“No. Nor in New York City. So prepare yourself, Ginny, for the treat of a lifetime.”
The place was packed. Country music wheezed out of tinny speakers. Cigarette smoke formed a blue haze around ceiling fans that spun lazily in the heat. Logan led the way to the only available table, a rickety one in the far back corner of the room. A very small table, she discovered, once she settled down on the well-worn chair. Her knees bumped Logan’s under the table. She slid her legs around, then crossed them, to avoid the contact.
He didn’t notice. Or at least, he pretended not to notice as he drummed his fingers on the table and waved a hand at a formidable-looking woman lumbering through the crowd toward them. She granted Logan a very wide, very friendly smile.
“There you are, Mac. I’ve been wondering where you’ve been.”
“Been busy, Mama.”
“I see that.” Her gaze settled on Ginny, and Ginny felt herself being sized up from her sandals to her tousled hair. “This ain’t no sister of yours. Never seen this pretty thing before. What are you thinking, bringing her into town?” Mama delivered her words with a slow, teasing smile and a wink in Ginny’s direction. “You’re going to disappoint every woman under sixty when they see her and you sitting all cozy here.”
“I’m just a decoy,” Ginny said, straightening in her chair and wondering if they really looked “cozy.” “Logan and I are…friends.”
“So you say, so you say,” Mama said, a wicked gleam in her eye. “I’m Mama Napoli.”
“Gene Van Saun,” she said, grasping the woman’s hand in her own.
“Professor Eugenia Van Saun,” Logan corrected. “Don’t let the pretty face fool you, Mama. She’s smart as a whip.”
“I can see that. She’s here with you, isn’t she?”
“She’s only here for a week or two,” Logan continued, giving Mama an eye. “She’s a city girl and doesn’t know a thing about pizza, so how about getting us something that’ll knock her socks off.”
“Honey, there’s already something at this table that’ll knock her socks off. But if you don’t know what it is, I ain’t going to be the one to tell you.”
Ginny gave Logan an eye as Mama Napoli turned away, hands flapping, shouting the order toward the kitchen. “Local character, huh?”
“Yeah.” He creaked back in his chair. “Speaks her mind.”
“I hope her pizza is as spicy as she is.”
“Spicy, huh? I pegged you for a plain-cheese-pizza kind of girl.”
Plain. Boring. Ordinary. “You pegged me wrong.”
“Apparently.”
“I take it we don’t get to choose a crust here.”
“Nope.”
“And what, exactly, does ‘the works’ mean?”
“Whatever Mama has in the kitchen. That’s the way it goes around here, city girl. Plain and simple. No pineapple. No goat cheese. What you see is what you get.”
“Too bad the men around here aren’t the same.”
A waitress clattered two beers on the table and then zipped away before they stopped rattling. Logan curled a hand around the frosty amber glass and lifted it to his lips. When he finished drinking, he swiped his face with his arm then slammed the mug back on the table.
“So what the hell is that remark supposed to mean?”
Cowboy, she thought as she took a hesitant sip of the yeasty brew. Bad table manners. Gets crusty when he’s the butt of a joke. More reasons why she and he made such an ill-matched pair.
Well, what the heck, she might as well plunge headfirst into danger. “It means that I still find it hard to believe that you’re an emergency-room doctor, Logan.”
“I’m not a doctor anymore.” His knuckles whitened on the beer. “Quit my job last March and I have no intention of ever going back.”
“Did you lose your license?”
“No.” A muscle in his cheek flexed. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not working as a doctor anymore.”
Miss Marples was jumping up and down in her head now, pearls a-flying, hands a-waving, warning her to change the subject. It was obvious by all signals that Logan didn’t want to talk about it, but a stronger force was at work here. She wanted to know what happened, why he’d given up on medicine after what must have been years of schooling. She wanted a reason to dislike him.
He spoke before she could ask.
“What you see is what you get, Dr. Van Saun. I was a doctor, yeah. But now I’m unemployed, I’m crashing at a friend’s house and I have no visible means of support. While you,” he continued, taking another gulp of beer, “are clearly employed, on a working vacation and have a very visible means of support.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you’re a rich girl.” His gaze slipped down to the pearls draped at her neck. “And I didn’t need that fancy foreign car parked in my driveway to figure that out.”
Her back straightened on a needle of anger. “Oh, really?”
“Yeah. It’s more than the pearls. Or the boarding school and the classical music you listen to when you’re working. You ooze wealth, Red. It’s been bred into your blood. It’s like a cool frost you give off your skin.”
She watched a drop of moisture slide down the side of the mug. She traced it with her finger. “You’ve got a problem with wealth?”
“Not,” he answered, a little too swiftly. “I don’t have a problem with it because it isn’t an issue. Because we’re not an issue.”
“Good. Because I am rich,” she said, scraping the chair out a little from the table. “At least, my parents are. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t work hard getting to where I am today.” She jutted her chin. “Last time I looked, you couldn’t buy a Ph.D. Or an M.D., for that matter.”
He winced, then looked away from her, across the heads of the crowd. The speakers hissed between the twang of country songs. He twirled the mug absently in his hand, rattling it over the warped wooden boards of the table. When he looked back at her, it was with a tilt of his head.
“I was just making a point, Ginny.”
“Were you?”
“I don’t give a damn if you’re rich or poor. I know you worked hard to get where you are. I was just trying to point out how different we are.”
“And that’s the whole point for this…” She couldn’t bring herself to say “date.”
“Yeah, that is the whole point.”
“So I take it,” she said, with more bite than she intended, “that you were born into abject poverty?”
He glared at her. “Not exactly.”
“Standing in breadlines? No shoes for your feet?”
“I was born on a ranch in Montana. One of eight kids.”
“And you all slept naked in one bed, I suppose.”
He raised a brow. “My wit and charm are working on you already. You’re as cold and edgy as an icicle, and we haven’t even made it to the movie yet.”
She dropped her gaze from his. Okay, okay, maybe she was laying it on pretty thick. But she resented his inference that she was born with a silver spoon in her mouth. Maybe she had been. She’d never been hungry, she’d never wanted for anything. Well, almost anything. There was more to growing up than having food, clothes and lots of educational toys.
“My dad was a vet,” he continued, “but most times the ranchers couldn’t pay him much. So me and my brothers and sisters worked like dogs every summer keeping the family ranch running. Got to medical school on scholarship. Wouldn’t have been able to go otherwise.”
“Congratulations.” She paused as the edge dulled. She’d never had to worry about money for schooling, though she had gone to graduate school on a fellowship. She’d never had to work a day in her life to pay for schooling or anything else, for that matter. “That mustn’t have been easy.”
“Nope.” He slugged down the last of the beer. “And it put dirt under my fingernails, the kind that never comes out.”
Her gaze fell to his hands. They were dean, but they were strong, work-hardened hands.
Nicked here and there, sprinkled with dark hairs on the back. They’d be rough against her skin, she found herself thinking. As they’d been that day in the forest, when he’d scraped his hand up her rib cage and cupped her breast—
“The only dirt I ever got under my fingernails was from my grandmother’s garden,” she found herself saying abruptly, in an unnaturally high pitch. “Easy enough to wash off.”
A silence stretched between them. She told herself that this was another difference between them: Rich and not-so-rich. Hard-working and… Well, she wasn’t about to characterize herself as a slacker. She’d worked hard to get where she was today. A different kind of work.
“You told me about your grandmother,” he said, his voice lower. Rougher. “You spent summers there.”
“I wish I could have spent more time. But during the year I was off in boarding school.”
“I thought boarding schools only existed in novels.”
“Oh, no,” she said. “First grade on, it was boarding school for me. The best my parents could afford—”
“First grade?” His brows shot up. “You were, what… seven years old?”
“Actually,” she said, “I was six.”
“That’s insane.” He leaned forward, urging her to deny it. “You’ve got to be kidding me. Your parents sent you away when you were six?”
“To one of the most exclusive boarding schools in Switzerland.”
Ginny let her gaze drop to the condensation pooling under the beer.
Mother, please let me come home. I don’t like it here. I don’t understand people. They talk funny.
“My parents are both surgeons at Mount Sinai Medical Center,” she explained in a light, easy voice. “They’ve been developing cutting-edge surgical techniques for thirty years now. People…of their class… send their kids to boarding school.”
“I see.”
“I got a hefty allowance.” She shrugged a shoulder, felt the slip of the sleeve against her arm. “All my parents’ friends’ kids were sent to Europe, too. And my parents visited often. I think I saw them more when I was in boarding school than when I was in New York.”
Mother, why can’t I stay home with Nanny?
“I learned a lot,” she added. “Piano lessons, ballet lessons, art lessons. Never a free moment.”
“Sounds hellish.”
“It was.”
She started. The words had slipped out before she could stop them. She stared at Logan, who had pushed aside the beer and was leaning on the table, watching her closely.
“I got used to it,” she added swiftly. Defensively. “It built character, I think. I got the best education money can buy. And it made me…independent.”
“Lonely.”
She flashed him a look. “You know, just because they sent me off to boarding school doesn’t make them bad parents.”
“Uh-huh.”
“They spent every Sunday with me when I was home. We ate dinner together at least twice a week.”
“Twice a week.”
“My mother and her family escaped Poland during the war,” she added, “and came here without a penny. Her parents sacrificed to send her to medical school. She sacrificed the same for me.”
Logan settled back in his chair as she laid that little piece of information out for him. “That’ll teach me to make snap judgments. It’s just…” He frowned as he perused her face. “I just don’t like the image of you as a six-year-old little girl with pigtails… Did you have pigtails?”
“Freckles and buck teeth, too.”
“A six-year-old little girl with freckles being shipped off to some institution for the remainder of her childhood.”
“It wasn’t,” she murmured, “all that bad. I had never known any other life. I had nothing to compare it to, and I was one of the rich ones, one of the fortunate ones.”
“When I was six years old I was learning to ride a horse. I was learning how to drive cattle and lasso a calf. I’d helped my father birth more foals than I could count. And every night, without fail, the family ate dinner together.”
Ginny curled her hand around her mug and traced patterns in the dew. She could imagine his youth. She’d imagined a similar life for herself a hundred thousand times when she was a little girl and still could dream of the kind of family life she saw on American TV: a mother who stayed home, a father who came home in time for dinner, friends who lived in neat little houses with front lawns and played on the grass after dinner. She’d been almost eleven years old before she realized that most people really lived like that.
She crossed her legs and met his gaze. “We’re very different, Logan.”
“Worlds apart.”
“Couldn’t be farther.”
“Absolutely.”
The point was moot. She met his gaze across the width of a restaurant table and held it steadily, and wondered why they were trying so hard to make it.
Truth be told, she didn’t really care where he came from. She’d never cared about that sort of thing. She hated that he’d even brought up the fact she’d been born into a wealthy family. It shouldn’t make a difference. It wasn’t where you came from that mattered; it was where you were, and how you got there.
In many ways, she and this man sitting across the table from her, etching her face with his intense green gaze, were in the same place. She had a Ph.D. in botany; he was a doctor of emergency medicine. Her parents were doctors. She knew how much schooling, how much training went into getting an M.D. She knew it took brains and grit and a hell of a lot of motivation to obtain it.
What she didn’t know was why—after so much time and work—he would give it all up.
Suddenly, she didn’t want to know. To know—to understand—would be to draw closer to this man she could not stop thinking about. She didn’t want to get closer to him. They’d shared a hot kiss, yes, but that had to have been an aberration—a trick of the hot sun and fresh air. If it had continued, surely he’d have discovered what it took Michael two years to discover—that she was as frigid and unfeeling and sexually cold as an icicle.
A tray clattered on the table. She leaned back in her chair, as did Logan, as the steam of the hot pizza filled the space between them.
“One pizza, everything on it,” the waitress said, tearing off the check. “I’ll get you more beer.”
Ginny stared at the creation between them as the waitress clattered away. Her stomach growled; her eyes widened. “There’s got to be two inches of stuff or it.”
Logan pulled off a slice and eyed it from different angles. “It’s a little low tonight.”
She pulled off her own slice, folded it as best she could and took a healthy bite off the tip. She closed her eyes as the taste of melted cheese and spicy sausage and fresh pepperoni and firm mushrooms filled her mouth.
“Well?” he asked. “What do you think, city girl?”
Defying Miss Marples, she spoke around the wad ir her mouth. “It is out of this world.”
“There’s one thing we can agree on.”
A SOFT, COOL RAIN GREETED THEM when they left the movie theater later that evening. Logan welcomed the chill; after sitting in a dark room next to Ginny for twc and a half hours, he needed a cold shower.
“We’d better get to the truck,” he said gruffly shrugging his jacket over his shoulders, “before is pours.”
The air in the car was heavy and humid, the insides of the windows sweating with moisture. He turned the key and revved up the motor, trying to ignore the subtle scent of strawberries floating in the air as Ginny settled in beside him.
Best to get her talking, he decided. Chatter. Mindless chatter. Anything to get his mind off the warm female body beside him, the way her damp skirt dung tc those long, long legs…
“So,” he said, “how did you like the movie?”
“It was great.”
“Great, huh?” He shook his head. “C’mon, Ginny. Which car crash did you like best?”
“I wasn’t keepin
g count.”
“You were counting the bodies, then.”
“Nope.”
“You’re supposed to argue with me. Tell me you would have preferred another movie.” He turned out onto the highway and headed down the road just as the patter of the rain intensified on the windshield. “Something with bodices and long dresses.”
“That would have been fine, too. But I really liked this movie.”
“You’re lying.”
She made a noise of dismay. “I am not!”
“Ginny, there was more testosterone in that movie than in a whole class of eighth-grade boys.”
“I noticed. So what?”
“So there’s no way you could have enjoyed it.”
“Is that why you chose it?”
“I chose it,” he said defiantly, “because I wanted to see it.”
“Very Neanderthal of you.”
“Thank you.”
“Nonetheless,” she continued, “I liked the movie.”
“Why?”
“You really have to ask?”
“Humor me.”
“Men can be so dense,” she said. “Who starred in that movie, Logan?”
“Mel Gibson.”
“Bingo.” She shifted her bottom on the damp vinyl seat. “Do I really have to explain anything else?”
Logan concentrated on the road while he grappled with this new insight into the female mind. He’d intentionally chosen the most male-oriented movie on the marquee and bought tickets for it without even asking what her choice would be. He’d wanted to put her off He hadn’t given a thought to the relative hunk value of the leading men.
But what was disturbing him more was the fact thai she’d admitted she’d liked the movie because of the leading man. Which was tantamount to admitting she had a secret sexual fantasy life.
“What is it?”
He glanced at her, then realized that he’d chuckled out loud. He fixed his gaze back on the road, but not before getting a good view of bare knees. She’d hiked her skirt up to dry it. “You,” he said, shaking his head, “You and Mel Gibson.”
“In my dreams.”
“Precisely,” he continued. “You keep surprising me, Ginny.”
“Why should that surprise you?” Strident. Slightly defiant. “I have blood in my veins.”
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