The M.D. Courts His Nurse Read online

  And this jealousy she felt—this nagging worry about Louise or whoever was sharing his mystery weekends with him. She hated all of it, and she must endure the pain of leaving his life for good. Otherwise it would just get worse.

  She cheered herself up somewhat with the reminder that tomorrow she might select her new place. She’d found a cedar town house in Lambertville that was in her price range, and she had an appointment to see it this very evening. If she landed a job at Lutheran Hospital, which seemed a done deal already, she’d be only five minutes drive from work—and would rarely ever see John, who did most of his surgery at Valley General.

  She took a quick shower, then changed into black leather pumps and a plum V-neck dress with a wide, flowing skirt. She was still combing out her wet hair when the telephone chirred.

  Caller ID showed it was Hazel’s number, so she picked up. “Hi, Hazel.”

  “Hey, hon. Got big plans for this weekend?”

  “Don’t I wish,” Rebecca muttered, though she was instantly wary of Hazel’s tricks. “Why—what’s up?”

  “Mainly I’m just wondering if you’d agree to spend the weekend with me at the Lazy M?”

  The request was oddly worded, and Rebecca wasn’t sure where it was headed. “Wait a minute, Hazel. Is this another setup for a date?”

  “Actually, I’m not quite up to that stuff,” Hazel assured her. “The thing is, I’m a mite off my feed, Becky. I feel tired and a little achy.”

  “Has Donna taken your temperature?”

  “Yes, and it’s just a little high. Almost a hundred.”

  Not serious, Rebecca thought, but often a slight elevation signaled that the body’s immune system was kicking in.

  “Could be you’re fighting off a bug,” she suggested lightly.

  Although she kept her voice calm, Rebecca felt a little prickle of alarm. It wasn’t Hazel’s temperature that worried her—it was her weary tone. It didn’t signal an emergency, perhaps, but given Hazel’s lifelong energy and her “keep up the strut” McCallum confidence, this defeated, vulnerable tone was worrisome.

  Without a second thought, she decided to call and reschedule her appointment to see the town house.

  “It would be fun to spend the weekend,” she told Hazel, eager to help the woman who had done so much for her.

  “How ’bout I toss a few things into a bag and come right on over?”

  “I do appreciate it, sweet love. Donna’s making her delicious chicken Kiev, we’ll have a nice dinner. Maybe you could do some riding while you’re here. That three-year-old ginger you like so much needs to shake out the kinks.”

  “Well your temperature is perfect,” John told Hazel, reading a digital thermometer in the soft light of a bedside lamp. “Ninety-eight point six precisely. And your blood pressure and pulse are normal, too.”

  He took a small penlight from his kit and examined each of her eyes.

  “It was awfully sweet of you to come over like this, John,” Hazel assured him as he peered into each cornea. “It just came on so suddenly, I—well, maybe I sort of overreacted.”

  “Nonsense,” he assured her. “I’m happy to come check on any neighbor, but especially you. Stick out your tongue and say ahh…that’s it, good.”

  He switched off his light, dropped the used tongue depressor into a nearby waste can, and announced, “Hazel, if you were any fitter, I’d put you on the Olympic team.”

  Although still respectful, there was suspicion in his tone. She aimed a covert glance at the clock on the nightstand. If Rebecca arrived when she’d promised to, the timing should be just right.

  “Now, now, Doctor, you know how it is with us seasoned citizens—better safe than sorry.”

  “Hmm…what, exactly, did you say you felt?”

  “It was sort of like a twitching sensation in my chest.”

  “A twitching?”

  She shook her head. “No, maybe it was more like a fluttering.”

  John grinned briefly. “Perhaps we should consult the dictionary to see which you felt?”

  “I’ll go with fluttering,” Hazel decided as if picking an entrée.

  “Any dizziness in the past few days?”

  “Possibly,” Hazel said, hedging, and John’s eyes narrowed.

  “Possibly?” he repeated. “You’re not sure?”

  “Well, the thing of it is, I haven’t fainted,” she clarified, her face focused as if trying to remember. “But there may have been a brief dizzy spell.”

  John definitely didn’t trust her. She was acting a little too innocent, a little too confused and hesitant. That was nothing like the Hazel McCallum he knew.

  “Have you had a recurrence of your angina pains?” he asked next.

  Hazel was about to respond when a two-tone chime out in the living room announced the arrival of a visitor.

  “Donna will get it,” she remarked.

  He aimed a stern, yet curious, glance at her. “Hazel, you’re faking this illness, aren’t you?”

  While she was a gifted actress, when the cause of love required it, Hazel had never been a very good liar when directly confronted. Now, hearing voices approach the bedroom, she quickly resorted to another tack.

  “Yes, I’m faking,” she admitted. The ailing tone was gone. “You thick-skulled, high-strung youngsters have forced me to it. And now you’re going to play along.”

  “Hazel, I can’t—”

  “Shush it! She’s almost here. Do you want Becky or not?”

  “Becky? But how does she—”

  He never finished the question, for at that very moment the lady in question appeared in the bedroom door, carrying a nylon overnight bag and a leather jumpkit similar to John’s.

  “Hazel, what—” She paused in midsentence when she saw him standing beside the bed. For a few moments her face closed in anger against him. But then she saw his open bag and the stethoscope around his neck. Worry suddenly replaced her anger.

  “I called John right after I talked to you, hon,” Hazel explained, the under-the-weather tone back in her voice. “I felt a little twinge. John thinks it might be my angina kicking up.”

  “Oh.” Rebecca looked uncertainly from one to the other. John seemed on the verge of saying something. But his eyes took in all of Rebecca, from her well-turned ankles to those lovely arching eyebrows, and the faintest of smiles lifted one corner of his mouth. He remained silent.

  “Have you taken your nitro?” she asked Hazel.

  “I was just telling John,” the matriarch spoke up quickly, “that Donna has looked all over the goldang house for them. I seem to’ve misplaced them.”

  “If John writes a prescription,” Rebecca offered, “I can run into town quick and—”

  “Oh, I know where I left them,” Hazel cut in suddenly. “I’ve been working on the old foreman’s quarters out in the barn. I had them out there with me and must have left them there.”

  “Where? I’ll run out and get them,” Rebecca volunteered.

  Hazel’s weather-seamed face tightened in a show of concentration. “Let me see…did I leave them on the kitchen counter? Or maybe it was on the stand beside the sofa…oh, botheration, I can’t recall.”

  “I’ll go out there and look,” Rebecca said, starting to turn away. “You go through the tack room, right?”

  “That’s right, Becky, the door should be unlocked.”

  John was still standing beside the bed, gazing at Rebecca. Hazel quickly reached out and gave him a little punch on the arm to goad him into action.

  “A backbone,” she whispered as the younger woman left the bedroom, “not a wishbone, remember?”

  He snapped quickly into action. “Just a second, Becky,” he called behind his departing nurse. “I’ll help you look.”

  The moment he, too, had left the bedroom Hazel sat up in bed and pulled a wireless phone out from under the covers. She quickly tapped in a number.

  “Get your rear in gear, Russ,” she ordered the hidden cowboy in the barn. �
��They’re on their way out.”

  Fifteen

  John caught up with Rebecca even before she left the house. It was apparent to him that her concerns about her friend’s health outweighed any suspicions she had of Hazel’s motives.

  “What is it, John?” she asked the moment they left the house. “Her heart?”

  “If so, it’s nothing I can tell without an EKG,” he replied, promising himself he would tell no lies even though Hazel was deceiving them. “Her heartbeat is regular and strong, and her blood pressure is 130 over 80.”

  “Well…did she describe her symptoms to you?”

  He recalled Hazel’s evasive talk of “flutters” and “twitches.” It was hard to keep a straight face when he replied. “Not too clearly.”

  Rebecca sent him a quizzical glance. “Does she still have a slight fever?”

  “No fever at all.”

  “No fever?” They were halfway to the barn now, twilight gathering around them. “But she told me her temp was up slightly.”

  “Maybe it was, but it’s fine now.”

  “I wonder,” she mused, more to herself than John. Hazel’s phone call had left her with stretched nerves. If it turned out she was playing another one of her little matchmaking games, Rebecca was going to read her the riot act.

  They reached the cavernous main barn, and she flipped the toggle, opening the sliding doors. Overhead lights winked on automatically. She shivered slightly as a chilly breeze whispered around them, suddenly very aware of John’s nearness.

  “The tack room’s toward the back,” she told him as they moved inside. “The living quarters Hazel mentioned are used as a storage room now. We’ll have to go through the tack room to reach it.”

  “You know plenty about the ranch, don’t you?” he remarked as they strolled through the long barn. Cows of various breeds watched them from placid eyes.

  “I could run the place,” she admitted. “The Lazy M was my second home. Especially after my mom died and with my dad gone so much.”

  “Yeah, I can relate to that,” he assured her. “I spent a lot of my childhood on the Blackfoot Indian reservation.”

  “You did?” His remark genuinely surprised her, for it did not fit her preconceived ideas about his youth.

  But before she could ask him about it, they’d reached the tack room. The familiar, pleasant smell of leather, saddle soap and horse liniment reminded her she’d been away too long from this life. She pointed to a closed door midway in the rear wall.

  “That’s the entrance to the foreman’s quarters. I hope Hazel left it unlocked.”

  The door opened when she turned the knob. She flipped the wall switch, and light flooded the interior. They both stepped inside. This first room was the kitchen, brightly painted and cozy.

  “What in the world?” she wondered aloud, startled at what she saw.

  “This place is hardly a storage room,” John pointed out, looking all around them. “It’s neat as a pin. Is someone still living here, you think? Anybody home?” he added, raising his voice.

  No answer from within. There was no sign of dust or cobwebs, either, and the entire apartment had a fresh, clean-scrubbed smell. The old but serviceable appliances gleamed.

  “If it’s not used any longer,” John said, “why is the refrigerator plugged in and humming?”

  They moved into a small dining room off the kitchen. Both of them gaped in astonishment when they saw a two-branched gilt candlestick on the small gateleg table—candles already lit.

  “This is kind of spooky,” he remarked. “Those candles have hardly burned. Somebody must have lit them in the past few minutes.”

  “Spooky isn’t quite the right word,” she countered as it began to sink in what Hazel was pulling off here.

  Lit candles weren’t the half of it. A small wooden tub on a nearby sideboard was filled with ice, barely beginning to melt, and a magnum of champagne. An oval wicker basket on the table held bunches of fragrant red and white carnations. Becky read the card beside them, written in Hazel’s distinctive hand: “For the flower girl.”

  Her eyes met John’s. She felt suddenly defensive, afraid he’d think she was part of this deception. “We’ve been had by a mastermind.”

  He nodded, an amused smile replacing his baffled look. “Look—the table’s even set for us. You ever get the feeling, around Hazel, that you’re just a chess piece being moved around?”

  “Do I ever. But it’s not going to work,” she vowed, turning to leave. “Hazel presumes too much on her white hairs. This time she’s gone too far. Well, she can cry wolf about being sick. But she can’t make me stay here if I don’t want to.”

  “Hey, where you going?”

  “Where do you think? I’m going to march right back to the house and give her a piece of my mi—”

  She abruptly fell silent when, halfway back into the kitchen, she spotted the closed door.

  “Did you shut that?” she demanded of John.

  “No. And spare me that dirty look, I’m not playing any tricks on you. Maybe the door just swung shut behind us.”

  Rebecca then discovered, with a sinking feeling, that the thick, solid wood door refused to budge.

  His denial just now struck her as sounding a little staged. She whirled around, glowering at him as her suspicions suddenly widened. “Did the two of you plan all this?”

  Angry resentment hardened his handsome features. “There you go again, giving vent to your unlimited ego. I’m not so desperate for female companionship that I need to trap women in barns.”

  “My unlimited ego? Don’t make me laugh. I’m not the one who needs to carve notches on my bedpost to ‘validate’ myself.”

  “Just what the hell does that mean?”

  “Did you and Hazel cook this up?”

  “I told you no. So get over it, okay? I was sucked in just like you were. I admit I guessed, just before you arrived, that Hazel was faking the illness, all right? But I did not know about any of this.”

  Rebecca believed him, but in her irritation she didn’t care. She pounded on the door, her fist making pitifully little sound on the thick heart pine.

  “Help!” she cried out. “Help, somebody! We’re locked in.”

  “I’ll try the phone,” John suggested, seeing one on the wall near the door.

  Not surprisingly, though, it was dead.

  “Is there another door?” he demanded.

  She shook her head in helpless frustration. “No windows, either, since it’s all an interior apartment. The place has ventillation shafts for fresh air, but they’re too small for a person to fit in them.”

  “That lock should be pretty old,” he reasoned. “Got a bobby pin?”

  She slid one from her hair, and he bent it open, then knelt before the door and began working on the lock. However, after about fifteen minutes with no luck, he gave up.

  “Well then, we might as well face it,” he told her, his own voice resigned. “Hazel didn’t go to all this trouble just to lock us up for a few minutes. We won’t get out until she wants us out. So why injure your hand beating on the door? We might as well make the best of it.”

  “Meaning what?” she demanded.

  He shrugged, heading toward the refrigerator. “Suit yourself. I’m hungry. I’m going to see what our captor has given us for supper.”

  “I can take an informed guess,” she predicted sarcastically as he opened the refrigerator. “Chicken Kiev in a casserole dish, ready for warming in the oven. With a little note from Donna taped to it—twenty minutes at 325 degrees.”

  He glanced inside, eyes widening in surprise when he spotted the casserole dishes, three of them, with the very note taped to one.

  “Sounds like you know the drill around here, all right,” he speculated quietly, watching her with eyes narrowing. “Besides the chicken Kiev, there are steamed asparagus tips and boiled new potatos. You sure you’re not in cahoots with Hazel?”

  “Why not?” she riposted, her tone rising i
n anger. “We gold diggers and guilt trippers will stop at nothing to trap our prey.”

  “I didn’t go that far,” he taunted, as if enjoying her little tantrum. “But I’m glad you thought to include fresh eggs—for breakfast.”

  The hit scored, and his sudden laughter left her speechless with indignation.

  How dare he assume she would stoop to…to…

  But she lost the thought as renewed anger at Hazel surged into her thoughts again. Rebecca had forgiven her for other unwelcome intrusions and trickery; this, however, was simply outrageous. Hazel had gone over the line this time, and she needed to be told that.

  “She played on our concern for her,” she fumed.

  “When all along she was just luring us in like…like bugs to a zap light.”

  He laughed at her comparison as he popped the casserole into the small electric oven and set the temperature.

  “You should preheat the oven,” she remarked absently.

  “Bachelor doesn’t mean stupid,” he teased. “I set the timer for an extra few minutes. Is it really that bad?” he added.

  “What?”

  “Having to be here with me?”

  He turned from the stove and crossed his arms over his chest, watching her with a sexy, sly smile that stirred heat and desire within her. He wore a short-sleeved khaki shirt, and she admired his muscular forearms and the fine, dark-brown hairs covering them.

  Even as she felt her ardent, needful response to him, however, she reminded herself how ideal this situation was for him. He could have a little fun until Hazel sprang them loose, then wave bye-bye and head to Deer Lodge.

  She had no desire whatsoever to accuse him of anything, only to ignore him as best she could.

  So her next outburst surprised her as much as him.

  “I guess you wouldn’t mind a little spur of the moment trysting.” The words sprang out of her. “I won’t be keeping you from Louise, will I, or any of your more deserving and qualified lovers?”

  “Louise?” he repeated uncertainly. “Man, you just lost me on that one.”

  Horrified at her outburst, she had determined to just shut up. But she could not remain silent.