to her. “I’ll feel better if you do it the conventional way.”
“Spoilsport.” She laughed. But she took the keys from him and got back in on the driver’s side. She buckled up then waited for him to swing his legs inside the car and secure his seat belt. “Here, I’ll hold your cheeseburger,” she offered.
He surrendered the cheeseburger, placing it back into the box on top of the now-spilled French fries and handing that to her while he slid the metal tongue of his seat belt into place.
“Thanks,” he told her, taking the meal back.
The slight movement of her shoulders in a careless shrug blended in with her verbal response. “Don’t mention it.”
“I mean for everything,” he emphasized, his eyes holding hers. “Bringing the car, bringing food. I get caught up in a patient’s care, and I tend to forget everything else,” he confessed.
“Well, that’s a good thing, isn’t it? Aren’t all doctors supposed to be that selfless? Oh God,” she groaned, as if suddenly becoming aware of something.
When she didn’t follow it up with an attempt at an explanation, he looked at her. “Oh God what?” he prodded.
“I keep saying these good things about you. If I’m not careful, somebody overhearing us might think that we’re actually friends,” she told him flippantly.
He knew what she was doing. She was trying to make him think that she was still the old Kara with the flinty tongue. But she wasn’t. She was caring despite her attempts to seem otherwise. His thoughts went to Gary that morning in the clinic. She had a good heart, as well. That went a long way to balancing things out in his book.
“Heaven forbid,” he said, just before taking another bite of his cheeseburger.
“Yeah,” she agreed, backing the car out of the parking space. “That’s what I say.”
She wove her way across the hospital grounds until she came to the exit. Within a few minutes, they were on the main thoroughfare, heading for the freeway.
Time for directions, she thought. “Okay, how do you want to do this?”
“Do what?” he asked.
She gave him his options. “Shall I drive to my place so you can drop me off and then drive yourself to your house, or do you want to stop by your place first and then take me to my apartment?”
The second choice seemed to be rather convoluted, but he kept that to himself. Instead, he said simply, “I pick option number one.”
“You know, if you’re not careful, you’re going to have me thinking that you’re actually a real person instead of this plaster saint I always believed that you were.”
“Why on earth would you think I was a plaster saint?” he asked, completely mystified.
She looked at him, stunned. He didn’t remember? It hardly seemed possible. She remembered perfectly. “Because that’s the way you used to behave. As if you were holier than thou—or at least holier than me.”
Was that it? Dave laughed quietly, shaking his head. “As I recall, it wouldn’t exactly have taken much to be holier than you. You were hell on heels back then.”
She was about to get slightly defensive of the girl she’d once been—the woman she still believed herself to be—but what he said next completely took the wind out of her sails.
“I really envied you that freedom.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Freedom?” Kara echoed, a little confused.
“My father had certain expectations of his offspring,” Dave confided.
Having made short work of his cheeseburger, he crumpled up the paper it had been wrapped in within the container and turned his attention to the French fries. They had long since ceased to be warm but they still tasted good. He couldn’t remember when he’d last had fries. He allowed himself to savor the first one before continuing what he was saying.
“When you came right down to it, my dad expected me to be mature by the time I took my first step.”
That didn’t jibe with the man Kara remembered from those summer vacations.
“Your dad was a lovely man who was always a lot of fun,” she protested, remembering the tall, robust man fondly.
Now that she thought about it, Dave looked a great deal like his late father. The same thick, dark hair, the same green eyes and broad shoulders. The only difference was that Dave’s hair was a bit unruly while his father’s had always appeared to be perfect.
“With you,” Dave agreed readily. “Because you were a girl. Had I had a sister, I don’t doubt he would have been more or less the same with her. I guess in his own way, he was a chauvinist,” Dave theorized. “He didn’t expect nearly as much from ‘the softer sex,’ as he liked to call them, as he did from the male of the species, namely me.” He spared her a look. “I have no doubt that you and he would have probably gone a few rounds once you got older,” he told her with certainty.
She felt for him. Your father was the parent you were supposed to bond with if you were a boy. How awful for Dave if his father had gotten so caught up in rigid expectations that there was no place for the more memorable moments. She had a boatload of the latter not just with her mother but with her father, as well.
She began to see Dave in a whole different light. “Was he hard on you?” she asked.
Was that pity in her voice? Or sympathy? Either way, it surprised him. He hadn’t thought her capable of that sentiment, at least not where he was concerned. But then, he wouldn’t have expected her to be thoughtful, either, and he was obviously wrong in that department.
In response to her question, he shrugged. “No more than was necessary, I suppose. He told me there were no do-overs in life and that I had to get it right the first time because the world had no patience for the losers and the inept.” The corners of his mouth twisted in a mirthless smile. “God knew that he didn’t,” he added almost under his breath.
She thought how his relationship with his father had differed from hers with her own father. She worshipped the ground her father had walked on, and he had always made her feel secure in his love. She’d wanted to please her father, to reward him for his faith in her, but he’d never asked anything more of her than that she be a good person and that she be happy.
Because of him—and her mother—she was.
Kara took a breath. Dave probably didn’t want to hear this, but she needed to say it anyway. “I’m sorry you had a rough time of it.”
The French fry he’d just popped into his mouth went down the wrong way. He coughed, his eyes beginning to water. One hand on the wheel, Kara reached for her soda. Pulling it out of the cup holder, she held it up to him. He took it without offering a protest and drank deeply. The coughing subsided.
“Thanks,” he said, finally catching his breath. And then he looked at her as he wiped away the dampness from the corners of his eyes. “You keep sounding like that and I’m going to ask to see some ID pretty soon. Either that or we need to swing by your mother’s garage to check for a pod.”
“Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” She laughed. “Who are you and what have you done with Dave? Talk about pod checking, I should be looking in your garage for one.” And then she grinned. “You really are getting to be a revelation. I didn’t picture you as someone who was a movie buff.”
“I’m not,” he told her honestly.
The hell he wasn’t. “Then how do you explain all the movie references? The accurate movie references,” she emphasized.
That was simple enough to explain. “I remember everything I read or see, even just in passing. And as for having a rough time of it—” he got back to her initial question “—I didn’t. Living up to my father’s high standards helped me achieve as much as I did. There are easier things than getting through medical school,” he told her.
She was certain that it had been hard. But she was just as certain that he was capable of it. “You would have done that on your own. Don’t look so surprised. Just because I gave you a hard time when we were kids doesn’t mean I didn’t think you were smart or capable of making something of yourself. Young as I was, I always knew you’d be somebody when you grew up. Truth was, you made me feel a little inadequate. That was part of the reason I gave you such a hard time,” she confided.
“And what was the rest of the reason for giving me such a hard time? Why did you give me a such hard time, Kara?”
“I already told you,” she answered, looking back at the road. Glancing at the speedometer, she realized that she was pressing down too hard on the gas. The needle was nosing its way past the sixty mark. She eased back. The subject was getting her too agitated. He was getting her too agitated.
Dave did a quick mental review. No, he hadn’t missed anything. “No, you didn’t.”
“Well, okay, maybe not in so many words,” she allowed. Maybe the man didn’t take behaving “holier than thou” as a reason to get her back up. “Because you looked down on me.”
“No, I didn’t,” he protested. He’d thought of her as annoying, a brat and, at times, skillfully humiliating, especially for her age. But he’d never thought himself better than her. Just nicer.
She knew what she knew. “Yeah, you did. There was a two-year age difference between us, but it might as well have been twenty. Those two years made you act as if I were beneath you. Insignificant,” Kara added for good measure, vividly remembering those years and how it felt.
Dave stuck to his guns. “That’s not what I thought. You were so fearless, you made me feel self-conscious. And there was that incident with the snake,” he reminded her pointedly. “You didn’t exactly endear yourself to me with that.”
Handling snakes had never bothered her. But she knew it bothered him and she’d acted on it. “That only happened later. After you—” She sighed, stopping herself. “Never mind, there’s no point in rehashing all this old stuff. Just water under the bridge,” she told him.
She didn’t want to open up any old wounds and make them fresh. That could all be pushed into the background. She had a mother to ease into her place and so did he. That was far more important than renewing any old squabbles with him that she knew were not about to be won today.
Kara spared a glance in his direction. “Any fries left?”
He hadn’t realized that he’d been eating all this time. The fries were almost all gone. But there were still a few stragglers left.
Dave raised his brow. “Want one?”
“No, I’m taking inventory,” she answered sarcastically, then stopped herself. Maybe that sounded a little too sharp. She laughed a bit self-consciously. “Sorry, old habits die hard. Yes, I want one.”
Since her hands were on the wheel, he decided just to put a French fry in her mouth. Taking the largest one that was left, he held it up to her lips and said, “I know I’m going to regret saying this, but open your mouth.”
She turned her head slightly toward him. Even so, Dave saw that her eyes were laughing at him as she complied. When she closed her lips again, they brushed against his fingers.
Or perhaps his fingers brushed against her lips. In whatever order it happened, the effect was still the same. An electrical surge, quick and jolting, passed through both of them at the same time.
Chapter Eleven
Kara’s skin felt hot and her heart suddenly leaped without warning, pounding madly like some impromptu marching-band drum soloist.
Belatedly, she shifted her eyes back to the road and realized she was about to go right through a red light. Alarmed, she slammed on the brakes.
Kara felt the back end of the vehicle fishtailing first to the right, then to the left as she attempted to compensate for the sickening lunge by turning the steering wheel quickly in the opposite direction.
The front tires had gone well over the intersection’s white line before she finally managed to get the car to stop. Fortunately for them, there was no through traffic.
Her heart was pounding so hard that it hurt. She told herself it was because of the near miss, but it had begun beating erratically before she ever had to slam on her brakes and she knew it.
Her heart was pounding because of him. How dumb was that? she asked herself.
Beside her, Dave had both of his hands braced against the dashboard, anticipating a traumatic collision at the very least.
When there wasn’t one, he blew out a breath and tried to relax. His neck and shoulders felt as stiff as if they’d suddenly been turned to iron.
“You charge extra for that?” he cracked, attempting to make light of the near-overwhelming moment.
Who was this man beside her? The Dave she remembered hadn’t had a sense of humor—possibly because she hadn’t really given him anything to laugh about, she thought now ruefully. But he would have definitely read her the riot act at being this careless—all but flying through a red light and then almost sending them both through the windshield in her attempt to stop the car.
Letting out a long, shaky breath, she shook her head in response to his question. “The first one’s on the house,” she told him.
Dave looked at the traffic light and then back at her. She wasn’t moving.
“Light’s green,” he prompted and then leaned forward, peering closer at her. “And so are you,” he observed.
“There’s a reason for that,” she murmured, moving her foot back to the gas pedal. Her stomach had tied itself up in a knot.
She wasn’t used to doing stupid things like that. Granted, there were times when she drove fast, maybe a wee bit faster than the speed limit, but she was never reckless or preoccupied.
Until just this moment.
Once is all it takes, Kara reminded herself ruefully.
“You want to pull over for a minute?” Dave suggested. “We could switch places and I could take over. After all, it is my car and I’ve finished eating,” he added.
She didn’t want to surrender the driver’s seat. If she did, she knew that she’d never hear the end of it from him. As it was, she probably wouldn’t anyway, Kara thought.
Never hear the end of it? Listen to yourself, the little voice in her head silently mocked. Like you’re going to keep seeing him or running into him once this charade is over? C’mon, Kara. This is all temporary. You know that. What’s wrong with you?
She had no answer to that, no idea why she was behaving the way she was. She felt restless and unsettled, as if she was waiting for something to happen without really knowing what—or why.
“Kara, are you okay?” Dave was asking her. When she looked in his direction, she saw concern in his eyes.
“I’m fine,” she snapped out a little too forcefully, ashamed of herself the moment she did. “Just can’t seem to be able to eat and drive at the same time,” she added a bit stiffly.
“Yeah, that must be it,” he agreed for the sake of peace. But he didn’t believe it for a second. Kara could easily do five things at once and keep track of each; she always had. Something else was going on here. Most likely, he judged, the same “something” he’d felt himself.
“Sorry if I scared you,” she said in a smaller voice that soun
ded completely unlike her usual one.
“Ditto.”
It felt as if every single nerve she possessed had gone on red alert and no matter how she tried to talk herself out of it, they all refused to stand down.
She spared him a glance now and even though part of her understood what he was saying—that he’d sensed her reaction to him, to being fed by him—she asked sharply, “Excuse me?”
He knew that telling her to relax would only fall on deaf ears. Kara was the most contrary person he’d ever known, always ready to do the exact opposite of whatever she was told. The only way out of the situation—and an argument—was to make this about him, as well. It would keep this from escalating or becoming some kind of battle of wits, neither of which he wanted. And, he suspected, if really pressed for an honest answer, neither did she.
“I felt it, too,” he told her quietly.
He might as well have shouted it. She could feel every vein in her body pulsing, making her grow extremely hot in the space of what felt like a nanosecond.
Still, being Kara, she felt compelled to deny the obvious. So she feigned ignorance. “Felt what?”
He wasn’t exactly certain how to describe it. “That electrical spark,” he finally said. “You know, when your lips brushed against my fingers.”
Her back went up almost instantly. “You mean when your fingers brushed against my lips.”
“Really?” he asked, his voice as quiet as hers was intense. “You’re going to break this down into who did what to whom first? You really want to go that route?”
He didn’t say it, but his tone indicated that she was being juvenile. And she supposed she was. But that was only because this reaction she’d just experienced—desire? Longing?—was very, very new to her. She supposed it was something that teens went through, but she’d never felt connected like this to anyone before, never felt herself growing hot with anticipation before. Imagined it, maybe, wondered about it, sure, but never actually experienced it. Not until just this moment.
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