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He was a bit businesslike and direct about it, but she sort of liked his confident, why-don’t-we-close-a-deal manner, so she accepted. He was friendly without sounding desperate or nervous in the way of men who placed too much importance on a date. And the Hathaway House in nearby Summerfield, while no leader in trendy cuisine, was generally considered the best restaurant in Mystery Valley—respectable but hardly formidable, appropriate for a safe first date.
She had hung up the phone feeling better than she usually did after making a blind date. Well, not actually a totally blind date, she reminded herself while she washed and rinsed a few dirty plates and set them in the drainer. After all, she finally remembered who the guy was. She’d gotten a good look at Rick once a few months ago from Hazel’s kitchen window.
She recalled his collar-length blond hair and the gorgeous, sexy smile he’d flashed at her when he caught her scoping him out from the window. But Rick had been at least four or five years ahead of her in school, so she’d never met him and knew little about him except that he was still single and worked for a manufacturing company located about fifteen miles from Mystery.
She was perhaps a little bothered by his by-the-book manner. She liked to flirt a little, but he had passed up the opportunities she had given him over the phone.
God forbid that he’d turn out to be another John Saville—just a good-looking vinyl boy who reserved his charm for debutantes and Vassar grads.
Something else bothered her about the brief conversation. Hazel had implied that she knew Rick well. Yet he admitted on the phone he hardly knew her. But so what if Hazel was being a little pushy. The old girl had always seen herself as a crusader in the cause of romance. Had some notable successes at it, too.
Romance… Rebecca rinsed her hands, then used her wet fingers to comb back a few rebellious strands of chestnut hair that had escaped the barrettes. Suddenly the old rumination came to her again: for too long now she’d been wondering what “doing it” was really like. She’d been close a few times with Brian, but something had always stopped her—some inner sense that the time just wasn’t right. In Brian’s case, it was the commitment that wasn’t right; she saw that now. She only hoped that the next time she had the opportunity to take the plunge, her instincts would go away. So far they’d only prevailed in keeping her from making any move. And she was tired of her virginity, and getting cynical.
If she couldn’t find love, then she at least wanted to pretend she knew about it.
Unbidden, an image of John Saville’s intense cobalt eyes, raking over her like fingers, filled the screen of her mind, and a restless yearning stirred low in her stomach, quickening her pulse.
That’s just great, she chided herself—a cute guy just asked you out, and here you are fantasizing about some self-loving, elitist snob who wouldn’t be caught dead with you in public.
Another doctor in her life might send her screaming for the nunnery. So she erased the unwanted image of John Saville from her mind and returned to drying the dishes.
Surprisingly, the rest of the week went by smoothly at the clinic, as if John Saville were on his best behavior. Late on Friday afternoon he came up front from his private office.
“Ladies,” he announced in his stilted, formal manner, “I’ve finished reviewing Dr. Winthrop’s financial books. I see that neither of you has received a raise in almost two years now.”
His fiercely blue eyes lingered on Rebecca, seeming to dwell on the spots where a snug cashmere pullover, despite her bra, clearly marked her nipples. He cleared his throat.
“So I’ve informed our bookkeeper,” he continued, “that retroactive from the day I took over, you both are to receive a 10 percent raise. Also three more paid personal-leave days.”
Rebecca was too pleasantly surprised to speak.
Lois, however, quickly thanked him on behalf of them both. They received a second shock when John Saville actually flashed a quick and very charming smile—nothing imperious about it.
“Nonsense, both of you earn your salaries,” he insisted.
He left, taking some mail with him back to his office.
Lois looked at Rebecca, then fanned herself with the folder in her hand, as if bringing down her temperature.
“Sexy smile. And does that man look good in herring-bone dress slacks? Especially from the rear.”
But a moment later she added, “A pox on myself for such adulterous thoughts. And me the property of the Gang of Four.” The Gang of Four was Lois’s name for her husband, Merrill, and their three sons, who ran Brubaker and Sons Automotive in nearby Colfax.
She looked at Rebecca before adding, “Besides, he was putting the eye on you, Miss O’Reilly. Oo-la-la.”
Rebecca was unimpressed. “I wouldn’t alert the media if I were you, because I doubt that. Unless the doctor had a brief fantasy about slumming with the scullery help.”
“You ingrate. The man just padded our pay envelopes. And you saw how sweet he was about it.”
“I appreciate the raise,” she told Lois. “But he’s right, we are due for one, girlfriend.”
“Not to mention well worth it,” Lois conceded. “Lutheran Hospital has been wooing you ever since you did your nursing practicum there. And I’ll have my business degree in another year—I know for a fact Bruce Everett wants to hire me to manage his new dude ranch.”
Rebecca only half heard her friend, thinking about John Saville. “If you ask me,” she speculated, lowering her voice, “he’s one of these big carrot-and-stick commandos. This raise is a carrot meant to bring us—me, actually—into line.”
“And when he gets that uptight look like somebody’s giving him a wedgie,” Lois giggled, “that’s one of the sticks.”
They enjoyed a rebellious laugh. Their goof-off mood inspired Rebecca to suddenly pucker her face in an exaggerated scowl.
“‘Having fun, Miss O’Reilly,’” she lectured, making her voice as deep and disapproving as she could, “‘isn’t the point of this clinic.’”
They were safe, for he was well out of earshot at the rear of the building. However, the sudden sound of his steps in the hallway caught them before they could quite suppress their mood of bubbling mirth.
“Shush, woman,” Lois hissed melodramatically. “We just got a raise, don’t get him mad.”
But that last smart crack was one joke too many, and badly timed. She had to swivel sideways in her chair, and Lois barely managed to compose her face before the doctor appeared in the doorway, several X-rays in his left hand.
“Miss O’Reilly, has the lab got back with us yet on Bernie Decker’s blood-and-urine workups?”
His request was polite and straightforward, similar to dozens he made each day.
Rebecca never would have foolishly lost it if she hadn’t made the dumb mistake of making eye contact with Lois so soon after they’d just been goofing around.
It was the “Miss O’Reilly” that did it—it was like a spark to a powder keg.
“Yes, Doctor,” was all she managed before she lost her composure and broke into giggles that set Lois off, too.
For a few moments after their adolescent outburst, he was caught completely off guard. Rebecca watched a perplexed smile draw his lips apart. At first he seemed to think something else was causing their mirth. Then she saw a quick glimmer of realization in his eyes that he was the butt of the joke. Then his face registered some deeper emotion—hurt, she realized with a sudden stab of guilt. They were only being immature and laughing at his stuffy formality, but he couldn’t know that.
An indrawn, bitter look came over him, and the handsome, angry face closed against both of them.
“All right,” he replied, still under control but so mad that his jaw muscles bunched tightly. “I guess I’ll get that lab report later, when you two’ve gotten over your private joke.”
Guilt gnawed at Rebecca for the rest of the day. It wasn’t just her childish behavior and the raise thing—she thought of John Saville’s brief but charming smile, the hurt deep in his eyes before anger took over. She also thought about how his gaze had seemed to linger on her body. Not that she cared. No doubt the lover within him was as uptight and calculating as the physician. Being with him wouldn’t be worth the enormous effort she’d have to put forth just to have some fun.
However, all her guilt was whisked away like a feather in a gust the moment she tried to apologize right before quitting time at 5:00 p.m.
He cut her off in midsentence with almost the same caustic retort she had recently flung at him. “I doubt it will leave me a broken man.”
And to think she had wasted time feeling sorry for such an overbearing brute. The absolute creep, she fumed as she drove home in the aging but reliable Bronco her father had turned over to her as a high school graduation present. He was so like Brian. His spitting image exactly, she told herself, self-justification in every word.
Even thoughts of her upcoming date tonight with Rick Collins could not crowd irksome images of John Saville from her mind.
By the time she finished a long and relaxing bath, the light of late afternoon was taking on the mellow richness just before sunset. Wearing a snug terry cloth robe, her long hair wrapped in a towel, she watched the copper blaze of sunset from her bedroom window.
Feeling calmer, she dressed in a hunter green merino wool skirt and a black silk blouse, digging a good pair of black leather pumps out of her closet. She left her hair unrestrained, just combing it out and spritzing it back a little in front, letting it cascade down her back and over her shoulders.
“A very sexy little package,” she approved as she checked herself out in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. “Play your cards right, Mr. Collins, and who knows? This girl is in the mood.”
She hummed pop tunes while she added a finishing touch, a pair of delicate cameo pierced earrings that had belonged to her mother. But while she slipped the delicate French wires through her ears, again she saw John Saville’s face closing against her, the intense cobalt eyes accusing.
A little guilt, and plenty of anger, knotted her stomach, already pinched with hunger.
He was the last man she wanted on her mind tonight.
Noticing it was almost seven o’clock, she quickly opened her compact and lightly brushed her cheeks with blush, trying to get in the right mindset to enjoy a date, John Saville be damned.
Rick Collins rang her doorbell at 7:00 p.m., prompt as a wake-up call and looking quite dapper in a dark evening suit. His blond hair was shorter and neater than she recalled, and he was a little stouter than she had imagined him. Nonetheless, he made a good first impression when Rebecca opened the door.
The smile was still as sexy as she remembered it being. Definitely movie-star teeth.
She was a little put off, however, when he escorted her out to his vehicle: a glittering gold SUV that rode incredibly high off the ground on huge, oversize tires.
“Not quite a monster truck.” Rick seemed to apologize as he helped her in.
She felt as if she was climbing up into a military assault vehicle. This is Montana, she reminded herself. People drive weird trucks out here.
But from that point on, the date rapidly became a fiasco.
During the drive to the restaurant, he rebuffed her every attempt at conversation because, as she quickly learned, he was obsessed with reciting trivial facts. Batting averages, team mascots, per capita consumption of chocolate, the cures for diphtheria in Colonial America, an endless, random recitation of pointless facts proving he had a photographic memory but no other apparent intelligence. Hazel was right to call him a big reader, but she failed to mention he read nothing but books on trivia.
Before long she had also noticed something quite irritating about Rick’s “pleasant voice”—it was oddly uniform in tone, seldom varying much. He might as well be reading out loud from a phone book to pass time. The monotony of it had quickly begun to grate on her.
The date officially tanked by the time the Hathaway House loomed into view. She was practically clawing at her window to escape. He hadn’t shut up once.
“No kidding,” his monotone voice droned on like a weed-eater idling, “Charles Bronson was actually named Charles Buchinsky before he changed his name.”
“Is that right?” she muttered.
“Yeah, and John Denver was Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr. And you know what Eric Clapton’s real name was?”
“You tell me.”
He laughed for the first time. “Eric Clap. No kidding, it really was.”
When she said nothing, he pressed on. “Don’t you get—”
“I get it,” she answered, wondering how she was going to get through the interminable two hours of dinner.
The modern exterior of the Hathaway House, with its elegant marble walls, seemed a deliberate contrast to the old-time intimacy of the interior. Candles burned in sconces along the walls, and two-branched gilt candlesticks illuminated each table.
But tonight it was all wasted on Rebecca. The double line of full-length windows opening onto a scrolled-iron balcony, the tables bright and fragrant with fresh bouquets of spring—all wasted.
In fact even as a pallid and bored maître d’ escorted them to their tables, it was all she could do to restrain herself from bolting. She still smarted with humiliation from their arrival—she had actually required a valet’s help to climb down out of Rick’s truck.
“Hopalong Cassidy’s horse was Topper,” Rick’s voice hammered on, beating at her ears by now. “Dale Evans rode Buttermilk, the Cisco Kid was on Diablo, Gene Autry rode—”
I dared to dream, Rebecca thought with self-lacerating sarcasm that made her smile. Unfortunately she was looking right at Rick when she did it. His next remark proved he misread her ironic smile as some sort of romantic green light.
“I thought maybe after dinner,” he confided in a near whisper so others wouldn’t hear, “we might take a little ride out to Turk Road.”
He couldn’t be serious. Cold revulsion made her shudder. Turk Road used to be a local lovers’ lane until huge feed-lots were built on both sides of it. Either he hadn’t parked there in a long time or he didn’t care about the smell.
“You’re joking, right?” she blurted out. “That area smells like a leaking sewer.”
“Oh, not when the wind’s out of the north,” he assured her with a solemn face. “Like it is tonight. We can just keep the windows rolled up.”
They were seated, and immediately the wine steward hovered at Rick’s elbow while he ordered some white zinfandel she had no intention of drinking.
A brief image of Rick groping her in his almost-monster truck, windows steamed over, cows bellowing on all sides, had killed her earlier appetite.
“Take me home,” she blurted out suddenly. “I don’t feel well.”
“What? But we—”
“I really don’t feel well,” she insisted in a tone that quashed any further resistance from him. To underline her determination she stood up and gathered her purse and sweater.
“Man, oh, man!” he exclaimed in frustration. “Hazel didn’t tell me you were such a dingbat.”
Well at least he gets angry, she thought as the two of them walked quickly outside, scrutinized by curious eyes.
“The gold truck,” Rick snapped to the valet, and the latter trotted around to the side lot. The teen returned a minute later, shaking his head at them.
“Bad news, sir. Your right rear tire is completely flat. If you’ve got a jack that’s big enough, we’ll change it for you.”
Rebecca’s heart sank at this stroke of rotten luck, and Rick cursed. “No, it’ll have to be towed to a hoist. Or at least lifted by a tow-truck winch.”
He looked at Rebecca as if it were all her fault. “I’ll have to call a tow. Looks like it’ll be a while before you get home.”
The date from hell, she thought, as she watched him walk away with the valet to inspect the damage.
Four
Oh, great, Rebecca groaned inwardly while her date dug the phone number for his tow service out of his wallet. Mystery Valley had virtually no cab service, just a shuttle bus service for the airport at Helena, so she couldn’t get home that way.
Hazel…her place wasn’t all that far, or maybe Lois—
A low rumble of exhaust and a flash of bright-red paint pulled her attention to the street out front. John Saville, looking handsome and slightly windblown in a brown leather bomber jacket, parked his Gran Sport classic right out front and leaped athletically out without opening the door. He carried his leather medical kit and hurried toward the restaurant, ignoring the valets.
“Got it,” Rick muttered beside her, finally finding the number. He had already retrieved the wireless phone from his vehicle. “Shouldn’t be too long,” he told her, avoiding her eyes now. “It doesn’t make sense I’d have a flat, those are brand-new tires.”
She stood there on the sidewalk, her irritation at herself tinged with sudden curiosity. She wondered what emergency could possibly have called John Saville to the restaurant. The place had seemed calm enough when she and Rick came outside.
An inexplicable flat tire and the doctor’s sudden arrival—certainly it was odd timing.
Rick finished his call and pushed down the antenna of his phone. “Forty minutes to an hour,” he informed her.
She resisted the urge to snap at him in frustration. It wasn’t his fault, after all. “I think I’ll go inside and see if I can call a—”
“Rebecca!”
The voice cut into her thoughts. She turned around. John Saville went toward her, dressed in stone-washed jeans and a white pullover she could see under his open jacket.
He actually used my first name, she thought.
Evidently, however, he had not approached her to be friendly. His tight-lipped smile of greeting seemed to cost him great effort.
“Dr. Saville,” she greeted him. When he sent a quick glance at Rick she added with perfunctory politeness, “Rick Collins, this is my employer, Dr. John Saville.”
“Excuse me for butting in, both of you, but I wonder if you know anything about an elderly woman who had a dizzy spell inside the restaurant? I got the call a few minutes ago, but no one inside seems to know a thing about it.”
Rebecca thought once again, How odd. Her suspicions grew stronger. Everyone knew Hazel had matchmaking on her mind. But the town matriarch was tricky. It would be just like Hazel to pull a bait and switch. Accusation aimed squarely at Hazel niggled at her for a few seconds, but it passed as abruptly as it popped into her mind. She had too much to deal with right now to give it the consideration it deserved.
“I didn’t notice any trouble,” she replied. “Did you, Rick?”
He was still in a sullen mood since she had poured cold water on his hot plans for later.
“Maybe whoever it was left already,” he suggested without interest.
“Well…” John Saville’s gaze raked over Rebecca. He had never seen her with her hair unrestrained like this, framing her face.
“Well,” he repeated, starting to turn away, “I guess it was a false alarm.”
“Dr. Saville?”
Her voice brought him back around to face them. “Yes?”
Of all the people to request a favor from, why did it have to be him?
“I, that is, Rick’s truck has a flat tire, and he has to wait for someone to come fix it. Could you—would you mind giving me a lift home? If it’s not too far out of your way.”
“Hey, whoa, here,” Rick objected, sensing an invasion of his male territory. “This is still my date with you, not his.”
The totally unwarranted possessiveness made her flush—she hardly knew the guy. He sure had a lot of nerve.
Despite her horror at making a public scene, she couldn’t stop herself from saying, “If I could remind you, Rick, I’m not exactly feeling well, remember?”
“Look,” the doctor said with diplomatic politeness, addressing himself to Rick, “there’s a service station a few blocks down the street. Why don’t I run the tire over there and get it patched?”
It irked her, suddenly, that her employer showed more consideration for this stranger than he did for her. He walks with kings, she thought scornfully, but never loses the common touch—until he comes to work.
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