FROM HOUSECALLS TO HUSBAND Page 4

  He didn't want his standing "enhanced." He didn't want to live on a golf course. He didn't want a trophy wife. Most of all, he didn't want his life "managed" by a woman who didn't care about him so much as she did being the wife of a "rich" doctor. She'd wanted the right house, the right car, membership in the right clubs, the right clothes. She'd said she was entitled to it all, because she'd spent the two years of their marriage supporting him. Emotionally, anyway. His parents had paid for his schooling, and he and Maria had paid their living expenses equally, so it wasn't as if she could claim any financial obligation on his part. To add insult to injury, she hadn't wanted to start their family as they'd planned, either.

  It had taken two months from the time they'd moved to Honeygrove for all her little plans to come out, two months for him to realize that, from the day they'd married, she'd simply been biding her time.

  He turned from the window, from the ghostlike reflection of himself. He didn't know why he was thinking of this tonight. When the divorce had become final last spring, he'd felt relief more than anything else. He hadn't felt any bitterness or pain, either, which had left him wondering if he'd ever loved her at all. It had made him wonder, too, if he really wanted the wife and the kids and the dog. Maybe he didn't need the comforts of a home. As he stood watching the rain, the steam from his mug fogging a streak on the window, he wondered if maybe that was why he didn't care that his house echoed when he walked through it.

  The thought settled like a hollow weight in his gut. He didn't like the empty feeling at all. So, he did what he always did when he needed to disassociate himself from something that held the potential to cause discomfort, or to hurt. He pulled back from it, mentally blocking the sensation by focusing objectively on the matter at hand. And, objectively, he knew he wouldn't be thinking of any of this if Katie hadn't originally brought it up. He also knew he needed sleep, and that was his priority at the moment. He was on call for the next five days, so he had to round on all the office's patients, not just his own. Given that one of his colleagues was out with a cold, it could well be one of those weeks.

  The week started off badly for Katie, and went downhill from there.

  She walked into work the next morning to find the floor short-staffed from a flu bug making the rounds, and every bed filled. There wasn't any staff to float from other units, either, and only one aide was available through an outside service. The bug had been around for a while, and hospitals as far away as Portland and Medford were using up all the temporary help.

  The whims of fate being truly perverse, while everyone was running around doing double duty, a staff meeting was called for the next afternoon to explain that the computer program was being changed—just as the old new one had finally got up and running. But administration wasn't the only area being unreasonable. Her patients seemed more demanding than usual, too. So did their relatives. Which meant that Katie, who was fighting off a sore throat herself, had to utilize all her skills as psychologist, facilitator and counselor.

  As the week went on, stress levels rose. Patience was tested. Dr. Aniston was his usual charming self, which didn't help matters at all, and the nurses, especially the temporaries they did manage to get, balked continually at having to collect extra data each time they administered Mike's study drug when they were barely able to keep up as it was. Rather than having a year's worth of Mike's work skewed, Katie collected most of it herself. On top of that she had a flat tire on the way home from work Wednesday night. On Thursday, her throat was worse and she wound up on an antibiotic so she wouldn't pass anything on to her patients. And Saturday morning, already late because she'd overslept, the hot water handle on her shower broke.

  I can do this. Katie repeated the phrase to herself so many times that week that she began to think of it as her personal mantra. She could handle it all simply because it wasn't acceptable to admit that she couldn't. She would cut corners where her own needs were concerned, but she refused to shortchange anyone else. If anyone was counting on her for anything, she would be there.

  That was why she didn't call in sick when no one would have blamed her for doing just that. And it was why she dragged herself to her shift at the free clinic when what she really wanted to do was crawl into bed and sleep for a week. She wasn't a martyr. Far from it. It was just that the thought of letting someone down was anathema to her. She wasn't the only nurse at Honeygrove Memorial who was pulling double shifts when she didn't feel all that great. And the clinic operated with only one nurse and one nurse practitioner or doctor each shift. If she didn't show up when she was scheduled, that left one person to handle an entire evening's worth of indigent patients alone. She knew exactly what it was like to expect someone to be there and not have them show. She knew, too, what it was like to make plans, to count on someone, then have to deal with the inconvenience or the disappointment because one person didn't do what he'd said he would. She simply wouldn't do that to anyone.

  Still, the thought crept into her mind every evening that she really wouldn't mind coming home to someone who would put his strong, supportive arms around her while she talked out her frustrations. Or they talked out his. Or they just held each other while nothing was said at all. But she had no one like that, had no prospect of anyone like that, and the last thing she needed was to dwell on what she lacked.

  What she did have were friends. Terrific ones. And it would have helped enormously if she'd been able to unload on them. Not on Mike, however. Aside from the fact that he'd been pressed for time himself the past several days, being a guy, he wouldn't have understood the need for a pair of strong, capable, protective arms to curl up in. Her girlfriends would have certainly related, though. Especially Dana and Lee. Dana Rowan and Lee Murphy, both signers of the now infamous I-will-never-marry-a-doctor pact, were like sisters. The three of them had known each other since ninth grade and, being similarly unattached, would have offered the proper amounts of understanding, sympathy and commiseration. Both worked little more than a stone's throw away. Dana was a surgical nurse. Lee was a nurse practitioner in the outpatient clinic.

  With all three of them working in the same building, large and sprawling as it was, it should have been easy for them to get together. It rarely worked that way. Katie couldn't even get away for lunch until the following Monday, and then she had to cancel at the last minute because one of her patients wasn't doing well. She learned from a quick call down to Dana that Lee had canceled, too. The doctor Lee worked for was being his usual impossible self and she couldn't get away, either.

  Hours later, reminding herself to try again tomorrow, Katie let herself into her duplex after working her sixth, twelve-hour day in a row. Within five minutes, she'd given Spike his obligatory cuddle, while the fifteen pounds of vibrating fur checked her pockets for treats, traded scrubs for sweats, washed off her makeup and pulled her hair into a ponytail. She was just preparing to see what dietary delight awaited her in her freezer when she remembered the kitty litter and cat food she'd picked up on her way home and left in her car.

  Thinking she might as well get it before Spike started getting vocal about being fed, she opened the door to slip out. The cat was right behind her. In a split second, he was between her feet and darting for the twenty-foot pine tree ten feet away.

  "Spike! No!" she hollered, and watched him disappear up the trunk.

  She couldn't get him down. She coaxed. She cajoled. She tried bribing him with cat food and tuna and a leaf from the fern he loved to destroy when she wasn't around. He didn't budge. He simply sat clinging to a three-inch branch fifteen feet up with his tail wrapped around the orange and black spots on his little white body and a look of abject terror in his eyes. He was a house cat, pure and simple. He might have developed a sudden yen for the great outdoors, but once he got there, he was petrified.

  Tired, running out of patience, she coaxed some more. She begged. She told him she was going to wring his furry little neck.

  Nothing worked. And the more she tried, t
he more she realized her throat was tightening up and her eyes were beginning to sting. It was fatigue, she knew. It simply had to be fatigue that was making her stand shivering in the dark wanting to cry because she couldn't get her cat to come to her.

  She already knew she couldn't climb the tree herself. She'd tried it the last time the little monster had done this and she'd nearly broken her neck. The couple who lived next door to her were sweethearts, but they were pushing seventy and in no position to offer help. What she needed was a ladder. A big ladder. And the only person she could think to call was Mike.

  * * *

  Chapter Three

  « ^ »

  "You're lucky you caught me. Two more minutes and I'd have been out the door."

  "You weren't on your way to the hospital, were you?"

  "Dinner."

  "Oh, Mike. I'm sorry."

  Muscles shifting under his sweater and jacket, Mike told her not to worry about it and lifted the extension ladder from the ski rack on his black sedan. As anxious as she'd sounded on the phone, he hadn't had the heart to tell her he was already running late. "I begged an extra half an hour. I figured that would give me time for a rescue on my way to the restaurant."

  He considered it a fair indication of how concerned she was about her cat that she had no comeback for his faint sarcasm. As she hurried beside him, her breath a puff of vapor in the cool night air, she carried her worry in her eyes. At work, she couched her concerns with professional calm. When it came to friends and family—which she considered her cat to be—she wore every emotion on her sleeve.

  "I really appreciate this," she murmured, casting a troubled glance toward the top of the pine. "I really do. I just didn't know who else to call."

  "Ever consider the fire department? That's who most people call when their schizophrenic pet gets stuck in a high place."

  The look she spared him was laced with tolerance. "Spike's not schizophrenic. He's just a little … hyper. And I couldn't call the fire department," she informed him ever so reasonably. "Not looking like this."

  In the merging pools of light from her porch, her carport and the streetlamp on the corner, he watched her push back a long, soft-looking curl that had escaped the tangle of hair anchored atop her head.

  "What does how you look have to do with anything?"

  "Are you kidding?" Incredulity washed fatigue and worry from her face. "I don't have a scrap of makeup on. My hair's a mess. And nobody but Spike sees me in these sweats." Tugging on the stretched-out neckline of her faded gray sweatshirt, she pulled it back over her shoulder. "Some of those guys are major hunks. What if the man of my dreams was one of them? I'd be mortified if he saw me looking this awful."

  For a moment, Mike said nothing. He just stood with the ladder on his shoulder, wondering if he should be insulted. Since it was obviously all right for him to see her as she was, he'd apparently been lumped into the same category as her psycho cat.

  Personally, he didn't think she looked so bad. Granted, the old sweats were so loose that a person really couldn't tell how shapely she was. And she did look considerably less polished without makeup and her hair pulled into that high, slightly listing ponytail. But there was an intriguing lack of artifice to her freshly scrubbed face, and a gamine quality about the baggy clothes that was kind of sexy in its own way. Especially with the stretched-out neckline sliding off her shoulder again. It kind of made a guy want to discover just how soft she was under that concealing material. Especially since he already knew she had a great little body. She was curvy and feminine, not sinewy and hard the way some of the women at the gym looked. A man would feel as if he were making love to a marble statue with some of them. But with Katie, he'd know he was holding a woman.

  He was wondering if she was wearing a bra, suspecting she wasn't, when he felt a tightening low in his gut. Reminding himself this was Katie he was mentally bedding, he swung the long, aluminum extension ladder upright.

  "Why don't you get a ladder from your parents' house?" he muttered, blaming the edginess he suddenly felt on the fact that he hated being late. "You could have your dad throw it in the back of his Suburban and drop it off. Or I'll leave this one," he added, the afterthought occurring as he wedged the ladder between the pine's long branches. "It would make sense to keep one here if your cat's going to keep this up."

  His last words were accompanied by an ear-piercing screech and a shower of pine needles as fifteen pounds of skittish feline scrambled higher.

  Katie's hand flattened over the knot in her stomach. The thought of imposing on her father had put the knot there. Her panicking cat doubled it. "The ladder scared him," Katie explained, her tone caught between admonishment and sympathy. "Try not to make any sudden moves. Okay?"

  A vision of her precious kitty clinging like an ornament to the top of the tree vied with the guilt aroused by Mike's narrowed glance. Having interrupted his evening, she had no business criticizing his rescue effort. Especially since he was going out of his way to help her. That was something her father never would have done. She'd grown up hearing how important her father was, how important was his work, and being told that she shouldn't interrupt him unless it was absolutely necessary. This man shoving a bough out of the way as he started up the ladder was no less important, his work no less significant, yet there he was, six feet up in her tree making kissy noises at her cat.

  The thoughts were the sort guaranteed to produce a headache if she let herself dwell on them, so she focused only on Mike's ascent and held the ladder to steady it. The fresh scent of pine enveloped her, but she couldn't see a thing. The instant she'd glanced up, pine needles and droplets of water cascaded in a mist, forcing her head back down.

  The cat hissed.

  "Hey!"

  Her head jerked right back up again. "What happened?"

  "He tried to scratch me."

  "Spike! Knock it off."

  "That's effective," Mike muttered, moving higher.

  "Are you okay?" she asked him, thinking of his hands. A cat scratch wouldn't keep him out of surgery, but unless he wore a bandage, a cut or scratch against latex gloves could be awfully irritating.

  "Yeah, I'm fine. But he's on the edge of the limb now."

  "Maybe I should get him."

  Mike clearly refused to be defeated by something one-twenty-fifth his size. He didn't even acknowledge her suggestion before he moved up another rung and his arm shot out.

  The tearing sound was the sleeve of his jacket catching on the end of a broken branch. The screech was Spike when Mike clamped his hand around the cat's ruff. Pine cones bouncing through the branches, he dragged Spike along the limb.

  "Be careful!"

  "I'm not going to hurt him. Ow! Damn it," Mike growled, pulling back with the animal clinging like a barnacle to the underside of his sleeve. "What do you do to his claws? File them to points?"

  "That's just the way they grow. Here, sweetie," she cooed, reaching up as Mike pried off the cat and held him out to her. "You're not hurt, are you?"

  "You talking to him or me?"

  Mimicking Mike's droll glance, Katie tucked Spike's little head under her chin, holding him like a baby while she whispered to the little monster that she'd take his stuffed mouse away for a week if he pulled a stunt like that again. To Mike, she merely said, "Come here," and reached for his arm when he hit the ground so she could pull him into better light.

  "Oh, geez," she murmured, when she saw the back of his jacket. Shivering from the cold night air, she hugged the cat tighter. "It did rip."

  Something low and succinct preceded his cautious, "Great. How bad?"

  "Just a couple of inches. Right along the shoulder seam," she expanded, feeling worse by the second for imposing on him. "It won't take but a minute for me to fix it."

  "Then let's go. You need to get inside before you get pneumonia, anyway."

  Katie wasn't fooled by the disgusted scowl Mike aimed at Spike before he turned to grab the ladder. She knew for a fact that
he liked the cat better than he let on. As she retrieved the grocery sack from her car—since that was what she'd originally started to do—she didn't think that right now was a good time to point that out, or to mention that having a cat of his own might be good for him. Having a pet would put another heartbeat in that mausoleum he lived in, give him companionship, provide a little diversion from his work.

  "Take off your jacket," she told him when he followed her in the door that opened to her cozy dining area and kitchen. The low drone of a television newscast immediately greeted them, along with the faint scent of cinnamon from the potpourri on her front entry table. "I'll get a needle and thread and be right back."

  "I need to wash up."

  "Go ahead."

  Spike leapt from her arms as she reached the oatmeal-colored sofa that divided the comfortable space, promptly perching on the matching chair. The walls of her living room were lined with art prints, all Monet and all of his gardens with their verdant greens and splashes of soft color. With her view restricted to the back of a neighbor's garage in one direction and another duplex in the other, the colorful prints and the plants she kept in brass pots on the bookcase and by the windows, were the only way she had of bringing the outdoors in.

  It took less than a minute for her to dig her sewing basket from between the quilt she'd started four years ago and never completed and an unfinished cross-stitch project of geese with holly wreaths around their necks. Promising herself she'd have that project done by next Christmas, she headed back down the short hall—and found Mike on her telephone. He had the portable unit tucked under his chin and was drying his hands on a paper towel while he paced between the country French canisters on the beige counter by her stove and the bunches of dried flowers and herbs hanging above her sink. Without missing a step, he nodded to where he'd left the jacket on a chair back.