“So you think you might be an alumnus?”
“Or I could be a dropout. Who knows?”
She made her way to his bedside and peered at his plate. “Roast beef?”
He nodded. “It’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be.”
“Actually, Brighton Valley Medical Center has a great cafeteria. I usually prefer to eat here more times than not.”
“And where do you eat when you’re not working?”
“At home.”
“Where’s that?”
Normally, she didn’t offer her patients any details about her personal life, but for some reason, she felt like opening up to John. Maybe because she felt sorry for him. “I live on a small ranch outside of town.”
“Oh, yeah? That surprises me.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. You’re a doctor, and I figured you for a place in the city and close to good restaurants and all the cultural haunts.”
She laughed. “In Brighton Valley? You’re definitely new in town.”
“Which means there probably isn’t any reason to post a picture of me on the back page of the newspaper and ask residents to call in if they recognize me.” The smile he’d been wearing faded, and she figured that he’d been trying to make the best of a bad situation but wasn’t having much luck.
“Well, we have some clues that we didn’t have before. You might be from California. And you might have once attended USC.”
His shrug indicated that her guess wasn’t much to go on.
“What about you?” he asked.
“Originally? I’m from Houston. After my…” She caught herself, realizing she didn’t want to mention her divorce—certainly not with a stranger whose gaze was enough to set off a flurry of hormones. So she altered her explanation by saying, “Well, after my internship I had an opportunity to take over a medical practice in a small town, so I moved to Brighton Valley and worked with Dr. Graham until he retired.”
“And so you liked it here and purchased property.”
It was a natural assumption, she supposed. And there was no reason to set him straight, but she did so anyway. “I’d planned to get a place of my own, but Doc invited me to stay in the guesthouse at his ranch until I got settled.”
They’d both thought it would be a temporary arrangement, but Betsy had never moved. She’d blamed it on being too busy to look for a house, but it had been more than that. Living so close to Doc had provided her with an opportunity to learn from an old-school physician who was a natural diagnostician and who was still making house calls up until the day he took down his shingle.
Sometimes, in the evenings when she wasn’t on call, she would brew them both a pot of tea, and they would sit before the fireplace and talk. On those cozy nights, she would laugh at his anecdotes and soak up his wisdom like a child sitting on his knee.
She might have learned the modern methods of treating illness and disease in med school, but Doc had taught her how to deal with people—and not just the patients.
“Are you still living on his ranch?” John asked, as he shifted one of the pillows behind his back.
She nodded, and a slow smile stretched across her face as she thought of the little decorative touches she’d added to make her bedroom warm and cozy, the green-and-lavender quilt she draped over the foot of the bed, the picture of a lilac bush that hung on the wall. “Yes, I’m still there. And even though his guesthouse is just a little bigger than a studio apartment, it’s home to me.”
Sure, every now and then she thought about buying a place of her own, one that was closer to the hospital and to Shady Glen, the retirement community in which her parents lived. But even if she wanted to move, she’d have to rent at this point in her life. She’d used almost every dime of her savings to buy stock in the medical center—something very few people knew.
“And you have no plans to move to a place of your own?”
“No, not now. Doc is getting older, and his health isn’t as good as it once was. Since his wife died, he’s all alone.”
“And you feel an obligation to look after him?”
“It’s more of an honor.” And she felt the same about looking after her parents, too.
“You’re not only a good doctor,” John said, “you’ve also got a good heart.”
She wasn’t sure what made her more uneasy—his praise or her self-disclosure—and she wondered if she ought to back away. After all, she didn’t know this man from Adam.
“So,” John said, connecting the dots, “in a way, you’ve become Doc’s personal physician.”
“I guess you could say that.” She glanced at the clock on the wall, then drew up as tall as her five-foot-two frame would allow. “My shift will be starting soon, so I’d better go. I just wanted to check in on you.”
“I like having my own personal physician, too.”
That wasn’t the impression she’d wanted to give him, but what did she expect? She’d stopped by his bedside for the second time today.
And if truth be told, her interest in him had drifted beyond that of physician-patient and bordered on female-male.
But she’d be darned if she’d admit that to anyone, especially to him.
She glanced at her pager, even though she hadn’t heard a sound or felt a single vibration. “Well, I’d better go. Enjoy your dinner.”
“Will you be back in the morning?” he asked.
Would she?
She shouldn’t—and she hadn’t planned on it.
Yet she found herself agreeing anyway.
Chapter Three
Two days later, after closing up the cozy little house she’d called home for the past two years, Betsy strode across the yard to where she’d left her car.
The brisk wintry air and an overcast sky suggested a storm was on its way, so she turned up the collar of her jacket. Most women who worked a day shift would be ready to put on a pot of soup and batten down the hatches for the night. But not Betsy. She was heading to the hospital to start another twelve-hour shift.
As she reached the driver’s door of her white Honda Civic, she spotted Doc walking out of the barn and heading toward her. Nearly ninety, his gait was more of a shuffle these days.
“You’re leaving earlier than usual,” he said.
She smiled at the man who’d become a mentor, a second father and a friend. “I want to check in on a patient before I start work.”
“A child?” he asked, knowing that she had a heart for kids, especially those who were seriously ill or injured.
“Actually, it’s a man who was robbed and assaulted outside the Stagecoach Inn Wednesday night. He’s got amnesia.”
“Oh, yeah?” The old man leaned his hip against her vehicle, as though intrigued by the case, too.
“He’s a stranger in town,” Betsy added, “but the expensive clothing he wore tells me that he has ties to a community somewhere.”
“That’s too bad. I had a case of amnesia once, back in the late seventies. A father of three fell off a railroad trestle near Lake San Marcos