“It gets worse.”
“How could it get any worse than competing with your backstabbing rival from med school?”
“It seems Derek’s gotten himself engaged.”
“Who’s the unlucky woman?”
Any other time, Tripp would have appreciated his friend’s sarcasm. “Olivia.”
“Your Olivia?”
Tripp didn’t bother to remind Coop that Olivia wasn’t his anymore, if she ever had been. Olivia Babcock’s father was an influential man in the medical field, capable of pulling very impressive strings. It didn’t look good for Tripp. It didn’t look good at all.
“Does this mean I won’t be getting first dibs on this office?” Coop asked.
“I’m not giving up that easily.”
“Yeah? In that case, listen up. People don’t mind if an E.R. doctor is a player, but parents like their kids’ pediatricians to be family men, so if I were you, I’d find myself a woman with a couple of kids. Better yet, find one with relatives as influential as Olivia’s, too. Stat.”
Tripp was in the process of scowling when he heard a noise in the hallway outside his office door. He caught a whiff of expensive, exotic perfume a millisecond before Amber Colton breezed in. There wasn’t a wrinkle in her sage-green pantsuit. He didn’t know how rich people did that.
Tripp wasn’t surprised at the change that came over Coop. The man went on testosterone alert every time a woman came within ten yards of him. But Amber wasn’t paying him any attention. She was looking at Tripp.
“Hello,” she murmured, her voice just sultry enough to sound seductive. Reaching into her pocket, she drew out his watch. Easing closer, she said, “I thought you might want this back before tonight.”
She had to know how that sounded. Glancing over her shoulder, she smiled at Coop and said, “Does he leave his things lying around the hospital, too?”
Tripp had to force his gaping mouth shut.
Amber appeared completely nonplussed. With a flutter of eyelashes and the sureness that the rich seemed to be born with, she extended her hand toward Coop. “Hello. I’m Amber Colton.”
Coop’s voice lowered, softened, mellowed. “Gavin Cooper, head of E.R. Colton? Any relation to Joseph Colton?”
“You know my father?”
Coop chuckled. “Not personally.” Rising languidly to his feet, he released Amber’s hand. He looked Tripp in the eye and said, “I underestimated you, my friend. I see you’re already on it. You show up at that dinner party this weekend with a woman like Amber on your arm, and you’ll be a shoe-in for the position in Santa Rosa. At the very least you’ll give good old Spencer a run for his money. I’ll leave you two alone.”
Still grinning, Coop left, closing the door behind him.
Amber stared up at Tripp. The room, all at once, was very quiet. Maybe too quiet. Something was wrong.
Tripp’s eyes had narrowed. Hers were wide open. His breathing was deep, hers, shallow. In the tight space so near him, she thought of a dozen questions. What position? What does it have to do with Santa Rosa? What rival? Who was Olivia?
Three separate times, she opened her mouth to voice one of them. Her gaze caught on Tripp’s mouth. He really had a marvelous mouth, the bottom lip fuller than the top. Right now, both were set in a straight line.
“Is something wrong?”
The question seemed to bring him to his senses. He took a deep breath, let it all out and paced to the other side of the cluttered office. “Coop thinks we’re lovers. What on earth could possibly be wrong? And what are you doing here, besides charming the socks off every male you meet?”
Amber recognized an attack when she was under one. She didn’t understand the reason for it. “I repeat. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Bull.”
That got his attention. “Do you make a habit of eavesdropping?”
“The door was open,” she said quietly.
He glanced over her shoulder, and so did she. The door was closed now. And they were alone. Tripp took a backward step, putting more distance between them.
“Coop can hold his own,” he said, “but the orderly I saw you with earlier is still a boy. It was like watching the bored, pampered house cat play with a poor defenseless mouse.”
Poor defenseless mouse? For long seconds, Amber could only stare at him, stunned. Finally, she said, “Fredrico is about as defenseless as an octopus.”
“Fredrico?”
She’d been prepared for several questions. That wasn’t one of them. “He helped you smuggle that puppy into the hospital. Surely you know his name.”
“I know Fred’s name. Everybody does.”
She was getting a bad feeling about this. Now that she thought about it, Nurse Proctor had called the boy Fred. “I see.”
Tripp was on a roll. “Good, because Don and Mary Smith might have named their son Frederick, but definitely not Fredrico.”
All right, already. The boy had pulled one over on her. That didn’t explain the reason for Tripp’s bad mood, or what he and Cooper had been talking about. “Let’s talk about positions, shall we?”
Tripp’s pulses leapt. “I beg your pardon?”
“Didn’t I overhear something about a position you’re hoping to gain down in Santa Rosa?”
Ah. She was referring to the position he’d applied for at an exclusive, private practice in Santa Rosa, not, er, the position for another activity completely unrelated to medicine. He cleared his throat. Clearing his mind of the mental picture that had sprung straight out of his imagination was more difficult to accomplish.
“There’s an opening in pediatrics there. The practice is affiliated with the oldest, most prestigious hospital in Santa Rosa. It’s larger than Ukiah County General, and wealthier by far. I would receive a higher salary, and ultimately, I could reach a lot more kids.”
“Then I don’t see the problem. I’ll do it.”
She stared up at him with luminous green eyes so large it was easy to get lost in their depths. “What exactly are you proposing?”
He didn’t have much mind capacity left at this point, but even he had enough to appreciate the effort she put forth to keep from rolling her eyes. “Your rival is going to be there with his fiancée, right? I’ll go with you. Then you and your rival will be starting on even ground.”
He stared at her for several seconds. She looked happy, as if she was enjoying herself. Again, he thought of a pampered house cat. Olivia used to look like that, too. It was a sobering thought.
“What are you doing here, Amber?”
Her eyes delved into his. She really had very expressive eyes. He imagined they would look this way, large and luminous, in the dark. Whoa. That kind of thinking could be dangerous to a man who was trying to keep his wits about him.
She reached out, touching the watch she’d placed in his hand minutes earlier. “Inez discovered this in the living room at Hacienda de Alegria. You were right. About Inez, I mean. She was matchmaking, just as you said. It would have been apparent even without all the advice she gave me along with directions to the hospital here in Ukiah. Don’t worry. I have no intention of allowing Inez to manipulate me.”
It