The M.D. Meets His Match

by Marie Ferrarella

  She looked out over the terrain, asleep except for the party in the building behind them. There wasn’t much to see and what there was of it was dark. Even the theater was closed. Since everyone in town was at the Salty, there had been no reason to keep the theater open tonight. She could remember all those years, aching to get as far away from Hades as possible.

  “What I crave,” she told him, “is something with a pulse.”

  The grin on his lips was warm, inviting as he held up his hand for her to examine. “I have a pulse.”

  A smile began to bud on her lips. April could only shake her head. He’d gotten her again. “I have to learn to pick my words more carefully around you.”

  He moved a little closer to her as the wind rose. “Does that mean you’ll be around me?”

  He was too close, but to back away would imply that she was afraid, or wary, and that wasn’t the sort of image she cared to project. So she stood her ground and ignored the feelings taking place inside of her. “There you go again.”

  He liked the way her eyes snapped, and the way she smelled when the wind shifted, bringing the scent of her perfume to him. Ever since he could remember, he’d always paid attention to women. All women. The pretty ones he paid a little more attention to.

  Inspired by the subtle nuances he was picking up, Jimmy decided to make another pitch. “You can’t be postmistressing all the time. I mean, a place like this can’t get that much mail—seeing as how there aren’t that many people here. You have to have some free hours, what do you do then?”

  Stepping to the side, she moved away from him. “Take care of my grandmother.”

  A high-pitched laugh reached them from within, escaping through the fraction of an inch where the window sash failed to meet the sill. They turned and April could see her grandmother was standing right next to the window. From all appearances, she was vamping the socks off the gray-bearded man she was with. Jimmy, eyeing Yuri Bostovik, noticed that he looked almost besotted with April’s grandmother.

  Nothing he liked better than to see seniors enjoying their lives. Jimmy grinned and looked at April. “Looks to me like your grandmother is taking care of herself.” More than a touch of admiration mingled with his amusement.

  The way April saw it, Gran was doing the exact opposite. She should have been at home, resting, not out at the saloon. The woman had angina, for heaven’s sake. But there had been no talking her out of coming. Gran had been insistent. Until this moment, despite Gran’s blatant allusions to Yuri, April had thought it was to insure her coming here. Now she wasn’t so sure.

  She watched the older couple move and meld into the crowd. April shook her head. “Gran’s headstrong. She absolutely refuses to let me take her to Anchorage—to the hospital there.”

  The woman looked healthy enough, even glowing, but Jimmy knew how deceptive appearances could be.

  “Can’t Shayne treat her? Alison says he’s the best.” He remembered feigning jealousy when Alison had told him that, but they’d both known he’d been kidding. He hadn’t an envious bone in his body. And he knew that while Alison was kind, she wasn’t recklessly lavish with her praise. She called them as she saw them.

  “I’m sure he is for the common everyday things, but it’s her heart—”

  “What about her heart?”

  Because they’d been preying on her mind ever since she’d received June’s letter, the words were out before she realized that she was sharing them. “She has angina and Shayne suggested an angiogram to see if there’s any sort of blockage. Her EKG looks good, but an electrocardiogram is almost useless in determining the actual condition of a heart—and she’d been having these pains.”

  Jimmy wondered how much was true and how much had been fabricated by Ursula Hatcher for April’s benefit. From what Alison had told him, he had a hunch the crafty-looking woman on the other side of the pane had exaggerated her condition to get something she wanted—her granddaughter in the area. “What kind of tests have been done?”

  Interest mingled in with her suspicion. “What kind of a doctor are you?”

  “A good one, I’d like to think.” He regarded Ursula’s profile with interest before turning back to one that interested him more at the moment. “I can take a look at her for you if you’d like.”

  “I don’t need her looked at, I need her scanned.”

  Jimmy laughed. “You make her sound like some sort of digitalized cartoon character.”

  “No, she’s a person,” April said softly as she watched her grandmother shamelessly flirt. “A very precious person.”

  Jimmy watched as moonbeams tangled themselves in April’s hair. Urges whispered softly through him. It was hard keeping his mind on the conversation. “She’d have to be, to get you to come back to a place you hate so much.”

  April didn’t like having things presumed about her, or having words put in her mouth. “I never said I hated Hades.”

  Was she serious? He looked at her expression, clearly challenging him, and realized that she was. Very serious. “In every way but to actually use the word,” he contradicted.

  She opened her mouth to put him in his place then closed it again, deciding the argument wasn’t worth the effort. Not when he was right. It was just that she didn’t like having someone read her so well, not a stranger at any rate.

  Shrugging, she looked away. “It’s just that I find it stifling here, confining.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. When something’s unformed like Hades, there’s a world of possibilities in that vastness. You can do anything, be anything. It’s like a huge empty canvas you can paint on.”

  He’d said he was visiting, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe he was checking things out. “You sound like somebody who’s fixing to make a monumental move.”

  Not hardly, he thought. He had everything set up for him at the hospital back in Seattle. That had taken some doing. Besides, Kevin was having enough trouble with Alison being so far away. His older brother would seriously flip out if two members of his family were more than an hour away by regular route. Jimmy supposed, after sacrificing so much for them, Kevin felt he deserved to be part of their lives once those lives took shape.

  Jimmy shrugged casually. “No, just somebody who’s always got his eye out for possibilities.”

  “I would have thought that someone like you would have restricted his possibilities to women.”

  “There’s that field, too.” His grin was wide and it tugged at her, pulling her in against her will. “But not restricted, never restricted.”

  When he looked into her eyes like that, she found she had trouble thinking. Good thing she’d stepped out for some air when she had. She’d definitely been in danger of light-headedness. “So, where do you practice—medicine, I mean.”

  “I don’t have to practice,” he told her, his voice low, moving slowly around her, hypnotizing her. “I have it down pat—medicine, I mean.”

  April shivered, trying to snap out of the trance she felt herself falling into.

  “Cold?”

  It was as good an excuse as any. “Yes. Spring here is only a little warmer than winter at times.”

  Too late she realized it was the wrong thing to say because he slipped his arm around her shoulders, then shielded her against the wind with his body. “Maybe we’d better get you inside.”

  She’d gotten good at rejecting men who came on to her. She could do a put-down with just a well-aimed glance. There was no doubt in her mind that James Quintano was definitely coming on to her. She could feel it in every bone in her body. But when she turned her head toward him, no words came, no well-honed, belittling glance found its way into her eyes. Instead, she felt a definite pull toward this man she didn’t know.

  “Maybe,” she agreed, her voice hardly above a whisper.

  Reaching around her, he put out his hand to push open the door. And wound up wrapping that same hand around her other side instead. Pulling her to him.

  He’d meant to be on hi
s best behavior, he really had. But when she looked at him like that, with the moonlight caressing her face and moonbeams getting lost in that tangle of hair that invited his fingers to touch it, he felt something stronger than his good intentions stir within his gut.

  Before he quite knew what he was doing, natural born instincts had him cupping her cheek and tilting her face up to his. Had him touching his mouth to hers to break the spell because nothing could taste as good as her lips looked.

  He was wrong.

  They could.

  Maybe it was because he’d been at loose ends ever since Melinda had canceled out on him, begging off from the cruise because of some personal emergency at home that now eluded his brain.

  The real emergency, he’d had no doubt at the time, was that she’d had marriage on her mind and he’d had nothing more serious than a pleasant interlude on his. It wasn’t that he had anything against marriage in general, just nothing for it in particular when it came to himself. He reasoned that he saw enough dying at the hospital, he didn’t need to be part of something that, no matter what, had a finite lifespan. His parents had driven that lesson home long before he’d ever put on his first pair of scrubs.

  But that belief in no way made him monastic. For him, relationships lasted as long as they were mutually beneficial, comforting and light. While he was involved, he could be counted on for emotional support, a kind word and to be summoned in the middle of the night in case of a breakdown—as long as he wasn’t on call. Even after a relationship had run its course, he usually remained on good terms with the woman. But he’d made it a rule never to meet the woman’s family or to discuss anything more romantically serious than pending plans for the weekend. He didn’t believe in committing himself to anything longer than that.

  Right now, there was no weekend, no future, no past. Nothing but the moment.

  A moment bathed in a feeling so incredible it defied succinct description. And that bothered him. Though he considered himself footloose and independent, he also liked labels. If something was labeled, it couldn’t suddenly render a surprise he might find himself unprepared for.

  He wasn’t prepared for his reaction to April.

  Not the degree of it at any rate. He felt his body tighten, as if every sinew was on alert. Poised. Taut.

  Slanting his mouth against hers and pulling her closer still, he deepened the kiss. Layer fell upon layer, wrapping him tightly within.

  Like someone desperately trying to follow a path through a blizzard to get home, April was appalled to discover she’d lost her way. Lost it completely and immediately the instant his mouth touched hers. One second, she’d wondered at this strange electricity that danced between them, charging her. The next, she’d found herself cocooned by something that was dragging her down and flowing over her head.

  She remembered falling into the river once when she was very young. Victor, a dour-faced, half Native American, half Inuit they’d all believed was completely crazy, had pulled her out. Grabbing her by her hair, he’d managed to pull her to the surface and then swim for shore. To this day, she remembered what it had felt like, going down for the last time. She’d thought she was dying, but it had ceased to be a frightening experience. Disembodied, she had found herself floating between one world and the next.

  That was how this felt. Disembodiment. Not quite real.

  And yet it was. So real it was almost agonizingly exhilarating.

  Her heart pounding, her fingers curled into his hair, she pressed her mouth harder against his. Savoring, enjoying. And determined, with her last breath, to make him remember this as much as she remembered almost drowning.

  And then, for self-preservation purposes, because she needed to stop this before it completely obliterated her, April pulled back her head and looked at him.

  It took her a second to catch her breath. “What did you do that for?” she demanded.

  The lady packed a hell of a punch, he thought. He couldn’t remember the last time a slight kiss had turned into a full three-course affair. He found himself fighting the urge to do it all over again. “Have you ever felt like you just had to find something out?”

  April struggled for her deepest sounding voice, afraid anything less than that would crack in the middle. “I generally go to the encyclopedia.”

  His grin was ever so slightly lopsided. He toyed with a strand of her hair.

  “They don’t have anything like this in the encyclopedia—or on the Internet, either,” he added, second-guessing what she was about to say.

  No doubt about it, she thought. Educators and scholars probably hadn’t come up with a word to fit what had just happened here. Electricity didn’t do it justice, but for lack of anything better, it would have to do.

  “I think I’ve had enough fresh air for now,” she told him, turning away.

  “You still haven’t answered my question.” His voice followed her into the now comforting warmth of the Salty. Funny how all these people she’d wanted to get away from had suddenly formed a haven for her.

  She glanced at Jimmy over her shoulder. Her heart began racing again the moment she did. What was wrong with her? “I wasn’t aware that I’d left anything unanswered.”

  He moved so that he blocked her path. “All right, let me put this as formally as possible. Will you be my guide while I’m in Hades?”

  Because she found herself wanting to spend time with him under any excuse, she said the first thing that popped into her mind. “Why can’t Alison be your guide?”

  “She and Shayne are busy almost all the time. I can’t just expect Alison to take off just to show me around Hades.”

  He had a point, but she had herself to think of. “There isn’t that much to see.”

  His eyes narrowed as if he was attempting to get inside her head. “As a photographer, you can’t be serious.”

  He made it sound as if she did nothing but take eight by ten glossies of things that wound up being preserved in coffee table tomes which went generally unnoticed by anything except dust.

  “I’m a photojournalist,” she emphasized. “There’re no stories here.”

  There were always stories. He’d seen volumes in the eyes of the people who came to him in the emergency room. “Maybe you just don’t know how to look.”

  Fire leaped into her eyes, put there by his words and by her own annoying reaction to his closeness. There were things going on in her body that she didn’t like. Things such as longing. She didn’t want a fling with this man unless it was on her own terms and she wasn’t entirely sure if she could dictate them.

  “I know exactly how to look. I—” She stopped, realizing that he was amused and that she was working herself up needlessly. “You’re baiting me again, aren’t you?”

  He had the face of an innocent angel when he looked at her.

  “I wouldn’t dream of it. But I am asking for that tour.” Ursula Hatcher came into his line of vision. She was dancing with Yuri. Or just swaying side to side in reality. “I tell you what, you show me around Hades and I’ll examine your grandmother. I’m a surgeon, which means I have a pretty good working knowledge on how the body should and shouldn’t work,” he added glibly to give weight to the trade. “How about it?”

  She knew she wanted to. Giving in, she told herself she had nothing to lose. “All right, I guess it can’t hurt. Maybe if both you and Shayne tell her she needs to go get herself looked at, she’ll finally listen. God knows she won’t listen to me.”

  “Maybe it’s because you’re her granddaughter.”

  “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “People who are used to being in charge don’t like being given advice by the people they’ve raised, no matter how well intended the advice is. It has something to do with the passing of authority. Seems to me that she’s not quite ready to relinquish hers.”

  April blew out a breath. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Minored in psychiatry,” he told her.

&nbs
p; She stopped trying to get by him and glared, hands on her hips. “I don’t care if you dated Freud, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” She turned and tried to walk away. Her progress was impeded no matter which way she looked.

  Jimmy kept pace and was right behind her. “Freud wouldn’t have dated me. He had an Oedipus complex.”

  That made her laugh. Turning around, she found herself brushing up against him. This time when the electricity came, she allowed herself to enjoy it. “Do you just talk until you wear someone down?”

  “Pretty much. How am I doing?”

  He’d won the round and she couldn’t say that she was actually unhappy about it. “Come around one tomorrow. I’ll close the post office early for the day—just for the day.”

  That was fine by him. If anything longer was in the offing, that would come. Besides, there was only a day less than two weeks to deal with, anyway. And he did find her very appealing and attractive.

  “I don’t like making long-range plans, either,” he told her.

  “Good, then.” She put her hand out, as if they were sealing a business deal. “It’s settled.”

  He slipped his hand into hers, his eyes promising a great deal more than his words. She felt a deep flutter in the pit of her stomach and ignored it. Or tried to.

  “I’ll be there at one,” he promised.

  When Alexander Connors came up behind her to claim a dance, April felt relieved to have an excuse to leave Jimmy’s company.

  And just a little disappointed, as well.

  Chapter Five

  Walking into the post office, April flipped on the lights. The bulbs struggled to illuminate the area, creating more shadows than pools of light. It was almost unnaturally quiet. Crossing to the stairs in the rear, April heard nothing but the sound of her own footsteps on the scarred wooden floor.

  After six years of being away from Hades, the silence was particularly hard for her to get accustomed to. Even though she always lived alone in the various places she’d been to, the sounds of the city always permeated her apartment, offering the covert comfort that life existed outside the walls that surrounded her. Here the houses were far apart enough that once evening came with its accompanying darkness, sending people into their homes, a silence fell over Hades like a heavy, oppressive snowstorm.