“Your long list,” Gabby corrected.
“OK, so maybe I have a few too many goals. Dr. Anderson even said something to that effect, but I know what it’s like not having any goals, not having anything to look forward to day in and day out. So a few extra goals are good.”
“If you don’t get so caught up in achieving goals that you miss something else.”
“What would I miss?”
“What is it they say about stopping to smell the roses? Well, sometimes it’s nice to stop and smell the aftershave, too.”
“You’re not talking about…?”
Gabby shrugged. Smiled. Didn’t comment.
“Well, for your information, he doesn’t wear aftershave. I smelled soap on him, that’s all. And the only thing I want to smell is the scent of pine trees when I’m called out on a rescue operation. So, I’m going to audit his class. Sit in the back row so I don’t even have to smell soap on him, and learn what I need to know so I can apply to the next class… one he won’t be teaching.”
“You smelled soap on him?” Gabby teased. “How close, exactly, were you?”
Angela shook her head. “Were you listening to anything I said?”
“OK, so I got sidetracked. But you’re so… so animated. It’s the first time since Brad that I’ve seen you react this way to a man, and it just seemed to me that…”
Angela held out her hand to stop her. “He’s grumpy. He keeps to himself. He’s not friendly. What, in that description, makes you think I’d have anything to do with him?”
“Well, for what it’s worth, he’s had a very rough couple of years.”
“And you and I haven’t? You’ve had two babies and survived an avalanche. I had one baby, a cheating husband, and I survived that same avalanche. That’s all rough, Gabby. But we’re not grumpy.”
“But I have Neil, as well as Bryce and Mary. You have Sarah. Whatever we went through was worth it to get everything we have. And we do have a lot, Angela. We’ve both been blessed in so many ways I can’t even describe it. But Mark…” She trailed off and shrugged.
“You’re right,” Angela whispered, thinking about Sarah again. “We do have everything, don’t we?”
“Neil and Eric brought him here to White Elk because he lost everything.”
“Mark?”
Gabby nodded. “It’s really not my place to say anything, except he walked away from something that made what you and I’ve gone through look like a picnic, and at the end of his road there was nothing or no one waiting there for him. So he may be a little grumpy right now, but I suppose if anyone has a right to be…”
“OK, so maybe I won’t hate him. But that doesn’t mean I have to like him, does it?”
“Just consider him a means to your end. Audit his classes, learn everything you can from him because, from what Neil tells me, he’s an amazing trauma doctor. Then, at the end of eighteen months, ask him to give you a recommendation to the next class.” Gabby grinned. “Who knows? Maybe he’ll do it. Maybe you’ll even enjoy smelling the soap by then.”
About the soap, no. Definitely not. But maybe he would give her the recommendation. Or maybe, after eighteen months, when she’d proved herself to be just as good as anyone else he was training, she’d present his words to him on a silver platter and ask him to eat them. It was certainly a satisfying image, one that made her want to run straight to her sister’s shelf of medical reference books and start reading. “I brought you a nice fresh fruit salad. It’s down in the kitchen. Want some?” she asked Gabby.
“With strawberries?”
“Lots of strawberries.” Angela pushed herself up out of the chair and headed downstairs. On the way to the kitchen, though, she stopped in the den and took a look at all the medical volumes belonging to Gabby and Neil. Dozens and dozens of them, all well past anything she could read and understand. But tucked into a corner was an old paperback medical dictionary. Words… medical words with meanings. That was as good a place to start as any, and she was anxious to ask Gabby if she could borrow it. Her fingers were almost trembling as she pulled the book from the shelf. “This is where we begin it all, Sarah,” she whispered, as she tucked it under her arm and continued on to the kitchen. “One word at a time.”
With, or without, Mark Anderson’s help.
CHAPTER TWO
“STAT, from the Latin statim, meaning immediately,” Angela said as Mark hurried by her in the corridor.
He stopped, turned round. “Excuse me?”
“I said stat, from the Latin statim, meaning?”
“I know what it means,” he said. “But what I’m wondering is why you feel the need to tell me that you know what it means.” She arched her eyebrows at him and what he noticed was that they were perfectly sculpted, a lovely frame for the sparkling eyes beneath them. Eyes he stared at for the span of a full five seconds. When he realized that he was staring so intently, he forced a hard blink that shattered the rising sizzle of the moment. Crazy thoughts, he scolded himself. Crazy and stupid.
“No particular reason.”
The heck there wasn’t. She was serious about auditing his class, and if he were a betting man, he’d bet a week’s pay that she was memorizing a medical dictionary or something as equally bizarre. “I have a hard time believing that you do anything without a reason, Mrs. Blanchard.”
“Call me Angela. You’re going to be seeing enough of me over the next few months that I don’t think we need the formalities standing between us.”
“Then you’re really serious about this?” As if he didn’t already know. Angela Blanchard exuded determination. One look said it all. She squared her shoulders, held her head high, and plunged right into the middle of whatever she wanted, and he doubted an army could stop her. “You’re really going to spend the next year and a half of your life sitting in the back of my class, only to reap no benefit?”
She laughed. “Depends on how you define benefit, doesn’t it, Mark?”
A chill, caused by the way she’d said his name, shot up his arm. Her pronunciation had been crisp, deliberate… rolling off lips he didn’t want to look at but caught himself staring at like he’d stared at her eyes an instant ago. And her voice, with just a hint of huskiness… What was it about her that was drawing him? Certainly, she wasn’t his type. He liked them long, slim, blond… she was short, rounded in ways he didn’t want to think about, athletic. So, after a year or so without a woman, that’s all it could be. His retreat into self-imposed celibacy. He was out of his comfort zone, not that he’d had much of a comfort zone lately, and Angela was… tempting. Any man would admit that, and that part of him wasn’t in retreat quite as deeply as he’d thought. Although he’d been happier when he’d believed it was.
But he could deal with this like he dealt with everything else these days… with indifference. God knew, he’d practiced that to perfection. “Benefit, in practical terms, is the certificate I’ll be issuing that will validate eighteen months of study and hard work, that will enable its recipient to become an advanced member of the mountain rescue team and even coordinate rescues on his or her own. Which is a benefit you won’t be reaping.”
“Your choice, not mine.”
“Ah, we finally agree on something.”