by Caro Carson
I want to be loved.
Was that what she’d been really thinking at the gala, when she’d wondered what would happen if she stopped being the life of the party? If she were the one sitting alone in the corner, wearing black, failing to reflect the light and enjoy the moment?
No one would want that somber version of Diana. No one would come to cheer her up. She knew that; she’d had to contact every person who sat on her porch right now. As long as she made them happy, they’d be her friends.
She’d never in her life intended to find out—ever, with anyone—what would happen if she stopped being positive. But she’d stopped being positive with Quinn just now. In a big way.
She put her hand to her tripping heart. “I can’t believe I just said that. Any of that. I’m sorry for being so angry, for—”
“Don’t apologize.”
She looked up at that.
“You expressed your opinion. It’s not the end of the world.” He was watching her closely. “You’re as white as a ghost. Is there anywhere to sit?”
She did feel kind of strange. She gestured toward the porch, where she’d carried all her patio chairs earlier today, when she’d thought she’d die of the loneliness after leaving Quinn. Party at my place. No one had asked her why.
“Let’s go out front,” Quinn said.
When she didn’t move, Quinn took her hand, led her out her own front door, and gently pushed her shoulder to make her sit on the step.
She hadn’t called Quinn. He’d come on his own, riding up on a motorcycle to find her tonight. Just her. Not her big-screen TV, not her chips and drinks, just her. She hadn’t been positive, or friendly, or happy just now, yet Quinn was still here.
“Why did you come?” she asked. It was easier to talk in the dark.
“I came for this,” he said, finding room for himself on the step next to her.
She thought he was going to kiss her. He didn’t. He just sat there, staring into the night by her side.
“For what?” she asked.
“To be with you. To hear what you were thinking.”
“I wasn’t thinking anything nice, apparently.” She wrapped her arms around her middle.
“Actually, you were thinking what I was thinking. You just put it in different terms. My relationships have been pretty surface level. I didn’t realize how shallow, until today.”
He didn’t say anything else. He didn’t seem to expect her to say anything, either. She had no frame of reference for being with a man, with just one person, for no reason except to sit in the dark. Shouldn’t she be doing something?
She knew her mother’s advice by heart; she had every line of her last letter memorized, the letter she’d written when she was dying, to try to guide Diana through life. There was nothing in it to cover this situation.
Diana was on her own, kicked out of the nest, apron strings cut.
“I missed you, Diana. Seven hours seemed more like seven days.”
“Seven months.”
She felt him go still again, beside her in the dark, before he spoke. “Then let’s keep seeing each other.”
“I don’t know where it will go,” she said. “I’ve never had a friend like you.”
He chuckled, a gentle movement of his chest. “That about sums it up for both of us.”
She sighed, and dropped her head on Quinn’s shoulder. The muscle was solid. Not relaxed in sleep, not flexed in passion, just solid. There for her.
“When I sigh like you just did,” he said, “I know it’s time for a ride to clear my head. I brought an extra helmet. Would you like to go nowhere, fast?”
She smiled, although he couldn’t see it, turned her head and dropped a kiss on his shoulder.
“I’d love to.”
* * *
Work should have felt good. It was everything Quinn’s personal life had not been for the past two weeks: predictable, defined, controlled. He made his rounds at the hospital, listened to hearts beat, read lab results, deciphered the ECGs he’d ordered. The cardiovascular system embodied physics at its finest, a study of electricity and flow dynamics. Quinn usually found great satisfaction in fixing obstructions and restoring order in the heart and blood vessels of his patients. Usually.
Today, as he drove his truck from the hospital to his office, he was impatient. There’d been more patients in the hospital than usual, so he’d left late, and the streets of Austin were now clogged with rush-hour traffic, doubling his commute to his office. He’d begin seeing his office patients late, which meant he’d be ending his day late, which meant he’d have less of a chance to catch Diana.
Catching her was the operative term. Dating Diana was an experiment in chaos. Her actual work hours were as likely to be from five to nine as nine to five. Even then, she was as likely to be working from a laptop in a burger place as at her desk in her real estate office. Before work, or after, or during, she might disappear to take a rescued mutt to a vet or run some other errand that had been asked of her. She was generous to a fault when it came to doing favors for others.
But when Quinn could catch her...
Yeah.
Quinn caught himself grinning as he entered the building through the back entrance, smiling even though he was arriving late. He’d smiled more in the past two weeks than he had in the year before he’d met Diana at the gala. The unpredictability of their relationship bothered him, but it also kept him living an absurdly hopeful life. Maybe today they’d grab tacos and watch the bats fly out of the Congress Avenue bridge. Maybe today she’d wear her green dress to dinner at a restaurant with white tablecloths. Maybe today they’d take one look at each other and head straight for his bedroom—or hers. Her bedroom in her blue house, or maybe in the new house, which was the older one.
The woman didn’t even have a set address. It drove Quinn crazy. He’d never had to work so hard to find whichever woman he was currently dating.
He greeted members of his staff as he headed down the hallway toward his office, accepting their good-natured teasing.
“Dr. MacDowell in the house. Watch out, he’s got his swagger on.”
Quinn remembered the first hour he’d known Diana. I’m here to help you get your party on. He nearly laughed at the memory.
“Someone’s in a good mood...”
One time, Diana had surprised him at his desk after showing a house nearby. Only once in the two weeks they’d been dating, but it was enough to make him hope, every time he opened the door to his inner sanctum, that a woman would be waiting in his office.
“Good morning, darling. You’re running late.”
Wrong woman. Quinn tried to keep his disappointment from showing. “Morning, Tricia.”
Patricia had made herself at home behind his desk, sitting there as if she owned it. Diana had perched on the edge for only a moment. Like a firefly, she’d flitted from there to the sofa, until she’d perched on the arm of his desk chair. He’d caught her and kept her there for as long as he could.
He picked up the day’s mail, which was stacked neatly with its envelopes already sliced open for his convenience. Patricia didn’t move from his chair.
“I offered you your own desk once,” he reminded her.
“As your office manager?” She made a dismissive motion with one hand. “Please. I don’t do hard labor.”
“I offered, you said no, so now you don’t get my desk.”
She moved to the sofa. “Congratulations on your impending uncle-hood. I heard the news at the hospital this morning. You might have told me yourself.”
“I didn’t know Lana and Braden were making it public yet.”
“You wound me. I’m not the public.” Patricia crossed her legs. If Quinn didn’t know better, he’d think she’d done it just so he’d notice her shapely legs. He dou
bted any man failed to notice a nice pair of long legs on any woman, but she was Tricia. She didn’t need to show off for him. It must be a habit for her to sit just so.
“I heard that your little real estate girl had been there to hear the news, too.”
Quinn kept flipping through the mail. “Don’t tell me my brothers are turning into gossiping old biddies now that they’re married.”
“Kendry told me. She’s an open book.”
“Hardly a challenge for you, then.” Quinn led with the opening jab, if only to set a more normal tone for this conversation. Patricia was in an odd mood, and Quinn was running late. Done with his mail, he stood.
Patricia remained seated. She adjusted her watch so that it was facing just the way she wanted it. “Kendry said it was so exciting, toasting Lana’s baby and meeting Quinn’s girlfriend. Girlfriend? Isn’t that a bit much for a fling that didn’t last through Sunday brunch?”
“Fishing again. Yes, I’m still seeing her, and she has a name. Diana Connor. Was there any other reason you came by? I’m getting a late start.”
“I know her name, darling. My charming step-whatever sang her praises ad nauseam after the gala. Thank God dear Becky’s mother retrieved her the next day.”
Quinn smiled—inwardly, to himself—at the power of Diana’s safety pins, and her kindness.
Patricia extended her hand toward him, wanting a boost up from the plush sofa. Quinn obliged.
She took his white lab coat off its hanger on the back of his door and held it up for him. “The business portion of this visit is a Texas Rescue and Relief service announcement. We’ve got a meeting this weekend. It’s supposed to be a busy hurricane season, and the new director is as nervous as a cat about it. I’m here to drag you to it, if I must.”
“I’d forgotten.” Quinn slipped his arms in the sleeves.
Patricia smoothed his collar. “No, you didn’t. You were hoping I’d forget to force you to come. The forecasters might be right for once. They upgraded that tropical depression in the gulf to a named storm this morning. I can’t tell if dear Karen is hopeful or worried. Anyway, since this will be only the members of the steering committee, I thought we’d hold it at my father’s lake house. We can make a boating weekend out of it, if the weather holds.”
“That, I definitely can’t do.” He had a hard enough time catching Diana during the work week. He wasn’t about to sacrifice an entire weekend to Patricia and her sailboat fetish.
“Don’t be that way. Everyone already agreed to it, and they’re bringing their significant others. It will be fun.”
The Cargill lake house was a modern-day palace on a massive freshwater lake. If Quinn could corral Diana into coming, he’d have her to himself during the long drive. Once there, she’d be all his, no dogs or people demanding her time and attention.
“In that case, count me in. I’ll bring Diana.”
“Are you sure? She’s not exactly part of our crowd. You might want to leave your little fling at home for this kind of event.”
“Let’s get two things straight. First, Diana Connor is not a fling. Secondly, you’re wrong about her. Take Kendry’s word for it, if you don’t trust mine. Diana fits in everywhere she goes. You’ll like her, I promise.”
“Fine. Ten o’clock sharp, then. We have to get the business out of the way so we can relax the rest of the weekend.”
“Ten o’clock.” Quinn gave her a peck on the cheek. “Now go harass your next victim.”
Chapter Fourteen
“I’m running late.”
“Late is not an option, Diana.”
There was no answer on the other end of the line.
Damn it. Too late, Quinn realized the tone of voice he’d used. Diana wasn’t a cath lab nurse who’d failed to hand him the proper instrument.
He tried again. “The committee meets at ten. You can’t keep other people waiting for no good reason.”
More silence. She wasn’t an intern who needed a lecture on how the business world worked, either. But damn it, there was a meeting at ten.
The chaos that had marked the first two weeks of their relationship had only worsened since Patricia’s invitation. Quinn hadn’t seen Diana at all in forty-eight hours. Apparently, it was harder for a part-time animal shelter volunteer like herself to clear her calendar for the weekend than it was for a cardiologist who owned a private practice and served on staff at a major hospital.
He winced at his own thought.
Harder for a shelter volunteer than a cardiologist who needs to check his ego.
Had he always been this unbearably focused on his own life, and was only realizing it since he’d started caring how Diana perceived him?
She suddenly broke the silence, in a stunningly businesslike tone of voice. “I’ve got a plan. I checked my GPS, and the last errand I have to run is on the way. I’m already in my car, and so is my luggage. If you can be outside your building with your luggage in six minutes, I’ll pick you up. We’ll run my errand on our way out of town, and we should just make it to the lake by ten.”
Quinn never knew what to expect from her, but in this case, the real estate agent who was capable of negotiating a home sale was exactly the version of Diana he needed.
The only problem with her plan, he thought, as he left the cool of his building for the ovenlike heat of June, was that he’d travel to the lake in the passenger seat of a tiny VW Bug. The car was already parked under his building’s awning. He heard the trunk latch release as he walked up with his single piece of luggage.
The trunk was already full. A gigantic bag of dog food had been wedged inside. What little room that was left was taken up by a large suitcase in a jarringly bright print of cartoon monkeys. Surely, Diana wasn’t making him late for a steering committee meeting of Texas Rescue and Relief because she needed to deliver some dog food. Surely.
She hopped out of the car and came up to him, wearing shorts and a tank top. Plastic gems were sewn around the neckline in a geometric pattern, and her flat thong sandals were made of gold glitter. Quinn was wearing slacks and a dress shirt. Granted, he’d skipped the tie and cuffed his sleeves, but it hadn’t occurred to him to let Diana know Patricia’s idea of a casual weekend meant the men didn’t wear jackets to dinner. When he’d assured Patricia that Diana would fit in...
He scowled at the overcrowded trunk.
“Don’t worry,” Diana said, “we’ll make it all fit.”
She sounded cheerful. All morning, every phone call, he’d been on her case, lecturing her about promptness and meetings, and yet, she was smiling at him. She really was the most remarkably happy person he’d ever been around.
“You look beautiful.” He let go of his luggage handle—what an idiot to be holding luggage when he could be holding this woman—and crowded her against the open trunk as he took her mouth the way she always seemed to inspire him to: fully. Completely. Passionately.
All weekend. He’d have her in arm’s reach all weekend, and he’d have her in some undoubtedly plush bed all night. He could feel his heart beat harder. Hell, he could practically hear the blood rushing past his ears as it left his brain and headed south. He could hear...
He could hear...
The deep bass of a dog barking. A large dog. One that sounded like it might consume a gigantic bag of dog food.
He stopped kissing her. “You don’t have a dog with you.”
She couldn’t be so...so...clueless. As soon as he thought it, he felt a distinct pain in his chest, a physical sensation that might have been the first crack in his confidence in them as a couple.
She kept smiling, oblivious. “There had to be a reason I had dog food in here, right?”
“Your car isn’t big enough to carry the dog food and your luggage and my luggage and me and the dog.”
She waved away his pronouncement on her car’s capacity and glanced from the trunk to the tiny excuse for a backseat. “I’ve got it. Let’s put the dog food in the backseat and the dog on top of it, like it’s his bed. Then you get the front seat, and the luggage gets the trunk.”
He would not acknowledge the crack. He refused to feel the pain. He could function without feeling emotions. It was a vital skill for a doctor who threaded wires into human hearts.
He hauled the dog food out of the trunk while she opened the passenger-side door and hauled the dog out of the car. It was a damned Saint Bernard, or at least mostly that breed. In a Bug. She kept the dog out of traffic with two hands on its collar while Quinn laid the heavy bag on the seat.
Quinn started to put his single, compact, efficient carry-on piece into the trunk next to her large monkey-print bag.
“Wait a second,” Diana called out. With one hand on the dog, she hauled a second piece of luggage off the front seat, this one covered in a banana design. Of course. “Can you put this in the trunk?”
“Barely.”
The dog was eager to get back in the car and away from the noise of the traffic. It quickly became clear that he was not going to fit on top of the dog food in the backseat. Quinn took both pieces of her luggage out of the trunk, making a splash of color on the gray asphalt.
Like putting together pieces of a two-layered puzzle, Quinn squeezed his bag and her larger one into the trunk with the dog food and slammed it shut. His dress shirt was sticking to his back in the hundred-degree Texas heat.
“See?” she said. “It fit.”
“That dog and your smaller bag will both need to fit into the backseat.”
In the end, they did, but only when Quinn brought his seat so far forward that he literally had to hug his knees. “Let’s just get going. Please.”
Diana began chatting. Quinn had seen her do it before, when she was trying to cover up an unhappy feeling. Well, he felt unhappy, too, so he sank into silence while she gabbed away.
“I’m sorry about the dog food. I made him some scrambled eggs this morning, since I was out. I usually have some in the house, but I didn’t know he was coming for a visit. His owner needed someone to care for him for an extra day.”
