The Doctor's Forever Family

by Marie Ferrarella

  Miss Joan seemed to read his mind. He hadn’t realized that she was still this close by.

  Before he knew it, the woman had slipped her arm through his and drew him over closer to where the blonde was sitting at the counter.

  “That’s Tina Blayne, the sheriff’s sister-in-law.” Turning her face so that only he could see her smile and hear what she had to tell him, she said, “You’ll probably be seeing a lot of her.”

  Now how the hell did the woman know that? He looked at her, banking down his curiosity and only looking mildly interested in what Miss Joan was saying. “Oh?”

  Miss Joan nodded. “Yeah. Because of her little boy, Bobby. Cute as all get-out, but he keeps coming down with colds and fevers. She’s been running herself ragged, driving over to Pine Ridge every time the poor kid’s fever spikes. That, on top of working and taking classes for her degree, has been taking quite a toll on her. She’s really relieved about you—your brother—a doctor,” she finally settled on, “coming to town. Maybe the poor thing’ll get some sleep now.” She gestured toward the blonde she’d referred to as Tina, beckoning her over. “C’mere, Tina. Meet the new doc,” she coaxed.

  Tina had been sitting there, observing from a distance, thinking to herself that the man who had arrived was just too damn good-looking to be much of a doctor. He looked like Hollywood’s concept of a doctor, not the real thing.

  If the man actually had a degree, she had a feeling that he hadn’t really earned it. Most likely he’d gotten it by cutting corners. Men who looked like that always cut corners. Always used their good looks and charm to get by. They didn’t have to be good, they just had to smile and sound as if they knew what they were talking about.

  She was well versed in the ways—and shortcomings—of good-looking men. Don had belonged to that club and if she hadn’t had the strength of character, a good-looking man would have been her downfall, if not her complete demise.

  But, after Olivia, Miss Joan was like a second mother to her. It was Miss Joan who insisted she and Bobby come live with her once Olivia had gotten married to Rick. Miss Joan was also the one who had encouraged her to continue her education online. Once she was on that path, Miss Joan had urged her friends to take her on as an accountant even though her degree and accreditation were still more than a few months in the future.

  So, when Miss Joan wanted her to go some place or be somewhere, she was not about to say no to the woman. Even if she would have preferred to beg off. This was Miss Joan and she’d walk through fire for the woman, she was that grateful to her.

  Tina slid off the stool and approached the gathering around the new doctor. Miss Joan deliberately signaled for several of the men to step aside and clear a path for Tina. No one said no or ignored Miss Joan. They knew better than that.

  “Dr. Daniel, this is Tina Blayne,” Miss Joan said, resting her hands on Tina’s slim shoulders. The next moment, she delicately pushed Tina in closer to the town’s new addition. “I have a feeling the two of you will be seeing a lot of each other,” she pronounced.

  Tina looked at the woman sharply.

  Miss Joan smiled innocently, as if she had said nothing out of the ordinary. Certainly nothing that Tina should find upsetting.

  “I told him about Bobby and how sick he’s been lately,” Miss Joan explained after a sufficient beat had gone by.

  Well, Dan decided, he might not want to be here and was here pretty much under duress—even if it was of his own making. But he was a doctor and he liked to think that he was a damn decent one, even if he hadn’t exactly graduated at the top of his class. That outcome had been not because he didn’t know his material, or because he wasn’t skilled at his craft. It was because he’d preferred partying to working on imaginary patients and cadavers. But when it came to the real thing, he was as conscientious as they came.

  “Bobby?” he asked. She’d just said the name to him a couple of minutes ago. Referring to who? His brain still felt as if it was throbbing.

  “My son,” Tina told him.

  “Right.” He had to get his act together. Miss Joan had just told him that, Dan thought. He glanced at the young mother’s left hand. It was devoid of any rings. Divorced? Widowed? In any event, he took the absence of a ring to mean that she was a single mother. Things became interesting again.

  “Why don’t you bring him by my office?” Dan told her. “Once I have an office,” he qualified.

  “Oh, you have an office,” Miss Joan assured him. “Once you unwind a little I’m sure that the sheriff’ll be glad to take you there. Right, Rick?” she asked, peering around the new doctor’s arm.

  “Just say when,” Rick replied good-naturedly.

  “He will,” Miss Joan promised in Dan’s stead. She turned her attention back to the guest of honor. “But right now—” she looked around at the faces of the people she had, for the most part, watched grow up over the years, and then loudly declared “—we’re going to welcome ourselves a doctor.”

  “About time!” a burly man toward the front of the crowd called out.

  Miss Joan laughed and nodded. “I couldn’t agree with you more, Ezra.” She glanced over her shoulder toward two of her waitresses. “Julie, Rosa, see that everyone has a glass—and be sure to fill it. We need to make a toast to Dr. Dan.”

  Dan braced himself for whatever was ultimately coming. He didn’t mind being in the spotlight, but he had the feeling that this attention came with a great many strings. He had one hell of a challenge in front of him.

  This toast’s for you, Warren, Dan thought. Not me. He knew his brother would have been moved by it. As for him, it just gave him a feeling of anticipation that was far from good.

  He sincerely hoped that he was up to the challenge. For Warren’s sake, he was going to have to be.

  Chapter Three

  “To Doctor Dan!” Miss Joan toasted with enthusiasm, raising her glass of sparkling cider high. “Thanks for setting up your practice here and we all hope that you never come to regret it.”

  Dan raised his own glass to his lips. The woman was asking a great deal. More than was possible. If this was only about him, he’d be already regretting it. Already booking a flight back.

  But this wasn’t about what he wanted. It was about Warren and what he had wanted. What he selflessly had wanted.

  For now, he would make the best of it and muster through.

  As the light amber liquid made its way past his lips and down his throat, the taste created a note of confusion in its wake. He’d thought that the waitresses had poured some sort of alcoholic beverage into the glasses that they then distributed to him and the others. One taste negated that impression. Other than a few bubbles and a deceptively yellowish color, what had been poured into his glass fell woefully short of having any sort of a kick.

  His drink tasted suspiciously like soda pop.

  Dan regarded his glass, unconsciously raising a quizzical eyebrow as he tried to pinpoint just what it was he was drinking.

  Seeing his confused expression, Tina leaned into him so he could hear her. “It’s sparkling cider,” she told him, then added, “this is a diner. Miss Joan doesn’t serve any hard liquor here.”

  For a moment, he was distracted by Tina’s closeness and the scent of her hair. Something light and floral. And heady.

  Dan forced himself to focus on the conversation. Okay, no hard liquor. He could deal with that. But no liquor at all was something else again.

  He thought of wine. Entire cultures had wine with their dinner. Dan sincerely hoped that this wasn’t a dry town. “How about ‘soft’ liquor?”

  Amusement entered her eyes at the term. “None of that, either.”

  “Do they have any liquor at all in this town?”

  He wasn’t addicted to drinking, but he wanted to know if it was available should the need arise. There were times, since Warren’s death, that he felt the need to numb himself against the haunting memory of Warren’s last cry of pain and surprise. And, now that he thought o
f it, a drink at the end of the day after dealing with the good citizens of Sleepy Hollow might not be such a bad idea, either.

  “You can find some in Hogan’s General Store,” she told him, giving him the name of the biggest grocery store/pharmacy in Forever. “Mostly, Mr. Hogan sells beer, but if you catch him in a good mood, he’ll take you to where he keeps the top shelf stuff. Whiskey, vodka, whatever your pleasure,” she told him.

  Tina was doing her best not to prejudge the new doctor, or sound judgmental. But Don had been a drinker, as well as a closet drug addict. At the time she’d thrown her lot in with his, it hadn’t mattered. She’d been desperate to connect with someone other than the sister who had assumed the role of both mother and father to her. But it mattered now.

  Looking back, she realized now that Olivia had worked incredibly challenging hours just to provide for them as well as furthering her law career. But at the time all she could think of was that her sister was never physically there when she wanted her. And Don might have ultimately been a very poor excuse for a human being, but he had been incredibly charismatic when he wanted to be. She had been both lonely and highly impressionable when their paths crossed.

  In essence, she supposed she was a victim waiting to happen. But she survived all that, Tina thought, struggling to focus on the positive the way she’d learned to do. Survived, was the stronger for it and had a beautiful son to boot. All the rest of it was in the past and no longer of any consequence.

  Since Miss Joan had personally placed a glass of sparkling cider in her hand, Tina raised it now a beat after the others had chanted the toast to the doctor. The pause was part of her effort not to just blindly follow someone else’s lead, even if that someone was Miss Joan. It was all part of the evolution she was determined to go through.

  “To your stay in Forever,” she said, altering the toast to something she felt was more appropriate. Dr. Daniel Davenport didn’t have the air of someone who belonged in Forever.

  Because of the din, Dan was forced to watch the sexy blonde’s lips to “hear” what she was saying.

  Not exactly a hardship, he mused, since her lips were full and, at any other time, would have been decidedly tempting. But he wasn’t himself these days. He still struggled with his grief and the almost oppressively heavy weight of guilt that pressed down on him. Each time he managed to come up for air, to begin to pull himself together, the guilt would suddenly find him, stealing away the very air in his lungs.

  Six weeks after Warren’s death he was still caught in an emotional tailspin. A small part of him was the old Dan, the man he’d been before Warren had died because of him. The rest was a pulsating, formless glob of sadness and guilt, viewing everything around him in shades of gray and black.

  The first part was mired in denial. The second part was just mired. Both parts, he felt now, would need something stiffer than what was in his glass.

  “This is Texas,” he pointed out needlessly to the shapely blonde. “Aren’t there any bars or saloons or whatever the locals call them around here?”

  She noticed that he said “the locals,” not “you locals.” Was he deliberately excluding her from being part of Forever, giving her what he must have assumed was a compliment? Or was that just a slip of the tongue that he wasn’t aware of?

  “There’s a place on the other side of town,” she told him. “It’s called ‘The Cattlemen.’” The entire building was hardly big enough to be able to sustain the sign that proclaimed its name, but it did qualify for the label of saloon.

  “Didn’t think that this town was big enough to have an other side,” the doctor quipped.

  That was a definite put-down. Tina took offense for her adopted town. But when she looked at Forever’s newest resident, she didn’t see a smug, superior expression on his face. Instead, his expression appeared unfathomable, as if his heart and mind were elsewhere and his mouth just moved thanks to some automatic pilot setting.

  “It is and it does,” she assured him. She gave him a rundown on the establishment’s hours of operation. “The Cattlemen is only open after seven. The man who runs it also owns the barbershop next door and he works there in the daytime.”

  “After seven,” Dan repeated incredulously, thinking of the bars and grills located on practically every other corner back in three of New York City’s five boroughs. Most of those establishments opened before noon under the guise of serving lunch. “How long does this Cattlemen stay open?”

  Her eyes met his. Was the new doctor a closet drinker? she wondered uneasily.

  Her expression gave nothing away as she answered, “Long enough.”

  Her response brought an amused smile to his lips. The blonde probably thought he had a drinking problem. Nothing could be further from the truth. He had absolutely no intentions of drowning himself at the bottom of a bottle. For one thing, it wasn’t a solution. Warren still wouldn’t be alive once he sobered up. He was here, in Forever, for Warren’s sake. To make it up to his brother, at least a little—if Warren was up there somewhere, looking down and watching.

  He vacillated between believing in an afterlife and cynically regarding it as a myth intended to give people something to hold on to during the worst spates of their lives. Today he found himself somewhere on middle ground. Mostly he was just hoping to get through this without embarrassing his brother’s memory.

  “YOU LOOK LIKE THE CAT that swallowed a whole pitcher of cream,” Sheriff Rick Santiago observed as he passed Miss Joan in another part of the diner. He stopped to study the woman who had been one of his late grandmother’s friends. “What are you up to?” he asked. A hint of amusement flared in his green eyes as he regarded the owner of the diner.

  Instead of answering the sheriff directly, Miss Joan nodded toward where the new doctor and Rick’s sister-in-law were standing at the counter.

  “What do you see?” she asked, her voice deliberately innocent.

  Rick glanced in the general direction the woman indicated. But he was accustomed to taking in the bigger picture. “A damn good tally for you at the end of the day.”

  Miss Joan’s throaty laugh rumbled between them for a moment. “Well, yeah, there’s that, too, but something more interesting is going on. Look again.”

  He narrowed his field of reference and went with the obvious. “We’ve finally gotten a doctor to practice in this one-horse town.”

  “To go with the lawyer you got last year,” Olivia chimed in, joining her husband and Miss Joan. As Rick slipped his hand around her waist, drawing her closer, Olivia leaned her head against his shoulder. She was the picture of contentment—as well as pregnancy. “I won’t have a fifty-mile trip in front of me when my water breaks,” she said gratefully. “Looks like civilization has finally come to Forever,” she declared, immensely pleased.

  “Looks like more than that from where I’m standing,” Miss Joan propped.

  This time Rick and Olivia both looked over toward the diner owner’s reference point.

  “Tina’s talking to the new doctor,” Olivia noted. That seemed only natural, considering that Bobby’d had more than his share of earaches and colds this past winter. Tina doted on the boy. Most likely, she was telling the new doctor all about him.

  This could go on all afternoon, Miss Joan thought. Deciding to call an end to the fruitless guessing game, she gave them the answer she was waiting for.

  “Tina’s also smiling wider than I’ve ever seen her smile,” Miss Joan pointed out.

  Olivia narrowed her eyes a little, staring more intently at her sister. So that was it. Miss Joan was playing matchmaker. Well, the woman had certainly picked the wrong target this time.

  “If you’re trying to pick out a man for my sister, I really wouldn’t get my hopes up if I were you.”

  Miss Joan had had several husbands in her lifetime. Three by some people’s count, four by others. And it was rumored that there had also been a number of serious love affairs when she’d been a very young woman. Unattached at present, the
woman was nonetheless a romantic at heart and believed that men and women were created solely for the purpose of being paired up.

  “Why not?” she asked, her eyes pinning Olivia in place. “Tina’s a young, pretty girl with her head on straight, and in case you haven’t noticed because you only seem to have eyes for Rick here, that new doc’s real easy on the eyes.”

  Olivia shook her head. “That’s just the problem,” she informed the older woman.

  Miss Joan looked at her for a long moment, clearly confused. “His being easy on the eyes?” she asked, unable to make any sense out of Olivia’s response.

  “No, his being good-looking,” Olivia specified. She could see that Miss Joan wasn’t following this line of thinking so she made it clear for the woman. “The guy who almost ended my sister’s life—and who wanted to have their son die with them—was one of the handsomest specimens of manhood ever created. He was downright beautiful,” she concluded.

  In that he was very much like the fallen angel, Lucifer, Olivia couldn’t help adding silently. And her sister had fallen for the worthless piece of wasted flesh like the proverbial ton of bricks. Tina had almost paid for her mistake with her life.

  “More beautiful than me?” Rick asked teasingly.

  She turned her body in toward him, brushing against him and creating a sizzle between them. She put her hand against his cheek, all the love she felt shining in her eyes. “I hate to tell you this, Rick, but you’re not beautiful. You, Sheriff Santiago, are ruggedly handsome. Especially when you come to bed with your badge pinned to your naked chest,” she added with a laugh, punctuating her declaration with a quick kiss. “Now that I’d like to see,” Miss Joan hooted.

  “No offense, Miss Joan,” Olivia told the woman for whom she bore a great deal of affection, “but that’s never going to happen.” Her eyes danced as she specified, “That’s for private showings only.”

  Miss Joan laughed, her low, Kentucky bourbon voice rumbling mildly. It pleased her more than she could say that Rick had finally found someone who could love him the way he fully deserved to be loved. He’d gone through a lot in his life, not the least of which was magnanimously reconciling with the mother who had abandoned him when he was a kid and his sister had been a year-old baby.