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“Dr. Shepherd’s on his lunch break.”
Eve hadn’t even considered the possibility. The entire walk over here, she’d been bracing herself to see Daniel, her old buddy, again. She smiled gamely at the receptionist and held up the bag. “In that case, I think Dr. Martin—”
“He’ll be in the rehab area. I’m sorry, I can’t let you cut through the surgery prep to go out back, but if you walk around the building, you’ll see the fenced-in area.”
Eve left the lobby and walked around back, wanting to hand this bread to Dr. Martin and head straight back to the empty bakery, where she could pretend she wasn’t disappointed that her grandmother’s machinations had failed.
The fence was white and wooden, but about eight feet tall, a fortress version of a white picket fence. She found the gate and knocked.
“Who is it?”
Daniel’s voice. She hadn’t missed him, after all.
Eve threw the sack of loaves over her shoulder like it was a sack of toys. “It’s Santa Claus.”
“Is that right?”
“Ho ho ho.”
A deadbolt was thrown, the gate opened a few inches, and there was Daniel beyond the crack, looking her over with a twinkle in his eye. “My, my, Santa. I must say, your portraits have not done you justice. That belly is not at all like a bowl full of jelly.”
Old friends, old friends. Eve poked him in his mid-section. “Let me in.”
Daniel ushered her in, then grabbed the bag from her with one hand and started unbuttoning his white doctor’s coat with the other. “You’re just in time for lunch.” He led her to a table tucked under the eaves of the clinic, set the bread on the table, then shed his coat and hung it up on a hook like some kind of insanely young and virile Mr. Rogers welcoming her into his home.
“Enjoying your day off?” he asked conversationally, as he picked out a loaf of whole-grain bread and broke it into big chunks.
“I overslept. Grandma didn’t wake me. She left me a note saying to bring you these.”
“She must have thought you needed the sleep. Vacations are good for that.”
“Not working vacations. I’d planned on discussing the need for an updated register.”
Daniel grabbed a knife, opened a jar, and started to slather the contents onto a chunk of bread. “One of America’s great contributions to the world. Peanut butter.”
“The bread is your lunch? I thought it was for the animals.” This was Daniel, her Daniel. Eve would have given him the best, not the leftovers. What had been Grandma been thinking?
“I might get a slice of the white bread, if I’m lucky. It isn’t as good for the ducks and birds, so I’ll put it in the employee break room. It will disappear by the end of the day. It makes excellent toast, day-old or not, and everybody knows it.” He held up the peanut-buttered chunk. “The whole grain bread is for our injured songbirds. Come and see.”
Spaced apart in a neat row along the fence were shaded bird cages, huge ones. Daniel knew every bird, which one had escaped Mrs. Clark’s cat, alive but injured, which one had been found by children on the side of the road, and so many more. He told Eve their stories as the birds twittered and hopped and pecked at the peanut butter and Eloise’s Bakery’s fine bread.
Eve was enthralled. Daniel always had been able to cast this spell, explaining the lives of ducks and chickens as if they were magical creatures. As he spoke, she watched the songbirds less and Daniel’s profile more, until finally, finally, she could see her childhood friend Daniel and this handsome doctor Daniel as the same person. Same passion. Tempered by more experience, more education, more accomplishments, but Daniel.
He went back to the table for a metal bowl and long tongs, which he used to beckon Eve over to the biggest cage. She caught her breath at the magnificent, majestic bird inside.
“She’s a Peregrine falcon,” Daniel said. “An apex predator. Not a peanut butter fan.”
“She’s absolutely gorgeous.”
“She is. I wish I could have saved her wing. I had to amputate the tip. It was shattered.” He used the tongs to take a piece of raw meat from the bowl. “It was shattering to do it. She can’t fly accurately, so we can’t release her. She’d starve and become prey herself.”
He held the tongs through the bars, waiting patiently until the bird approached and took the meat. “It’s okay for her to get used to humans. I’ve found her a place at a zoo where she’ll be in an aviary with her own kind.”
Shattering. It tugged at Eve’s heart. “You sound sad, but you saved her. You’re giving her a comfortable life.”
“Yes, I know,” he sighed. “But it’s not the best life. Taming a wild thing isn’t really a blessing to the wild thing. I’d rather watch them take off and go do what they’re meant to do.” He slid her a look she didn’t know how to interpret.
She followed him to the last cage. For this bird, he used the tongs to toss the meat through the bars from a few feet away. The bird tracked the trajectory of the meat and pounced on it with his talons. “Red-tailed hawk. I don’t want to get him accustomed to humans. This fellow will be able to go back to the wild.”
The bird suddenly pitched a fit, flapping its wings and letting out a sound louder than Eve would have guessed anything that size could make. She jumped back, banging into Daniel.
Daniel tossed the hawk another chunk. “He’s angry that he can’t get through the bars and get this meat himself. That’s a good drive for him to display. It means he’s back to his old self.”
Daniel was so calm, so unruffled, so...strong, six feet of muscled man standing close behind her. Stop leaning against him, Eve.
She put a little space between them. “I’m not a fan of flapping wings. It always reminds me of...” She had to address it sooner or later, didn’t she? “Of a certain chicken one summer. I apologize.”
“For what?” Daniel sounded genuinely confused.
If he didn’t even remember that kiss, she was going to turn beet red and stay that way forever. “For that summer. That last day, when you were carrying the chicken, and I tried to kiss you. Don’t you remember?”
Daniel laughed. “How could I forget? That was my first kiss. It set quite the standard. I have yet to find a woman whose kiss can give me that kind of thrill.”
“You mean that kind of alarm. That kiss was a disaster.”
“But as kisses go, it was an exciting one, you must admit.”
Eve laughed a little, despite her regrets. “I thought it killed our friendship. You were silent on the way back to the pond.”
Daniel’s smile lingered. “I was waiting for you to kiss me again. I was determined to not act like a startled chicken the second time, particularly since I was no longer carrying a startled chicken, but you didn’t try. For miles, you didn’t lean in to kiss me.”
“I had no idea you wanted me to. Why didn’t you try?”
“Because I was a thirteen-year-old boy. Girls are much more courageous at that age. I’m convinced of it.”
“I thought you were mad at me. I’d announced, ‘You’re my boyfriend and I’m your girlfriend’ and attacked you.”
He shook his head, that gingerbread-brown gaze warming her on a crisply cool day. “I should be so lucky to have that happen to me twice in my life. If you ever lean in to kiss me again, I will do a much better job kissing you back. I’m no longer thirteen.”
She caught her breath.
“And neither are you, Evie Richards.”
She might have swayed into him a bit. At least, he seemed to be closer to her. Very close.
Just as she lifted her face and let her eyes flutter shut, a powerful beating of wings disturbed the air, whomp, whomp, whomp, right over her head. With a yipe that rivaled the one she’d let out when Jingle Bell had charged toward her frosting masterpiece, Eve ducked.
Daniel threw his arm toward the bird. “Get out of here, you jealous thing.”
Evie peeked to see another hawk, flying free, circle around to land right on top of the cage where they stood. It was much bigger than the caged hawk, who kicked up a great fuss at the intruder. Evie openly and without shame hid behind Daniel.
“Are you all right?” he asked, craning his neck to see her as she cowered behind him.
“I am never kissing anyone or discussing kissing or even thinking about the concept of kissing when there are birds around, ever again in my life, so help me God.”
“Or at least make sure the man in question isn’t holding a bowl of raw meat out to the side when you do.” Daniel sounded unbelievably calm while being stared down by a wild and free apex predator less than an arm’s distance away. There was one small chunk of meat left in the bowl. Using the tongs—and an impressive amount of strength—Daniel flung it high into the air, far from the cages. The hawk took off and caught it mid-air, then kept flying away.
“That red-tailed hawk is a former patient. She was released into the wild, but she keeps coming back. I don’t kid myself that I hold her affections, though. She just wants a free dinner.”
“She’s smart. I’d stick around, too, and let a handsome man take care of me.”
“Would you?” He started walking back to the table. “Is there a man in Pittsburgh you’ll be returning to?”
“Only my boss.”
Daniel stopped in the middle of taking his white coat off the hook.
“Oh—no, I don’t mean I’m dating my boss. Absolutely not. He’s just the only man who’s paying attention to me in Pittsburgh. He wants to keep it that way. He doesn’t believe that anyone should have a life outside of work, not even a family. Anyone, men or women.” Especially women. “If you have a family, you pretend they don’t exist while you’re in the office.”
“I can’t picture Evie Richards appreciating somebody else making rules about her life for her. I knew you well, too, back in the day.”
“I haven’t had time to date, anyway.” We were going to kiss. We didn’t kiss. Are we going to kiss?
Daniel shrugged into his tailored white coat, settling it in place on his broad shoulders.
The songbirds twittered in their cages.
“You have time now,” Daniel said. “It would be a daring, rebellious thing to do against your boss’s restrictions. Would you care to go to dinner with me on Saturday? You put the whole idea of dating girls in my head, you know, with your Nancy Drew and Ned stories. I must prepare you for disappointment, however. I don’t have a convertible.”
A hundred thoughts went through her head—and her heart. Too many to come up with an easy yes or no. Yes, she wanted to. No, she did not want to start anything with any man in Texas, not when she was returning to Pittsburgh after Christmas.
“I will not throw your food and make you catch it,” Daniel added, perfectly grave.
Eve matched his gravity. “Even so, I’m afraid I have to decline. Two of my friends from high school already made plans with me to meet for drinks at the Irish pub on Saturday.”
“How long will you be in Masterson?”
“Until Christmas night.”
“Next Saturday, then. It’s the Chamber of Commerce’s holiday dinner dance. I would enjoy having you with me.”
“You really don’t have to appease my grandmother, you know.”
“I know.”
But there was no swaying, no leaning. No kiss. She’d misinterpreted the conversation by the hawk’s cage. Daniel had been gently teasing, gently sweet, telling her he had wished that day that he hadn’t been holding a chicken. That’s all. She was a fool for having thought otherwise. This was only the third conversation she’d had with him as an adult. Why would he kiss her?
Eve pointed at herself. “I have to appease her. I’m related to her, after all. I need to check with her and see what our obligations are that night. She might have sponsored the dessert table, or something like that.”
He smiled briefly, but there was no trace of a dimple. “If you can, then. I don’t have a date for the dinner yet. I won’t look for one.” Not unless you tell me no.
Eve heard what he didn’t say. It was flattering and unnerving, both. “Well, I guess I better get back to work. To the bakery. Even though we’re closed, I have some work to do. And you have to work. I’m taking up all your time. So...goodbye.”
“Thank you for the bread, Eve.”
It’s Evie. For you, it’s Evie.
But she didn’t say that. At the gate, she turned back. “Thank you for telling me all about your birds. I really enjoyed it. I always did enjoy it.”
This time, there was a trace of a dimple as he nodded at her, but the sound that rang in her ears as she walked away was the sound of the deadbolt as he locked the gate behind her.
