Dana quashed a snort of incredulity. Of course she knew that. But try holding back a wave of kids. No thanks to the prankster who had locked her out of her clinic this morning, she was doing well to get the right pills in the right squirmy little bodies before those bodies zipped off to class.
Now, why am I putting up with this? Oh, yes. Kate. One beautiful blue-eyed angel baby—although I can’t call a three-year-old a baby anymore .
Dana’s line of kids waiting for morning meds stretched out the door and down the hall. Well, waiting might create the wrong impression. They shuffled, fidgeted, jostled one another, picked at the staples on the poster of a big laminated hand exhorting them to lend health a hand by actually washing their own hands.
If Dana didn’t get them out of her little clinic soon, they’d be late for class and she wouldn’t have a staple left on that bulletin board.
“Hey! Cut it out! Leave those staples alone!” she yelled as she noticed one kid steadily slipping a fingernail under an already loosened staple. The gesture of the newly positioned middle finger wasn’t difficult to discover. Of course, she could be wrong. This only her third week at the school. She was still getting over how many kids needed morning meds after the school-issued breakfast.
The Ritalin and Zithromax dispatched, Dana called out, “Next!”
But before any other patients could step up to her counter, a man rounded the door and stopped short at the line.
“Whoa. We got an epidemic I don’t know about?” he inquired.
Dana couldn’t remove her eyes from his face. How absurd, plain absurd, to focus on a man’s face to the point when you could look nowhere else. But the last place she expected to find a man that handsome was in a small-town elementary school. With his silvered dark hair, movie-star white teeth and intense blue eyes, he had a face made for a cologne ad.
His voice, though, held a south Georgia twang and his clothes—khakis and a worn chambray work shirt with some sort of logo on it—tagged him as a native of Logan.
A parent? A teacher? The guy did have two kids by the scruff of the neck.
“Oh, my gracious! What happened?” Dana had managed to take her eyes off his face long enough to see obvious injuries. “Bring them on in and I’ll have a look.”
In quick order, she had a pack of ice on the little kid’s eye—Mike Holmes, he’d said his name was—and was tilting the bigger, surlier boy’s head forward, ordering him to pinch his nostrils together.
Only then did she dare return her gaze to the man who’d brought the two boys in.
She found his dark blue eyes assessing her with more than a little interest. At her regard, he spoke up. “They got into a fight on the bus.”
A bus driver? Man, oh, man, she wished they’d had bus drivers like this when she was in school. But no, she’d had all the oogy ones.
Dana yanked her brain back from its descent into a hormone lovefest. Marty had been that good-looking in his own way, and when the going had gotten tough, her ex-husband had run as though demons were after him. So why imbue a guy with wisdom just because genetics had graced him with a gorgeous face?
Mr. Gorgeous stretched out a hand. “Patrick Connor, substitute bus driver and sucker—once, but nevermore.”
She couldn’t accept his extended hand because she was occupied with the two young combatants. Just as well, because she sure knew where casual little handshakes with the likes of Patrick Connor led.
“Um, hi, I’m Wilson Dana—I mean, I’m Wana—” Oh crap. Why wouldn’t her mouth work for a simple introduction?
He chuckled. “Can I help you? You seem a little swamped.”
“Someone locked me out of my clinic—” The morning announcements over the intercom interrupted Dana and she fell silent in response to the loud “Shh, shh” she heard from the students still in line. They weren’t shushing her; they were taking the opportunity to shush one another. She used the moment of calm to hand out the next round of medications.
The medicine assembly line went quicker now, and Dana managed to dispense the meds in record time. She double-checked her list, ticked off the last name and breathed a sigh as the door shut.
“That bad?”
“I had no idea kids could be so inventive.” She leaned against the bulletin board. “I thought that after three weeks I had run the gauntlet of every practical joke a kid could come up with. Maybe I’m not cut out for this job.”
She was rewarded with a frown as Patrick surveyed the room as if inspecting it. The frown eased a bit, but concern still tightened his forehead.
“So things aren’t settling down for you?” Patrick asked after that moment of inspection. “Your résumé said you could run trauma codes in big-city emergency rooms with one hand tied behind your back. Our superintendent figured that operating a little old school clinic would be a breeze.”
The two boys rolled their eyes and snickered.
Dana ignored the noises. The man’s familiarity with her set all inner alarms on full alert. Maybe new school nurses were hot gossip in a small town like Logan.
Again, he must have read her expression. “Sorry. When I’m not completely screwing up bus routes and letting kids like these pull each other apart limb by limb, I manage a glass company and am chairman of the board of education. I voted to hire you—on the principal’s and superintendent’s recommendations, of course.”
Dana couldn’t subdue the cringe overtaking her. The chaos in her office this morning created exactly the wrong impression she wanted to give the powers that be. She swept the clipboard and other paperwork littering her desk into as tidy a pile as she could.
“No, no, things are settling down nicely. It, uh, just, takes time, I guess.”
Patrick skewered her with a stare. She dropped her gaze first to her messy desk, and then swiveled it to the floor, to the copy box of office things she hadn’t gotten around to unpacking. Only the loud ticking of the clock and the boys’ renewed snickers punctuated the silence. If she could have departicalized and slipped through the molecules of the floor, she would have.
Patrick cleared his throat, obviously preparing for a speech of some sort. To occupy her hands and give her some reason not to meet his eyes, Dana once again shifted the items on her desk from one pile to another.
“Ms. Wilson, could you stop that? It’s driving me nuts.” His voice was sharp.
She met his gaze, her pulse pounding in her ears, and prepared for the worst.
CHAPTER TWO
P ATRICK C ONNOR WAS moving his mouth again, but Dana couldn’t focus on his words because of the humiliation humming through her veins. Fired. She was going to get fired.
She saw his frustration and knew he realized she wasn’t paying the slightest attention. She bit her lip and covered up the action by turning to the two malingerers still lounging in clinic. “Boys, out. You’re okay. I’ll put your visit slips into your teacher’s box, all right?”
They went, grumbling, and Dana recovered some of her composure. She forced a smile at Patrick. “You were saying?”
“Oh. Yeah. Just wanted to be clear that you knew how important getting daily status checks on our asthmatic students was. Nellie prepared weekly reports for me.”
Bureaucracy. Red tape had a way of slithering around you until it nearly strangled you. Dana sighed. “Sure. The principal mentioned it to me, though I think daily checks for every asthmatic student we have are a little much. I was hoping we could scale back to perhaps an as-needed basis.”
Patrick’s