It had been a long day. Twenty minutes after her last patient had departed, an exhausted Nora was getting ready to close the office when the clinic door opened, and there, standing in the doorway, haloed by a blaze of light from the setting sun behind him, was Caine O’Halloran.
His handsome face had been badly battered, his upper lip was split open and his right eye was surrounded by puffy flesh the color of ripe blueberries. He was weaving in the doorway, braced on either side by two rugged blond men she knew too well.
How dare her brothers go drinking with Caine! And then, to have the unmitigated gall to bring him here, expecting her to patch him up after whatever drunken brawl he’d gotten into this time, was really pushing their luck!
Although his right eye was swollen almost completely shut, the left was as blue as a morning glory and gleamed with a devilish masculinity that long ago—in another world, at another time—had possessed the power to thrill her.
Caine’s split lip curved in a boyish grin that Nora knew had coaxed more than his share of women into sharing intimate favors.
“I sure hope you weren’t planning to close up shop early, Doc,” he greeted her in his deep, bedroom voice. “Because you just got yourself another patient.”
It was as if time had spun backward, and Caine and her brothers were boys again. Having gone through their wild years together, the unholy trio had gotten in more than their share of fights. They’d always emerged, bloody but not bowed, grinning with the sheer satisfaction of having stuck up for one of their own.
“Dana Anderson, I thought you’d grown up.” Nora turned on him, not yet prepared to confront Caine. “And exactly how do you plan to explain that black eye to Karin?” she asked Tom hotly.
He shrugged, looking sheepish. “I don’t suppose you’d be willing to back me up if I told her that I got hit with the wrong end of a two-by-four.”
“You’re right. I wouldn’t.” Nora turned her back and walked into the examining room.
The three men exchanged an uneasy look, then followed.
“But it wouldn’t do you any good even if I was willing to lie,” she continued as she opened a small refrigerator and took out a cold pack, “since by breakfast tomorrow, everyone in town will know that the Anderson boys were out brawling with that hellion, Caine O’Halloran.
“Here.” She tossed the gelled pack to her brother. “Put this on that eye. It’ll be ugly as sin by morning, but that should help keep the swelling down.”
She took her other brother’s hands and frowned as she looked at his skinned knuckles. “This is going to hurt for at least a week,” she predicted.
“You don’t have to sound so pleased about it,” Tom complained.
“It’s only what you deserve for fighting. And at your age!”
“You saying we should have let the Olson boys kill Caine?”
“I’m saying that responsible men—intelligent adult males with wives and children—don’t get into brawls in bars.”
She shot Caine a cool, disapproving glance, really looking at him for the first time since the men had entered the clinic.
“I’m not surprised that you’re involved in this.” Her voice reminded Caine of the ice on a melting glacier—cold and dangerous. “One day back in town and you’re already in trouble.”
“Harmon swung the first punch, Nora,” Dana said.
She arched a blond brow. “And I wonder whatever could have provoked him? Could it be, perhaps, that some hotshot jock with an IQ smaller than his neck size practically killed Harmon by playing chicken in a Ferrari in some misguided attempt to live up to his stupid macho image?”
“Ouch,” Caine objected. “What the hell ever happened to Osler’s creed—the part about a doctor judging not, but meting out hospitality to all alike?”
Sir William Osler had been a famous clinician in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Enthusiastic about his theories concerning the emotional and social responsibilities of a physician, Nora had quoted from his essays to Caine. At the time, he’d been so busy rubbing some foul-smelling grease on his damn glove, she hadn’t thought he’d heard a word she’d said.
“I’m amazed you remember that.” Surprise took a bit of the furious wind out of her sails.
“Oh, I remember everything about those days, Nora,” Caine answered quietly.
An uncomfortable silence fell over the room. “Well,” Dana said with forced enthusiasm, “now that Caine’s in your expert hands, little sister, I guess I’ll get back to work.”
“And I promised Karin I’d stop and pick up some milk and bread on the way home,” Tom said.
Caine grinned, then flinched when it hurt his split lip. “Chickens.”
Dana didn’t deny it. “Cluck, cluck,” he said instead. “Don’t be too rough on him, Nora. Those Olsons have always fought dirty.”
“Kirk hit Caine on the back of the head with a whiskey bottle when he was shaking hands with Harmon,” Tom added.
“I suppose that explains why you smell like a distillery,” Nora said, wrinkling her nose with obvious distaste.
“Take good care of him, sis,” Dana said when Caine didn’t answer.
Tom seconded the request and then they were gone, leaving Nora and Caine alone in a room that suddenly seemed too small for comfort.
“Well, I suppose we may as well get this over with,” Nora said with a decided lack of enthusiasm. “Wait here while I get some ice for that eye.”
“I’d rather have a cold pack like the one you gave Dana.”
“Tough. We had a run on cold packs today. That was my last one.”
She left the room, expecting Caine to remain where he was. Instead, he followed her to the kitchen where, in the old days, he and Tom and Dana and sometimes a young, bespectacled Nora—who’d usually had her nose stuck in a book—had sat around the table, eating cookies and drinking milk from Blossom, Anna Anderson’s black-and-white cow.
Rosy red strawberries still bloomed on the cream wallpaper, shiny copper pans continued to hang from a wrought-iron rack over the island butcher-block table.
The long pine trestle table was the same, although now, instead of plates of cookies and glasses of milk, its scarred and nicked surface was covered with medical books, suggesting that Nora still read while she ate. The ladder-back chairs that he remembered being dark blue had been repainted a bright apple green; one was missing.
“I can almost smell bread and cookies baking,” he said.
“Things change,” Nora replied as she filled an ice pack with cubes from the double-door refrigerator-freezer.
“Tell me about it,” he muttered. “I was honestly sorry when I got the letter from Dana telling me about your grandmother’s stroke. She was a terrific lady. I liked her a lot.”
“Gram always liked you, too.” Her curt tone indicated that she couldn’t imagine why.
“Dana also said something about your parents having got the travelling bug.”
“The day after Dad retired and turned the mill over to Tom, he came home with a motor home. Two weeks later, he and Mom hit the road.
“That was a year ago and they haven’t settled down anywhere for more than six weeks. In fact, I got a call from them last week from someplace called Tortilla Flats, Arizona. They were on their way to Yellowstone Park through Monument Valley.”
“I guess they’re making up for lost time. I can’t remember your dad ever taking a day off, let alone a vacation.” Caine rubbed his chin, dark with the stubble of several days’ growth of beard, thoughtfully. “Except for the day Dylan was born.” And the day he’d died, Caine recalled grimly.
It was bad enough having Caine back in Tribulation. She damn well didn’t want to discuss her child with the man.
“Here.” Nora shoved the ice pack at him. “If you’re finished strolling down memory lane, I’d like to examine you.”
Caine followed her, with uncharacteristic meekness, back down the hall to what had been her grandmother’s front parlor.
Now designed for efficiency, rather than comfort, the formerly cozy room was dominated by an examining table, covered with fresh paper from a continuous roll. There was a short, wheeled, dark brown upholstered stool, a white pedestal sink and a small writing table. Beside the table was the ladder-back chair missing from the kitchen.
Instead of the fragrant potpourri Anna Anderson had made from the colorful blooms in her backyard rose garden, the room smelled vaguely of disinfectant and rubbing alcohol.
Beside the writing table, Anna’s oak china cabinet, handmade by her husband, Oscar, had been turned into a supply cabinet. Behind the glass doors, the old crabapple-decorated plates had been replaced with boxes of dressings, plastic gloves, hypodermic syringes and shiny stainless-steel instruments.
A window looked out on Anna’s rose garden and the woods; between the slats of the unfamiliar mini-blinds, Caine saw a family of deer grazing, their brown and gray coats almost blending into the foliage behind them.
“Nora, look.”
Surprised by his soft tone, she turned and glanced out the window. Her lips curved into a gentle, unconscious smile.
“They come every day about this time. Last Friday was the first day they brought the babies.”
Caine squinted. “Where? I don’t see any fawns.”
“There are two of them. Beside that hemlock.”
When Nora pointed, her fingers brushed against the rock-hard muscle of his upper arm. She pulled her hand back, as if burned.
Caine observed the telling gesture and decided not to comment on it. “I see them now.” The creamy spots, nature’s clever camouflage, had done their job well. “God, I’ve missed this,” he said on a long deep sigh.
She glanced up at him, clearly surprised. “If you actually mean that, I’d better check out your head injury. All you ever used to talk about was how baseball was going to be your way out of Tribulation.”
“I guess I did say that,” Caine agreed reluctantly.
Trust Nora to remember that. He ran his hand through his hair and sighed again.
“But I don’t know, when everything started falling apart, I found myself drawn back home. As if somehow, I’d find the answers I’ve been looking for here.”
“Answers to what questions?”
“That’s the hell of it. I don’t know.” He gave her a faint embarrassed smile. “I sound like Dorothy, don’t I? ‘Please, Almighty Wizard of Oz, I just want to go back home, to Kansas,’” he mimicked in a falsetto.
“Hell, maybe instead of driving the Ferrari back from New York, I just should have clicked my heels together and said, ‘There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home.’”
“If you could’ve gotten home by clicking your heels, there wouldn’t have been any reason for the Olson boys to beat you up,” Nora added briskly. “Which brings me to your examination.”
She washed her hands at the sink, then dried them with a paper towel. “So where does it hurt?”
“Everywhere,” he answered promptly, holding the ice pack against his eye. “But I guess my chest and the back of my head feel the worst.”
Cool, measuring eyes flicked over him. “Take off your shirt and jeans and get onto the table,” she instructed. “Then we’ll see how much damage you’ve done this time.”
“It was Harmon and Kirk who did the damage,” Caine felt obliged to say. “I offered to pay for any damage to Harmon’s rig, but he wasn’t having it.”
“Perhaps that’ll teach you that you can’t buy everything you want,” Nora suggested dryly. “Call me when you’re undressed.” She left the room, closing the door with a decided click.
Caine unbuttoned the bloodstained denim shirt and shrugged out of it, grimacing when the gesture caused a sharp pain in his chest. He managed, with difficulty, to pull off his boots, then his jeans.
Finally, clad solely in white cotton briefs and crew socks, wincing and swearing under his breath, he pulled himself up onto the examination table.
“Ready,” he called out in the direction of the shut door.
Although the papers were reporting that Caine O’Halloran had reached the end of his playing days, Nora’s first thought, when she returned to the room, was that her ex-husband’s body was definitely not that of a man past his prime. He was exactly as Nora remembered him: all lean muscle and taut sinew.
He was also, for a fleeting moment, more than a little appealing. Pressing her lips together, she blocked that thought.
“You look as if you’ve been kicked by a mule.”
Actually, he felt as if he’d been run over by an entire mule train, but Caine would have died before admitting that. “A mule probably would have been preferable to the Olson boys.”
Reminding herself that she was a physician and this near-naked man was merely her patient, Nora began her examination with his head. The whiskey bottle had broken, causing a jagged laceration.
“You’re going to need stitches.”
“Why do I get the impression you’re just looking for an excuse to stick a sharp instrument into my flesh?”
“Don’t flatter yourself. Although infected scalp wounds are admittedly rare, when they do occur they’re a real mess. Medically and cosmetically.”
She gave him a dry, feigned smile. “And I’m sure you wouldn’t want to permanently mess up that pretty head.”
“You’re the doctor,” Caine said.
Despite the pain, which was considerable, all the beer he’d drunk during the afternoon had created a pleasant buzz that made this meeting with Nora less stressful than he’d expected.
“If you say I need stitches, who am I to argue?”
Who indeed? She couldn’t remember a time when she and Caine hadn’t argued. About everything. Well, perhaps not everything. The sex, once they’d abandoned her fought-for celibacy agreement, had admittedly been good. Better than good. Unfortunately, they hadn’t been able to spend all their lives in bed.
She pulled her penlight out of the pocket of her lab coat. “Keep your head straight and follow the beam with your eyes.”
His dark blue eyes moved to the left, then to the right, then up and down as she checked his pupillary reactions. Although she had to lift the lid of the swollen eye to examine it, Nora found no interior damage.
Pocketing the light, she placed a hand on the back of his neck and ran her fingers over the series of bumps making up the cervical spine before going on to his chest.
“You’re going to have some ugly body bruising.”
So why didn’t she tell him something he didn’t know? “You should see the other guy.”
Frowning at his flippant attitude, Nora put the bell of her stethoscope against his battered chest. The whooshing breathing sounds were a good sign that a rib hadn’t punctured a lung, which was a possibility, considering the strength of the Olson boys.
“Tell me if anything hurts.” She pressed his left shoulder with her fingertips, but received no response. She moved her fingers over his left nipple and pressed.
Her hands were pale and slender, her fingers long and tapered, her nails neat and unpolished. Caine remembered a time when those soft hands had moved with butterfly softness against his chest; now, her touch remained strictly professional as it probed for injuries.
When her fingers moved over his ribs, she hit a hot spot, causing Caine to suck in a quick breath. She pressed again.
“Does this hurt?”
Sadist. He decided she was probably gouging her fingers into him just to make him suffer. “It’s not exactly a love pat, sweetheart,” he said through gritted teeth.
“We’ll need to take an X-ray. It’s probably just a cracked rib, but I don’t want to take a chance on it being broken and puncturing a lung.”
“I don’t really feel up to driving to Port Angeles, Nora.”
“You don’t have to. Last month I would have called an ambulance, but you’re in luck, O’Halloran. My new portable X-ray machine arrived last week.”
“I’m impressed.”
Although he had no idea what such a piece of medical equipment cost, Caine suspected that it wasn’t cheap. If she’d made such a major investment, she was obviously planning to stay in Tribulation.
Which, Caine decided, probably wasn’t all that surprising. Nora had always loved it here on the peninsula; he’d been the one anxious to move on to bigger and better—meaning more exciting—things.
“I figured it would come in handy for broken arms, cracked ribs, the sort of occupational and recreational injuries I get a lot of,” Nora said. “But I guess everyone’s been extra careful, because not one patient has come in with a proper excuse for me to use it.”
“Then I suppose that makes this all worthwhile,” he declared. He brushed his hair away from his brow; as always, it fell untidily back again. “Anything to oblige a lady.”
His voice was a low sexy drawl, with a hint of mockery. His eyes, dark and knowing, roamed her face with the intimate impact of a caress.
Nora’s hand was still on his chest; she could feel his strong steady heartbeat beneath her fingertips. An unexpected, unbidden awareness fluttered between them. A lull fell as they studied each other.
Her hair, which he remembered her wearing in a long braid that hung down her back like a thick piece of pale rope, had been cut to a length that just brushed her shoulders, curving inward to frame her face. The naturally blond strands glistened like sunshine on fresh snow.
Nora Anderson’s eyes, unlike those of the rest of her family, whose eyes were the expected Scandinavian blue, were a soft doe brown. One of her few concessions to vanity was to darken the double layer of thick blond lashes surrounding them.
Caine’s gaze drifted down to the delicately molded lips that she was still forgetting to color. Although he knew it was ridiculous, he imagined that he could taste those soft lips, even now.
Desire spread, then curled tightly, like a fist in his gut, as Caine remembered those long-ago nights, when Nora’s body, rounded with child, had moved like quicksilver beneath his. He remembered her mouth—warm, soft, avid—and the way she’d murmur his name—like a prayer—after their passion had finally been spent.
As Caine silently studied her, Nora tried not to be affected by the way an unruly lock of sun-streaked sandy brown hair fell across his forehead, contrasting vividly with his dark tan. A purple bruise as dark as a pansy bloomed on his lower jaw; his square chin possessed a stubborn masculine pride that bordered on belligerence. His arms were strong, with rigid, defined tendons, his shoulders were broad, his battered chest well muscled.
His washboard-flat stomach suggested that all the drinking and carousing she’d been reading about in the papers lately was a newly acquired bad habit. Knowing how hard Caine had worked to mold his naturally athletic body to this ideal of masculine perfection, she couldn’t imagine her ex-husband ever succumbing to a beer gut.
Her gaze followed the arrow of curly hair that disappeared below the waistband of his white cotton briefs with an interest that was distressingly undoctorlike.
Although she knew it was dangerous, and warned herself against it, for a long humming moment Nora, too, was remembering the fever that had once burned between them.
His head wound began to bleed again. She jammed a sterile dressing on it. “Hold this steady,” she directed. “And lie down.”
She continued examining him with more force than necessary, making him flinch again. “You did that on purpose.”
“So file a complaint with the State Medical Board,” she snapped. “I think you’re going to live,” she decided after more probing and poking. “Let’s take some pictures of that rib.”
He accompanied her into the adjoining room, where she donned a lead apron. “Stand with your chest against this plate. Hands out to your sides.”
“I’ll have to let go of the bandage.”
“I realize that. But that wound is far from fatal.” She made an adjustment to the bulky machine. “Now, when I tell you, take a deep breath and hold it.”
They both knew taking such a breath was bound to be painful. “I don’t remember you being so sadistic.”
“That’s funny—” she took hold of his shoulders and straightened his torso “—I could swear that, just a little while ago, I heard you say that you were a man who remembered everything… . Don’t move.”
She made another adjustment, then checked her controls. “Okay, hold absolutely still. I’m ready to shoot.”
“Nora?”
“What now?”
“Do you think you could use another word? That particular one doesn’t give me a great deal of confidence.”
When a reluctant smile crossed her lips, Nora pressed them together. Hard.
“Shut up, O’Halloran. And don’t you dare move.” She stepped just outside the open doorway. “Take a deep breath. That’s it. Now hold.” The X-ray machine whirred, then clicked.
“Go on back to the examining room,” she said briskly after she’d taken two more views. “I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Caine wanted to ask Nora if she’d ever thought of using the word please, decided that there wasn’t any point in aggravating her further, and did as instructed.
He sat on the edge of the examining table, legs dangling over the side, and gazed around the room.
The walls were a soft pale green reminiscent of new fir needles in the spring. The ceiling was the color of freshly churned cream. Diplomas, framed in oak, attested to her professional competence.
It did not escape Caine’s notice that the name calligraphically inscribed on all those diplomas was Dr. Nora Anderson. Not that he was surprised; neither of them had ever really thought of her as Mrs. Caine O’Halloran.
“All right,” she said as she returned to the room. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”
She snapped the X-ray film onto a light box. When she flicked on the switch, the film went from all black to shades of gray. “Just as I thought.” Nora nodded with satisfaction. “You’ve got a cracked rib.”
“You don’t have to sound so pleased.”
“I’m far from pleased when I get a patient who risks his health—not to mention his life—due to stupidity,” she flared. “If Harmon had broken that rib instead of merely cracking it, it could have punctured a lung.”
“He attacked me, Nora,” Caine reminded her. “I really didn’t have any choice.”
“You made your choice when you decided to play chicken with him on the highway,” she pointed out. “That was an idiotic, childish thing to do.”
Caine shrugged, then wished he hadn’t when a lightning bolt zigzagged through his chest. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”
“If you keep up these adolescent acts of derring-do, Caine O’Halloran, you’re going to end up in the morgue.”
“Nice bedside manner you’ve got there, Dr. Anderson.”
Ancient animosities, never fully dealt with, surfaced. “If you want an acquiescent female hovering at your bedside, kissing your owies to make them better, I’d suggest you get in that Ferrari and go home to your wife.”
Nora examined the wound on the back of his head, then began cleansing the cut.
“I’m not married.”
She tugged on a pair of surgical gloves. “That’s not what I hear.”
“All right, I guess we’re technically married, but Tiffany—who, by the way, never let marriage interfere with her constant need for male companionship—is currently sleeping with one of my old teammates. She’s also filed for divorce.”
He frowned, thinking of his last conversation with his New York lawyer. Tiffany was insisting that six months of marriage entitled her to half of his last contract earnings. While Caine had been willing to pay it, writing his second marriage off as an expensive mistake, his attorney had counseled restraint.
“Apparently, an up-and-coming outfielder is socially more desirable than a relief pitcher who’s been put out to pasture on waivers.”
“I’m sorry,” Nora said, meaning it.
“I can’t really blame her,” Caine said. “I knew all along that Tiffany was only along for the ride. So, I can’t expect her to tag along if that ride takes a downhill turn on the way.”
He didn’t add that since his injury, he’d been a less-than-ideal husband. He’d been, by turns, sullen, uncommunicative, hot-tempered and angry. And those unappealing mood swings hadn’t been helped by his increased drinking.
But dammit, Caine had told himself innumerable times in an attempt to justify his behavior over these past months, given the choice of sitting home and listening to his young, spoiled, self-centered bride whine about how she’d never agreed to be the wife of a washed-up old has-been, or going out to some convivial watering hole, where people still treated him like a hero, he’d choose the drinks and his newfound friends any day.
“Nice view of matrimony you’ve got there, O’Halloran,” Nora murmured.
Caine shrugged. “Hell, Nora, you know as well as I do that marriage is nothing more than a convenient deal between two people who both have something the other wants. So long as things stay the same, the relationship putters along okay.
“But let the balance of power shift, and it’s over. Finished. Kaput.”
Nora thought back on the unromantic agreement she’d forged with Caine on that long-ago rainy afternoon. Their marriage had admittedly started out as a convenient deal to legitimize an unborn child’s birth. But surprisingly, for a too-brief, shining time, it had blossomed into something more. And then it was gone, disappearing back into the mists of memory like the fabled Brigadoon.
“What about love?” The minute she heard the quiet words escape her lips, she wished she could take them back.
“Hell, if there’s one thing life has taught me, sweetheart, it’s that love is nothing more than good sex tied with pretty words.”
Caine’s cynical view of love and marriage, along with his wife’s seeming desertion, had Nora almost feeling sorry for him.
“Well, I wouldn’t worry about being alone for long, O’Halloran,” she said as she drew up some lidocaine into a syringe. “If that half-nude layout in this year’s Vanity Fair sports issue was an advertisement for wife number three, you should get a lot of applicants.”
Caine felt the bite of the needle and drew in a short, painful breath. “You’ve seen it?”
Caine couldn’t imagine, in his wildest dreams, this woman even glancing at a spread of scantily clad men. Then he remembered how, before their marriage and their lives had fallen apart, Nora had displayed a fire he’d never suspected was under all that Scandinavian ice.
“Hasn’t everyone?” She put in a stitch, tied it, then moved on to the next one.
“Well, what?” She made another careful stitch.
“What did you think?” He pressed his hand against his stomach in a futile attempt to quiet the giant condors that were flapping their wings harder with each stitch Nora made. “Have I still got it?”
“I suppose you’ll do. In a pinch.”
“You always were so good for the ego,” Caine muttered.
Nora scraped at the sides of the wound with a fine scalpel, straightening the jagged edge.
Caine glanced into the mirror, saw what she was doing, felt his stomach lurch and looked away. “I suppose, to be perfectly honest, I was advertising, in a way. But not for a new wife.
“Although I didn’t admit it to the press until I got put on waivers,” Caine said, “I knew all along that I wasn’t going to be starting this season. That being the case, my agent felt we needed to keep my name in front of the public.”
“I suppose I can understand keeping your name alive,” Nora said, “but where does taking off your clothes and posing in your underwear with a cocker spaniel come in?”
“Hey, I sure as hell wouldn’t be the first athlete to use a sexy photo shoot to show he’s still in shape,” Caine argued. “It’s the same thing all those actresses do to prove to producers and casting directors that they’re not over the hill.
“As for the spaniel, that was the photographer’s idea. She said something about a cute dog making me look both tough and soft at the same time.
“Besides, at least the magazine and all the press it generated was a helluva lot better than all those stories the sports reporters are writing about me being a washed-up, out-of-shape old wreck.”
“It’s fortunate you didn’t get yourself beaten up before that photo shoot,” Nora said. “Because right now you are anything but photogenic.”
She finished the last three stitches, then pulled off the gloves and tossed them into the white enamel trash can.
“That’s it?” Caine asked, not quite able to conceal his relief. Although she’d done a pretty good job of killing the pain, the sound of the silk thread pulling through his numb flesh had made him queasy.
“That’s it.” When she turned around, Nora caught him surreptitiously rubbing his hand. “Let me see that.” She took hold of the hand that had always been so much larger and darker than her own. “Dammit, Caine, your knuckles look worse than Tom’s.”
“I was just grateful your brothers were there to help me.”
“They always were.” His knuckles were badly bruised, and skinned, but nothing was broken, Nora determined.
“The Three Musketeers,” Caine remembered fondly.
She turned his hand over. “You’re still shaving your fingers.”
“Hey, as a doctor, you use your best tools. Well, my fingers are my tools and shaving a layer of skin off my fingertips gives me an ultrasensitive touch.”
She’d been three months pregnant, and a reluctant new bride, when she’d first found him using a surgical scalpel on his fingertips. She’d accused him of barbaric behavior, but months later, when they’d finally consummated the marriage neither of them had wanted, she’d been unwillingly stimulated by the idea of his heightened tactile sensitivity.
Memories, painful and evocative, hovered between them. Caine’s eyes moved to the front of her white lab coat, remembering how her breasts felt like ripe plums in his hands.
Nora remembered the way his compelling midnight blue eyes seemed to darken from the pupils out when he was aroused.
Caine wondered if there was a man in Nora’s life now. And if so, if they did all those things together that he’d taught her to do with him.
“I read that you’ve lost the feelings in your fingers,” Nora ventured finally, seeking something—anything—to say.
“The feeling’s come back,” Caine insisted, not quite truthfully. “I just have a little control problem.”
“Well, I wish you luck. Sensor-motor injuries are unpredictable. Who knows, you may actually prove all the naysayers wrong and be back on the mound by the All-Star break.”
Which would, of course, result in yet another injury. Although Nora had never been a baseball fan, one of the few things she’d learned about the sport was the tradition of wearing out relief pitchers rather than starters.
The better a relief pitcher was—and Caine was undeniably one of the best—the more often a manager used him. Add to that the mental stress that came with pitching when the game was on the line, and it was no wonder relief pitchers tended to be men capable of living for the moment.
Needless to say, Nora had never been able to understand the appeal of such a life.
“I want to tape that rib. Then we’ll be done.” She wrapped a wide flesh-colored tape around his torso, tugging it so tightly he was forced to suck in a painful breath. “You can get dressed now,” she said in the brisk, professional tone he was beginning to hate.
Without giving him a chance to answer, she left the room, closing the door behind her.
Caine braced his elbow on his bare thigh and lowered his head to his palm. The beer buzz was beginning to wear off and now, along with the pounding in his head, the ache surrounding his swollen eye, the crushing feeling in his chest and a grinding nausea, he was experiencing another all-too-familiar, almost-visceral pain.
“Damn,” he muttered. “Maybe I shouldn’t have come home, after all.”
But he had, and now it was too late to get back in the Ferrari and drive away. One reason he couldn’t leave Tribulation was that having already cracked open Pandora’s box, Caine knew that all the old hurts, ancient resentments and lingering guilt would eventually have to be dealt with.
The other and more pressing reason was that as much as he hated to admit it, Caine O’Halloran, hotshot baseball star and national sports hero, had absolutely nowhere else to go.
He dressed with uncharacteristic slowness, every movement giving birth to a new pain.
Nora was standing behind the oak counter she’d had built in the foyer, waiting for him.
“You’ll need another appointment.” She clicked through the appointments in her computer. “If you’re still in town two weeks from today, you can come in around four-thirty. Otherwise, you’ll need to find another doctor to take out those stitches.”
“Sorry to disappoint you, Doc, but I’m going to stick around for a while.”
“And exactly how long is ‘a while’?’
“You asking for professional reasons? Or personal ones?”
“Professional.” She practically flung the word in his face.
Caine started to shrug, experienced another sharp stab of pain and decided against it. “Just wondering. And to answer your solely professional question, I’m sticking around for as long as it takes.”
Nora didn’t quite trust the look in his eyes. “For the feeling to come back in your fingertips?”
“Yeah.” Caine nodded, his gaze on hers. “That, too.”
When the mood threatened to become dangerously intimate once again, Nora became briskly professional, which was no less than Caine expected, and named her rock-bottom fee.
“Not exactly city rates.”
“Tribulation is not exactly the city.”
“Point taken.”
It took a mighty effort, but he managed to pull his wallet out of his back pocket without flinching and withdrew the bills.
“You’re in a hurry.” He remembered this as she asked for his insurance. “I don’t need a receipt.”
“My accountant yells bloody murder if I don’t keep accurate records,” she said, taking the form from the printer and signing it with a silver ballpoint pen. Her penmanship, Caine noted, was as precise as everything else about the woman. And even as he reminded himself that such painstaking attention to detail was simply Nora’s nature, there was something about the meticulous cursive script that provoked the hell out of him.
She handed him the receipt. “Where are you staying?”
“At the cabin.”
“All alone?”
“That’s the plan.”
“You might have a concussion. It’d be better if someone kept an eye on you.”
“I don’t have a concussion, Nora.”
Her brow arched in the frostiest look she’d given him thus far. “Now you’re a doctor?”
“No. But I’ve had concussions before, and I think I’d recognize one.”
“You’ve drunk a lot today,” she reminded. “All the alcohol is probably numbing the pain. You really should spend the night at your folks’ house.”
“I’m staying at the cabin. Alone.”
“Still as hardheaded as ever, I see.”
“Not hard enough,” he countered.
“You’ll have pain.”
“I’m used to that.”
“I’m sure you are. However, I’m still going to prescribe something to help get you through the night and the next few days.”
“I can think of something a lot better than pills to help me get through the night.”
The seductive suggestion tingled in the air between them.
Nora reached for the prescription pad. “Take one tablet, with food or a glass of water, every six hours as needed.”
Her voice, Caine noted, had turned cold enough to freeze the leafy green Boston fern hanging in the front window. “Needless to say, you shouldn’t drink and I wouldn’t advise driving or operating heavy machinery.”
“Damn. Does that mean I can’t down the pills with a six-pack, then go to the mill and play Russian roulette with the ripsaw?”
She absolutely refused to smile. “Not if you want to keep that hand.” She glanced at her watch as she tore off the prescription and handed it to him. “Nelson’s Pharmacy should be open for another five minutes. I’ll call ahead just in case his clock and mine aren’t in sync.”
Caine plucked the piece of white paper from her fingers and stuffed it into the pocket of his jeans without looking at it. “Thanks. I appreciate everything you’ve done.”
“I’m a doctor, Caine. It’s my job.”
“True enough. But I’ve become painfully familiar with doctors, Nora, and believe me, none of them have as nice a touch as yours.” He flashed her the bold, rakish grin that had added just the right touch to his Vanity Fair photo.
“If you don’t behave, I’m going to call your mother to take you home.”
“Why do I get the feeling you still refuse to put athletes in the same category as adults?”
“If the jockstrap fits…”
Her smile was patently false as she picked up the telephone receiver and began to dial. “You’d better get going, Caine. Ed Nelson isn’t going to keep his pharmacy open all night. Even for the great local hero, Caine O’Halloran.
“Oh, hi, Ed, this is Nora. Just fine, thanks. And how are you? And Mavis? Another grandchild? Twins? You and Mavis must be thrilled. What does that make now, six? Eight? Really? Well, that’s wonderful… .
“The reason I called, Ed,” Nora said, breaking into the pharmacist’s in-depth description of the newest additions to the Nelson family, “is that I know it’s near your closing time, but I’m sending a patient over.”
She turned her back, studiously ignoring Caine.
Frustrated and aching practically everywhere in his body, Caine stalked to the door, then slammed it behind him with such vehemence that one of her diplomas fell off the wall in the adjoining room.