- -
- 100%
- +
Jake headed down the stairs. Ally watched him go until he disappeared around the corner of the house.
Then she closed the door and turned from it, catching the faintly lingering scent of his cologne.
And even though she didn’t understand why, she couldn’t resist breathing it in.
Breathing it in and picturing Jake all over again.
Jake standing at the door, facing her, towering above her in all his broad- shouldered, masculine majesty.
Looking into her eyes.
Touching her cheek.
Jake in a position from which he could easily have kissed her…
She yanked herself back to reality.
Kissed her?
Jake Fox?
Maybe she should have her head examined, too!
VICTORIA PADE
is a native of Colorado, where she continues to live and work. Her passion – besides writing – is chocolate, which she indulges in frequently and in every form. She loves romance novels and romantic movies – the more lighthearted the better – but she likes a good, juicy mystery now and then, too.
Victoria Pade
www.millsandboon.co.uk
Chapter One
Ally Rogers felt shell-shocked as she stared out the window of the Chicago-bound airplane.
It wasn’t every day that some stranger told her there was a situation with her mother that she needed to “get to Chicago—immediately—to deal with.”
It wasn’t every day that some stranger told her that even though Ally might not want to be involved in her mother’s life he wasn’t giving her the option not to be any longer.
It definitely wasn’t every day. It was just yesterday.
This week had been hellish for Ally right from the start. As a well-known interior designer dealing with celebrity clients, she sometimes had to travel the world to get to their sprawling mansions, and she was frequently required to keep odd hours to accommodate her clients’ hectic schedules.
Yesterday had been a prime example of that. She’d flown in from Italy at dawn, catching only a few hours sleep on the plane. Then she’d had to rush home, shower and change her clothes before dashing to meet with a national news anchor while he did his live morning show. During his commercial breaks she’d presented pictures of what was being implemented by her design team in his Tuscan villa and gotten the okay on her plans for the rest of the project.
Ignoring the jet lag she was suffering, she’d had a full twelve hours of other appointments and details that had had to be attended to before she’d finally gotten back home again. Where a curt voice mail from a Jake Fox had awaited her. The name wasn’t familiar to her and he hadn’t said more than that to identify himself, only that he needed to speak to her ASAP about her mother. That it was an emergency.
When Ally had heard that, she’d wanted to kick herself for not having given her mother her new cellphone number yet. But Ally had been en route to Italy on Sunday when she would have made her weekly call to Estelle. And to be honest, she’d just been so busy that she’d forgotten all about it.
The moment she’d heard Dr. Fox’s message, she’d dialed the number he’d left. And if his message had been curt and impatient, it was nothing compared to her conversation with him.
After the under-his-breath “It’s about time” response to her call, Ally had said, “Are you with my mother now? Who are you?”
“A friend of Estelle’s from the senior center,” he’d said. “If you talked to your mother more often you’d know that.”
“Are you her doctor?”
“No, I’m not her medical doctor, but Estelle needs to get to her doctor. Unfortunately her friends and I can’t persuade her to do that. Besides, this is a family situation, something a stranger shouldn’t need to tell you,” he’d added, under his breath again. Then he’d proceeded, in a more matter-of-fact tone, to say that Estelle had been unwell, that it wasn’t exactly clear what was going on with her, but that he was convinced she needed medical attention.
After trying and failing to get more out of the doctor—who insisted he had no more information to share—Ally had instantly dialed her mother’s house. But there hadn’t been any answer. She didn’t have the numbers—or even the last names—of any of her mother’s friends. The neighbors had all changed since Ally had lived with her mother, so there was no one nearby she knew to call. And despite the fact that Ally had continued to try her mother’s number again and again in between making arrangements to fly to Chicago as soon as she could, she hadn’t ever reached Estelle.
So there she was, on her way to Illinois with no clue what was going on and only her own worst fears to keep her company.
Thank you very much, Jake Fox.
What kind of person made a call like that when something happened to someone’s seventy-nine-year-old mother?
No, she and her mother weren’t close. And never had been. But Estelle was still her mother. Shouldn’t there have been a little compassion? A little finesse? Especially from a medical person?
But Jake Fox had been so impatient. And why? Just because Ally didn’t live in the same city, the same state that Estelle lived in? Innumerable people didn’t live near family. Ally was sure Estelle wouldn’t even want her close by, or that close proximity would change the nature of their relationship. Once-a-week phone calls and spending major holidays together, that was the extent of it and would be the extent of it regardless of where she lived.
And who was this guy, anyway? A friend of her mother’s from the senior center—that’s what he’d said. Was he some sort of boyfriend Estelle hadn’t mentioned? Another retiree who had become her companion? And even if they were close, why couldn’t he have said what kind of trouble her mother was having? Or if Estelle had been hurt. Or where she was…
Ally wasn’t a nervous flyer and yet her hands were clenched onto the armrests and her palms were sweaty.
Rather than drying her hands on her twill slacks, she decided to make a trip to the restroom to wash them, thinking that getting up, moving around, might help some of her agitation.
It didn’t. She was no more relaxed as she ran cool water over her hands, and one glance into the mirror over the sink gave evidence to how tense she was.
She hadn’t had time to do more than leave her honey-blond hair loose around a face that had lost the usual bloom of pink that highlighted her cheekbones. Even her slightly full lips looked washed out beneath the thin, straight nose, and her emerald-green eyes were a little bloodshot from lack of sleep.
She dried her hands and smoothed the simple brown T-shirt she wore over the tan slacks before retaking her seat, feeling no better than when she’d left it.
She decided to stop focusing on Dr. Fox. Her mother’s health was the only thing that mattered right now.
Please let her be all right…
She took a few deep breaths to combat a fresh rise of fear.
If only her mother was all right, Ally was even willing to have more dealings with Jake Fox. He and his bad, dictatorial disposition were beside the point. Ally just wanted her mother to be okay.
Then she’d deal with Jake Fox.
It was after noon when Ally pulled her rental car up in front of the small suburban home in which she’d grown up.
The two-story, circa-1950s red brick house with its covered front porch looked the same as it always had except that the lawn was dry and nearly dying in spots.
If it had been any other yard in the neighborhood Estelle Rogers would have marched up to the front door, rung the bell, and when the owner had answered, minced no words about how their laziness was lowering her property values. She would have given them a dressing-down that would have shamed them into improved lawn care. So the fact that Estelle’s own yard looked so bad in the August heat was an indication that something was amiss.
And Ally needed to go in and see what it was. See her mother.
Ally’s stomach—which had been in knots since yesterday’s phone call—tied itself into one more. But then, her stomach tied itself into that knot every time she came to visit her mother.
Well, she couldn’t sit there and wait it out the way she usually did, so she charged from the car, taking only her purse with her.
“She’s not there.”
Ally stopped short before even reaching the front porch and turned to find a boy of probably five or six on his bicycle on the sidewalk that ran in front of the house.
“Do you know where she is?” Ally asked, doubting that he did but desperate.
“She got taked ’way in a am-buh-lance today.”
Oh God.
Ally’s stomach clenched even tighter as awful things went through her mind. Had Estelle been home alone last night when she’d called and called, maybe unable to get to the phone? Had she been lying on the floor all night?
“When was this?” Ally asked the child.
“After breakfast,” he answered.
“Do you know where she was taken?” Ally inquired, feeling more frantic by the minute.
“To the hospital,” the little boy said as if it should have been obvious.
The neighborhood hospital—she’d start there. And hope she wasn’t already too late.
Ally nearly ran down the porch steps and back to her car.
“Thank you,” she said to the little boy as she went by him and got behind the wheel again. The hospital was only about a fifteen-minute drive away. Ally made it in ten, parking crookedly in the first spot she could find in the emergency-room lot before she nearly ran to the hospital entrance.
“I’m looking for Estelle Rogers, she may have been brought in by ambulance—”
“Those people are also here about her,” the receptionist said, pointing to the waiting room.
Maybe the receptionist didn’t want to give her bad news…
Ally turned in the direction the woman indicated. Among the other people in the waiting room, she spotted a group she recognized, if only slightly. Her mother had had routine gallbladder removal four years ago and Ally had come to Chicago then to help Estelle through the surgery and to convalesce afterward. There had been a steady stream of her mother’s friends from the Wilkens Senior Center who had visited Estelle during that time, and while Ally didn’t remember most of their names, their faces were faintly familiar.
Faces that all looked somber and serious now.
The worst…
The worst has happened…
Ally felt her knees go wobbly. Her head was light. The whole hospital seemed to be spinning.
Without taking a step, she listed to one side and had to grab on to the reception counter’s edge.
“Ma’am?”
The receptionist’s alarmed voice seemed to be coming from far away.
Then Ally was only vaguely aware of the receptionist jolting to her feet and calling, “Dr. Fox! I need help!”
“So cold! Her hands are like ice, Jacob!”
“It’s okay, Bubby. She’s coming around.”
Ally forced leaden eyelids open. For a moment she was lost. She didn’t know where she was, or why she was lying on her back on a hard floor, surrounded by people she barely recognized.
There was a very attractive man hunkered down on one side of her, taking her blood pressure. There was a much, much older woman who had Ally’s left hand between both of hers, rubbing vigorously. And there was a woman who looked like a nurse standing at her feet.
It was the blood-pressure-taking and the sight of the nurse that cued memory—she was at the Chicago hospital where her mother had been taken by ambulance.
“My mother…” she said, her own voice sounding fearful and sluggish at once.
“You’re who we’re interested in right now,” the man said, despite the stethoscope in his ears.
Ally looked to the elderly woman rubbing her hand and whispered, “Am I too late? Is she…”
“Oh, no!” the older woman said quickly. “Not Estelle. She had a fall today. And there are some other things wrong, but she’s still with us.” The hand rubbing became more intense. “Just rest and let our Jacob take care of you.”
The man being referred to as “our Jacob” took the stethoscope out of his ears and unfastened the blood pressure cuff from around Ally’s arm. As he did, he said, “You thought Estelle had died?” He actually looked…embarrassed.
“I didn’t know what to think.”
“You didn’t tell her what’s going on?” the older woman demanded of him.
“I told her Estelle was in trouble,” he answered, turning even redder.
“Jacob! Look at this poor girl! So worried!”
Now she remembered the woman. Bubby had been the friend that Ally had liked most during Estelle’s gallbladder recovery. She was a tiny Jewish lady who had come every day with pastries and casseroles. Rayzel—that was her name.
“She should be worried,” the man said under his breath.
And that was when Ally knew that Jacob was Jake Fox.
She bolted upright, sending her head spinning again. The spinning made her reel, and if Jake Fox’s long arm hadn’t snaked around her to catch her she would have smacked her head on the wheel of a nearby gurney.
“Hold on! Where do you think you’re going?” he said.
“It’s you!” Ally accused.
“Lie back down,” he commanded, easing her to the floor again before he said, “Yes, we spoke on the phone last night.”
His tone wasn’t warm, but at least it wasn’t as impatient as it had been the previous evening.
Ally realized then that the hospital receptionist and the rest of her mother’s friends had gathered around, keeping some distance behind Jake. She hated that she’d made such a spectacle.
“How about a chair?” he said to the nurse. “I think all we have here is a stress-related fainting spell. She doesn’t need a bed, but since she wants up, let’s let her try to sit. And maybe she can have a little orange juice and a cookie or a cracker…”
With the excitement over, the receptionist returned to her post as the nurse left to do the doctor’s bidding. Only Jake Fox and Estelle’s friends remained.
Then Jake said to Bubby, “You all can go out and watch for Nina—you don’t want to keep her waiting. I’ll deal with this.”
“I could stay,” Bubby offered. “Nina could take everyone else.”
“And miss your card games at the center? No, go on. There’s nothing you can do. You know what’s happening with Estelle, and her daughter is here now. She’s going to be okay. I’ll get her back on her feet and she can take over.”
After assuring Ally that she would check in with her at dinnertime, Bubby and the contingent of elderly ladies filed out of the emergency room just as the nurse brought a wheelchair into the reception area.
“We can put her in her mother’s room,” Jake told the nurse. “I’ll take her there while you see if you can find the juice and crackers.”
“I don’t need a wheelchair,” Ally protested. Feeling more embarrassed by the minute, she sat up slowly this time so she could stay up.
“I’ve kept you from having to see an E.R. doctor, but I’m not going to let you on your feet until I’m sure you can stay there,” the doctor said flatly.
The nurse put the brake on the chair and left again.
“Let me do the work,” the doctor ordered Ally.
His left arm came around her from behind again, he grasped her nearest forearm with his right hand and brought her off the floor and into the chair in one smooth movement as if she weighed nothing.
For no reason she understood, Ally was very aware of the power and strength in that bracing arm and the warmth of his hand on her bare skin. Aware of it all and feeling for the first time as if she wasn’t in this alone somehow.
But then she was in the wheelchair and she came to her senses—this was the guy who had read her the riot act and created the stress that had buckled her knees in the first place. Not only was she alone in whatever was happening, but she and Jake were at odds over it, without her even knowing why.
He didn’t say anything as he released the brake on the wheelchair and pushed her through the doors that separated the reception area and waiting room from the actual emergency-treatment area.
He took her to one of the small examining rooms that surrounded a central space like satellites. None of the doctors or nurses talking, checking charts or at the computers in the center even looked up, and when they got to Estelle’s room it was empty.
“My mother isn’t here,” Ally said.
“She’s probably still in X-ray. I’ll check,” he said, leaving just as the nurse came in with orange juice and crackers.
Rather than argue, Ally accepted them, taking a few sips of the juice and eating a cracker. Then she tested the sturdiness of her own feet.
She was still a bit shaky, but she made it to the visitor’s chair without incident and the nurse wheeled the chair out of the small room.
The nurse met Jake coming back and Ally watched as the two stopped just outside the door to discuss something she couldn’t hear. It gave her the opportunity to study the man who had caused her such torment in the last several hours.
He was tall, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, and had long legs that were muscular enough to tease the fabric of the khaki slacks he was wearing with a maroon dress shirt and tie.
His hair was a dark espresso brown and he wore it longish and slightly unkempt. He had the facial bone structure of a Greek god—all angles and planes and sharp edges. His nose was hawkish, his lips were lush, and if Ally hadn’t disliked him so much from their phone call, she would have been blown away by how good-looking he was.
But appearance aside, he was still the jerk who had verbally skewered her last night and movie-star handsomeness didn’t change that.
One thing was for sure, though, he wasn’t her mother’s boyfriend or companion. He was close to Ally’s age—likely in his early thirties—and while it would have surprised her to know her seventy-nine-year-old mother was keeping company with anyone, she knew Estelle wouldn’t do anything as audacious as fool around with a younger man.
Which begged the question—why was he hanging out with a group of geriatrics? Maybe he was related to Bubby?
His conversation with the nurse ended just then and he came back into the room.
Propping a hip on one corner of the examining table, he leveled a charcoal-colored gaze on her and Ally tried not to appreciate the beauty of those thickly lashed eyes. Instead, in her most authoritative voice, she said, “Will you please just tell me what’s going on with my mother?”
He surprised her with a purely businesslike voice of his own. “I hold groups at the senior center—”
“Groups?”
“I’m a psychiatrist.”
“My mother went for therapy?”
“Not exactly. The groups deal with general issues of aging.”
“Ah.” But if he was a shrink, wasn’t that all the more reason that he should have handled things with more tact? Ally thought it was but she didn’t say it and he merely went on.
“I also walk every morning with the ladies, so I have pretty consistent contact with Estelle.” He paused, sighed slightly and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to get into this on the phone and have you think it wasn’t that big a problem that you’d have to rush to address. But I started noticing problems with your mother’s memory a few months ago. I suggested some supplements, some vitamins that I was hoping might help. But she can be stubborn—and she told me I was crazy, that her memory was as good as ever.”
“Only you didn’t think that was true?”
“I’m not the only one who’s been seeing the changes. Bubby—who I’ve known half my life—and the rest of Estelle’s friends have also seen them.”
So he wasn’t related to Bubby.
“More than memory changes?” Ally asked rather than get into his personal life.
Jake sighed again. “There’s been an all-round slip in her mental state. She gets disoriented, confused. Bubby has been with her twice now when your mother has forgotten the way back from the senior center. Two other friends found her at the mall unable to find her car in the lot—they had to have security drive them up and down the rows until her friends spotted Estelle’s car, then one of them drove her home. We’ve been waiting—and hoping—that you would notice something and step in…but that’s never happened.”
That last part had a tinge of the previous evening’s criticism in it. But since he was allowing her to get her side of the story in, she said, “My mother and I talk on the phone once a week—every Sunday except this last one. But the fact that she doesn’t remember what I’ve told her from one week to the next isn’t unusual. She’s never been interested enough in what I tell her to make any kind of mental note about it. I’ve always had to remind her again and again that I’m referring to something I told her. I haven’t noticed that being any different.”
“Do you ask how she is? Did she tell you about the mall fiasco? You haven’t seen or heard anything that seems out of the ordinary?”
Ally thought about it, but she honestly could not come up with a single instance in which Estelle had seemed like anything but herself.
“No, nothing,” she said, even though she knew this man was going to take it as a strike against her. “Every week I ask how she is and she says she’s fine—never anything else. When I try to question her about what she’s doing, if she’s getting out of the house, what might be going on with her friends or at the senior center, she will only say that she’s keeping busy, and she gets peeved if I press her for any kind of details, as if I’m prying. Then she cuts me off and that’s it for that week’s call.”
“Maybe she doesn’t think you’re interested.”
So it’s still my fault… Ally was getting mad. “Look, Dr. Fox. Things between us just aren’t…touchy-feely. On either of our parts. She had gallbladder surgery a few years ago and she only told me about that begrudgingly because she said her doctor was going to make her go into some kind of care facility afterward if she didn’t have help at home. As soon as I knew, I rearranged my schedule so I could be here and I’d planned to stay longer but after two days she told me she was well enough to take care of herself and that she wanted me to go home.”
“Estelle is proud of how independent she is. If she felt as if she was infringing on you or on your time—”
Again it’s my fault…
Ally stopped him before he could go any further. “So, were some memory lapses the reason you called me the way you did yesterday?” she asked.
“No,” he said simply. “As I said, the ladies and I do a walk every weekday morning. If someone can’t make it, they either tell us ahead of time or call one of the group to let us know so no one worries. Yesterday Estelle just didn’t show up. I sent the ladies on without me and went to your mother’s house. I found her front door wide open, a burner on her stove blazing hot with nothing on it and no Estelle. After searching the place and calling for her, I spotted her from an upstairs window—she was nearly at the other end of the block, wandering down the middle of the street in her nightgown.”
That knocked some of the wind out of Ally again.
“Oh.”
“Yeah, oh. I went after her, got her back home and she was in such a daze she didn’t understand why I was upset. She said she’d just gone out to get her newspaper, as if that was all there was to it. I got her some breakfast, but I still didn’t want her to be alone. Sylvia—I don’t suppose you know her?”