“Trust me, it’s a reaction to my smoke inhalation, but not the kind of reaction you think it is.” But she could be Julie. Except, Aunt Grace had told him Julie was working in the south. “In answer to your question, though, let’s just say that I got tired of my old job, quit it and decided to try something new.”
“Well, I suppose quitting is good … for some people, isn’t it? You know. As in running away.”
Julie! He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the stretcher and yanked off his oxygen cannula. “I thought you were working down south someplace.”
She turned to face him, full on. “This is south, compared to Lilly Lake.” She reached up, switched on the bright overhead so he could see everything. “Julie Clark, R.N., paramedic.” Said in all bitterness.
Well, this was certainly awkward. His first love. His first … everything. It was so awkward he didn’t know what to do. Bail out of a moving ambulance, lie back down, shut his eyes then pretend she wasn’t there? Let her have it out with him before they got to the hospital? Which was long overdue, actually.
With the way her eyes were sparking now—the same beautiful blue eyes that kept nothing hidden—jumping from the ambulance seemed like the best way out of this mess … for him. But he’d been the one who’d laid out that mess back then, and running away a second time sure didn’t feel like the honorable thing to do. Hadn’t then, didn’t now. So, Jess gritted his teeth for the confrontation, and since this was Julie, he knew there would be one. Being feisty had always been part of her charm, and he didn’t expect any of that had changed.
“It’s locked,” she said, as if sensing his thoughts. “You’re not going anywhere.”
Was that a barbed smile crossing her lips? “So, what’s the protocol here, Julie? Do I ask how you’ve been? Should we sit here in silence and stare at each other? Or would it be easier if you beat the hell out of me and just got it over with?”
“If I weren’t on the job, I might just take you up on that one. But since I am, here’s an idea. How about you be a nice, cooperative patient and lie back down, and I’ll be the paramedic who watches your vital signs and makes sure you don’t go into respiratory arrest as some aftereffect of the smoke inhalation? Does that work for you, Jess?”
“Are you going to put a pillow over my face and smother me?”
“Is that what you want me to do? Because I can.” “Look, Julie …”
She shook her head, and thrust out her hand to stop him. “Lie down. Now! And don’t argue with me.”
“Sure,” he said, doing just that. “And I suppose if you really want me to wear a mask …”
Julie laughed, but it had a cutting twinge to it. “Jess Corbett, trying to comply. It doesn’t become you, Jess. Not at all. Besides, I’d rather watch you lie there and be uncomfortable around me. Good show, watching you squirm.”
He did stay down for about a minute, hating every blasted inch of silent space around him. Then he popped back up. “You said I’m your last patient. Does that mean you’re quitting?”
“Moving on. Went to nursing school part time for years, all the way through to my doctorate, and now I’m going to work as a full-time nurse.”
“Congratulations,” he said, still pretty much at a loss for words. It wasn’t every day that you ran into a childhood sweetheart, one he’d actually had feelings for. Of course, he’d made fast work of that. But, still, Julie … She was a memory-maker. Gone from his life, but never forgotten. “Well, I hope you have a good career. Aunt Grace would have been proud of you.” What a lame thing to say, but he really couldn’t think of anything else except, maybe, to apologize. After all this time, though, that seemed so trite, and under these circumstances so contrived.
“Oh, I intend to. So now, unless you have a medical concern or question, be quiet. Okay? I don’t want to talk to you anymore. Don’t want to listen to you either.”
Too bad, because he liked the sassiness in her. He’d liked it seventeen years ago, and it hadn’t changed much. But once they dropped him off at the hospital, that was going to be the end of the line for Julie and him … again. It was for the best, he thought as he sank back down on the stretcher, shut his eyes and tried to blank her out. Definitely for the best.
“Signing out for the last time,” Julie said, handing in her badge. This was it. After so many grueling years in the back of an ambulance, she was finally moving on to the place she’d always wanted to be. And it was a good move, being a nurse. Grace Corbett had helped her, had made everything possible. Had dreamed the dream with her. She sighed, thinking about Grace, missing Grace. “And glad to be moving on.”
“Well, you take care of yourself. It’s not going to be the same without you around here, Julie,” her supervisor, a tall, big-boned woman named Gert, said, giving her a hug.
Good times, good memories, being a paramedic. Better ones ahead of her, though. She hoped. And two hours later, when she was tossing the last of her few incidentals into a cardboard box, she was still looking forward, not backward, because looking backward would be filled with thoughts and memories of Jess Corbett … the last person she’d ever expected to find in the back of her ambulance tonight.
Jess … darn! Now she’d opened the floodgates, and he’d poured through in a huge way. The funny thing was, she didn’t try holding him back. In fact, she shut her eyes for a moment and indulged herself. Jess … He was bigger than he was last time she’d seen him. More muscled. Lean. Fit. Broader shoulders. Face more chiseled, edgier lines to it. His eyes, though … still the same sapphire blue, but harder. Much harder than she remembered. No laugh lines around them either, which made her wonder if he ever smiled. His hair was the same, though. Sandy, maybe a little darker than it had been seventeen years ago. Clipped a whole lot shorter than she’d ever seen it on him. She liked the stubble on him, too. Made him look … masculine. Not that Jess, as a teenager, hadn’t been masculine. But Jess then compared to Jess now … actually, there was no comparison. Jess the man and Jess the boy, the man won hands down.
“But I’m not going to think about him,” she said, heading down three flights of stairs, grappling with the last of the things she was taking to her new life. She had an emergency room to expand. New responsibilities to think about. And thinking about Jess distracted her. So she wouldn’t. That’s all there was to it. She would not think about Jess Corbett.
An hour later, as she turned onto the interstate taking her north, she was still trying not to think about him. Of course, this new life she’d chosen for herself wasn’t going to make that easy, was it? Not when her destination was Lilly Lake, and Lilly Lake was the place they’d almost started a life together.
For early spring, the evening was pleasantly warm. Tonight, the sun was setting in gold hues over the lake, and in the distance the wail of a loon saddened the expanse. Heard for miles, across land, and from lake to lake, it was the haunting call of mates looking for each other, mates lost to each other and calling out to find them. Jess knew what that was about, what it felt like to search. “So that’s the long, sad story of my exile from New York City.”
“Smoke inhalation?” Rafe Corbett snorted a laugh. “They grounded you a week for smoke inhalation?”
“Two weeks,” Jess grumbled, then chuckled. “Let’s just say that I overstepped my bounds. After my clean bill of health I shot off my mouth when I should have kept it closed, and my captain decided to put me on ice for a little longer to think about it.”
“In other words, you don’t play by the rules.”
“And you do?”
“Okay, so the Corbett men do things their own way. But for me, that’s fine. I’m an orthopedist, I don’t really have to get into much of the team spirit the way you do.”