“About time!” a burly man toward the front of the crowd called out.
Miss Joan laughed and nodded. “I couldn’t agree with you more, Ezra.” She glanced over her shoulder toward two of her waitresses. “Julie, Rosa, see that everyone has a glass—and be sure to fill it. We need to make a toast to Dr. Dan.”
Dan braced himself for whatever was ultimately coming. He didn’t mind being in the spotlight, but he had the feeling that this attention came with a great many strings. He had one hell of a challenge in front of him.
This toast’s for you, Warren, Dan thought. Not me. He knew his brother would have been moved by it. As for him, it just gave him a feeling of anticipation that was far from good.
He sincerely hoped that he was up to the challenge. For Warren’s sake, he was going to have to be.
Chapter Three
“To Doctor Dan!” Miss Joan toasted with enthusiasm, raising her glass of sparkling cider high. “Thanks for setting up your practice here and we all hope that you never come to regret it.”
Dan raised his own glass to his lips. The woman was asking a great deal. More than was possible. If this was only about him, he’d be already regretting it. Already booking a flight back.
But this wasn’t about what he wanted. It was about Warren and what he had wanted. What he selflessly had wanted.
For now, he would make the best of it and muster through.
As the light amber liquid made its way past his lips and down his throat, the taste created a note of confusion in its wake. He’d thought that the waitresses had poured some sort of alcoholic beverage into the glasses that they then distributed to him and the others. One taste negated that impression. Other than a few bubbles and a deceptively yellowish color, what had been poured into his glass fell woefully short of having any sort of a kick.
His drink tasted suspiciously like soda pop.
Dan regarded his glass, unconsciously raising a quizzical eyebrow as he tried to pinpoint just what it was he was drinking.
Seeing his confused expression, Tina leaned into him so he could hear her. “It’s sparkling cider,” she told him, then added, “this is a diner. Miss Joan doesn’t serve any hard liquor here.”
For a moment, he was distracted by Tina’s closeness and the scent of her hair. Something light and floral. And heady.
Dan forced himself to focus on the conversation. Okay, no hard liquor. He could deal with that. But no liquor at all was something else again.
He thought of wine. Entire cultures had wine with their dinner. Dan sincerely hoped that this wasn’t a dry town. “How about ‘soft’ liquor?”
Amusement entered her eyes at the term. “None of that, either.”
“Do they have any liquor at all in this town?”
He wasn’t addicted to drinking, but he wanted to know if it was available should the need arise. There were times, since Warren’s death, that he felt the need to numb himself against the haunting memory of Warren’s last cry of pain and surprise. And, now that he thought of it, a drink at the end of the day after dealing with the good citizens of Sleepy Hollow might not be such a bad idea, either.
“You can find some in Hogan’s General Store,” she told him, giving him the name of the biggest grocery store/pharmacy in Forever. “Mostly, Mr. Hogan sells beer, but if you catch him in a good mood, he’ll take you to where he keeps the top shelf stuff. Whiskey, vodka, whatever your pleasure,” she told him.
Tina was doing her best not to prejudge the new doctor, or sound judgmental. But Don had been a drinker, as well as a closet drug addict. At the time she’d thrown her lot in with his, it hadn’t mattered. She’d been desperate to connect with someone other than the sister who had assumed the role of both mother and father to her. But it mattered now.
Looking back, she realized now that Olivia had worked incredibly challenging hours just to provide for them as well as furthering her law career. But at the time all she could think of was that her sister was never physically there when she wanted her. And Don might have ultimately been a very poor excuse for a human being, but he had been incredibly charismatic when he wanted to be. She had been both lonely and highly impressionable when their paths crossed.
In essence, she supposed she was a victim waiting to happen. But she survived all that, Tina thought, struggling to focus on the positive the way she’d learned to do. Survived, was the stronger for it and had a beautiful son to boot. All the rest of it was in the past and no longer of any consequence.
Since Miss Joan had personally placed a glass of sparkling cider in her hand, Tina raised it now a beat after the others had chanted the toast to the doctor. The pause was part of her effort not to just blindly follow someone else’s lead, even if that someone was Miss Joan. It was all part of the evolution she was determined to go through.
“To your stay in Forever,” she said, altering the toast to something she felt was more appropriate. Dr. Daniel Davenport didn’t have the air of someone who belonged in Forever.
Because of the din, Dan was forced to watch the sexy blonde’s lips to “hear” what she was saying.
Not exactly a hardship, he mused, since her lips were full and, at any other time, would have been decidedly tempting. But he wasn’t himself these days. He still struggled with his grief and the almost oppressively heavy weight of guilt that pressed down on him. Each time he managed to come up for air, to begin to pull himself together, the guilt would suddenly find him, stealing away the very air in his lungs.
Six weeks after Warren’s death he was still caught in an emotional tailspin. A small part of him was the old Dan, the man he’d been before Warren had died because of him. The rest was a pulsating, formless glob of sadness and guilt, viewing everything around him in shades of gray and black.
The first part was mired in denial. The second part was just mired. Both parts, he felt now, would need something stiffer than what was in his glass.
“This is Texas,” he pointed out needlessly to the shapely blonde. “Aren’t there any bars or saloons or whatever the locals call them around here?”
She noticed that he said “the locals,” not “you locals.” Was he deliberately excluding her from being part of Forever, giving her what he must have assumed was a compliment? Or was that just a slip of the tongue that he wasn’t aware of?
“There’s a place on the other side of town,” she told him. “It’s called ‘The Cattlemen.’” The entire building was hardly big enough to be able to sustain the sign that proclaimed its name, but it did qualify for the label of saloon.
“Didn’t think that this town was big enough to have an other side,” the doctor quipped.
That was a definite put-down. Tina took offense for her adopted town. But when she looked at Forever’s newest resident, she didn’t see a smug, superior expression on his face. Instead, his expression appeared unfathomable, as if his heart and mind were elsewhere and his mouth just moved thanks to some automatic pilot setting.
“It is and it does,” she assured him. She gave him a rundown on the establishment’s hours of operation. “The Cattlemen is only open after seven. The man who runs it also owns the barbershop next door and he works there in the daytime.”
“After seven,” Dan repeated incredulously, thinking of the bars and grills located on practically every other corner back in three of New York City’s five boroughs. Most of those establishments opened before noon under the guise of serving lunch. “How long does this Cattlemen