“How shocking,” Seth remarked.
“Ramona needed the night off, and I was available,” Prudence said with finality.
“You’re never available for me,” he pointed out, loving the way her mouth tightened into a disapproving little moue at his comment. Oh, she was soooo transparent. She wanted him. He was—almost—sure of it.
She narrowed her eyes at him. “There’s a good reason for that,” she said.
“But you’ve never seen fit to tell me what it is.”
She shrugged, but there wasn’t an ounce of carelessness in the gesture. “I figure you’re a big boy, a smart guy. You have a college degree, and—”
“Three of them, actually,” Seth supplied helpfully, holding up his left hand with that many fingers to punctuate the claim.
“—and I knew you could figure it out for yourself,” she finished, ignoring his interjection.
He pressed his index finger against his cheek and, for a moment, feigned deep consideration. Then, after a moment, he told her, “Nope. Sorry. Can’t figure it out. You’ll just have to spell it out for me.”
She smiled mildly at him, but there was no warmth in the gesture. Seth could tell, because the temperature in the room seemed to drop twenty degrees at least as she completed it. “Gosh, then I guess you’re just not the big Mr. Know-It-All you thought you were, are you?”
Seth sniffed indignantly. “Hey, that’s Dr. Know-It-All to you, Prudence,” he countered.
“And that’s Ms. Holloway, to you, Dr. Know-It-All.”
He sidled up closer to her, mainly because he knew it bugged the hell out of her whenever he sidled in her presence. But for every step he took toward her, she took a step back. The nurse with whom she’d been conversing seemed to sense that her presence was no longer noticed, and slipped off nearly undetected. Seth braved another small step toward Prudence, and she, in turn, claimed another giant step in retreat. Doing so, however, rather impeded her progress, because it left her flat against the wall, just inches from a corner that effectively closed the trap.
Such an imprudent move on her part, Seth thought.
He smiled his most predatory smile, set down his plate of goodies and covered what little distance between them remained. Then he flattened one palm against the wall near her head and opened the other on the wall at his shoulder level. At last, he thought, he had fair Prudence where he wanted her.
Now if he could just get rid of the dozen other people present, maybe he could coax her around to his way of thinking. His way of thinking being, of course, that the two of them belonged together. Preferably close together. Preferably naked. Preferably horizontal. Though there was a lot to be said for vertical, too….
“You know,” he murmured smoothly, bringing his face closer to hers—no easy feat, seeing as how she stood a good eight inches shorter than he. “A lot of the nurses here—a lot of the doctors, too—call me something other than Dr. Know-It-All.”
“Do tell,” she remarked dryly.
She almost convinced him that she was completely unmoved by his nearness, but Seth, ever vigilant, had noted the way the pulse at the base of her throat had quickened when he drew closer. Now he noted further that, currently, that pulse was pretty much dancing a samba. He also saw that her cheeks had warmed to pink, that her eyelids were lowering over darkly passionate eyes, and that her lips had parted in faint—but undeniable—desire.
Well, well, well, what have we here? he wondered. He hadn’t had a chemistry lesson like this since he was an undergrad. Who knew?
He inhaled a slow, deep breath, then released it leisurely, intentionally fanning the bare skin of her throat when he did. Again her pulse jumped, and her pupils dilated to nearly eclipse the pale green of her irises. Oh, she did have lovely eyes, he thought. Lovely, radiant, passionate eyes.
Eyes that held no secrets.
And for the first time in two years, Seth began to realize that Prudence wasn’t quite as unaffected by him as she tried to let on. Now if he could just get her to admit that to herself….
“No, what they call me behind my back,” he said softly, “is Dr…. Irresistible. Of course, I myself,” he hastily qualified, “much prefer Dr. Irrepressible, which, to my way of thinking, suits me much better. Dr. Irresistible is just a tad forward, don’t you think? I would never presume to be irresistible. Even if,” he couldn’t quite stop himself from adding, “many women do find me just that.”
Prudence expelled a sound that was decidedly unimpressed. But her pulse still jumped, and her eyes still grew dangerously dark. “Yeah, and some of them,” she said, just a little shakily, Seth noticed, “me included, call you Dr.—”
Quickly, he moved one hand to her hair, skimming his palm deftly over the dark curls in an effort to unbalance her and to cut off whatever she had been about to say. And, he might as well just admit it, because it was something he’d been wanting to do for a long, long time.
“—Insufferable,” she finished, anyway, jerking her head to the side in an effort to end his soft caress. “They—and I—call you Dr. Insufferable.”
Well, this was news to Seth. No one, absolutely no one—no one of the feminine persuasion, at any rate—found him insufferable. Inspirational, impressive, incomparable, intrepid, sure. And of course, irresistible. And okay, maybe impertinent, impetuous, irreverent and incorrigible, on occasion. But insufferable? Him? No way. That was…inconceivable.
Seth shook his head—imperceptibly—and forced himself to turn the page in his mental thesaurus. Unfortunately, moving from the letter I just landed him with a bunch of J words—jerk, jester, juvenile, for example—which were no help at all. So he turned his attention back to the matter at hand.
“Prudence,” he said, swallowing a chuckle, as always overcome by the inappropriateness of her name, “I think you’re making that up.”
The sound she expelled this time was even less impressed than the last one she’d made—but was still much too shaky for it to be nonchalant. “You have no idea,” she told him.
He nodded. Of that, if nothing else, he was certain. Where Prudence Holloway was concerned, he never knew quite what to think. In spite of his conviction, however, he murmured, “Oh, really? Funny, but I actually have a few ideas where you’re concerned.”
“None of them decent, I’m sure,” she said.
He smiled. “Well, of course not. Where would be the fun in that?”
“Dr. Mahoney,” she began.
“Seth,” he quickly corrected her. “How many times have I asked you to call me Seth?”
“Dr. Mahoney,” she tried again, more forcefully this time. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m due at the nurses’ station.”
Her voice was breathless and a couple of octaves lower than normal. Something about it made Seth’s blood run hot—well, hotter than usual, anyway—and he couldn’t quite bring himself to move out of her way, even though that was clearly what she was instructing him to do. He only continued to study her face and to lightly twine a dark curl around his index finger. And he realized then that the color of her eyes reminded him of the shallow waters that lapped at Caribbean beaches.
Someday, he thought, letting his mental meanderings drift to fantasies again, maybe she’d accompany him on a little trip down to that part of the world. They could charter a sailboat, just the two of them, and sail indolently from one tranquil harbor to another. They could make sweet love beneath a blue sky and fiery sun, swim naked in cool waters, and then, when the moon hung high in the sky like a bright silver dollar, make love again. Yeah, if only she’d—
“Now.”
That