by Caro Carson
And you don’t notice my appearance.
“My supervisor said I needed a second pair, anyway. I do wash my scrubs, you know, every single night. They’re clean.”
It was such a struggle, day after day, getting those scrubs in the sink, working the soap in, rinsing and rinsing and rinsing until the suds all came out. Hanging them up so they’d be dry by her next shift. It was a daily necessity, and she hadn’t failed, not one day, to get it done. She greeted her children in clean clothes every morning.
She shifted in the scratchy new scrubs.
“Of course they’re clean,” Jamie said, and she could practically hear the frown in his voice.
“Thank you.” Kendry sniffed again, sucking the tears back in an unladylike fashion, but she refused to weep anymore. “But my supervisor doesn’t think it’s possible for a person to wash her scrubs every single day, I guess.”
She looked at Jamie fully for the first time since he’d sat down. The concern in his expression just about made the weeping start again, so she went back to looking up at the tree, focusing on the beauty of the branches against the sky. “It’s okay. They’ll dock my pay a little every week for the next eight weeks. I can survive eight weeks.”
Desperation—fear—crawled up her throat a little bit, but she pushed it back down. She’d been told to clock out early today. Those extra six hours at the E.R. couldn’t be paid as overtime after all, so she had to go home to prevent her time sheet from going over its weekly forty hours.
Still, even with her pay being docked for the cost of these scrubs, she’d pay the rent. That was most important, not to end up on a sidewalk, unprotected. Not to go backward, back to the homeless shelter.
She was so busy coming up with a new budget for the next eight weeks that Jamie caught her utterly, completely by surprise when he cupped her cheek in his hand and turned her to face him.
Her first thought was his hand is so warm.
Then, his hand is so large.
And as her eyes closed, so she wouldn’t have to look into his and their unbearable concern, she thought, his hand is so gentle.
It was her undoing. Tears ran down her cheeks, no matter how hard she scrunched her eyes shut, but Jamie’s warm, large, gentle hand drew her head to his shoulder. She leaned her forehead against the smooth cotton of his dress shirt, pressed her face into the male muscle underneath and sobbed.
Her careful plans had come undone. She’d nearly had enough saved to take the last course to become a certified medical assistant. Nearly. She thought longingly of the envelope labeled school that she had taped to the inside of her dresser drawer. She’d been managing to put five dollars in it, every week, on a schedule to start classes in February.
For the next eight weeks, though, her paycheck was going to get docked. She quickly did the math in her head, something she’d gotten good at. Her rent was an even one hundred dollars per week. These scrubs, with their contrast piping, were fifty dollars. Six dollars and twenty-five cents would be missing from her paycheck every week. There went the five dollars for tuition, plus another dollar and twenty-five cents that would have to come out of which envelope?
Food. There was no other choice. The court-ordered payment took more than half of her paycheck, but it was not negotiable.
She gulped and hiccupped, but couldn’t stop a fresh waterfall of tears. Jamie’s shirt was going to get soaked, but the weight of his hand was keeping her head on his shoulder.
She had to keep the tuition money. She had to. She’d never get out of debt if she didn’t have the qualification for a better-paying position.
She could keep the five dollars for her tuition if she skipped lunch three or four days each week, but lunch was all she had. She always saved her plastic bowl and refilled it before leaving her shift, getting two meals for the price of one. Although Kendry had learned that she didn’t need to eat much, even she couldn’t get by without three days of meals.
Maybe she could drink the juice and eat the Popsicles that were kept on hand for the patients. Her conscience objected, though. She felt guilty enough today for eating the crackers that came with the soup when she hadn’t bought soup. She could go without food one or two days a week, couldn’t she?
Probably not. She would have to delay her classes. Again.
“I’ll be okay,” she said out loud. For Jamie’s benefit, and her own. There was no law that said she had to start the CMA class in February. June would be here before she knew it.
She lifted her head, but Jamie pressed her back down into his shoulder and put his arm around her. “Be still for a moment,” he said. “Relax.”
Relax? She almost laughed. First, she was too anxious about money to relax. On top of that, Jamie was too damned handsome for a woman to think of relaxing in his embrace—and no matter how he viewed her, she was quite aware that she was a woman whenever he was near. He smelled good, warm and woodsy, and the shoulder she rested her forehead on was all muscle. It would be terribly easy to turn her face toward his throat and taste his skin. Since kissing him was out of the question—and would result in a humiliating scene for her—she faked relaxation as best she could.
Mostly, she wanted to run away from this man who was everything she wasn’t.
“Don’t let this supervisor get to you,” Jamie said, his breath warm on her hair. “It sounds like she threw her authority around a little, but it’s only a set of scrubs.”
He thought her feelings were hurt, then? He thought this was an issue of pride?
Her own conscience prodded her: Isn’t it? She was too proud to admit how poor she was, how far in debt she’d dug herself. The hole had been of her own doing; it was up to her to dig her way back out. Jamie was right. She was too proud to tell her supervisor why she couldn’t afford the scrubs.
“Let things like that roll off your back. It doesn’t matter what people say. You know your clothes are clean. I think your bangs look nice,” he said.
That startled her into raising her head a little. She wiped her cheek with the back of her hand. “Excuse me?”
“Your bangs.” He gestured toward them with one hand, nearly touching them, but not. “I think they look nice, even if you cut them yourself. Don’t let the gossip get to you.”
“I—I—” She had no idea where this new information fit in. “I don’t understand.” But she did. People in the hospital must have been making fun of her homemade haircut. Jamie had heard them.
Her humiliation was absolute. Everyone saw through her charade of respectability. Everyone scorned her attempts to act like she had a normal life and a normal job at this hospital. Everyone except Jamie.
Instead of scorning her, Jamie pitied her. For a month, she’d eaten lunch with him and let herself believe he was her friend, but the truth was, he pitied her. A man didn’t ask a woman to be his celibate wife if he didn’t think she was rock-bottom hopeless.
Kendry sat all the way up, and this time he let her. Then he sat up, too, straightened his tie, and dusted her cracker crumbs off his lap. The cellophane wrapper she was still holding must not have been empty, after all.
Embarrassed, she tucked that fist into her own lap. “Sorry.”
“No big deal. Sam makes a much bigger mess than you do.”
“A big mess,” she repeated. She forced a little laugh. “That about sums it up. I’m a big mess.”
“I didn’t say that.”
Oh, but he had. It was the truth, and it hurt to hear. She’d made a mess of her life, and she knew it.
“Your hair looks nice. Your clothes are clean. You are never late to work, and you are exceptional at your job. You’re not a mess, Kendry, and I don’t want to hear you think that way about yourself.”
Kendry didn’t want to think about anything at all. She was exhausted. She bent to grab the plastic bag at her feet that
held her dirty scrubs, the ones she had to go home and clean in a tiny bathroom sink that she shared with three other people, the sink she had to clean first, before she could clean her scrubs in it. She threw her trash in the bag.
“My life is a mess, Jamie. It’s the truth. Sorry if it offends you.”
“It’s not that you offended me,” he began, but then he stopped and practically glared at her. “Check that. Yes, you did offend me. I asked you to marry me. Do you think I’d ask a ‘big mess’ to be the mother of my child?”
There was no other kind of person he could have expected to say yes. Pain made her lash out.
“You want to secure some kind of permanent nanny for Sam. Your proposal wasn’t what Prince Charming said to Cinderella, was it? ‘Come to my castle and take care of my kid.’”
“I’m offering you much more than that. We’ll be a family.”
“You have a family. You need a babysitter. If you’d asked me to be your babysitter, I might have said yes. It depends if you pay better than the hospital.”
Jamie stood abruptly. “It’s not about money, and it isn’t about babysitters, but if that’s what it boils down to for you—”
She looked up at him, dry-eyed, angry. “That’s exactly what it boiled down to, Jamie. You offered me marriage to get yourself a free babysitter. You thought I was so pitiful I’d take you up on it. Well, the answer is no.”
“No? You’re turning me down?”
She couldn’t believe he still thought she’d say yes. Was she that pitiful, then?
Look at yourself. Crying over fifty-dollar scrubs. Eating free crackers. He must have thought you were a sure thing.
Pride kept her chin high and her voice even. “I’m not as desperate as you think, Dr. MacDowell. Of course I said no.”
He left. Without another word, he walked toward the hospital with his usual stride. Purposeful, swift. Not a backward glance. Not a goodbye.
As she watched him walk away, her heart hurt even more than her empty stomach. Jamie wasn’t heading for the E.R. He was going toward the tower that held the playroom. Kendry understood perfectly. She wished she could hold sweet Sam, rest her cheek on his perfectly soft hair and feel loved.
Instead, she had to go wait for the city bus.
With filthy scrubs in a trash bag.
With the horrible knowledge that she’d picked a fight with a man who didn’t deserve it.
Chapter Nine
Jamie wanted his motorcycle back.
It was completely and utterly impractical for a father. Sam couldn’t be transported on it, so Jamie had sold the bike to Quinn. He regretted that sale when he needed to clear his mind.
Kendry didn’t want to be married to him. Kendry didn’t want to be Sam’s mother.
Twice in his life, Jamie had asked a woman to marry him. Twice, he’d been told no. At least Amina had chosen to stay in Afghanistan, where marriage to him was legally impossible, because she’d wanted to help her countrymen. But Kendry—
Jamie pushed the door open to the physicians’ lounge in the E.R. with too much force, making it bang against the wall.
Kendry hadn’t given him any reason at all. She’d sat on a bench and bawled over a set of new scrubs, and he’d felt sorry for her. Sorry for her, as if getting her feelings hurt fell anywhere on the same scale as saving children in a third-world nation.
Jamie rifled through the lab coat he’d left in the locker, looking for his truck keys. Quinn would use his truck while he used the bike, no questions asked. If Jamie had any hope of restoring a sense of calm, he needed to feel some speed and some wind and let his asinine, ridiculous feelings about Kendry get blown away by the highway.
That little scrap of a girl had insulted him. Kendry thought he was a simpleton for suggesting that her supervisor could have called the E.R. for fresh scrubs. You have no idea what it’s like to be at the bottom of the totem pole.
Fine.
She didn’t think his proposal was good enough. Come to my castle and take care of my kid.
Fine.
Jamie dug the motorcycle’s key out of Quinn’s gym bag, put his truck keys in its place and slammed the locker shut.
He’d said her hair looked nice, damn it. Wasn’t that what women wanted to hear? Hell, he deserved an Oscar for his performance, trying to make her feel like she wasn’t a big mess.
She was a big mess. She refused to do anything about her allergies, she was forever eating crackers and trailing crumbs, and she didn’t care about getting new glasses.
Still, she’d turned down his marriage proposal. Life with a successful, decent man like himself hadn’t been good enough for sloppy, messy Kendry Harrison.
He started to walk through the kitchenette, his gaze going to the coffeepot where the three nurses had smugly laughed at Kendry after calling her...
He stopped.
Calling her exactly what he’d just thought. He hadn’t said “homely” or “street urchin” like they had, not exactly, but he was focusing on the surface things, on her physical appearance, when he’d asked her to marry him for deeper reasons.
He stared absently at the coffeepot, then at the wall behind it, automatically reading the piece of paper taped to the wall, the flyer that food services put out every week.
This Week’s Specials:
Enchilada Casserole
Vegetarian Lasagna
Free refills on soup, Monday through Friday
Pieces started falling into place. Bits of information, coalescing into a new theory. The taped glasses, the refusal to buy over-the-counter allergy medicine—it all came together.
Free refills on soup, Monday through Friday.
He was an idiot. Blind. How many times had he teased Kendry for loving soup? Free refills—it was all she ate, all he ever saw her eat. God, she probably ate soup all day long.
Except today. She’d had no soup bowl on the picnic bench. Crackers, always the free crackers, but nothing else. Not when they were docking her pay for the cost of her scrubs.
He’d chalked up her tears to chafing under a supervisor’s orders, but she’d been worried about the cost. He’d sat next to her on a picnic bench and lectured her about being too sensitive while she’d exchanged her lunch for scrubs she hadn’t wanted.
Kendry wasn’t some college kid, living on student loans. Kendry lived in poverty.
It was like a punch in the gut. He thought highly of Kendry, very highly. She had every quality that would be important if she became Sam’s mother. He enjoyed being around her. He thought of her as a friend.
And he, he who had grown up on a prosperous ranch, he who’d banked the military bonuses for being a doctor and for being in a combat zone, adding those extra thousands to the accounts he’d already inherited from his father, he had spent a month watching his friend, too thin as she was, eat bowl after bowl of free soup refills.
Jamie headed outside toward the park bench. Kendry wasn’t there, and he’d already learned from the playroom staff that she was done for the day. He started running toward the parking lot, aware that he was turning heads. It didn’t matter. He needed to find Kendry and make things right. Now. Her shift was over, so she’d be going home, and he had no idea where her home was.
Did she have a home?
He’d failed her. The woman was going to eat nothing today, nothing except crackers. With every pound of his foot on the pavement, the thought repeated in his mind: I failed her. He’d offered her marriage, confident she would accept, but he hadn’t made sure she had a damned sandwich to eat.
Every moment it took to find the bike, to don the helmet, to fire up the engine, was another moment away from Kendry. Jamie drove the motorcycle through the labyrinth of hospital buildings, looking for one woman among the pedestrians, since it was now painfully obvious
to him that Kendry couldn’t afford a car.
He caught a glimpse of her—her hair, plain and brown, her scrubs, new and pink—as she boarded the city bus at the next corner. He shouted her name, but his voice only bounced around inside the motorcycle helmet.
The bus was easy to follow. It was harder to dodge the black exhaust that bellowed out every time the bus merged back into traffic, but Jamie stayed immediately behind it, watching to see if Kendry was one of the passengers who stepped onto the pavement at each stop.
It was hardest of all to dodge his own thoughts. He gave up trying. He deserved every mental lash he gave himself. Every scrap of a memory that caused him pain, he deserved.
Just leave your tray, Dr. MacDowell. I’ll take it up with mine. He’d walked away and never looked back to see that she was undoubtedly buttering the roll he hadn’t wanted, or finishing the apple pie he’d only eaten half of.
What kind of man let a woman starve in front of him? The bus belched more black smoke, and he put the motorcycle in gear to follow.
Primitive, caveman feelings he hadn’t felt in ages came to the fore. He was male and she was female. He was bigger and stronger; he ought to have been protecting her.
In Afghanistan, he—and probably every soldier there, male and female alike—had felt the frustration of not being able to protect the helpless, the children, the women who still hid in their burqas, afraid to trust that the Taliban would not return to power. They’d all done what they could, both as soldiers and as individuals.
There had been native Afghanis willing to fight for the helpless, as well. People like Amina. Near the end, as her pregnancy became obvious and the local situation deteriorated, he and Amina had fought, every day, about her desire to keep crusading and his desire to bring her to the States, to London, to anywhere safe. They’d never reconciled their goals as an unmarried, doomed couple.
In the end, none of it had mattered. Jamie hadn’t been able to save Amina from the same thing that killed an appalling number of women in Afghanistan: childbirth.
He’d failed to convince Amina to stay with him.
