The Most Eligible Doctor

by Karen Rose Smith

  While his dad was finishing a quick supper of hot dogs and baked beans, Jed went to the living room to call Brianne. She answered the phone herself.

  When he heard her voice, he couldn’t help but smile. “Brianne, it’s Jed.”

  “Is something wrong? Is your dad okay?”

  “Dad’s fine, just going stir-crazy. I told him I’d take him bowling tomorrow night. I was wondering if you’d like to come along?”

  A few moments of silence had him holding his breath. Finally she said, “Saturday night the bowling alley is packed.”

  “I know. But Dad’s league bowls at six. That’s early for the evening crowd, and we should be able to get a lane. The restaurant there makes a great beef barbecue. We can bowl our own game, then eat and watch Dad’s friends.”

  There was another hesitant pause. “People might talk if they see us together.”

  “I didn’t hear any gossip about us playing pool…or sledding at the lake. Will it bother you if people talk?” he asked.

  “I thought it might bother you. Isn’t that why we went to Madison to dinner?”

  “No,” he said with a bit of force. “I took you there because I saw that restaurant and thought of you. It just seemed to be a place you’d like.”

  This time her silence told him she was surprised by that. “Did you think I didn’t want to be seen with you?” he asked gently.

  “You are my boss—”

  “We work in the same practice together, Brianne. I don’t put much store in what other people think—never have, never will. Now, if you don’t want to go tomorrow night, I don’t want you to feel obligated in any way.”

  “I don’t feel obligated. I do want to go. What time should I be ready?”

  Jed felt inordinately pleased that Brianne had accepted his invitation…much too pleased for a bowling date!

  Chapter Eight

  The bowling alley was crowded. Jed stole a glance at Brianne as he held the door for his dad, who wasn’t using crutches anymore, but was wearing his brace. When she passed through the door, too, Jed caught the scent of her perfume. Or was it the raspberry soap she used? Whatever it was, it tempted him to do more than talk to her.

  Al saw his gang immediately, waved Jed away dismissively and headed toward the lanes. “See you later.”

  Brianne laughed. “I don’t think we have to worry about him having a good time tonight.”

  “Just so he doesn’t ignore the pain in his knee and try to bowl.” Leading Brianne toward the counter where they could rent shoes, Jed remarked, “He’s going to enjoy that bread. I think he thought you’d forget all about it.”

  “I don’t forget promises,” she said.

  That simple statement brought Jed’s gaze to hers. He believed her. He knew even small promises were important, and Brianne seemed to understand that, too.

  After they rented shoes, they crossed to the bench at the lanes with their score sheet. Brianne picked up a pencil, sat at the desk and wrote their names in the blanks.

  Looking over her shoulder, she asked, “Did I happen to mention I was on the bowling team in college?”

  Jed groaned. “And here I thought I’d run away with this.”

  “You did that at pool. I wasn’t about to play a game with you again that I didn’t have a good chance of winning.”

  He could tell she was teasing, and he guessed to her the fun was in the game. Her eyes took on a luminous sparkle as they both remembered how he’d taught her to hold the cue stick to make a shot. He had to remind himself that tonight wasn’t about holding Brianne close or whispering something sweet in her ear.

  However, as he watched her bowl—her lithe figure curvy and tempting in royal-blue leggings and a long sweater—he decided he didn’t have to be close to her to want her, for his heart to race, for his imagination to go wild. He found himself marveling at the fact that the delight on her face when she made a strike was as arousing as the simple sight of her. She knew how to enjoy life, and he had forgotten how for years. In spite of fighting his constant attraction to her, he enjoyed working with her every day, spending time with her, feeling her compassion as she dealt with patients.

  A few hours later, after they’d eaten and watched Al’s friends finish their games, Jed drove home. His dad was in good spirits and talked about the goings-on with his buddies. The senior citizens club was planning a trip to the Wisconsin Dells this summer and he wanted to take it. Jed would champion that trip. Anything to keep his dad active and involved in life.

  Since Al’s house was closer to the bowling alley than Lily’s Victorian, Jed had stopped there first. Now he asked Brianne, “Would you like to come in? I could light a fire and we could make hot chocolate.”

  “That sounds nice,” she agreed softly.

  Jed wasn’t sure what he was doing or what he was going to say. Maybe they’d just drink the hot chocolate and not talk about anything important. But his gut had a churning feeling, and he knew tonight was about more than sitting in front of a cozy fire to keep warm.

  After Al shucked off his coat, he headed for the stairs. “I’m beat. Jed, I’ll see you in the morning. Brianne, thanks again for the bread. It probably won’t last past tomorrow noon.”

  As Brianne slipped out of her coat and sat on the sofa, Al slowly took the steps one at a time.

  Jed set a log on the fire and lit a match to the kindling. Glancing over his shoulder, he assured her, “It will get warmer in here in a few minutes.”

  “I’m fine. I heard the temperature’s going to warm up again this week.”

  “I worry about the lake when that happens. Too much warmer weather and it won’t be fit for skating.”

  As he took a seat on the sofa beside her, the mood between them suddenly shifted. Small talk didn’t seem to belong in the room.

  “What’s on your mind, Jed?” Brianne asked.

  “I thought I was being so subtle.” He forced a smile.

  “You were subtle,” she acknowledged. “But maybe I’m just getting to know you. You can’t work with a person every day and not learn to understand what they’re about.”

  Maybe that’s why he felt close to Brianne—because they did work side by side every day. Yet when he thought about women he’d worked with in the past, he’d realized that a sense of closeness had never developed simply from working together.

  Sitting forward on the sofa, he clasped his hands and dropped them between his knees. “I guess what you said has been on my mind.”

  “Talking about what happened to your daughter?”

  Unclasping his hands, he rested them on his thighs, wondering why this was so damn hard. “Yeah. Whenever I think about Trisha I get this ache in my chest. I guess I never wanted to make it worse by talking about her.”

  “I don’t think it works that way. I mean…sometimes it hurts to remember, but the telling of it somehow puts it into perspective.”

  With a sigh he admitted, “I’ve never had perspective on this. Maybe because of the guilt. I have so much to feel guilty about.”

  When Brianne didn’t respond, but simply waited, he started with the easy part. “I told you I left Sawyer Springs to make a name for myself. I wanted to put my footprint on the world for everybody to see. Along with that, I wanted to make my parents’ life comfortable. When I accepted the residency in Los Angeles, it was the perfect opportunity to do both. I chose plastic surgery, knowing I could make an exceptional living. I guess I didn’t realize what I was getting into. I don’t mean the plastic surgery itself. I loved the work. But the trappings that went with it, the differences in values, the differences in people…”

  “Do you really think those differences are so great, Jed? Aren’t people just people?”

  Ever since he’d left L.A., he’d thought about that a lot. “I don’t know. Maybe I just met the wrong ones. Maybe I just met the ones who didn’t have meaning in their lives, and they looked at cars and success and women to put that meaning into it. I was looking for meaning when I met
my ex-wife, Caroline.”

  “Meaning?” Brianne asked.

  Once again she was showing him how perceptive she was. “All right. It didn’t start out as meaning. Caroline played a great game of racquetball, and we paired up a few times. She was beautiful, charming, well-bred and so polished. I just never realized how polished.”

  “You fell in love?”

  Still staring into the fire, he said honestly, “I fell in lust. And then I fell for more than that. Her family seemed to have everything that I was striving for. Her father was the president of a bank. Her mother gave parties I had never seen the likes of before. And I’ve got to admit, along with the practice I’d become a part of, it all dazzled me. I began to see us having the perfect life…the perfect children. The first sign that we weren’t meant to be together should have been our visit here, when she backed off from my dad and this house and wanted to stay in a hotel in Madison. I made excuses. Dad was gruff. He was rude. He wasn’t well-educated. The house was a throwback to the fifties. Then Dad made it clear he didn’t like Caroline. At the time, I just saw that as discord between him and me.”

  He glanced at Brianne. “I couldn’t understand Dad’s problem with Caroline until finally, after the first year of marriage, I realized he had seen a lot deeper than I had. Whereas I wanted to put meaning into my life and start a family, Caroline had her own agenda. She wanted to make me into her father. She wanted us to fly to Paris over a weekend to visit the Louvre…or ski in Vail with friends…or go shopping in New York City. I belonged to a group practice and except for once a month, weekends were my own. But I didn’t want to spend them flying around the world. I wanted to have kids, play ball with my son, teach my daughter how to swim.” At that, he felt the choking in his throat and stopped.

  “Tell me about it,” Brianne suggested softly.

  Never before putting it into words, Jed found he needed a few moments to sort through it all. “My marriage to Caroline was a shell. When she found out she was pregnant…It was an accident, because she was taking birth control pills. Still, she seemed to get used to the idea and liked the concept of having a baby. The only thing was she didn’t want to be tied down by one, and insisted we hire a nanny. We compromised. She had help daily, Monday through Friday, but the nights and weekends were ours. I could tell she didn’t like being trapped on the weekends. Often I’d take care of Trisha while Caroline played her tennis matches or went to Vail skiing. Once in a while, though, I had weekend commitments, too. When Trisha was barely three I had plans to speak at a conference in San Diego. I told Caroline that if she wanted the nanny to stay for the weekend, to hire her for those extra hours. But it turned out Mrs. Cunningham was busy and Caroline couldn’t find anyone else. I think she intended to make a point of showing me how unhappy she was by staying with Trisha herself that weekend. I don’t know.”

  He couldn’t look at Brianne now, and stared at the fire as the low flames licked at the log. “I got a phone call on Saturday afternoon. It was the police. The officer told me my daughter had drowned.”

  “Oh, Jed.”

  If he didn’t harden himself to the sympathy in Brianne’s voice, he wouldn’t be able to tell her the rest. “I chartered a plane and flew home. The police were at the hospital with Caroline and her father. Apparently the gate on the fence around the pool hadn’t been latched. Caroline said she’d only turned her back for a few minutes. But in those few minutes, Trisha had found her way into the pool and drowned. I hadn’t taught her how to swim soon enough.” His voice caught and he stopped, embarrassed that he didn’t have better control of his emotions.

  As Brianne eased forward on the sofa, her leg grazed his.

  He swallowed a few times. “The drowning was judged accidental. And it was. At first I wanted to keep my marriage together—it was all I had left. I told myself the same thing could have happened if I’d been home. But I knew that wasn’t so. I watched Trisha every moment, not because I had to, but because I wanted to.”

  Looking back, he recalled, “Caroline and I lived like strangers for a few months, until one night everything erupted. We had an argument that ended in her sobbing and blaming me for not being there that weekend. I was filled with rage against her for not being a good enough mother…until I realized she was right. If I had been home that weekend, Trisha would still be alive. We both realized that night that our marriage was over. Caroline moved out, and a month later, when I saw the notice that Deep River needed a doctor, I applied. I ran, escaped, disappeared into the snow and ice.”

  After a few pops as the fire consumed more of the logs, Brianne asked, “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “I found a life that was different. The practice was demanding in a primitive way, the hours longer than any place I’d worked. At the beginning, I just stayed numb. Then some part of me started coming alive again, and I saw the beauty of Alaska, the beauty in its people. I liked it there. But by the end of my stint, I realized I was still hiding. I needed to make decisions about where my life was going to go. Returning to Sawyer Springs was the first step.”

  The story might have ended there. The sharing might have stopped. But Brianne must have guessed he hadn’t gone far enough because she asked, “What did you like the very best about being a daddy?”

  Vividly then, he saw the many pictures of Trisha pass through his mind, and this time he didn’t stop them. “I loved feeding her and watching her expressions change with the tastes. Each day was an adventure, because when she learned something new, I did, too. When I let myself, I remember so much. She had this way of sticking her two middle fingers into her mouth when she fell asleep. At night I’d go in and put my hand on her back to make sure she was breathing.” He shook his head. “It hurts so damn much, Brianne. Four years haven’t changed a thing.”

  When he turned his head, he met Brianne’s gaze. Her eyes were moist, and he knew she understood a little bit of what he was saying. At that moment, he realized he didn’t want her empathy, though.

  All he wanted to do was get rid of the pain. All he wanted to do was make it vanish for a few minutes. It vanished whenever he kissed Brianne. Her taste and touch and sweetness always consumed him, and there was never room for anything else.

  He needed to be consumed now.

  When he leaned toward her, she hesitated only a moment and then lifted her face to his. With the kiss, he became immersed in everything he was trying to escape. Tonight he didn’t try to control his hunger or the need of his body.

  Holding Brianne’s face between his hands, he kissed her long and hard and deep, until her hands went into his hair and her fingers clenched ferociously. When he broke the kiss, her lips clung to his and he almost went back for more.

  But then she murmured his name.

  Her voice was so soft…so filled with need. And he knew he’d done the wrong thing tonight. He knew it had been a mistake to bring her home and tell her anything.

  “Brianne, are you a virgin?”

  Her eyes fluttered open. “Yes,” she whispered.

  Swearing, he moved a good six inches away from her. “We can’t do this.”

  “Because I’m not experienced enough?”

  “Because I’m sixteen years older than you. Because you don’t know the first thing about passion between a man and a woman and what it can do. Because I never intend to get seriously involved again. Marriage costs too much.”

  As she absorbed his words, he saw reality sink in. If she wanted more than a one-night stand, she wasn’t going to find it with him.

  Her cheeks, which had been flushed from his kisses, now reddened even more. She looked away from him into the fire, and he could only imagine what she thought of him now.

  “You’d better take me home,” she said in a small voice.

  That was exactly what he was going to do. Then he was going to figure out how to switch nurses with Dr. Olsen. Working with Brianne was too much of a distraction, and Jed wasn’t about to make another mistake.

&
nbsp; Brianne went through the motions of her job mechanically the following week. After Saturday night, she understood Jed’s defenses better. She knew words wouldn’t convince him to take a chance on love again. She wasn’t exactly sure when she’d decided she should. All she knew was that her feelings for Jed had invaded and captured her. The problem was he’d obviously experienced only pain from his marriage. Nothing she could say or do would change that. Somehow she had to work with him, yet keep herself removed personally. It seemed an impossible task.

  Fleetingly, she thought about the position she’d applied for on the team for Project Voyage, which traveled the world helping underprivileged children. Maybe she should check on her application and find out its status. Even if she was accepted, before she could leave Sawyer Springs, she still had a responsibility to her parents that she hadn’t satisfied—their bequest.

  The more she’d thought about it during the past few days, the more a plan had formed in her mind. The plan included Jed, but only because he was the most qualified to carry it out. Not only was he the most qualified, but what she could offer him might help him heal from the past.

  He was dictating patient notes Wednesday afternoon when she rapped on his office door. As he looked up, she could see in his eyes the memory of everything that had happened between them on Saturday night. But she had to put that behind her. She had to go on with her life no matter what Jed did with his. If he refused her offer, she’d find someone else.

  “May I talk to you for a few minutes?”

  He pushed the off button on his tape recorder. “What is it?” he asked in a neutral tone.

  That’s how he’d been with her for three days—neutral—and she’d tried to be the same with him.

  Stepping into the office, she sat in the chair beside his desk. Before Saturday night, she might have asked him if he was skipping lunch to work, but now small talk seemed to have no place between them. So she got right to the point.