“Stop looking at me like that.” Charli chopped yet another carrot. “Talk to me. About anything.”

“Okay. How about what I heard from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation today about Secret Santa?” Neil asked.

The knife in Charli’s hand came down at an awkward angle, and Neil could see she’d almost cut herself. He sprang up to check on her, but she waved him off.

“Sorry! I’m all thumbs tonight,” she joked.

“More cutting like that, and you won’t have thumbs at all,” he said. But his comeback was reflexive. What he’d said had surprised her. That was clear.

“So …” Three more whacks and the carrot was history. “What did they tell you? Chief Hawkins didn’t seem to think it would be a high-priority case”

How was it he could still want to kiss her when he was convinced she knew more than she was telling him? Or telling the police?

Dear Reader,

As a kid, I never could understand my mom’s deep loathing of any Christmas lights that weren’t “white and twinkling.” After all, to my six-year-old eyes, our neighbor’s outlandish display of Christmas décor, complete with a Santa, a sleigh and reindeer on his roof, was perfect. My mother? Bless her heart, she’d grind her teeth when she drove by.

Eventually, my mom succeeded in converting me to the “white and twinkling” school of Christmas décor. When I married, though, my husband turned out to be a lot like Neil in Secret Santa—Christmas is his time to shine! Every year it’s a loving fuss over whether we keep my white lights or break out a new set of “real” (his words) Christmas lights. Still, as Neil and Charli discover, the true meaning of Christmas isn’t decorations, but the spirit of giving.

I loved writing Secret Santa … I loved discovering Neil’s wonderful, playful personality and seeing Charli learn to enjoy Christmas, despite some formidable obstacles. As you read their story, I hope you root for Neil and Charli as much as I did.

I’d love to hear from you. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow me at @cynthiarreese, and why not check out all the Heartwarming authors as we blog? You can find us at www.heartwarmingauthors.blogspot.com.

Merry Christmas!

Cynthia

Secret Santa

Cynthia Reese

www.millsandboon.co.uk

CYNTHIA REESE Cynthia Reese lives with her husband and their daughter in south Georgia, along with their two dogs, three cats and however many strays show up for morning muster. She has been scribbling since she was knee-high to a grasshopper and reading even before that A former journalist, teacher and college English instructor, she also enjoys cooking, traveling and photography when she gets the chance.

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In memory of William, one of my biggest cheerleaders ever. April is surely the cruelest month.

Acknowledgments

This book was a miracle in the making, impossible without my awesome editors Victoria Curran and Laura Barth—thank you, Laura, for all your cheering!

Many doctors helped me with technical and personal insight into the life of a young doctor, including Dr. Lawton Davis, Dr. Misty Poole, Dr. Gary Branch and Dr. Jean Sumner. More technical advice came from Terrance Shulman of The Shulman Center for Compulsive Theft, Spending & Hoarding, as well as Investigator Ron Bivens, who is not at all like the police chief in this story! All errors are mine, and I apologize profusely for any that may be there.

A huge thanks goes to my critique partner Tawna Fenske, to my sister Donna, and to my Twitter cheer squad—Jessica Lemmon, Linda Grimes, Jeannie Moon, Jamie DeBree, Susan Adrian, Deb Salonen, and Patty Blount—as well as to my wonderful Heartwarming blog sisters.

Most of all, big hugs to my wonderful, long-suffering husband and The Kiddo. I couldn’t have done it without you!

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER ONE

“YOU’RE NOT ASLEEP, are you?”

Dr. Charli Prescott snapped to attention from the doorjamb she’d been propped against. “’Course not,” she muttered to her amused-looking nurse, Lainey Edge. “Why on earth would I want to sleep? I’ve had the luxurious amount of two hours of sleep for three straight nights. If those new E.R. guys don’t get in here soon, though, I will be sleeping standing up.”

Lainey laughed and slapped a stack of charts in Charli’s hand. “Good to know, because there’s a broken arm from a ladder fall in Bay 2, and you’ve still got to sign off on discharge for Food Poisoning in Bay 1. Oh, and your dad says Knife Guy in the trauma room can go home.”

Charli had just caught the name of Broken Arm—Neil Bailey—on his chart when Lainey’s last words caught her. “Hey!” she hollered after the departing Lainey. “Knife Guy—” She stopped herself from breaking about a thousand privacy violations and closed the gap between her and Lainey. “I wanted Knife Guy—I mean, Mr. Anderson—admitted,” she told her. “I signed the admission paperwork. At least overnight. He could have sepsis.”

“Yeah, but your dad—”

“Is an old coot who likes to fly by the seat of his pants, and I don’t care if he is my new boss and the hospital’s chief of staff. Both of us are sleep deprived because somebody ran off all the E.R. docs and thought we could handle the E.R. until the staffing service cried uncle. We may miss something, and a twenty-three-hour admit is a good way to be sure we haven’t.”

Lainey looked about as excited at the prospect of getting in the middle of the brewing battle between Charli and Dr. Chuck Prescott as she would about going on a fast. “Look, he’s my boss—and yours, too. So before we put Knife Guy on the floor, can you talk to your dad?”

From behind them, the sounds of Food Poisoning’s retching came through the striped curtains dividing the hospital bays. Broken Arm, next door, called out, “Hey, I think my neighbor might need some help here! If you’re not going to get around to seeing me, could you help him? Please?”

Charli and Lainey exchanged a long weary glance. “I’ll call custodial,” Lainey said. “You sure Food Poisoning’s able to go home?”

“Yeah, not dehydrated yet—just be sure he gets some Phenergan before he leaves. He says he wants to go—that he can throw up at home as well as here. Got some sort of phobia about throwing up in public. I guess he should have thought of that when he ate week-old potato salad.” Charli shook her head to clear the cobwebs and skimmed Broken Arm’s chart. She hadn’t felt this tired since her first few weeks of med school.

“Okay, then, Food Poisoning’s chart’s on the bottom.”

Charli riffled through the charts and scrawled her signature in the requisite places. “Make sure he knows he can come back,” she told Lainey. She headed toward Broken Arm—Neil Bailey.

“Oh, you might want to do something with your hair,” Lainey told her in that understated tone a woman used that meant there was either broccoli in your teeth or toilet tissue hanging out of your skirt.

Charli reached up and assessed the damage. Half the ponytail she’d snatched her hair into that morning—just that morning? It felt like a million years ago—was tumbling out of its rubber band. She used the glass of the trauma bay door as a mirror, and yanked the mess into some semblance of order. Ordinarily her straight hair was tidy and presentable, but now it looked as if she’d been dragged through a bush backward. Giving up, she turned from the door, where she could still hear Knife Guy singing a drunken version of “Walking After Midnight” by Patsy Cline, and didn’t bother to suppress her yawn.

Snatching back the striped curtain, Charli pasted a smile on her face. “Well, Mr. Bailey, I’m sorry for the wait, but as you can see, we’ve been a bit busy this evening. I understand you fell off a ladder? How high were you? Did you hit your head?”

Neil Bailey was a lanky fellow about her age with rumpled brownish-blond hair who would have looked quite attractive if he hadn’t been grimacing in pain and wearing a paint-spattered hoodie and jeans that looked as though they had been gnawed on by a rat. Charli didn’t wait for him to start his story before checking his pupils for signs of concussion.

“No luck on the negotiations between the E.R. staffing firm and the hospital?” Bailey asked over a quick intake of breath as she began examining his arm.

Charli paused, surprised. “What do you know about any negotiations?”

“Should have introduced myself...” He awkwardly extended his good hand, which was his right one. “Hi, I’m Neil Bailey, editor of the Brevis Bugle. I know Dr. Prescott—that would be your dad, right? He got into another tiff with the staffing firm. Anyway, I covered the emergency meeting of the hospital authority board that authorized the hospital to pay you and your dad to handle the E.R. until the hospital could negotiate with the firm or get someone else in.”

She gave the proffered hand a quick shake, while she checked that arm to be sure it was injury-free, as well. It was a very nicely constructed arm, with just the right amount of biceps and defined muscles. Charli yanked her thoughts away from their unprofessional admiration of his physique and continued with her assessment.

“Well, Neil Bailey, editor of the Brevis Bugle, it’s obvious you don’t have any signs of memory loss or head trauma.”

“You didn’t answer my question about the negotiations.”

“No comment. That’s my answer. You can ask my dad—Dr. Prescott. Or the hospital authority board.” She went back to looking at his injured arm, then stepped over to the computer and called up his X-rays. The ulna had a nice clean break, with an additional textbook Colles fracture to the distal radial. She came back to the gurney and poked and prodded, checking his fingers and evaluating the swelling. She raised his arm to check his shoulder movement. “You’re not a diabetic, are you? How did you fall off a ladder?”

“Ow! Sorry, sorry, don’t mean to be a wimp. Not a diabetic. The fall sounds more dramatic than it really was. I was almost to the ground and stepped wrong. I tried to catch myself. So it’s broken, huh?”

Charli couldn’t help smiling back at his rueful grin. She’d always been a sucker for dimples. And he had very nice dimples.

“Yep, ’fraid so,” she said. “I’ll put a temporary splint on it tonight and get you a referral to an orthopedic surgeon—”

The curtains behind her snapped open. “No need for a referral,” Dr. Chuck Prescott boomed. “He can come by the office and I’ll take care of it. Go ahead and put a permanent cast on it tonight, though.”

The easy moment between Charli and Neil evaporated. Charli closed her eyes and rubbed her forehead, her headache surging forward again. “Excuse me, Dr. Prescott,” she ground out. “This is my patient.”

“Neil? You trust me, don’t you? If I tell you that you don’t need a bone-and-joint doc, you’re okay, right?” her father said, winking. At the wink, Charli thought she’d self-combust with anger. For two weeks, her father had been waltzing into her treatment areas and second-guessing her. This time, though, she was too tired and too frustrated to let it go.

“He’s a writer,” she said. “He needs full use of his hand, which will require physical therapy, and the break needs to be evaluated by someone who can give him optimum care—”

“Do you hear her?” Her father shook his head. “New doctors. They’re all alike, even my own flesh and blood. They sound like they’re reading out of a med school textbook. What she means is she doesn’t want you to sue her if you can’t bend your elbow the full extension once it heals.”

“Have you even looked at—” Before any other hot words of defense could leap out of Charli’s mouth, she jabbed a finger. “Outside.”

“Oooh, don’t write about this, Neil, but I think she’s taking me to the woodshed.” Her father waggled his eyebrows, bushy and gray, over eyes that sparkled.

Beyond the curtain, Charli marched down to the staff lounge. Anna, one of the nurses, quickly cleared out once she saw who Charli had with her. “Uh, I’ll let you two talk,” she muttered as she swept by with her half-eaten sandwich.

The lounge, like the rest of the hospital, was tiny, worn and had last seen a decorator somewhere around 1980. Her father pulled out one of the folding metal chairs and sat down.

As he did, his phone buzzed. He fished it out of his pocket, glanced at it, frowned and stabbed at the touch screen. His face cleared. “It’s Lige Whitaker. Well, he can wait.” His tone was entirely more cavalier than Charli would have treated their chairman of the hospital authority—their boss’s boss.

Her father pocketed the phone again. He leaned back against the chair. “This is where you tell me that I’m an old fogey, and that medicine has completely changed since I got out of med school myself a hundred years ago, and that specialists are specialists for a reason.” His lips twitched at the corner with barely concealed amusement. “I agree. Guilty on all counts.” With his foot, he shoved the chair beside him away from the table. “Have a seat. Now that you’re a doctor, you’ll need to learn to sit when you can.”

She crossed her arms. The chair was tempting to her aching feet, but she ignored it and her father’s good-old-boy charm, which he always pulled out as his weapon of choice. “No,” she said firmly. “This is where I tell you that the next time you undermine me with a patient is when I walk out. What you did—what you have been doing—is disrespectful and not professional. Emory University—along with Georgia Health Sciences, not to mention Memorial in Savannah—are convinced that I am a physician. So is the state board. You may have got away with treating other doctors like this—and the way you treat your nurses is like something you’d see on a 1980s soap opera, by the way—but you will not treat me with professional discourtesy.”

Her father wrinkled his nose. “Thank God some of those shows are off the air. All those subdural hematomas and amnesias and people waking up perfectly fine out of months-long comas bugged the stew out of me. Fake doctors.”

“I’m referring to the way those fake doctors treated their fake nurses, Dad.”

The older Dr. Prescott opened his mouth, shut it, fiddled with his stethoscope. “I’m that bad? I can’t be. I haven’t pinched a gal on the backside in a decade.”

Charli sent her eyes heavenward. Leave it to her father to think that simply avoiding overt sexual harassment was enough to prevent him from being gender-biased. “You’re lucky you’re the chief of staff at this hospital, Dad. Otherwise, you’d have been a frequent flyer in sensitivity training—and only if you’d had an understanding chief of staff.”

He ran a hand over his rumpled silver hair. Suddenly, Charli could see all of her father’s sixty-seven years in the lines of his face. “Dad...”

“Nope, give it to me straight. Cut me no quarter just because I’m your old man.” He held up his hands to forestall any softening in her stance. “I admit, I could probably do with a few of those sensitivity training sessions. I am an old fogey, but I can learn. And that in there—I was trying to save the poor guy money. He has high-deductible insurance that pays practically nothing. That’s what you young punks can’t get in your head—you think just because you have all this medical technology available you need to use it.” He must have seen her anger as it rekindled and realized his apology was going off the rails. “But you’re right. I’d have had your head if you’d pulled the same stunt on me.”

Her father stood up, back straight, lab coat amazingly still showing the creases her mother had lovingly pressed into it that morning. “Apology accepted?”

“Yes,” she said. “And by the way...Knife Guy? He’s staying.”

“You’re going to break this hospital, you know that? Knife Guy’s got no insurance.”

But her father didn’t wait for her to answer, just headed past her with a slap on the shoulder. “I’m proud of you, kiddo. You might make a good doctor one day.”

The door slammed behind him, and for a long minute she stood there. Would this ever work out? She’d either kill herself or kill her dad. But this was the one thing she’d wanted, right? To work by her father’s side, prove to him that she knew what she was doing, prove to him that she could be a doctor—not a nurse as he’d suggested so many times.

Don’t forget that by working here, a good chunk of your student loans will be forgiven, she told herself. It’s a win-win. I’m home with Dad and Mom, and I can work off some of my debt. So suck it up, Prescott.

She went back to see Neil Bailey on her own. “Let me tell you what could happen if you don’t see a specialist,” she said. “Your wrist has what’s called a Colles fracture, and the ulna has a clean break. Either one alone, I wouldn’t be too worried about. But since you broke both bones, and since you’re a writer, they worry me. I want you to have full range of motion with the wrist. It’s your choice. You can do it the—” She bit back “the old-fogey way.” Using that expression, even if that’s what she thought of her dad’s method, would break her own dictates about professionalism. “You can take my dad’s suggestion and follow up with him, since I’m assuming he’s your primary care doctor. Or...”

“I’ll take the referral. No offense to your dad. But I am a writer. Like you say. I’ll figure out how to pay for the specialist some way. How long do you think I’ll be typing one-handed?”

“Hard to say. But probably, if you don’t need any surgery or pins—which I don’t think you will—at least six to eight weeks, depending on if you drink your milk and eat your green veggies.”

Neil nodded. “I will double my intake of both.”

“Now, let’s give you some pain medicine and see if we can get the swelling reduced.”

“That would be ibuprofen or Tylenol—don’t like anything stronger.”

“Okay, tough guy. We’ll see about that.” Charli had seen biker dudes beg for morphine when a bone was being set, but she knew from hard experience you had to let a man figure things out on his own. She headed for the curtain and the other patients who waited for her. “Give us a few minutes while we get you a shot of Toradol—it’s pretty much souped-up ibuprofen. That okay with you?”

“Does the Toradol do a better job? It’s not a narcotic, is it?” he asked her. “Because I don’t want to be zonked out.”

“Nope, it’s not a narcotic, and, yes, Toradol by injection works faster than oral meds like ibuprofen. Did you drive yourself?”

“Nah. I had my buddy drive me.”

Charli paused at the curtain and looked back over her shoulder. “So where was this buddy when you were climbing a ladder all by yourself?”

“Oh, Brinson was there. But he was busy texting Jill—his wife—to get out of the doghouse about being late for supper.”

“Wait...” Charli’s brain turned over the uncommon first name in combination with a wife named Jill. “Brinson Hughes? He’s my neighbor.”

“Yeah? Well, what do you know? It’s a small world.”

“What were you doing on a ladder, anyway?”

“Finishing up my Christmas lights.”

She frowned again. “It’s the first of November.”

“Ya know, that’s what Jill said.”

Just then, Knife Guy started in on a particularly loud rendition of Elvis’s “Suspicious Minds.” It served as a reminder to her that no matter how interesting Neil Bailey was, no matter how she enjoyed chatting with him, she had other patients who needed her.

“I’ll be back,” Charli told him.

“I’ll be here,” he replied. His dimples jumped and she found herself liking the fact that he didn’t whine when in pain.

Outside, she crossed to the trauma bay and checked first on the malodorous Knife Guy, who seemed content enough. She left him warbling on and headed for the nurses’ station. Lainey handed her a phone and a stack of charts, Knife Guy’s on top.

“So do we kick him loose or put him on the floor? We’ve got to do something.” Lainey wrinkled her forehead. “He’s driving us nuts.”

Charli scrawled a signature on the admissions order. “Send him to serenade the floor nurses.” She put the phone to her ear. “Dr. Charlotte Prescott speaking.”

“Charli!” Her mother’s greeting was a mix of relief and irritation. “Neither you nor your father have been answering your cell phones. You have to send your father home! He’s sixty-seven years old, and he’s not in any shape to be staying at that hospital all night long.”

“Mom.” Charli sagged against the counter and let her forehead sink into her palm.

“He’s an old man, Charli. He needs to be home.”

Charli cast a sideways glance down the hall, where her father was doing some shadowboxing with a tree trunk of a man in a camouflage coverall. Her father’s fists were light and fast, and his face glowed with merriment. He was in his element.

“I think he’s okay, Mom.”

“What do you know?”

“Oh, I dunno. Maybe a few years of medical school and residency? Mom. Trust me, if he looked really tired, I’d send him home—I’d have to bind and gag him first, but I’d do it. You don’t need to worry, okay?”

“But you and he need to come home. I’ve got a surprise for him! And for you, too, of course.”

Her mother’s words caught Charli off balance. She straightened up and pressed the phone closer to her ear. “Mom, a surprise? Did you, uh, buy it?”

“No. No, Charli, I made it. I didn’t buy it.” Her mom’s words sounded resigned and hollow. “You know how your father is―he worries so much about my shopping. I’m very careful now. Why everybody always has to obsess about me and my shopping... The surprise is a coconut cake. He’s been working so hard this week, so I thought a coconut cake would be a nice treat. So today I bought a fresh coconut, because you know your Mama Grace’s coconut cake recipe calls for fresh grated coconut.”

“You’re not serious.” Charli knew that her mother was indeed drop-dead serious. If there was anything Violet Prescott was serious about, it was pleasing her man.

To get the most perfect coconut, her mother wouldn’t have thought twice about jumping a plane to Hawaii to pluck it off the tree herself.

That is, if her dad had trusted his wife with a credit card.

Her mother had most likely spent hours on that cake—it was a nightmare of a recipe. Charli looked down the hall at her dad, his face still lit up, and her heart softened. Maybe she could handle the shift until the new E.R. guys showed up—it would only be an hour or so more. “I will tell him what you’ve said.”

“Not the bit about the cake. Let something be a surprise, okay? Just tell him I’m worried about him.”

“How about this?” Her father had left the shadowboxing behind and was grinning as he headed toward the nurses’ station. “You tell him yourself.” Charli jabbed the phone in her dad’s direction. “For you, Dad.”

“Sugarplum!” her dad warbled into the phone once he realized who was on the other end. “Are you worrying your little head about me? Do you miss me, sweetums? Are you lonely?”

He sounded pleased as punch that a woman needed him so much she was miserable without him. Honestly, he’d created a monster. Charli shook her head and gave Lainey instructions about Neil Bailey.

Lainey grinned. “Isn’t it sweet?” she asked, nodding toward the phone. “Your dad is so in love with her. Still, after all these years.”

A sour feeling followed by a chaser of guilt swept over Charli. She’d always felt overshadowed by her parents’ mutual admiration for each other—mutual except when they’d battled over her mother’s shopping. It wasn’t that she was jealous of her mother’s ability to wrap her father around her finger. It was that she knew she could never be the sort of sweet little woman her mother pretzeled herself into being for her father. If that was the kind of woman Charli needed to be for her father—or any man—to love her, she was doomed.

But Lainey was waiting expectantly for Charli’s reply. “I’m glad they’ve got each other,” she said. “Let me know when the Toradol has had time to work its magic, okay? I’m off to see—who am I off to see?”

“This one. A dad got his, er, backside stuck in a trash can that he was using for an impromptu toilet.”

“Huh?” Charli flipped open the chart and started reading. “Eww. Scout camping trip. Got a bottle opener?”

“What?” Lainey fished around in her desk drawer and came up with one.

“He’s created a vacuum, and I need to release it.”

“No. Not with my bottle opener.” Lainey held the gadget out of Charli’s reach.

“Come on. I’ll buy you another. We need the bed. The waiting room’s overflowing, right?”

Lainey hesitated. “A brand-spanking-new one. Tomorrow. In the package. So I know beyond a shadow of a doubt you didn’t wash this one.”

“And the receipt. That clinch the deal?” Charli yawned again, tired to the marrow of her bones.

“That’ll do it.”

Bottle opener in hand, Charli sailed off to uncork the scout leader.

* * *

A STARRY SKY. A beautiful, clear November night. Charli soaked in the silence of her car. No more hearing her name paged on the overhead. No more screaming patients. No more Knife Guy singing “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” No more telephone calls from her mother, begging her to send her father home.

No more father telling her she didn’t know anything because she didn’t know the “real world of rural medicine.”

I want to sleep forever. I don’t care if it’s just 8:00 p.m. I don’t care if I have office hours tomorrow morning. I’m going to bed and sleeping until next week. Thank goodness they finally sent in those wonderful, wonderful E.R. docs.

Charli turned on her street and saw a line of cars almost to the intersection. What? Traffic? On a side street in Brevis? Red taillights glowed in a long series, looking like Morse code as people tapped brakes and inched forward.

Charli rolled down her window and heard...Christmas carols? Yes, it was a way too cheerful “Winter Wonderland” being belted out of speakers.

She wasn’t the only one who had her window down. The car ahead of her had kids hanging out the back window, faces aglow with excitement. What on earth?

Behind her a horn blew. The driver was impatient, a trio of kids bouncing in the backseat. Well, he was no more impatient than she was. What were they looking at up ahead?

She inched around the curve, with her house in sight, and she saw what all the fuss was about. Her neighbor—whom she hadn’t met yet, but it was clearly high time to introduce herself—had enough Christmas lights to outshine an airstrip. And music. Loud music. “Winter Wonderland” had given way to “Frosty the Snowman.”

Good grief! Her bedroom window was on her neighbor’s end of the house. So much for sleep. It’s only the first of November. Why the Christmas lights?

Finally the car in front of her inched up enough that she could squeeze into her driveway. Just as she did, something tumbled off the roof next door—a reindeer whose nose went black as he dived into a somersault and headed straight toward her car. Charli hit the brakes and prepared for the thing to smash into a million pieces.

But instead, it bounced. She blinked. Yes. It bounced. It was an inflatable. A big huge hulking inflatable Rudolph that had landed between her car and her carport.

Charli got out. Rounded the front of the car. Tried to drag the deer, but found that it was way heavier than it appeared. She stood there, nonplussed, as Jimmy Durante sang about a button nose and two eyes made of coal.

“We’re gonna have to deflate it,” a voice came from behind her on the sidewalk, barely audible over Frosty. “With this arm, I’m never gonna be able to move Rudolph without letting the air out first.”

Charli turned around. There, in the glow of his Christmas lights, a sheepish grin on his face, his arm in the sling she’d carefully adjusted for him in the E.R., stood Neil Bailey.

CHAPTER TWO

THE GOOD DOCTOR looked mighty ticked, Neil decided. In fact, he could almost see a few choice words forming on Dr. Charlotte Prescott’s lips.

Gone was the tolerant, somewhat amused professional expression on her face from earlier in the evening. Now her mouth turned sharply down at the corners, her forehead furrowed, and her hands were at her hips.

He could tell the moment she recognized him from the hospital. Her lips parted, but no words came out. Her head, with that silky honey-colored hair that had mostly fallen from a straggly ponytail, shook a little, like a boxer dazed from one too many rounds.

She said something that Neil couldn’t understand over the strains of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” which he thought was apropos to the situation at hand. Maybe he did have the music turned up a little too loud. He stepped closer to her.

“What?” he asked.

“I said, you’re my neighbor? These were the Christmas lights you were talking about?” She swept a hand over the boxwood hedge, in the direction of his lights.

He couldn’t help but take in his efforts with pride. Even with the now-blank spot on his roof from Rudolph’s untimely high dive, the display looked good—still some tinkering to be done for the final polish, but he was proud of himself. “Yeah. Pretty cool, huh?”

Her expression shifted rapidly from bemusement to ire again. His response hadn’t been the right one, obviously. He held up his good hand and rushed to forestall whatever blistering comment she was about to deliver. “Look, the music goes off at eighty-thirty. I keep it on for the kids. And before you think this is all about me, I use the display to take up donations for Toys for Tots.”

On the street, a horn blasted, cutting through the cool night air. It encouraged a volley of horns to join in.

Charli’s frown deepened, maybe because of the added sound effects. She was visibly shivering now, as she stood without a coat, her arms wrapping around herself to keep her warm. “Let me get this straight. Every night, from now to Christmas, I can expect an electric dawn outside my bedroom window?” she asked. “And canned Christmas Muzak until eight-thirty? Not to mention a traffic jam? Every night? Tell me, am I your only neighbor who has a problem with this?”

He thought for moment, considering. Nah, Jill didn’t count, really. She was mainly ticked because Neil had monopolized Brinson’s available “honey-do” time the past few nights. “Pretty much, yeah. You’re the only one. I did this last year, and the guy who lived in your house, well, he tried to outdo me. That’s where I got Rudolph, by the way.” Neil jabbed a thumb toward the inflatable. “He had it on his—I mean, your—roof. When he moved to a condo on Tybee Island, he didn’t have a roost for Rudolph anymore.”

“Oh. Awesome.” She put her hand to her forehead as though she had the world’s worst headache. In the glow of the Christmas lights and the streetlights, Neil was surprised to see that the doctor’s nails were polished a nice melon color. He hadn’t noticed that in the E.R.

Another volley of horn blowing interrupted the music, and she winced again.

The move prompted a sudden thought. “Dr. Prescott. You didn’t hit your head or anything when you slammed on your brakes, did you?”

“No. Why do you ask? And you might as well call me Charli. When anybody in Brevis says Dr. Prescott, I think they’re talking to my dad.”

“Well, Charli, then. You look like your head’s hurting.”

“Gee. With all this music and all these lights and all those horns, not to mention no sleep for two weeks, I wonder why.” Her words dripped with sarcasm. She must have reconsidered her tone because she made a visible effort to soften her scowl. “I’m sorry. I’m really tired. Exhausted. I’m beyond exhausted. And all that’s been keeping me going today—tonight—is the idea that I could park my car, stumble inside and go to bed.”

“Sure, sure.” He nodded. “I guess you’re pretty wiped out—those E.R. hours must be killing you. I’m really sorry that Rudolph took a dive. It’s gonna take about an hour to deflate him....”

Charli’s face crumpled. She looked a lot like Neil’s four-year-old niece did when she’d gone without a nap and was late for bed.

“Tell you what,” Neil started. “Why don’t you leave me your keys, and go on inside? I’ll get Brinson over here. We’ll deflate ol’ Rudolph a little and move him at least out of your driveway. Maybe over closer to the hedge?” He pointed to the small stretch of lawn between the concrete drive and the boxwoods. “We’ll pull your car in, and tomorrow when it’s daylight, I’ll retrieve Rudolph.”

Charli appeared to be ready to argue for a moment. Maybe she was debating whether he had an honest face and could be trusted not to abscond with her car.

But then she shrugged her shoulders, went back to the idling car, switched it off, slammed the door and handed him the keys. “Sold. You wouldn’t sweeten the deal with a pair of room-darkening blinds, would you?”

From her weak smile, he saw it was an attempt at humor. “Sure, anything to keep a neighbor happy.”

But Charli wasn’t lingering. She skirted around Rudolph, who was swaying back and forth in the night’s cool breeze, and stumbled up the steps to her back door. In the blink of an eye, the doctor was out of sight.

With a sigh, Neil looked from the keys in his hand to Rudolph. Time was a-wasting, and Jill was only going to get madder the later he called Brinson to help him out of this jam. With that, Neil fumbled for the phone in his pocket to call in the cavalry.

* * *

CHARLI KEPT RUNNING out of wrap, and Neil Bailey wouldn’t hold still. Every time she’d get his arm splinted, he’d move or the spool of bandage would be inexplicably empty. Finally, she snapped at him, “Just what is your problem?”

And he grinned at her. “I’m taking up money for Toys for Tots, and I’ll ride Rudolph to deliver the cash.”

And there was Rudolph, nosing in behind her, his red nose blinking and buzzing—

No. She shook herself awake. It wasn’t Rudolph. It was her cell phone. What now? She pushed herself up out of her warm snuggly covers and saw—very clearly in the bright-as-daylight glow of her neighbor’s Christmas extravaganza—her phone buzzing away on her nightstand.

Caller ID registered the hospital’s number as she hit the answer button. “This better be good,” she griped into the speaker. The bedside clock told her she’d been asleep only a couple of hours.

“Charli.”

Lainey’s voice sounded all wrong. Somber.

“What is it?” Charli asked, already reaching for the slacks she’d dumped on the bench at the end of the bed. “I’m on my way, whatever it is. Knife Guy?”

“No...Charli, your dad...”

An icy chill shot through her. She froze on the bed. “What’s wrong?” She was surprised she could even verbalize the question, as scared as she was.

“He’s had an MI. At home. Your mom called 9-1-1, and the EMTs responded. They’re inbound. She’s with them and, well, Charli—from the way it sounds from the EMTs, you’d better come right away.”

* * *

NEIL WAS BUSILY rigging up a plastic bread bag over his bad arm in order to take a shower when first his front doorbell rang, long and loud, followed by someone doing a good impression of the Gestapo on the heavy oak.

He dropped the bread bag on the kitchen counter and made his way through the living room to the foyer. When he threw open the door, Charli Prescott nearly beaned him on the head, apparently ready to pound on the door again.

He caught her fist in his good hand. “Whoa! I’m here.” He released the pink-tipped fingers. For a long moment, all she could do was gulp in air. Maybe she was still ticked about his Christmas lights? He tried a smile to defuse the situation. “Can’t sleep?”

“My keys... I gave you my keys!” she got out.

“Yeah. I put them under the flower pot by your back door.”

“Oh! Sorry! I didn’t look there!” She whirled around, purse flying, no coat on despite temps hovering around a chilly forty degrees, and her hair even worse for wear than it had been earlier.

“Wait! What’s wrong?” Neil followed her as she stumbled down his steps and down the walkway.

“My dad! He’s had an MI—I’ve got to get to the hospital.” She wobbled unsteadily as she shouted this over her shoulder and backed past his Christmas lights.

“A what?”

“An MI... A heart attack.” As she turned to head for her own driveway, her purse got caught in Neil’s trio of wired angels by the front walk. She snatched at the strap, making the whole chorus of angels rock back and forth.

“Let me drive you. I have my keys, right here in my pocket.” Neil held them up and was gratified to see her extricate the strap from the offending angel’s halo without doing any damage and without falling herself. “My car’s here.”

Charli stopped again. Her expression revealed indecision. Neil could literally see her body jerking first one way and then the other.

So he didn’t wait for her reply. Instead, he dipped back into the little foyer, grabbed two jackets and shut the door behind him. He loped over the short distance between him and Charli and took her arm gently in his.

“Come on. Let’s get you to the hospital.” He steered her to his car and assisted her in with a fumbling one-handed approach, though she didn’t seem to notice. He wrapped the spare coat around her slim frame. She didn’t protest, just folded her long legs into his little Corolla and seemed to withdraw into herself.

Once he’d negotiated closing the door with his right hand, he started the car and backed carefully out of his drive. It seemed to trigger something in her. “I’m never like this,” she said. “I’m always cool in a crisis.”

“Hey. It’s your dad. You’re thinking like a daughter, not a doctor.” Gravel that had collected in the dip between the street and the drive crunched under his tires as he backed out onto the street and started for the hospital. “What happened? Do you know?”

She jerked her head in the negative. “Lainey—a nurse—”

“I know Lainey. She called?”

“After they got a call in from the EMTs. It’s bad.”

She would know. She’d probably handled lots of these in her work, Neil figured. At the stop sign, he hung a left and made the subsequent turns to the main road in town.

“Do you want to call your mother?” Neil asked her as they stopped for the last red light between their neighborhood and the hospital. “I didn’t think to ask if your mom needed a lift.”

In the crimson glow of the light, he could see Charli’s swallow. “Should I go back?” he asked.

“No. Lainey—Lainey said Mom was riding with the ambulance.”

The light turned green and he took his foot off the brake, trying not to gun it, but still going a little faster than the speed limit.

Charli seemed calmer now, but he could tell from her drawn face in the glow of the streetlights she was anxious.

“You said it was bad. How bad?”

“I don’t— What if he dies?” She put her hand to her face. “Listen to me. I don’t have any information. I’m just freaking out, and I tell my patients’ families to wait, to see, that we’re doing all we can. They’re doing all they can. They are. I know.”

Neil understood why she’d blurted out her what-if. Did he ever know that desperate thought. He’d never forget the night they’d taken his mother to the hospital. A terrified six-year-old, all he could think was, What if she dies? And she had died.

Now wasn’t the time to tell Charli that life was survivable, if far poorer, after the death of a parent. Honestly, there was never a time when anybody should say that, but Neil knew it for the truth it was. Instead, he reached over, squeezed her hand and said gently, “You are a doctor. You know way too much about, well, about everything medical. But I think you’ve just given yourself some excellent advice.”

The reminder of who she was seemed to fortify her. She straightened up and leaned against the gray fabric of the car seat. “Well, we don’t have enough information. We have to wait and see.”

“And we will. We will wait and see.” Now they were in the parking lot of the emergency room. The small, low 1960s building seemed perfectly preserved in the lights of the vapor lamps, but Neil knew that the morning sun would not be kind to it. It would reveal the overdue paint job, the scraggly bushes that the understaffed and overtaxed maintenance guys never got around to hedging. But for a town this size and this poor, simply keeping the doors open on a twenty-five-bed county-run hospital was an achievement. Across the street lay the town’s doctors’ offices—the offices where Dr. Chuck Prescott had spent much of his professional career.

Beyond Neil’s car, bathed in vapor lights and the Corolla’s headlight beams, lay the big circle with the H in it, ready for the helicopter that would certainly come for Chuck Prescott, to take him to a larger trauma hospital. If, that is, the E.R. could stabilize him.

Charli didn’t budge. For a moment, Neil let her sit there, collect herself. He saw the last vestiges of her earlier emotion hidden behind a mask that covered all the pain and fear and confusion.

“Okay. Let’s do this.” She flung herself out of the car and strode toward the hospital, back straight, head high. Even without the lab coat and the stethoscope, Charli looked every inch the doctor he’d seen earlier that evening.

Neil shook off his amazement. Scrambling to follow her, he caught up with her halfway to the entry. The doors whisked open in front of them, a belch of hospital air their greeting.

Lainey dashed toward them and wrapped Charli in a quick, tight embrace. “Charli, I am so sorry. He’s here, they’re working on him....”

For a moment, Neil saw Charli’s mask slip. “Who’s working on him?”

“Shafer—well, everybody, except me. They’re running the full code. Your dad...he didn’t have a DNR in place.”

Neil noticed Charli’s face blanch. “Where’s Mom?” she asked.

“Around here.... Come on.” Lainey guided her around the corner toward a private family room.

As soon as she saw the door, Charli balked. “Why...why there? That’s where we do notifications.”

“I had to. She needed some...space. You’ve got to be strong, Charli. She’s in a complete meltdown.”

Those pink-tipped fingers were by her sides, and Neil saw her try to stuff her fists into lab-coat pockets that weren’t there. She looked long and hard at Lainey and brushed past the nurse.

The door shut behind her with a soft thud. Neil stood there, unsure what to do.

“You didn’t want to go with her?” Lainey asked.

“Uh, no.” How could Neil explain that their acquaintance, such as it was, had existed for only a few hours.

“She might—”

Neil shook his head. “I’m her neighbor. I don’t really know her that well—and, see, she needs the time with her mom.”

“Oh. I thought you two knew each other.” Lainey shook her head. “It’s hard to remember that you haven’t always been here. I’ve known Charli all my life—we went to school together. We were best friends. I guess I thought you’d already talked to her. You know, to do an article on her for the paper.”

“I’d called, but her dad said to give her a bit—”

He shook his head. Any minute now, he expected Dr. Chuck Prescott to come blasting out of the double doors and tell them the patient was fine.

But the patient was Dr. Prescott. Who would fight to save the town’s hospital now? Who would keep the doors open on the little community clinic?

Lainey cast an anxious glance at the closed door. “Violet wouldn’t let go of him when they brought him in. We had to peel her off him. She kept saying that if he’d come home, he wouldn’t have gotten sick.”

Neil fiddled with the coat in his hands. “Maybe I should have gone in with her,” he murmured. “But I figured they needed their space.”

“You could peek in, see if Charli needs some help? You know how high-strung her mother is.” A noise behind them attracted Lainey’s attention to some people coming in the E.R.’s main doors. “I’ve got to—”

Neil waved her away. “Don’t worry. I’ll wait for her.” And as Lainey shot him a grateful look, for the second time that night, he dropped down into one of the E.R.’s uncomfortable chairs to wait. Despite Lainey’s suggestion, he didn’t think Charli would appreciate him intruding on her private moment.

* * *

CHARLI MARVELED AT the fragile quality her mom exuded. A petite woman who’d never come to more than midchest to Charli’s dad, Violet felt tiny and almost birdlike in Charli’s embrace.

There was nothing petite about Violet’s outflow of emotion, though. Sobs racked her mother’s slender shoulders, and Violet seemed mindless about the stained carpet as she knelt against an equally stained love seat. Charli understood all too well why Lainey had tucked her mom in the notification room.

“Mom, Mom...” Charli stroked her mother’s golden hair, the only thing she’d inherited from Violet. She was tall and gangly where her mother was petite. She had her father’s big hands, where her mother’s hands were barely big enough to wrap around a liter of soft drink. She was pragmatic and strived for a cool facade...and her mother?

“You have to save him, Charli! You have to!”

“They’re doing everything—” She halted before she tried that path again. “Tell me,” she said, trying her best to distract her mother and get her to focus on something besides her own emotions. “What happened?”

Her mother hiccupped, ignored the tissue Charli had extended her and wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her turquoise blue cashmere cardigan. “He was tired....” Here her mother shot her an accusatory glare. Charli chose to overlook it.

“So he came home tired?”

“Yes, and I asked him what he wanted to eat. I’d made him some supper, but of course he was late. And...he didn’t touch the coconut cake.” Violet drew her brows together. A spasm of guilt coursed through her features. “I don’t care if he’s late every night if he’ll just be okay!”

I’ll send him home early every day if he’ll just be okay. Charli’s mental bargain echoed not only her mother’s but every patient’s distraught family member she’d ever talked with. This is what they feel like. I thought I knew what they felt like, but I didn’t. I didn’t have a clue.

“He didn’t eat a thing...said his stomach felt iffy, some indigestion.” Violet blinked. “Oh, no. Indigestion. It was his heart all the time. Why didn’t I—” But she got nothing more out beyond a torrent of tears.

Charli gave up on soothing her mother. She dropped down on the floor and twisted to lean against the love seat. Beside her, her mother shook with grief and recrimination.

Thankfully, though, her mother ran out of steam a few moments later. She sniffled loudly. “They’re not telling us anything!”

“I could go and find out....” Charli hesitated. Should she leave her mother alone in the state she was in? “Why don’t we see if Lainey—”

Her mother was on her feet in an instant and headed for the door. “You go! They said I couldn’t see him, but they have to let you because you’re a doctor!”

Inexplicably Charli’s feet felt nailed to the ground. Did she want to see her father as sick and weak as she’d seen other patients?

Violet threw open the door to reveal Neil Bailey still in the waiting room. He’d sat down in a chair in front of the door. Now he and Charli stared at each other.

She was embarrassed that he’d caught sight of her on the floor, as though she’d collapsed from emotion. Scrambling to her feet, she joined her mother. “You’ll wait here?”

“I can’t take that room a minute longer,” Violet insisted. “The walls are closing in on me.”

Charli agreed, but still was uncertain what to do with her wreck of a mother. She craned her neck to find Lainey, but didn’t see her.

“Hey, if you like, Mrs. Prescott, you can wait here with me,” Neil offered.

Violet swooped through the door and dropped into the chair beside Neil. A flicker of irritation poked through the welter of Charli’s emotions. Why did her mother insist on latching on to men for support? She’d done it all her life with Charli’s father, and here she was now, already gripping Neil Bailey’s arm with her neat little hands and gazing up into the man’s face as though he were her knight in shining armor.

Honestly, her mother might as well have been a character off Madmen or a 1960s sitcom. Women’s Lib had completely passed her by.

No need to look a gift horse in the mouth, though. At least her mother was calmer with Neil than she had been with either Charli or Lainey. Charli shook off the irritation and murmured a thanks to Neil. Gathering her courage, she walked toward the doors to the E.R. treatment areas.

She heard it before she even got to the nurses’ station. It was a full code, expertly run, and she could predict the orders of the attending as he got feedback from each of his desperate attempts to restart her father’s heart.

“Clear—shock him again!” came the latest order.

“Rhythm still in v-fib!” a nurse called out.

“Come on! Come on, old man!” the doctor shouted. “Don’t you give up on me now! Another push of epi!”

“We’ve lost rhythm!”

Again with the defibrillator. Again with more meds. Again with more compressions. Again with no sustainable rhythm.

And over and over again, until the doctor choked out, “How long without a rhythm?”

Charli couldn’t hear the nurse’s answer.

The attending swore. In a quieter, more resigned voice, he said, “I’m calling it.”

Silence descended in the tiny E.R. Not even an errant beep from a monitor seemed to penetrate the quiet.

In the middle of that quiet came the doctor’s next words. “Time of death, uh, 11:31 p.m.”

Charli put her hand to her mouth and felt her knees give way as she crumpled to the cold tile floor.

CHAPTER THREE

CHARLI DRANK IN the silence of her car’s interior with guilty relief as she sat in her driveway. Nothing but the ticking of the cooling engine disturbed her. No chatter of helpful women, no well-meant condolences of her father’s friends, no bustle of people preparing food, or asking for the hundredth time if they could “fix you some little something, Charli? For heaven’s sake, you’ve got to eat!”

Charli had spent the horrible, horrible week following her father’s death at her mother’s—who’d had a houseful of her friends hovering over her the entire time.

Violet’s entourage had buzzed around Charli like a hive of bees, busy and industrious and trying to take care of her and her mother’s every need and whim. The incessant chatter had been just what her mother needed—but it was torture for Charli.

She’d escaped out the back door at a near-dead run, accepting the stack of Tupperware containers filled with goodies from one of her mother’s friends just so she wouldn’t be delayed by an argument. Charli hadn’t even had the courage to say goodbye to her mother. She’d go back. Later. She’d call. Later. But for now, she simply needed some quiet.

At that exact moment, Gene Autry started belting out “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Charli banged her head against knuckles that gripped the steering wheel. Neil and his blasted Christmas lights. All they did was remind her that this Christmas was going to be the absolute worst Christmas ever, in a long, long line of horrible Christmases in the Prescott family history.

That wasn’t entirely true. Neil’s Christmas lights reminded her of that. But Neil himself... He’d been so sweet. He’d hung right in there with her and her mom the night her dad had died. He’d come by her mom’s every day, and Charli was so grateful for the way he’d made her mom smile in those early moments.

At the funeral, Neil had waited patiently for the many, many people to greet them at the graveside. There, under the green tent the funeral home had provided, he’d gripped Charli’s hand in a tight comforting squeeze and assured her she could ask for anything she needed. The man had a kind heart—she could tell that.

So maybe if she walked through the gap in the hedge and asked him for this one night if he could forego the music...he might.

She hoisted herself out of the car on legs that still felt wobbly. As she approached the hedge, she saw Neil, his back to her, happily tinkering with a snowman’s lights, adjusting the display with his good hand.

She cleared her throat, but the music drowned out the sound. Somehow it seemed too intimate to watch him without him knowing of her presence as he fiddled with the lights, completely engrossed in his task. His attention to detail rivaled some of the surgeons she’d trained under, and he could have no greater focus to his task than her favorite chief resident.

“Neil?”

The name got his attention. He turned around. A smile lit up his face and warmed her, despite the raucous rendition of “Rudolph” in the background. “Hey! You’re home! How’s your mom?”

“She’s—she’s okay.” Charli’s throat closed up on her as she thought about her mom and how much she’d loved her dad. All her mom had ever wanted was to make her dad happy. And now the main purpose of Violet Prescott’s life was gone.

Neil crossed the lawn to where she was. He stood there, smiling, his eyes full of energy and merriment that the music seemed to fuel. Suddenly Charli thought it way too much to ask him to cut off the Christmas carols—would he think she was some sort of Scrooge? And he got so much joy out of the display.... Would she get that amount of joy out of anything ever again?

“I’ve got some hot cocoa if you’d like,” Neil offered. “Or I could scare up an omelet.”

She shook her head. “No, no, thank you. My mom’s friends have all conspired to make sure I don’t starve to death for the next century. I’ve got a carload of Tupperware filled with food.”

“Oh, okay. Yeah, every time I went to visit, it was always packed with people—the funeral home, your mom’s house....”

Charli felt tears burn her eyes. She turned her head, embarrassed that a week after that awful night, she still had to be on guard against her emotions. She was a doctor. She couldn’t be falling apart every minute of every day.

Neil touched her sleeve. “I—I’m sorry.”

For a horrifying moment, she thought she wasn’t going to be able to keep back the tears. His voice was so kind, so gentle, as if he understood exactly the depth of the pain she was going through. She was certain that if she looked Neil straight in the face, she’d surely lose it.

But the will that had gotten her through medical school and the grueling years of residency saved her. She swallowed it all down and promised herself a good cry later when she was alone.

“I—I have a silly favor to ask,” she said when she was able to face him again.

“Sure, anything,” Neil told her.

“Could—just for tonight—could you go without the music? I—I can’t explain it....”

Neil didn’t hesitate. He walked over to a weatherproof box she hadn’t seen before and killed the music. He turned around, palms ups, and said, “That better?”

Charli had been prepared to argue and debate and prove her point—something she had many years of experience doing first with her dad and then with every single one of the professors and doctors who’d trained her. To have a guy not question her, but just give her the thing she asked for, was almost too much. She felt her composure begin to falter.

Neil must have seen something on her face, because he closed the gap between them and steered her to the front porch steps. She sat there, staring at his awful decorations, unsure what she might say that would end the silence but not reveal what was on her mind.

Before she could figure that out, her phone buzzed.

She fished it out of her pocket and glanced at the screen. “My mom,” she said apologetically, and answered it.

“Charli!” her mom exclaimed in greeting. “Honey, where did you go?”

“I—I had to have some air, Mom. I just needed to be alone. I’m sorry. I’ll come back.” The thought of being in that hive of activity nearly undid Charli.

“No, no, don’t come back for me...but, honey, you don’t need to be alone. You need people, people who care about you. Right now, the thing that will do you the most good is— Oh, thank you, Ellen, thank you for the tea. Charli, the thing that will help is to be around people.”

Charli knew her mom meant well, but this was a meeting of the minds that would never happen. It was the same vast chasm of difference that had made her mom think ruffles and lace would suit Charli, when in reality, all Charli had wanted to do was pull on a T-shirt and jeans and tag along with her dad. How could Charli explain to her mother that being among people was the thing she could stand least right now?

It wouldn’t happen. Charli knew that. “I am around people, Mom,” Charli told her. She glanced at the man who sat quietly beside her, looking off into the distance and pretending not to listen. He actually made a move to get up and give her privacy—score more points for him—but she laid a hand on his arm. “I’m with my neighbor, Neil Bailey.”

“Oh!” Her mother’s tone slid from its prior worry straight to relief and delight. “Oh, Charli! That’s good. That’s very good. I should have known you’d need some companionship your own age. And Neil is so nice and so handsome, too.”

Charli couldn’t help but blush at her mother’s words. She knew where this was heading. She tried to cut her off, afraid Neil might overhear her mother’s effusiveness.

“Mom, it’s not like that—”

“He was just too kind! And did you see that beautiful write-up in the paper about your father? Neil did a fine job. Will you tell him that? And tell him to come by and visit me, so I can thank him properly. Oh, Charli! You couldn’t have found a finer gentleman.”

“Mom, I don’t need that sort of—”

“Oh, nonsense! Every woman needs a good man. That’s what we are made for. I had your father.” Here, her mother’s voice sounded choked. “For all these years, he stood by me, when I was so— He could have left me. And he didn’t. All the misery I caused him.”

“Mom...” Charli didn’t need to hear her mother’s regret play out again. She didn’t need to be reminded of her mother’s battles with her shopping addictions.

Her mother, though, pulled out of her sharp dive into moroseness. “You stay. Charli, stay right there. And get to know that young man. Your father would approve.”

And with that, her mother hung up, leaving Charli feeling churlishly contrary, not wanting to do anything that lined up with fitting her parents’ cookie-cutter plans for her. But that, she knew, was childish. Besides, Neil wasn’t anything more than a neighbor, a good guy who’d helped her out in a really rough patch—and one who had extremely tacky taste when it came to Christmas decorations.

Charli dropped the phone into her pocket and rolled her shoulders to ease the tension in them. Beside her, Neil still waited with a patient quiet that seemed restful after her mother’s energy.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

“Yeah. I ducked out without saying bye to my mother—my mom has a whole entourage attending her, and I just needed a breather.”

“She has friends from everywhere, doesn’t she?” Neil mused. “Even some ladies from Macon came down. Old college roommates, I guess, right?”

Charli bit her lip. She knew the ladies Neil had referred to. They were members of her mother’s compulsive-shopper support group. She’d been glad they’d made the trip down for her mom, but it did lead to questions Charli wasn’t quite sure how to answer.

“Something like that. They’ve been friends for a long time,” Charli told him, hating that she was lying. To change the subject, she asked, “So how did you get started with all these Christmas decorations?”

Neil seemed taken aback by the lightning-quick subject change. “Oh, well. That polar bear over there was my first one. Saw it at a big-box hardware store and I swear the rascal was so cute I couldn’t leave him there. Got him on sale, too.”

“One little polar bear? Led to all this? Remind me not to put up so much as a Christmas light. I might catch your Christmas spirit.”

“I don’t think it’s contagious, not so much, anyway, without years of exposure. My family has always made a big deal out of Christmas, so I had a lot of encouragement. My mom loved Christmas.” Here, Neil’s words were husky and she noticed his jaw worked a little.

“Your mom...”

“I lost her a long time ago. When I was six. But she always decorated for Christmas—all the lights, all the mistletoe and the popcorn garland. I still smell popcorn and think of her stringing together garland for the tree.”

“Oh, that’s sweet.” Charli swallowed past the lump in her throat. He’d lost his mom so young and still his grief was almost palpable. Whoever said time healed all things was just full of it. She’d never be able to think of the holidays without remembering how she’d lost her dad so close to them.

Neil cleared his throat. “Yeah, well, that’s why I love Christmas. And when I moved here, people just seemed to urge me on.”

“Well, you’re decorating enough for the two of us, so forgive me if I skip Christmas,” she said.

Neil cocked his head and pinned her with a look. “You mean to tell me you don’t plan to put up a single Christmas decoration this year?”

“Nope. Not even a wreath.” It wasn’t really a big stretch, actually. Christmas in the past for Charli had meant huge blow-up fights between her mom and dad over her mom’s secret shopping sprees. Her mom had just wanted to get the perfect gifts for her family, while her dad had simply wanted to stay in the black and out of debt. And then college and medical school and residency had meant Charli had spent the holidays apart from her parents the past few years.

“Come on! Your dad loved Christmas! You can’t skip it!”

She whipped her head around to look at Neil. She wasn’t one to lay out dirty laundry for people. She tried to speak to the truth of her memories without putting in all the details. “My dad? Christmas was just another day for him. I mean, we opened presents, sure, went to the Christmas cantata most years, but Christmas Eve and Christmas morning he spent at the hospital mostly, with patients. I know. I was with him a lot of the time.”

Neil’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “That’s not the guy I got to know. He’s one of the main people who suggested I use my display to raise money for charity. And he was the Christmas parade grand marshal for two years running, plus he served on the Christmas downtown celebration committee. Are you sure we’re talking about the same guy?”

Charli wasn’t. But it irked her that Neil had known a different side of the man she’d thought she’d known inside out. “He always—well, he always said he could take it or leave it,” she said.

Neil shook his head and reached over to tweak an errant light into place from where he sat on the steps. “That’s amazing. Your mom and dad were a force to be reckoned with around the holidays—your mom was a fixture on the Christmas tour of homes. Yeah, maybe their decorations weren’t as—shall we say—dime-store tacky as mine, but they went all out. Your dad even beat me out on the Christmas lights competition last year.”

Charli couldn’t reconcile what she was hearing with the dad she’d known and loved, despite his flaws. She couldn’t help but mutter, “I’ve been gone so long...maybe I didn’t know him at all.”

Neil sprang up and stretched out his arm. “Then let me introduce you to him, the man your father became.”

She hesitated, then placed her hand in his. It was a nice hand, with just the right grip—warm and comforting and sure of itself. Part of her wanted to yank free and run for her house, because she didn’t want to contemplate how she could have missed knowing one thing about her dad. But his hand in hers seemed to reassure her. That, and her curiosity, got the better of her.

“Okay.”

Five minutes later, Neil had parked on the downtown square. “Ready to commence the walking tour?”

On the sidewalk, a brisk wind tugged at Charli’s hair, but her jacket kept her warm in the darkening evening. Neil strolled beside her, in no hurry. As they went, he pointed out various buildings and causes and people that her father had championed. It was a revelation to Charli—she’d known of his fight to keep the hospital, but she’d had no idea he’d worked to revitalize the downtown area or to assist the Boys and Girls Club, or that he’d served on the permanent homes for foster children board.

“No wonder he had a heart attack,” she said as she and Neil came to a stop on a street corner. “He worked himself to death.”

“Oh, no, you don’t think that, do you?” Neil peered at her. “Nah, I didn’t think so. It seemed to energize him, actually. And he’d recently taken on a new project.”

“Yeah? When did he have time?”

“Come on. You’ll like this.” He started off down the sidewalk toward the rougher side of town.

She hesitated. “Neil...things may have changed a lot, but the direction you’re heading in used to be a hotbed of drug sales.”

“It’s okay. It’s cleaned up now—at least a little. Thanks to Dr. Prescott.”

A five-minute walk brought them in front of a new metal building with big glass windows, the lights on and the paved parking lot still dark with crisp yellow lines. The parking lot was overflowing with cars of every shape and size, none of them any newer than a decade. On the building’s metal exterior were simple block letters: Brevis Community Clinic, and underneath, in Spanish, Clínica de la Comunidad.

“Huh?” Charli gawked at the building. “What is this? Why isn’t it near the hospital and the rest of the doctors’ offices?”

“Let’s just say the hospital authority didn’t welcome this addition to the Brevis medical community,” Neil said. “But your dad saw the need for a community clinic. He said that a lot of people were uninsured and couldn’t afford or wouldn’t go to a regular doctor. But they’d come here. He really fought for this place.”

A group of people came out of the building, walking down the painted concrete block steps, talking excitedly in Spanish. Another car door opened and more Hispanic people headed for the clinic door.

“It’s an indigent care clinic? For migrant workers?” she asked. She couldn’t wrap her head around the idea that her father, who’d been so opposed to the migrant workers flocking here when she was a girl, would fight for a community clinic.

Neil smiled. “Yeah—well, of course it’s open to anybody, and a lot of the community’s uninsured use it. But mainly it’s used by the migrant workers. Your dad volunteered as the medical director, but a doctor who comes in a couple of days a week and a couple of nurse practitioners provide most of the care. At least, I think so.”

“Wow. I—I—” She turned to Neil, grabbed his good hand and squeezed it. “Thank you. Thank you. I have to admit, the man you’ve described isn’t one I would have recognized...but he sounds like a great guy.”

“He was. And he must have been with you, too, because...well, you turned out pretty terrific. I’m just sorry that he didn’t get the chance to show you all this. I’ll bet he would have—if he hadn’t been battling the E.R. staffing problem,” Neil told her.

Charli wasn’t so sure. Granted, she hadn’t been home much in the past seven years, but she and her dad had spent time together. Never once had he mentioned any of these things that Neil had shown her. Of course, a lot of that time her dad had spent trying to talk her out of pursuing an M.D., and talk her into getting married—to have some babies and be happy—all the things that she didn’t want to do.

Maybe they’d just spent too much time arguing without ever truly understanding each other.

“So...now you see,” Neil said, interrupting her thoughts. “Your dad loved Christmas—you’ve got to at least let me help you put up a tree and hang a wreath.”

Perhaps it was because she was flat-out jealous that Neil had seen a side of her father she hadn’t known, or maybe Charli simply wasn’t ready to be rushed into anything. Whatever the reason, Neil’s emphatic “got to” grated on her nerves.

“No,” Charli retorted, “I don’t. And I don’t appreciate you trying to guilt me into it. Why can’t you just live and let live?”

Neil put up his hands. “You’re absolutely right. I just thought it might make you feel better.”

“Everybody from my mother on down seems to think they know what’s best for me, including you. I can’t turn around without someone suggesting another way to move on with my life. Well, maybe I don’t want to move on just yet! And maybe seeing a tree in my living room would just make me miss my father even more!” Charli knew the words weren’t fair, but they came tumbling out, anyway.

“Whoa.” A muscle in Neil’s jaw worked. She could see he was angry—or at least trying to bite his tongue. Very carefully, he said, “I lost my mom right before Christmas. So I understand what you’re going through. I know how afraid you are about forgetting your dad, about how guilty you feel—”

“I don’t have anything to feel guilty about,” she snapped. “Not a thing.” It was a lie, a big one. She did feel guilty, horribly, horribly guilty, especially now that Neil had shown her the father she’d never get the chance to know. Still, she wasn’t about to let Neil Bailey know it. “And I think I want you to take me home now.”

CHAPTER FOUR

CHARLI SAW LIGE WHITAKER, the bank president who also served as the hospital authority board chair, come out of his office when she approached the bank’s customer service desk. Today he was in banker’s garb, but usually, even to the hospital authority board meetings, he wore jeans and a flannel shirt.

“Charli, how’s your mama? Neil called me, wanted a quote for the paper. I hope I did all right.”

Charli couldn’t help but frown at the mention of her neighbor. The night before was still bothering her. She was angry at herself for the way she’d acted, but she still felt a little resentful toward Neil. She pushed down her emotions and smiled at her father’s old friend.

Lige was thin to the point of boniness, about the same age as her father. Where her father had put on a little weight—all those coconut cakes, after all—Lige had kept the rangy build he’d had as a young man. “Thank you,” she said to him. “You said just the right thing. My mother was so grateful. You and my dad made a great team.”

Lige waved away the comment. His rural twang seemed so out of place for a bank president, but Lige had always prided himself on being just another fellow. “Darlin’, last week, you saw me at my worst, tryin’ to deal with that staffing situation in the E.R. I hope that didn’t contribute to...well, to the heart attack. All the stress, I mean. Your father’s a hard man to lose. He helped me keep this hospital here when I didn’t think it was possible.”

The smile on his lips was matched by his bright blue eyes, but she could see his jaw tense. He changed the subject. “What can we do for you? Do you need another loan against the practice? Your dad had just paid the last one off. I can understand if things are tight. Your father never was, bless his heart, much of a businessman. He was always way too generous with his skills and talents.”

“No, no, we’re good,” Charli assured him. “I think, anyway. He had just enough life insurance to pay off their house and buy an annuity for Mom. To tell you the truth, I haven’t really dug into the practice’s books yet. But I’m sure we’ll be fine. I’m not looking to add any debt to my student loans. No, what I came in here for was to access the safe deposit box. Jed Cannady—he’s the lawyer who’s helping us with probate—suggested I come and check it out.”

“Well! That’s all? My gracious. Such a little thing.” He didn’t take his eyes off her, but snapped his fingers. “Nora! Charli here needs to get into her safe deposit box. Why don’t you help her with that, all right?”

Nora Evers, who’d been at the bank since Charli was a little girl, scurried up to her, obedient as any dog Lige might own. She darted her eyes toward her boss, then at Charli. “Why, sure, why don’t you come with me?”

Alone, the woman greeted her with genuine sympathy. Several other bank staffers took a moment to share their condolences. Apparently, like practically everywhere else in town, her dad had them thoroughly charmed. He could do that. He might have been arrogant and peremptory at times with his family and with many of his patients, but he always won them back with his charm.

“Jed brought over a letter of testamentary this morning since you weren’t a signatory on the box,” Nora told her. “As the executor of estate, he authorized you as the signatory, but of course he’ll have access, too. You inherited the practice, so he figured the box had to do with it. It was part of your dad’s business account. You have the keys?”

“Yes, Jed had a spare one, just in case.”

She guided Charli to the safe deposit area, negotiated the whole business of the keys and manhandling the box to a carrel and said, “Now, just let me know if I can help you.”

With that, she left Charli alone with the closed box.

For a long while, Charli wasn’t sure she was going to have the courage to open it. Did it really need to be opened right now? The only sound in the little room was the insistent buzzing of the fluorescent light fixture above her. Everything else seemed muted by the thick carpeting and the rows and rows of safe deposit boxes behind her. A portrait of one of the bank’s founding fathers—one of Lige’s kin, she knew—glowered down at her.

Looking at the box, Charli couldn’t think what it might contain. The will had been with Jed, as were all her dad’s important papers. If her dad had felt the need to give a key to Jed for safekeeping, maybe the box contained something important.

Jed said the box might have computer backups or something else I need for the practice, she told herself. Or maybe it’s empty.

Her hand felt heavy as she flipped back the lid to reveal the interior jammed tight with a creased manila envelope.

It was mustard yellow, worn at the corners, having long ago lost its crispness. Charli had to tug at it to pull it free from the confines of the box. The envelope itself had some heft to it. On the back, she could see that her father had several times taped the envelope with his initials scrawled across the tape.

Her heart twisted at the sight of his familiar handwriting. She’d seen those initials many times, and seeing them again made her realize afresh she’d never stand beside him again while he scratched out patient notes.

What could be so important that her dad would want to be sure no one else had opened this envelope? Charli worked a finger under an edge of the tape and pulled it free.

When she turned the manila envelope upside down, thick packets of cash tumbled out.

Ten bundles of hundreds, with bands saying ten thousand dollars on them, landed in a heap on the highly polished wood of the bank table, along with another couple of bundles of fifties and three bundles of twenties, one of them simply rubber-banded.

A hundred grand, easy. In cash.

Charli’s mind did the calculations but couldn’t process the answer to the bigger question.

Where on earth had her father got a hundred thousand dollars in cash? And why was it stuck in a safe deposit box?

* * *

ON HIS DAILY WALK to the bank, Neil spied Charli huddled on a downtown bench and did a double take. Though the day was deceptively warm for the season, Charli hunched over as though a stiff north wind was cutting through her.

She looks plain miserable.

Maybe she’d rebuff his attempts to help her like she had the night before, but he couldn’t stand to see someone in the depths of so much grief.

Neil eased down beside her on the bench. For a moment, Charli didn’t even notice him. Then she did. He could see emotions swamp her face and felt like a foolish optimist that he could detect the flash of pleasure that disappeared in the wake of irritation and grief.

“Is this an attempt to be alone again? Am I horning in?” he asked.

She shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t think I can be alone in this town. But it’s a free country.”

It wasn’t the enthusiastic welcome he might have hoped for, but at least she didn’t tell him to beat it. He pressed his luck and remained beside her.

“Want to talk about it?”

He’d tried to keep his voice neutral, like he’d remembered his aunt and his father had done with him in the days following his mother’s death. It had been hard for him to open up. He’d blamed himself because she’d been killed in a car wreck while on a run for Christmas goodie bags for his first-grade class.

It had taken weeks for his aunt to dig that little tidbit out of him, but when she’d folded him in her arms and assured him that it wasn’t his fault, his healing had really begun.

Now he saw Charli’s lower lip quiver. Tears welled up in her eyes. She lifted her chin and managed to school her face into submission. He didn’t dare reach for her hand, though that seemed to be the thing that would have helped him the most. He just waited.

His wait paid off. In a halting voice, she said, “I don’t think I really knew my dad at all.”

“Because of what...what I showed you last night?”

She started to shake her head, but stopped. “I guess.”

Neil didn’t believe her—not totally. Charli had been angry with him last night, but only after she thought he’d been bossing her around. Maybe he had—or at least he could see how she could take it that way. Before that, she had been awestruck, not sad, about her father.

No, Neil was certain her confession had to do with something else.

He wasn’t quite sure what to say. “I guess it is kind of confusing to have one idea of who your father is while other people knew a different side. If it makes a difference, he was really proud of you,” Neil said. “He was excited that you were joining his practice.”

Her face lit up. “Was he? Really? I mean, I know he told me, but I figured it was—” Charli broke off.

“Yeah. Really. He’d already had me promise to do a big feature on you. That sort of got derailed with your upside-down schedule when you first got here. I wish you could have heard the way he talked about you. I was kind of intimidated—figured you’d be a spoiled-brat arrogant doctor with her nose up in the air after all that advance billing.”

“Hopefully—aside from last night—I haven’t lived up to that, huh?” she said, not looking at him.

“No. I like you. I like the way you stood up for me that night in the E.R. Your dad could be, well, hard to sway once he got his mind fixed about something.”

Charli’s laugh was rueful. “I had a lot of practice standing up to him. He didn’t want me to be a doctor. Did you know that?”

“He told me that. He said he’d tried to talk you out of the medical field altogether—said you got so mad with him you refused to let him pay for medical school.”

“Ah, yes. And I have a huge mountain of student loans to show for my stubbornness. He offered to help me out, but he really wasn’t in a position—” Her openness came to an abrupt stop, with her mouth clamping shut to bite off her words.

Neil took the hint and didn’t press her. “I just paid off my last student loan. I can’t imagine what yours must be like.”

“A nightmare. But it’s doable. After all, I had something handed to me that few family practice newbies get—Dad left me his practice.” Her shoulders slumped at her last words, and Neil speculated the reality of such a bittersweet gift was hard to accept.

“But you’d rather have your dad.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I would.”

“Well, his patients will love you, just like they loved him—and he loved them.”

Charli nodded, doubt furrowing her brow. “Maybe. It’s all changed. I’ve been gone too long. I can’t remember everybody.”

“Well, it just so happens I have the cure for that,” he told her. “Your mom called me earlier today to thank me for my article about your dad, and we were talking about everything your dad was involved in. She reminded me about how he always participated in the community Christmas cantata, and she suggested I invite you to fill his place. I know, I know, she said you’re an alto and certainly not the tenor he was, but you know what I mean. They’d be thrilled to have you. We start rehearsals tonight.”

Charli put a hand to her face. “Oh,” she said, the word a groan. “My mother.”

“What? Did I make a hash of things? Did I get it wrong?” Neil asked. “She said you’d participated when you were in high school and really enjoyed it.”

Charli groaned again. “Neil, let’s face it. I’m just so not ready for anything to do with Christmas. I know you’re the holiday’s biggest cheerleader, but...I just...I just can’t.” Her voice broke. “My mother is trying to get you to babysit me, and I don’t need babysitting. Honestly. I need to be working.” She sprang up from the seat. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’ve got a lot on my plate now. Okay?”

With that, Charli took off down the sidewalk, her businesslike stride full of purpose and showing none of the vulnerability he’d witnessed just a few moments before.

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