“And when he gets that uptight look like somebody’s giving him a wedgie,” Lois giggled, “that’s one of the sticks.”
They enjoyed a rebellious laugh. Their goof-off mood inspired Rebecca to suddenly pucker her face in an exaggerated scowl.
“‘Having fun, Miss O’Reilly,’” she lectured, making her voice as deep and disapproving as she could, “‘isn’t the point of this clinic.’”
They were safe, for he was well out of earshot at the rear of the building. However, the sudden sound of his steps in the hallway caught them before they could quite suppress their mood of bubbling mirth.
“Shush, woman,” Lois hissed melodramatically. “We just got a raise, don’t get him mad.”
But that last smart crack was one joke too many, and badly timed. She had to swivel sideways in her chair, and Lois barely managed to compose her face before the doctor appeared in the doorway, several X-rays in his left hand.
“Miss O’Reilly, has the lab got back with us yet on Bernie Decker’s blood-and-urine workups?”
His request was polite and straightforward, similar to dozens he made each day.
Rebecca never would have foolishly lost it if she hadn’t made the dumb mistake of making eye contact with Lois so soon after they’d just been goofing around.
It was the “Miss O’Reilly” that did it—it was like a spark to a powder keg.
“Yes, Doctor,” was all she managed before she lost her composure and broke into giggles that set Lois off, too.
For a few moments after their adolescent outburst, he was caught completely off guard. Rebecca watched a perplexed smile draw his lips apart. At first he seemed to think something else was causing their mirth. Then she saw a quick glimmer of realization in his eyes that he was the butt of the joke. Then his face registered some deeper emotion—hurt, she realized with a sudden stab of guilt. They were only being immature and laughing at his stuffy formality, but he couldn’t know that.
An indrawn, bitter look came over him, and the handsome, angry face closed against both of them.
“All right,” he replied, still under control but so mad that his jaw muscles bunched tightly. “I guess I’ll get that lab report later, when you two’ve gotten over your private joke.”
Guilt gnawed at Rebecca for the rest of the day. It wasn’t just her childish behavior and the raise thing—she thought of John Saville’s brief but charming smile, the hurt deep in his eyes before anger took over. She also thought about how his gaze had seemed to linger on her body. Not that she cared. No doubt the lover within him was as uptight and calculating as the physician. Being with him wouldn’t be worth the enormous effort she’d have to put forth just to have some fun.
However, all her guilt was whisked away like a feather in a gust the moment she tried to apologize right before quitting time at 5:00 p.m.
He cut her off in midsentence with almost the same caustic retort she had recently flung at him. “I doubt it will leave me a broken man.”
And to think she had wasted time feeling sorry for such an overbearing brute. The absolute creep, she fumed as she drove home in the aging but reliable Bronco her father had turned over to her as a high school graduation present. He was so like Brian. His spitting image exactly, she told herself, self-justification in every word.
Even thoughts of her upcoming date tonight with Rick Collins could not crowd irksome images of John Saville from her mind.
By the time she finished a long and relaxing bath, the light of late afternoon was taking on the mellow richness just before sunset. Wearing a snug terry cloth robe, her long hair wrapped in a towel, she watched the copper blaze of sunset from her bedroom window.
Feeling calmer, she dressed in a hunter green merino wool skirt and a black silk blouse, digging a good pair of black leather pumps out of her closet. She left her hair unrestrained, just combing it out and spritzing it back a little in front, letting it cascade down her back and over her shoulders.
“A very sexy little package,” she approved as she checked herself out in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. “Play your cards right, Mr. Collins, and who knows? This girl is in the mood.”
She hummed pop tunes while she added a finishing touch, a pair of delicate cameo pierced earrings that had belonged to her mother. But while she slipped the delicate French wires through her ears, again she saw John Saville’s face closing against her, the intense cobalt eyes accusing.
A little guilt, and plenty of anger, knotted her stomach, already pinched with hunger.
He was the last man she wanted on her mind tonight.
Noticing it was almost seven o’clock, she quickly opened her compact and lightly brushed her cheeks with blush, trying to get in the right mindset to enjoy a date, John Saville be damned.
Rick Collins rang her doorbell at 7:00 p.m., prompt as a wake-up call and looking quite dapper in a dark evening suit. His blond hair was shorter and neater than she recalled, and he was a little stouter than she had imagined him. Nonetheless, he made a good first impression when Rebecca opened the door.
The smile was still as sexy as she remembered it being. Definitely movie-star teeth.
She was a little put off, however, when he escorted her out to his vehicle: a glittering gold SUV that rode incredibly high off the ground on huge, oversize tires.
“Not quite a monster truck.” Rick seemed to apologize as he helped her in.
She felt as if she was climbing up into a military assault vehicle. This is Montana, she reminded herself. People drive weird trucks out here.
But from that point on, the date rapidly became a fiasco.
During the drive to the restaurant, he rebuffed her every attempt at conversation because, as she quickly learned, he was obsessed with reciting trivial facts. Batting averages, team mascots, per capita consumption of chocolate, the cures for diphtheria in Colonial America, an endless, random recitation of pointless facts proving he had a photographic memory but no other apparent intelligence. Hazel was right to call him a big reader, but she failed to mention he read nothing but books on trivia.
Before long she had also noticed something quite irritating about Rick’s “pleasant voice”—it was oddly uniform in tone, seldom varying much. He might as well be reading out loud from a phone book to pass time. The monotony of it had quickly begun to grate on her.
The date officially tanked by the time the Hathaway House loomed into view. She was practically clawing at her window to escape. He hadn’t shut up once.
“No kidding,” his monotone voice droned on like a weed-eater idling, “Charles Bronson was actually named Charles Buchinsky before he changed his name.”
“Is that right?” she muttered.
“Yeah, and John Denver was Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. And you know what Eric Clapton’s real name was?”
“You tell me.”
He laughed for the first time. “Eric Clap. No kidding, it really was.”
When she said nothing, he pressed on. “Don’t you get—”
“I get it,” she answered, wondering how she was going to get through the interminable two hours of dinner.
The modern exterior of the Hathaway House, with its elegant marble walls, seemed a deliberate contrast to the old-time intimacy of the interior. Candles burned in sconces along the walls, and two-branched gilt candlesticks illuminated each table.
But tonight it was all wasted on Rebecca. The double