A Doctor in His House

Chapter Three

Was Scarlett asleep?

Daniel wasn’t sure.

She hadn’t moved or spoken for a while now, and her breathing was very even. It was almost three o’clock, and Andy should be back with the prescription pain medication any minute. The TV was spewing out another crime show rerun. He preferred hospital shows for when he needed to unwind in front of a screen.

There was a symmetry about it, he realized. Scarlett was a doctor and liked TV crime. He was a cop and liked TV medicine. Neither of them wanted to revisit their working environment in their time off.

Healthy.

Something in common, too, in an upside-down kind of way.

Only problem was that this particular TV crime show was killing him with its implausibility.

He tried to find in Scarlett’s face and body the same woman he’d known six years ago, but couldn’t, and maybe that was good. She’d been quite defiantly blonde back then. Now her hair color was a natural golden brunette, but that wasn’t the biggest difference.

Where were the big, liquid, intelligent brandy-brown eyes and the sensitive, full-lipped mouth? The softness and curves? Lost in fatigue and stress and weight loss and pain. He’d eventually recognized her, but only just, and even now he couldn’t put his finger on what had finally clicked. Not her voice.

Something harder to define.

Something—and this appalled him, when you got down to it—that had its source in his memories of her body when they’d made love. The way she’d closed her eyes and surrendered so totally to the moment. The way she’d moved. The way she’d been possessed by the strength of their physical connection to the same degree she was now possessed by the blurred vision and pain.

They’d only been involved for a few weeks, but he hadn’t known sex like it before or since.

He hadn’t known certainty like it before or since, either.

Hell, what kind of an admission was that? What did it say about his life? Was this why he hadn’t said anything to her about their past acquaintance? Because he was afraid that his memories of their time in bed, and his memories of how she’d made him feel, would color his voice and she would hear it? Because if they talked about the past, then she might guess how much he’d never gotten her out from under his skin?

How could you say a calm, casual, “Remember me?” in a situation like this?

Better—way better—to let it go and say nothing.

For now, at least.

Scarlett began to feel human again when the stronger pain medication kicked in at around six o’clock. Andy had brought the pharmacy bag into the house, grabbed his overnight bag and left for the city almost at once. After she’d taken the medication, Daniel had left for the store, and now she could hear that he was back. He still had the key from under the flowerpot, and when he let himself back in the house, she heard the rustle of the shopping bags.

He closed the door behind her, put down the bags and came through into the living room, to Scarlett’s couch. “What can I do for you next?” He sounded like a cop, again. Voice deep and clipped. No words wasted. No hesitation or doubt.

“Find another crime show before I murder one of those designers …”

He didn’t laugh. Well, okay, she wasn’t being that funny. Humor was all in the timing, and hers had disappeared along with her vision. She heard him pick up the remote and start channel surfing, stopping at the first show he came to. She listened to it for a moment, then they both spoke at the same time.

“Sorry, I can’t handle—” from her.

From him, “Sorry, do you mind if we—?”

“Please,” she agreed. “Switch.”

“Sitcom?”

“One with an audience, not canned.”

“Let’s see what we have here … And then can I heat you some soup?”

“Please.”

She managed to sit and sip soup from a mug, in between bites of toast that Daniel had rested on a paper napkin, and when she opened her eyes the multiple images had resolved down to two, the blurriness was lessened and the light didn’t hurt anymore. She still couldn’t see clearly, but the progress felt good.

Daniel came and took the empty mug from her hands without her having to ask.

“Thanks. I’m feeling a lot better, painwise, even if the vision still isn’t that great.”

“You’re looking better. Way better color.”

“The soup really helped.”

“I can heat you some more.”

“Actually, yes, another mug.”

“More toast, too?”

“Please. It’s really settling my stomach. How come you’re so good at this?” she blurted out.

There came a long beat of silence, then, on a reluctant growl, “My mom was sick for a long time. From when I was a kid.”

A shock ran through her. He’d never told her that, six years ago. Never once. Not hinted at it, or—

Nothing.

She’d worked out that he’d had a challenging history—well, he’d ended up rubbing her face in it, with deliberate anger—but she hadn’t known about his mom. He’d never told her enough about anything, back then, and it shocked her that he hadn’t breathed a word about something this huge.

“She died a few months ago,” Daniel added, in answer to the question Scarlett hadn’t found a way to ask. “It was a good thing, by that point. She was glad to go.”

She apologized awkwardly, as if it was her fault that she hadn’t known. Maybe it was. Maybe he would have told her about his mom’s illness when they’d come up here, if—

Yeah. If a few things.

If she hadn’t been so obviously on the rebound. If her ex hadn’t left her with so much emotional baggage. If she hadn’t been so scared of the strength of her physical response to Daniel, when her whole life her bright mind was the thing she’d been taught to rely on. If she’d had more trust—because she hadn’t trusted even the good things about him, back then, let alone the obvious differences between them.

And if they hadn’t spent so much of their short time together in bed.

“It’s okay,” he said, and the words covered all sorts of bases, and allowed them both to let the subject go.

Silence wasn’t comfortable, though. She scrabbled around in her woolly mind for something to say, but Daniel managed it first. Very polite. “Your brother has done up the house great.”

“It’s gorgeous, isn’t it? He didn’t do all of it. The previous owner had made a good start. I’ve seen some photos from the 1970s when it was a dump. Badly subdivided, with cheap paneling everywhere, and dark brown paint with mustard-yellow appliances and flooring.”

“I remember that kind of color scheme. Actually our refrigerator was avocado-green.”

“You’re not that old!”

He laughed. “Some people don’t manage to buy a new appliance or repaint a room for quite a while after the fashions change.”

“True.” She held her breath. It was the kind of conversation topic that would have deteriorated into an argument six years ago, hinging on his underprivileged background—living with bad paint—and her well-paved path through life—regularly updated decor. She would have said too much, made it all too complicated, while he would have said barely anything at all, but with a sense that there was enormous emotion lying underneath.

Would he turn it into an argument now? Or one of the white-hot, simmering silences she’d hated?

After a moment, he laughed again. “Funny how you can turn memories around.”

“Yeah?”

“I hated those paint colors when I was a kid. Now they’re an anecdote. A war story.”

“Kids today think they have it tough,” she mimicked. “We had to live with avocado-colored refrigerators.”

“What is it they say? What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

“It surely does!”

They talked a little more, never openly confronting the fact that they knew each other, but letting it say itself in a reference here and there. Daniel held himself back, the way he always had. Scarlett gave a little more, and felt a zing of triumph every time she got something from him in return.

She thought that they couldn’t have related to each other like this in any other situation. It was only happening because she couldn’t see, because he’d had to help her, and because there had been that first ten or fifteen minutes when it wasn’t clear whether they both realized that they’d met before.

After a while, the conversation petered out in a natural kind of way. They watched—or in her case listened to—TV in silence, while she measured the passage of time in sitcom units and listened to Daniel’s occasional gruff gurgle of laughter.

She liked it when he laughed. It was a warm and very physical sound, reassuring and hopeful. Laughter created companionship every bit as much as conversation. Maybe more. She laughed along with him a couple of times, and his laugh touched her like a soft blanket or the palm of a comforting hand. She wished the sitcoms were funnier, so that the laugh would come more often.

Four and a half of them went by, which meant that it must be around nine. They’d spent most of an evening together and barely said a word, and yet she felt her emotions settling to a deeper place, a better place than she would have thought possible, with regard to this man.

For the past six years she’d felt a churn of uncomfortable memories and feelings any time she thought of him. She’d second-guessed everything she’d said and done, and everything he’d done, too. Maybe she hadn’t needed to feel that way. Maybe none of it had been as bad as she’d thought, on either side.

Well, huh.

She let the thought sit, didn’t know what she wanted to do about it.

Time for more medication, and the bed awaiting her upstairs. He brought the pills to her, with a glass of water, and she gulped them down. From experience, she knew that it didn’t do to let the pain take hold again between doses. The medication was most effective if she stayed strictly to the four-hour interval.

“Thanks, Daniel.”

“No problem. Going up now?”

“That’s the plan.” She stood.

And swayed.

Light-headed rather than actively dizzy, maybe because she’d been lying down for so long.

Daniel was there almost at once, grabbing her by the elbows and then, in case this wasn’t enough, stepping right up to her so she could grasp two fistfuls of his shirt and lean her weight into his chest. When she took a staggering step sideways, he kept her on her feet, and then the lightheadedness subsided and she felt almost normal, apart from her sight.

He put his arm around her waist and engulfed her hand in his and it felt good, even though she couldn’t even see him, she had no idea what he really looked like now. Not in detail. If he had lines starting to form around his eyes and mouth, or if his hairline was receding, but he felt so good, and he smelled so good, too, like sandalwood and mint and clean laundry.

“I could make you a bed on the couch, if it’s too hard for you to get upstairs,” he said.

“I want a real bed. It’s worth going up for.”

“Yeah, a real bed is always good.”

The words dropped into the air and seemed to hang there. She remembered the big, puffy four-poster at the bed-and-breakfast. She remembered the bunk bed in the doctors’ on-call room at the hospital, when Daniel had wedged a chair under the handle of the door.

She remembered her own bed at home in her parents’ Manhattan apartment. She’d gone back there to live after her separation from Kyle and had stayed on there through her demanding internship year, until she had more time to find the right place on her own.

Mom and Dad had been away for the weekend. Daniel had looked around at the high ceilings, the oil paintings on the walls, the windows with a distant view of Central Park, and couldn’t hide that this level of privilege was new to him and troubled him. What did it say about their differences?

But in her bed together, that hadn’t mattered.

In her bed, nothing had mattered except the way they moved together, the way they made each other feel, the sense of discovery and magic, the blissful contrast of his big, strong body and her softer, smaller one.

The only thing they’d ever really had during those short, intense weeks—sex, and bed, sleeping wrapped in each other’s arms.

It had scared her with its overwhelming power.

“Are we doing okay to move?” he asked. “Steady?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

But before they could start the walk toward the stairs, he added quietly, “We should say it, don’t you think? We’ve both been holding off.” He took a careful breath, and she could feel it through their contact. “You remember me.”

“Of course I do.” She opened her eyes, but they still wouldn’t focus properly. He was just a darker blur in a fuzzy radiance. “Even though I can’t see you.”

Sight was overrated, her body said. Neither of them moved. Time slowed. The heat of his hands burned into her and she felt the air seem to thicken around them. She could have let him go and stepped away, but she didn’t. Neither did he.

“You’re not blonde anymore.”

“That was my divorce hair.” She could feel the way his chest expanded and contracted as he breathed, could feel the detail of ribs and abs and back muscles beneath the cool weave of a short-sleeved T-shirt.

“You never wanted to talk about your divorce.” She knew the sleeves were short because the soft inner skin of his arm was in direct contact with her forearms as he closed his body more protectively around her. “I think you mentioned it twice.”

“We weren’t all that much about talking, you and me, were we? I still don’t want to talk about it.”

“It was that bad?”

“No, it was more … The marriage was that bad.”

“That’s not why we fell at the first hurdle, the two of us—because you’d had a bad marriage.”

“No. One of the reasons.”

“The other reasons … I never really understood what they were,” he said slowly. He loosened his hold a little, creating a slow friction where their bodies touched.

“You were angry …” she reminded him.

“So were you. And you pulled right back. I could feel you pulling back, and so I pushed harder and it all got worse until you just cut off.”

“The timing was wrong. Everything was wrong.”

“Without giving me a chance to bridge the gap. The last thing we ever did was go to bed.”

“Are you still angry?”

“Are you?” he countered quickly.

She bit back a retort that this was what he’d done before, he’d always turned things onto her, made her talk first and talk longest, so that she was the one who had to put herself out there, put her needs and feelings on the line, at a time when she was still such a mess from her marriage.

It was true. He had done that.

But there were so many mistakes and faults on both sides, she couldn’t untangle the rights and wrongs of it. It had been a mess. If she forgave herself, then she had to forgive him.

She said some of this, haltingly, and felt—because she couldn’t see—the way he listened. Cautiously. Willing to hear. Resistant about some of it. Tightening his hands at one point, and then softening them against her back. “I agree it was both of us,” he said. “I agree that we can’t just … be angry. Anger is such a prison. It holds you back. Even when you can see it, you can’t help it sometimes. But let’s not.”

He spoke as if he knew from bitter experience, driving home to her once again how little they’d really known about each other. She didn’t know what had happened in his past to make him believe anger was like that, did things like that.

“Is anger what you’ve felt, if you’ve thought about me, over the past six years?” She tried to open her eyes again, saw a shimmery blur. He was too close. She couldn’t bring him fully into focus and it threatened to make her queasy. Best not to look.

“No, mostly not,” he said. “You?”

“No. More like a sense of inevitability. I’ve thought about it. I could never find a way for it to have been different. We just weren’t in the right place, either of us. Me more than you, maybe?”

“Don’t know about that. But yeah, neither of us in the right place. Lot of regret. Not much clarity.”

“Pretty much.”

He shifted his weight again, and she felt the pressure of his chest against hers. They didn’t speak. She remembered what she’d decided after Daniel—that she really wasn’t cut out for the whole love thing. It was too daunting. Too huge. Too much of a contradiction to everything she’d been taught about her own strengths.

She’d had one failed marriage, and one failed fling where even the great sex couldn’t hold them together for more than a few weeks. The great sex seemed like the problem more than the solution. It was deceptive. It got in the way.

Immersed in her work, she might have tried love again if it had come her way. She’d planned to be very careful about it, to take it slow, to keep sex safely out of it for as long as she could. But she’d never had to follow through on those plans because no man had seriously tried for more than a date or two. How likely was it, really, when she kept to such a tight, demanding routine?

Daniel was the first to speak again. “What about the reasons why it was good between us, Scarlett?” His voice dropped low and slow. “What do you think, now, about those?”

The air went still and heavy around them, while the past crowded in and their bodies remembered. She wanted to tilt her head and see if her cheek would find his shoulder. Or lean in and lift her chin. Her mouth would be sure to find something, if she did that. Something delicious and wonderful. She knew it, because he was so close. She would find the hard, satiny heat of his neck. Or the fragrant tickle of his hair. Or the tease of his gorgeous mouth.

A man’s mouth didn’t change in six years.

Her own body began to soften and swell and melt. Her skin was so sensitive, she was acutely aware of every inch of Daniel’s touch, every ounce of pressure, every tiny sound he made, the strength that seemed to come off him in waves, like radiant heat.

“The reasons why it was good …” she said.

Incredibly, with her vision still below par, her capacity for arousal seemed to be working just fine. She shifted her weight, the way he had done a minute ago, and the movement brought their thighs together. He stood at a slight angle, so that one knee pressed between her legs, dragging her skirt into a deep fold.

“Yes. You know what I’m talking about. Have they changed?” The whole world narrowed to just this—her and Daniel, holding each other, remembering with their bodies what they were skirting around so cautiously with their words. “Has it changed? That one amazing reason?”

“How can I know?”

“You have an inkling.” His hand slipped a little, closing over her hip. She could feel the warmth, and didn’t want it to go away.

“Okay, but that’s a toe in the water.”

“Is it? You can tell a lot from a toe. If the water’s warm or cold. If it’s clean against your skin.” They both stood very still, and Scarlett barely managed to breathe. “You want to find out if this feels the same all the way?” His hand slid across and down and traced the curve from the small of her back, across her butt, to the top of her thigh. “More than a toe in the water?”

She answered him only with a ragged breath.

“This was always so good, Scarlett, so good. This was how it started. We got to this pretty soon. This was the center of it, the meaning of it. This was where it was always the best.”

“Yes …”

“Yes!”

“But we stuffed it up.”

“We stuffed everything else up,” he corrected her. “We never stuffed this. Never once. We slept together on our first date and we never, ever got it wrong.”

Chapter Four

Daniel heard himself sweet-talking—practically begging—Scarlett into bed and wondered what the hell he was thinking.

Start into this again? Risk losing himself this way? He didn’t know if he should wish he’d never stopped beside her skewed car on the verge of the road this afternoon, or if he might count it as the luckiest action of the year.

His body had a pretty powerful opinion on the subject, but should he listen to it? His body told him he could have Scarlett in the palm of his hand with the right touch behind her ear, the right peachy softening of his mouth over hers, exactly the way he’d had her before, but how crazy would that be?

He couldn’t believe how much he wanted her, even with all the baggage they had, all the memories of how it hadn’t worked before. His body said none of that mattered. The past was gone. Now was what counted. But he knew that now didn’t last, while its legacy often did.

It was like in a cartoon, with a tiny angel version of himself sitting on one shoulder and a tiny devil on the other. Talking him up. Talking him down.

“You can regret it in the morning, big fella,” the tiny cartoon devil urged. “Now is now.”

“She’s worth more than a one-night stand,” the cartoon angel insisted.

“Doesn’t have to be one night. The regret might be weeks away. The regret might never happen.”

While the cartoon symbols of his conscience bickered away, Scarlett made the decision for them. He could feel her body shaking beneath his touch, the power of her response that much stronger because she otherwise seemed so thin and frail with the pain and dizziness that were only just losing their hold. “Upstairs,” she said. “In a bed.” She took his hands and made them move down her body, the message that she wanted his touch so naked and clear. “Because I don’t have a strong enough head for anything creative tonight.”

“You mean—?” he began, slow about it in spite of her bluntness and her signals, not able to believe that she would make it this easy, even though she’d always made it easy six years ago.

She’d never used sex as a bargaining chip or a power play or a strategy. Not even right at the end. As he’d reminded her just now, the very last thing they did before she told him it was over was to make love with dizzying, almost desperate satisfaction, as if there’d been no problems between them at all.

“You’re right,” she said simply, with her palm cupped softly against his jaw and her whispered words just a fraction of an inch from his mouth. “We never once got this wrong.”

He carried her.

Not because she needed it, the way she had on the verge of the road, but because the sheer, crazy charge of hearing her say that she wanted him had no place else to go. He just scooped her up and settled her against his chest and went for the stairs, while she tightened her arms around his neck and tried to control her breathing. “Oh, Lord, Daniel, how do you make me want this so much?” He felt so strong and full of triumph about what was happening that he practically laughed out loud.

It was so sudden.

So very much wanted.

Both of them.

Total equality about it.

He’d had to fight all evening not to keep looking at her and mostly it was a fight he’d lost. He’d watched her color slowly come back and her movements become stronger and less dominated by pain. He’d watched her sipping the soup and chewing neatly on the toast with her eyes closed. She’d kept her hands wrapped tight around the mug and he could see in her face that it made her feel better, even before she’d said so.