“I’ll get it, Lo,” she called too eagerly at Lois. Even as she hurried to her desk, face flaming, John Saville turned on his heel and retreated into his office again, slamming the door even more loudly than Rebecca had.
“Doctor Saville’s office,” she answered the phone somewhat breathlessly. “Rebecca O’Reilly speaking.”
“What’s going on, pecan?” a throaty voice greeted her.
“Hazel, hi.”
“You sound as if you’ve been jogging.”
“I ran to the phone,” she explained. Looking at the closed door, she rolled her eyes. “And I’m sure glad you called.”
“Why? Don’t tell me you’re actually hoping I need a doctor?”
Rebecca’s voice turned serious. “You don’t, do you?”
“Honey, since my surgery I’m fit as a fiddle,” the notorious cattle baroness assured her. “I just called to shoot the breeze.”
Rebecca felt a weight lift from her. Her mother had died from a brain tumor while Rebecca was still in junior high school. With her father’s job as a freelance security consultant keeping him on the road constantly, Hazel had practically adopted her, even insisting that she stay out at the ranch when her father was gone. She still missed her mother fiercely, and the thought of anything happening to Hazel was like a cold hand wrapping her heart.
“Actually,” Hazel confessed, “I’m curious as the dickens to know how your love life is getting on. Did that good-looking sales rep fellow ever ask you out? The blond who drives the Town Car?”
“No, and he’d better not. His flirting was all a smoke screen.”
“No fire behind the smoke, you mean?”
“No, a wife behind the smoke, I mean. Last time he was here he forgot to take his wedding band off the way he usually does. Horny creep.”
Hazel sighed at her end. “It’s true, isn’t it? The real hunks are either married, gay or cowboys.”
Or snobs suffering from a bad case of “It’s all about me!” Rebecca added inwardly, her glance sliding toward John Saville’s closed door. Still pouting in his office, she told herself. At least she knew this conversation was safe from his sonar ears—her private line was separate from his.
“So how do you like your new boss?” Hazel probed as if plucking Rebecca’s thoughts from her mind.
“I don’t. For such a young man, he’s sure an old sobersides. At least with his co-workers. Or should I say, with his servant staff. It’s funny. I mean, he replaced Dr. Winthrop, but he seems even older. And, heavens, cranky? He’s always got his nose out of joint about something.”
“Well, I met him briefly at the reception Dottie Bryce hosted for him. I didn’t get that impression at all—his nose was perfectly in place, and so was the rest of him. He’s certainly good-looking. He’s well knit, as Grandma Mystery used to say of men with nice builds.”
“Little appeal beyond the eighteenth hole,” Rebecca insisted dismissively.
“Hmm,” was all Hazel said to that—a speculative tone that Rebecca knew well by now. “Anyway,” the rancher went on briskly, “I guess I would like to schedule an appointment after all.”
“I thought you were fit as a fiddle?”
“Hon, even a fiddle needs its strings tuned now and then.”
Hazel’s ironic tone turned the words strings tuned into a bawdy innuendo. Rebecca couldn’t help feeling it was also a little nudge from Hazel, the only person in town besides Lois who knew she was still a virgin with “untuned strings.”
Hazel added quickly, “I just want to ask Dr. Saville some questions about my diet since the gall bladder surgery.”
“Uh-huh,” she replied skeptically as she checked Lois’s appointment calendar. “Seems like a lot of female patients in the Mystery area suddenly want to discuss something with their new doctor.”
“So what? We gals of a certain age aren’t as finicky as you proud and stubborn little twenty-three-year-olds. That’s because you don’t feel Time nipping at your taut little fannies yet. We can feel it, in the form of gravity.”
Rebecca laughed as she scheduled her friend. But Hazel was wrong about one thing—she did feel Time nipping. And the question wasn’t lack of desire or fear about her first time. The one man she had felt like “giving it up to” had coldly rejected her as his social inferior. And once burned, twice shy.
“Ten o’clock next Tuesday sound all right?” she asked Hazel.
“That’s hunky-dory, hon. See you then.”
Even as she put the handset back in its cradle, however, Rebecca was already wondering what the sly Matriarch of Mystery was really up to.
Two
“Miss O’Reilly, when you’re free, may I see you in my office?”
Only my third week under Dr. Dry-As-Dust, Rebecca thought, and I’ve got all his imperious tones filed like everything else in this office.
She glanced at him. The tone he used now included the hardening of his mouth, and it sure wouldn’t have been so irritating if his mouth wasn’t so blamed handsome.
Whatever I’ve done now, he’s really going ballistic over it, she decided, having become a great judge of the doctor’s moods after all she’d observed of him the past weeks.
But she had to admire his nearly flawless control as he stood there in the tiled hallway where the waiting room met the reception area. Only the slight twitch of the muscles of his throat hinted at his anger.
Against her will, Rebecca noticed something else: the way his shoulders were so wide they stretched his pristine oxford-cloth shirt tight across his chest. Even the simple act of removing a pen from his shirt pocket showed the lines of his muscles. Another irritation. If he was going to look so good, why couldn’t the man have a corresponding personality to go with it.
She’d never know why God was so fickle.
“Miss O’Reilly?” he repeated impatiently, still watching her from a stern frown. His arrogant tone made her instantly feel hostile again.
“Yes, Doctor, of course. I’ll be there as soon as I’ve checked in everyone in the waiting room.”
No trace of their personal clashing showed in her face, for the day’s patients had arrived. First on the appointment calendar was Elizabeth Kent, two years older than Rebecca, who had requested a consultation regarding minor surgery to remove bone spurs in her heel. Rebecca had noticed how, ever since John took over the practice, so many women in Mystery Valley had suddenly decided to take care of various elective surgeries they had been postponing.
And they showed up dressed to the nines, looking far more gorgeous than they had bothered to look for Dr. Winthrop. Elizabeth, for example, wore a graceful garland-print dress of crepe de chine silk. And her neatly coiffed hair suggested she had just come from the salon.
But Brennan Webb, too, had already shown up, exactly forty-five minutes early, as he always was. Brennan was eighty-one, frail but courtly, and had always been one of Dr. Winthrop’s—and Rebecca’s—favorite patients. He sat, content and in no hurry, in the waiting room’s most uncomfortable chair, an uncushioned ladderback. He wore a ranch suit with a square-tipped bow tie, an American-flag pin in his lapel. Brennan liked to boast that he was “still strong as horse radish.”
“You sure you don’t want the headphones and remote, Brennan?” she offered, deliberately taking her time to anger her waiting boss. “Won’t take me a second to turn the TV on for you.”
He waved off her suggestion. “I get enough of that crap at home, honey,” he groused at her. “I get more ’n’ fifty channels, hardly any of ’em worth a tinker’s damn.”
Immediately, however, Brennan altered his tone and added, with no logical connection, “This new doctor is young, but I’m told he knows B from a bull’s foot, all right.”
“Yes, he’s certainly a blessing,” Rebecca drawled with mild irony.
Not mild enough, however, to fool Brennan.
Fancy bridgework brightened the old man’s big smile. But he replied in a phony, quavering tone, “Methinks you protest too mu
ch, dearie, but I’m just a senile old man. What would I know?”
“Senile schmenile,” she tossed back at him, choosing to ignore his sly hint that romance was in the air. She also ignored the dirty look Elizabeth sent her way.
Since John Saville’s arrival in town, the young and available women treated her like a rival for the doctor’s attention, not the office nurse.
Even old curmudgeon Brennan has been sucked in, she marveled as she headed down the hallway toward John Saville’s private office. The whole town acted as though Apollo had just descended into Mystery Valley from Mount Olympus.
Lois was alone in examination room A, setting up Rebecca’s station for initial patient screening before Brennan saw the doctor.
Their eyes met as they passed in the hallway.
Rebecca paused a moment. “I’ll be ready in a few minutes.”
Lois nodded.
Rebecca didn’t have to explain where she was headed— Lois had overheard Dr. Saville’s strained request.
“Temper, temper,” she reminded Rebecca quietly. “That vein is pulsing in your left temple.”
“I’m fine,” she insisted. “You’re right, we just need to play it cool and break him in right. I’m not going to lose it around him.”
Lois, however, had worked with Rebecca going on six years now and trusted that pulsing vein the way weather-men trusted Doppler radar.
“If you’re fine, then put this on,” Lois dared, picking up the blood pressure cuff and separating the Velcro tabs.
“Take your own pressure and let’s see.”
Rebecca stepped inside, but only so she could speak privately. “Never mind that. I confess his tone rubbed me the wrong way,” she admitted. “Like fingernails scratching a blackboard, actually. But I mean it, I’m not giving him the pleasure of getting to me. Maybe I’ll even drop a curtsy as I go in.”
“Oh, cripes,” Lois fretted. “Everybody buckle up, we’re going to get some turbulence.”
“You’ll see—I mean it. Cool and professional.”
However, her resolve was under assault from the first moment she stepped into the doctor’s private office.
Usually he prefaced his little lectures with attempts at polite small talk. This morning, however, he waded right in without even testing the water.
“Miss O’Reilly, last Friday I noticed you being extremely rude, in my opinion, with the sales rep from Med-Tech Supplies.”
“I doubt if it left him a broken man,” she countered, surprising herself at the sarcasm in her tone.
John Saville stared at her for a moment, not sure whether he or the salesman was the target of her scornful tone.
Both of us, he decided, and he felt his angry pulse thrum in his palms.
She’s got a hell of a mouth on her, he fumed. But when he glanced at the defiant pout of her lips, he suddenly wondered what it would be like to kiss that angry mouth, kiss it hard until the anger turned to something very different….
Fat chance he had of ever finding out. That was obvious in the way she always looked at him as if she’d love to slap him.
“Yes?” she asked, cutting impatiently into his reverie, trying to get him back on track. “You saw me being rude, as you call it, with the Med-Tech guy?”
Her bossy tone irritated him anew. “Yeah, and now this morning,” he forged on, “I learn that you’ve switched our account to Rocky Mountain Medical Supplies.”
So that’s what’s got him all bent out of shape, she thought, noticing how his features seemed etched in anger.
“I didn’t attempt to conceal the change from anyone,” she countered, her face coolly indifferent to his obvious irritation. “Is there a problem?”
“None that I was aware of. That’s precisely my point in asking. Why fix what isn’t broken?”
“Rocky Mountain Medical is a dependable supplier. I switched for a good reason.”
Those deep, intensely blue eyes cut into her like diamond drill bits. “That reason being…?”
The salesman was a married man hitting on me, that’s why, she wanted to toss in his face. But she feared he would use it as proof of more “unprofessional behavior” on her part. Her resolve to rise above any fray crumbled completely. She suddenly flushed, more angry than embarrassed. “My reasons are personal.”
“Yes,” he said, smug with triumph, “I figured as much from your behavior last Friday. I could tell there was…something between the two of you.”
“You can’t possibly conclude—”
She caught herself in the nick of time before exploding. If this was just a fishing expedition, a search for things to throw in her face, she had no intention of taking his hook.
“Look,” she told him, her hands balled into fists on her hips, “you know that it’s the nurse in any office who uses most of the disposable medical supplies. Dr. Winthrop always trusted me—”
“Yeah, right, I know the riff by now,” he said, cutting her off impatiently. “Paul Winthrop is God Almighty, and I’m the heartless outsider. The spawn of Satan.”
His rather childish outburst surprised her. His tone had sounded almost human. She might even have felt some sympathy for him if she hadn’t still felt the sting of his “your behavior last Friday” remark.
Not that it was any of his damn business, she fumed. Why not just call her the office slut and at least be a man about it instead of dropping smug hints like some little schoolyard snitch?
“I’m sorry,” she told him archly, “that you feel so persecuted in Mystery, Doctor. I suppose we hayseed types must seem a bit quaint to sophisticated outsiders.”
Her tone heaped extra emphasis on the last two words.
He wanted to laugh out loud. Staring at her, he thought, you beautiful, hotheaded little fool, you are so wrong it’s even funny. Sophisticated? He almost snorted. What would she think if she knew he grew up living in a broken-down trailer, or that pretty girls just like her used to mock him in school because of his family’s poverty? Medical school had been the only way out. The only way. And he’d grasped it like a lifebuoy.
But it hardly mattered what he thought. She didn’t give him a chance to slip a word in.
“I am the office nurse, after all,” she said, pushing right on in spite of his closed, angry glower. “It’s my job to order medical supplies. But if you have some specific complaint about Rocky Moun—”
“No, it’s fine, what the hell,” he cut in sarcastically. “I’m only the doctor around here, don’t let me interfere with your plans for the office.”
“I said if you want, I’ll order—”
“Order it from a Hong Kong clearing house for all I care,” he snapped, his tone brusquely dismissive. “You’re right, it’s your job, not mine. Thanks for your time.”
He sat down behind his desk and flipped open the current issue of Surgical Medicine Quarterly. His rude behavior was meant to be her dismissal.
But Rebecca saw how his eyes were not really reading. Anger flicked in his gaze like light reflected off midnight ice, darkening the blue and tightening his lips and facial muscles.
The feeling is mutual, her own angry eyes assured him right back as she turned away, resenting him to the point of pure hatred.
“One last thing, Miss O’Reilly.”
His voice behind her stopped her like a firm grip on her shoulders.
She turned to watch him from the doorway of the office. “Yes?”
“Concerning what I witnessed last Friday—your, uh, personal intrigues are of course your own business. But professionals don’t mix business with pleasure for this very reason we see now—it causes unnecessary problems. Try to keep your love life out of the workplace.”
His presumptions and false assumptions made anger surge up within her, anger tinged with bewilderment. Why should she care if he had a false impression of her involvement with a would-be adultering creep? She refused to let Saville get that personal with her, right or wrong in his assumptions. His nose wasn’t just out of joint—
it was also way too long.
The scornful twist of her mouth was meant to insult him more than any words could. Nonetheless, she flung a few at him for good measure.
“Despite your obvious belief that you are above everyone else,” she snipped, “this is not the Middle Ages, and you do not own your employees. I am a nurse, not a serf. My private life is my business and my business alone. Furthermore, as far as I see it, you have no right to make ridiculous observations like you have just now. In fact, you don’t have the right to even speak to me about my love life.”
Or lack thereof, she finished silently to herself with a twist of irony.
In the ensuing silence, her eyes refused to flee from his. Defiance edged every feature as she stared back at him.
His gaze turned toward the window and the view outside as if in surrender, but he still took up the gauntlet.
“If I did own you,” he assured her, “I’d see if I could swap you for an angry grizzly. Might make the office more pleasant.”
Down-home humor, she thought. Just what Mystery needed in a doctor from Chicago.
She turned and left the office. She didn’t make note of his angry stare or how it drilled into her. Burning. Burning.
By the time Hazel McCallum left for her 10:00 a.m. appointment with John Saville, not even a sweater was required, and the main yard and corral were teeming with horse wranglers and cow punchers.
Weather-rawed men wearing range clothes and neckerchiefs waved as her cinnamon-and-black Fleetwood wound through the crushed-stone driveway of the front yard. Some of the older hands refused to wave, considering that gesture beneath their dignity and Hazel’s status as the last living McCallum. Instead they touched their hats in a respectful “salute to the brand,” a gesture that never ceased to make Hazel feel pride in the cattleman’s traditions.
Those corporate boys in the big cities only talk about teamwork, she thought. One old-fashioned cattle drive would teach them the real meaning of pulling together.
She slowed for the asphalt road that led due east into town. Beyond the Lazy M’s far-flung corrals and pastures, blue sky curved down to meet green grass in a vista as wide as the eye could see. And rising majestically beyond the verdant floor of Mystery Valley, the hard granite peaks of the Rockies.
The M.D. Courts His Nurse Page 2
