One foot on the stairs, April stopped to turn around. “Yes?”
Feeling slightly awkward, Ursula lowered her eyes and picked at the yellow-and-white daisies crocheted within the throw. “Did I ever tell you how much I appreciate your coming back to mind the store?”
April’s smile broadened. “Yes, Gran, you told me. And you know I’d do anything for you.”
“I know—” She strained to listen for the sound of movement downstairs. “So go see who it is.” She raised herself up slightly, so that her voice would follow April down the stairs. “And if you don’t know where to find something—”
“You’re right here to tell me,” April called back, finishing a statement she had heard over and over again growing up. Unlike their far frailer mother, Gran had always promised to be there for them, to show them the way no matter what. And she had. April and her siblings had come to believe that Gran was going to go on forever. Being confronted with a different kind of scenario was difficult to come to terms with. “Yes, I know.”
April looked around the small outpost as she reached the bottom of the stairs. As if she couldn’t find absolutely everything there was to find in this room within a matter of seconds, she thought. If the post office were any smaller, her claustrophobia would have kicked in.
As it was, the room that housed all the incoming and outgoing mail for Hades could be referred to as small with just cause. She could turn the whole area upside down in a matter of mere minutes if she wanted to.
Gran’s hearing was as good as ever, she thought. Someone had entered the post office while she’d been upstairs. The small bell attached to the door hardly made a sound worth listening for, but Gran was apparently still tuned in to it.
“May I help you?”
Shoving her hands into the back pockets of her faded jeans, April addressed the words to the back of a head she didn’t immediately recognize. When the man turned around, she found she didn’t recognize his face, either. She had to admit that it felt a little unusual not knowing the man. Before she’d left Hades, there hadn’t been a face she didn’t know, at least on sight.
She would have remembered this face.
With the trained eye of a professional photographer, she studied him quickly from head to toe. He looked to be several years older than she was, but at the same time, he had a face that appeared as if it would remain perpetually youthful even in old age. He had the kind of eyes, blue and intense, that would twinkle well into his nineties.
They were twinkling now as they took slow, careful measure of her. She could almost feel them passing over her body.
She knew the type. Handsome, charming, and as trustworthy as a barrel of snakes after a nine month fast. She’d met more than a few of those in her travels. Men like that made an exhilarating date for an evening, but after that, their charm wore thin. As did any promises they might make in the heat of the moment. Just like her father.
She had no use for that type of man.
Still, she couldn’t help wondering who this man was and what had brought him to such a sleepy little place as Hades. It wasn’t as if Hades was exactly on anyone’s beaten path and it definitely wasn’t a place someone would happen on as they were passing through, at least not in this century. A hundred and fifty years ago, prospectors with dreams of getting rich quickly would ride into town, eyeing the hills that were directly behind it. But that hadn’t happened for close to eighty years if she was to believe the stories Gran had told them.
For the first time since arriving in town yesterday, James Quintano, Jimmy to all his friends, found his appetite whetting. Not that he’d arrived in Hades to have his appetite even mildly aroused. He’d come because Alison was here and he’d promised to return to visit his sister and her husband ever since he’d boarded the plane right after her wedding. Hades wasn’t a town a man would come to look for a fling or a pleasurable interlude. There was a different breed of people here. Decent people who worked hard and played even harder because those times were precious and rare.
It was also a town, he’d quickly realized, where a man had his work cut out for him if he wanted female companionship of any kind. Alison had told him the odds were something like seven to one against him. Not that he’d ever had a hard time finding willing women. He had a hard time not finding willing women. It had been that way for him ever since he’d found puberty a little after his eleventh birthday. He’d grown tall early, began shaving early, and discovered love early. The birds and the bees had had nothing on Mary-Sue Taylor.
Thoughts of Mary-Sue and her successors faded from his mind, as did the woman who was to have accompanied him on the Alaskan cruise before fate in the guise of an apparent family emergency had stepped in.
Habit had him glancing at the blonde’s left hand. He found it encouragingly unadorned.
Finished with his appraisal, Jimmy smiled and answered her question. “I certainly hope so.”
And then he saw her wrist. His initial scrutiny had missed that because she’d had her hands tucked into her back pockets, making her jeans strain against her torso and distracting him. Now he saw that there was a makeshift bandage wrapped around her left wrist. One that looked as if it was about to come undone with the very next movement she made.
He nodded at it, coming forward. “What happened to your wrist?”
She looked down at it grudgingly, the stranger’s question bringing with it a fresh wave of pain. She’d been trying to put herself beyond that. It was an injury sustained this morning because, as always, she had been moving too fast. But fast was the only tempo she knew. Away from Hades, there was always so much to do that moving fast was a necessity to staying on top of things. Her mind elsewhere, she’d brushed too close to the skillet and been awarded a red badge of courage in the form of a wide, angry blister.
“Nothing. Just a case of a frying pan not moving out of my way,” she said with a careless shrug.
As she reached for the pile of envelopes she’d abandoned earlier, the bandages began to loosen in earnest, coming completely undone.
“I can take a look at that for you,” Jimmy volunteered, already reaching for her hand.
Instinct, both inbred and acquired, had her pulling her hand away. Suspicion creased the brow beneath her wayward bangs. “And just why would you want to do that?”
He didn’t usually meet with resistance when he reached for a woman’s hand. Jimmy’s smile widened. “Well, for one thing, I’m a doctor.”
Chapter Two
April looked suspiciously at the tall, darkly handsome man standing in front of her, still keeping her wrist very much to herself. Medical treatment in Hades came via Dr. Shayne Kerrigan and, recently, his nurse, Jean-Luc’s wife, Alison. Shayne had been trying, unsuccessfully, to lure another doctor to Hades ever since his brother, the only other doctor within a hundred-mile radius, had left town to follow his heart’s dream—a woman named Lilah who had a wandering soul. Shayne had begged, pleaded and cajoled would-be seasoned physicians and doctors fresh out of medical school to no avail. The idea that one would suddenly just pop up in the middle of town without fanfare and an abundance of rumors preceding him, rumors Gran was always the first to be privy to, was completely beyond belief.
Wariness infused by her wanderings in the city took hold. April eyed the tall, muscular man carefully.
“You mean, you want to play doctor, don’t you?”
The stranger’s smile widened, becoming even more unsettlingly seductive and convincing April that she’d hit the nail right on the head about him. This was no doctor, this was an opportunist at the very least.
“After all the money my brother invested in medical school, I’d better