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 much, 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,