by Fiona Lowe
Her soft and pretty mouth flattened into a mulish line. “I’ve been making decisions about my diabetes for ten years.”
Half of him understood her need to be in control of her diabetes, but she’d just scared the living daylights out of him. One minute she was fine, and the next minute she’d been fast heading toward death—just like Charlie—leaving him to deal with everything. Every part of him tensed. If he had to deal, then he wasn’t going to negotiate or argue. That could come later when she’d recovered. “I’ll change the bag to saline to keep the line open, and you put Dex on the hypo repeat setting,” he said tersely, using her nickname for the device. “I want to hear the moment anything changes.”
Her eyebrows rose. “How come I never noticed how bossy you are with the patients?”
He swung her up into his arms and dumped her unceremoniously on the passenger seat. “Because I’m only bossy with the difficult ones.”
MILLIE sat in a booth studying the menu and raised her eyes above the edge of the black folder. “They serve great huckleberry pancakes here,” she said conversationally, breaking the thick silence that had descended between them the moment Will had strapped her into the car seat.
He lowered his menu and stared at her, his gaze stern and critical, pretty much like it had been since they’d driven out of the parking lot at Two Medicine.
Oh please, don’t give me that look. She huffed out a breath of exasperation, already missing the fun Will. “I only mentioned the pancakes because they’re a local treat just like the huckleberry pie. As a Montanan, it’s my duty to make sure you taste our delicacies. Of course, I’ll be having the grizzly bait.”
“The salmon?” he said without a trace of humor. “Sensible choice.” Glancing around, his gaze landed on the waitress and he clicked his fingers. “Miss?”
The waitress walked over, pad in hand and looking ticked off. “Are you ready to order?”
Will gave her a distracted smile. “We’ll have the Indian taco to share, the salmon and I’ll have the buffalo burger. Can the taco come out straightaway please, because my friend’s diabetic and it’s important that she eat as soon as possible.”
Red flames of anger and betrayal flared and burned behind her eyeballs. What the hell, Will? What about privacy?
“Sure.” The waitress threw her a sympathetic yet glad-that’s-not-me look. “Do . . . you . . . want . . . the . . . soup . . . or . . . the . . . salad?” She spoke slowly and carefully as if having diabetes meant that not only did Millie’s pancreas not work but her brain didn’t, either.
“The soup,” Millie managed to say calmly, although she wanted to hit both the waitress and Will upside the head with the menu. “And I’ll have the vegetables with the salmon and a diet soda.”
The waitress read back the orders before collecting the menus and retreating to the kitchen. Millie opened her mouth to blast Will about violating her privacy with the waitress when he suddenly folded his arms tightly across his chest and gave her an accusatory look.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were a diabetic?”
She folded her arms right back at him. “I tell people on a need-to-know basis.”
His chestnut brows hit his hairline. “And you didn’t think that going canoeing, where you’d be exercising, counted as”—he made air quotes with his fingers—“a need-to-know situation?” Incredulity dripped off his words.
“That’s correct,” she said crisply, as if she was in the witness stand and he was the questioning prosecutor.
He made a definite snorting sound. “I think the fact you almost lapsed into unconsciousness is a conclusive argument as to why you should have told me.”
“What happened today hasn’t happened in years.” She was still feeling jittery from the severe hypo, and his doctor-knows-best tone got under her skin. He didn’t know best. Sure, he knew the theory, but he didn’t know what it was like to dance every day on the tightrope that was diabetes, nor did he know the immense effort she put in to staying well. “When you left for the falls, my blood sugar was seventy. If I’d eaten something, then I’d have been fine.” Despite her best efforts, the post-hypo wobblies made her voice waver. “Only I couldn’t do that because you locked my purse in your car.”
His head jerked back against the booth as if she’d struck him, and then his shoulders rolled back and his spine straightened. “You’re blaming me for the hypo?”
Her throat was thick. “It was an accident.”
“It was totally preventable,” he ground out in a low and cutting tone. “If you’d told me you were diabetic, I wouldn’t have locked the car. Jesus, Millie.” He suddenly cleared his throat. “What if I’d decided to stay at the falls longer?”
Millie, this is serious. Millie, we’re worried about you.
His anger at her wasn’t dissimilar to that of her parents, and old memories washed up against her. The times she’d scared them. The times she’d disappointed them. The constancy of their concern for her despite the fact she now lived a sensible and stable life. She hated the guilt and self-reproach those memories brought up, but most of all she hated that her diabetes meant she was the one who was always expected to say sorry.
She didn’t want to be sorry, and she couldn’t stop the dismissive teenage shrug of her shoulders. “But you didn’t stay longer.”
Will’s inky eyes widened to huge, dark pools in his tan face. “That’s not a defense, Millie. You should have told me and then none of this would have happened. I mean, hell, you should have told me a long time ago. What if you’d had a hypo in the air?”
Her breath caught in her throat. Was he going to go all squirrelly on her and pull her from working with MontMedAir? It teetered on discrimination, but even so, the thought that he might cite medical grounds and pull her off the team made her both panic and seethe.
Breathe in, breathe out, in, out. Think.
She moved the sugar pourer toward her and added it to the condiment lineup in the middle of the table, as if it marked a battle line between them. Stay calm. Speak slowly. “I’ve flown with you six times, Will, and I’ve never come even close to having a hypo, because I handle my diabetes. I’ve been handling it for years, and usually I’m never away from my tote bag. It’s my survival kit. In my book, that’s a conclusive argument as to why I didn’t have to tell you about my diabetes. I’m sure there are things in your life you keep private.”
His chiseled jaw stiffened, and he suddenly looked as if he was working really hard at controlling his temper. But he didn’t yell or thump the table; instead, he suddenly raised his hands to his stubbled cheeks and rubbed his palms against them. When he dropped his hands away, he looked straight at her. “You scared me.”
His quietly spoken words packed a punch of culpability straight to her solar plexus. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. I didn’t have a choice. All too clearly she remembered her panic and disorientation on the trail, and she opened her palms outward. “I scared me, too.” She licked her dry lips. “Thank you for being there.”
“Yeah.” The word came out hushed on an exhale, and deep lines creased the edges of his eyes. He looked exhausted, as if he’d been the one fighting the hypo, not her.
She always felt shattered afterward, like a wrung-out rag, which was exactly how she felt now. All she wanted to do was curl up and sleep, but she had to stay awake. She had to eat. She had to monitor her blood sugar until she was sure it had stabilized. It was draining, and on top of struggling to stay awake, she kept getting flashes of memory, only she couldn’t tell what was hypo-induced hallucinations and what was real. She remembered Will picking her up on the trail and the burning sting of the IV piercing her skin. After that, things got hazy.
There were definite moments when she’d felt safe, warm and cocooned, but then there was a vibrant memory of Will gazing down at her with naked desire bright in his dark, fathomless eyes. That was definitely a hallucination—her sugar-deprived brain spinning pure fantasy. Still, it had been an amazingly won
derful 3-D make-believe, and she planned to revisit it in quiet moments when she was alone with her vibrator. It was as close as she was ever going to get to Will actually wanting her.
The waitress arrived, breaking the strained silence between them, and they concentrated on rearranging the table to make room for the plate of Indian taco. The flat fry bread was heaped with chili, lettuce, tomato, onion, cheddar cheese, sour cream and salsa. Millie tested her blood sugar at the table, because now that Will knew about her diabetes, there was no need for her to go somewhere private like she’d done at lunch.
“What is it?” Will asked, leaning forward.
“All good,” she said lightly, not looking at him as she pulled out her insulin pump. Truthfully, her blood sugar was still on the low side of ideal, and she didn’t want to give herself too much insulin and have her blood sugar tumble again.
She was in the middle of calculating the carbs and allowing for the fact the sour cream and cheese would slow down the carbs’ absorption when Will said, “Err on the side of caution with the insulin.”
She glanced up from her pump, and he gave her an earnest and encouraging smile. The entertaining, Energizer Bunny Will, with his friendly, laid-back grin, was nowhere to be seen. In his place was Dr. Bartlett, emergency physician, and he was looking at her with a worried diagnostic gaze, as if he expected her to self-destruct before his eyes at any given moment. It was written clearly on his handsome face that he no longer saw her as Millie the medical student or Millie the RN or even Millie his friend.
She stifled a hysterical laugh that rose in her throat, and she pursed her lips to stop it from breaking free. Never in her wildest dreams had she thought she’d yearn for a time when Will thought about her as Millie, his lesbian friend. No, now she was Millie the diabetic. A dull ache took up residence in her chest, throbbing slowly in a tattoo of loss.
Chapter 9
Ethan closed the library door behind the last stroller as toddler story time, which supposedly finished at eleven thirty, had once again spilled into his lunch break. He didn’t mind. If parents took the time to ask his advice on book suggestions for their kids, he wasn’t going to say no.
“Tahlee, can you shelve those board books for me, please?” he asked his new but lazy intern as he grabbed a folder off his desk. “I’ve got a family fun day meeting and then I’ve got to go to city hall and wrangle with them to release our Ready 2 Read Goes Wild! funding. I’ll miss the seniors’ bus, so if you need any help, you can get me on my cell.”
“A minibus of seniors?” The twenty-year-old rolled her heavily kohled eyes as she inspected her black nail polish for chips. “I think I can cope.”
Tahlee had no idea how busy that hour between two and three on a Wednesday afternoon could be or that her lackadaisical work ethic was about to get a thorough workout like it never had before. Doris would want her to find a particular book, but the only details she’d be able to give would be something as vague as It’s about the woman whose husband fought in Vietnam. Rolf, whose arthritis wouldn’t allow him to bend¸ always found a book he wanted on the lower stacks; Leo Ratzenburger would need help with logging on to the Internet, because he had far too many passwords and a habit of accidentally turning the caps lock button on; and at least three of the rest of the bus crowd would need some reminding on how to use the self-checkout kiosk. Guaranteed, someone will have forgotten their card.
Yup, Tahlee’s studied indifference was going to be well and truly frazzled. He smiled at the thought. “I’ll bring you back a coffee.”
She shrugged. “What evs.”
What evs? Had he ever been that disinterested in life? Not even as a teen. His total lack of coolness and his definite nerdiness had meant he’d had dollops of enthusiasm for the specific things he enjoyed and he’d thrown himself into them wholeheartedly. He still did. His self-imposed challenge was that by the end of the summer he’d have helped Tahlee find something that floated her boat and got her involved in the community. Perhaps he could let her loose on the Friends of the Library?
No, those fine people didn’t deserve that. He smiled to himself, hatching a plan—the scary women of the Bear Paw book club were another matter entirely.
He cut across the park, making his way toward the Big Foot diner, waving to the moms who’d just left the library and were having a picnic lunch on the grass near the playground. His head was full of plans for the Fourth of July family fun day. It was a chance to showcase the library to the greater community. Not that memberships were down; in fact, with the current Bear Paw baby boom, they were growing steadily, and story and music time was always full, but he wanted to reach the families and teens who really needed the services the library offered.
He wanted to target the families who didn’t have a novel in their home. He wanted to introduce the joy of audiobooks to families who found reading hard—after all, who didn’t like being read to? He wanted to reach families who lacked access to computers and the Internet and families who needed a place to meet people and expand their world. He was toying with the idea of a father and kids night, because separated fathers often had no clue what to do with their children on access visits. With ideas bouncing in his head, he found himself inside the diner without really noticing that he’d run up the steps and pushed open the door.
“Hey, Eth. Come join us.”
He swung around and couldn’t help but see Millie. Everyone could see her—hell, she was probably visible from the Hubble Space Telescope. For some reason, she was wearing vivid berry purple scrubs—the color in stark contrast to her usual more muted greens and blues. She’d risen from the booth seat and was waving at him as if she were taking part in a Mexican wave. Things must be quiet at the hospital if some of the staff had made it over to the diner for lunch.
“You’re very bright today,” he said, walking toward her.
“The hospital laundry service had a mix-up, which is why I look like an advertisement for grape juice,” she said with a smile that wasn’t quite as wide as it could be. “Sit with us. You’ve met Tara?”
His butt had already hit the bench seat before he realized that he wasn’t sitting next to someone from the hospital. He hadn’t spoken to Tara in several days—not since he’d been released from custody—but he’d seen her from a distance last Friday at Leroy’s. He turned to face her and got hit by her beautiful but coolly serious blue green eyes, which stared straight at him. A zap of pure lust rocked him from head to toe.
God, you’re absolutely gorgeous. “I . . . yes . . . we’ve met. Hi again.”
The one part of him that always tried to be self-assured around stunning women—the one part that was frequently embarrassed by the rest of him—slapped his palm to his face. Jeez, can you at least try to be cool.
“Actually,” he said, concentrating extremely hard at being casual, “we . . .” He leaned back, forgetting precisely how close his butt cheeks were to the edge of the bench seat. He suddenly felt air underneath him, and his fingers frantically gripped the edge of the table. No way in hell was he landing on his ass in the diner in front of a group of people who always had a phone and therefore a camera in their hand. Especially not today just as the roasting he’d gotten about the soccer video had died down.
Where the hell was the sticky table that stuck to you like glue when you needed it? Today he got the one slick with some sort of oil on it, and his fingertips skated across the surface, unable to grip. In a desperate attempt to save himself from bouncing onto the floor, he used his martial arts, upper body strength to throw himself forward. His head hit Tara’s shoulder hard—his forehead colliding with her collarbone with a nauseating and bone-cracking thwack.
Tara made a soft gasping sound and instantly recoiled into the booth.
“Sorry.” He straightened up but not before her scent had locked on to him, reminding him of the sweet perfume of a bouquet of spring flowers. It was a soft and almost unworldly scent—the total opposite from what he’d expected. Innocence and naïvet
é didn’t match up with an officer of the law.
“You seeing stars, Eth?” Millie asked with a sympathetic I cannot believe you just did that but I totally get it look in her eyes. “I’ll get you some ice.”
He was seeing stars, but he doubted it was from the knock on the head. It didn’t matter that Tara wore a uniform shirt buttoned up to the neck, a tie and a name badge; for one brief moment his face had been pressed into the blessed softness of the top of her right breast. Pillow soft. Sheer heaven. He wouldn’t forget that in a hurry.
Forget the boobs.
Are you serious? That’s as close as we’ve gotten to any action in a while.
Dude, people are looking.
The fog of arousal vanished under the immediacy of reality. What he needed was containment, not a fuss. Ice meant people would notice he’d done something embarrassing, so he gave his askew glasses a tap with his fingers—viewing life in focus was always a help—and he shot for macho. “I don’t need ice, Millie.”
“I think you might,” Tara said stiffly, her gaze staring distastefully at his forehead. “You’ve got a lump.”
His fingers automatically probed his brow, and he felt the egg-size bump rising under his tips. Just perfect.
Millie, who’d cheerfully ignored him, handed him ice cubes wrapped in a cloth. “Here you go. Press it to your forehead for ten minutes. Tara, do you need ice, too?”
“Hey, Eth,” Dane Aitken said, phone in hand and raising it toward his face. “Looking good.” The phone clicked—the photo would be on Twitter in seconds.
He raised the ice pack in a salute and then turned his back on him. “So, Millie, you working at the first aid tent on the Fourth?”
“I am and—” Her phone started vibrating across the table, and then it emitted the screaming sound of a siren. She jumped to her feet. “Sorry, gotta go. I’ll grab a ready-made sandwich, so when my turkey club arrives, Eth, you eat it. Sorry, Tara. Bye.”
