Mikki felt as if she couldn’t find a place for herself. Tension resulting from the last few days, especially after she’d weathered the disappointment of not having Jeff accompanying his mother for her second postsurgical exam, was beginning to tie her up in knots.
With all that going on, who would have thought that her mother could actually say something sensible?
Maybe she should be looking out her window, waiting for the arrival of the four horsemen, Mikki thought, because obviously the end of the world was coming.
She was happy for her mother, happy that her mother felt that she had finally found the right man. Chances of that proving true were slim, but if Veronica could still believe in miracles, why shouldn’t she?
But meanwhile, her own life suddenly looked as if it was in complete disarray and she had no idea how to fix it, or even if it was fixable.
Maybe she should call Jeff.
Or maybe she shouldn’t, because the two of them just weren’t meant to be.
When the phone rang again a little more than five minutes later, she looked at the landline accusingly. “Give me a break, Mother,” she muttered under her breath.
It rang again and she knew her mother wouldn’t stop calling until she answered.
Crossing back to the landline, she yanked the receiver from its cradle.
“I said I’ll come.” It was an effort not to snap the words out. After all, what she was going through really wasn’t her mother’s fault. This was all her own doing.
“I haven’t asked yet,” the deep voice on the other end said, “but good to know.”
The receiver almost slid out of her hand. Was she getting a do-over? “Jeff?”
“I take it that response when you picked up the phone wasn’t meant for me.”
Relief at hearing his voice temporarily made her mind go blank. It took Mikki a second to pull herself together and answer him. “I thought you were my mother, calling back.”
“Oh, if you’re expecting her call, I’ll just hang up,” Jeff offered.
“No!” she cried. If he hung up, he might never call back again. And then she realized how desperate that plea had to have sounded to him. Embarrassment all but saturated her. “No,” she repeated in what she hoped was a far more subdued voice.
She heard him laugh softly, and a warmth bathed over her.
“If you don’t want to talk to your mother that much, you can always take the phone off the hook,” he told her. “Although I wouldn’t advise it, because she’ll probably catch up to you sooner than later, and in my experience, it’s best to deal with things head-on, even if you’d rather avoid them.”
Was that a veiled message about her approach to things?
Stop it, stop reading into things. Just be happy he called.
“I don’t want to talk about my mother,” Mikki told him.
“All right,” Jeff responded gamely, “we can talk about something else.”
It sounded as if he was leaving the choice of subject up to her. She didn’t want to say anything that might wind up pushing her back to square one, so she asked about the first thing she could think of, even though she was afraid that she might accidentally bring up a sore subject.
At this point, she was totally unsure of herself—but not saying anything was even worse, so she began slowly. “How did the party go?”
“Party?” He’d been all but counting the minutes until he felt he could safely call her again. For the last few days—for the first time since he’d started in this field—it was all he could do to keep things going at work. What for him had always been a labor of love had been strictly labor since he had left her house on Sunday. His mind kept wandering back to thoughts of Mikki at the most inopportune times, causing him to lose track of things.
Work had taken a complete back seat in his thoughts. Consequently, he drew a total blank at her question.
“The fiftieth-anniversary party at your restaurant on Sunday,” Mikki prompted. Had it gone badly for some reason? Had she raised a subject he would have rather left alone? She felt as if she was verbally all thumbs.
“Oh, that.” How could he have forgotten the Strausses’ anniversary celebration? Pulling it off had been a huge deal, and he had outdone himself. “That went well. Very well,” he told her, adding, “The couple was totally surprised.”
Now it was her turn to be confused. “They didn’t know they’d been married fifty years?”
He laughed, and the sound went straight to her stomach, causing it to really tighten this time. She’d forgotten how much she really loved the sound of his laugh. Just hearing it was immensely comforting.
“No, they knew,” he told her. “But what they didn’t know was that their kids were throwing them a big party. The Strausses thought they were just being taken out for dinner.”
She could picture the couple entering the large banquet room and the surprise on their faces when they saw that everyone they loved was in that room, celebrating them. That was a family scene she had longed for her whole life.
“Sounds nice,” she told him, a wistful note in her voice.
“It was.” Jeff paused for a moment, as if debating whether or not to say the next thing. He didn’t want to risk scaring Mikki off, but keeping away from her like this was really getting to him. He decided to go for it. “Mikki, could I come over?”
Her heart practically did a backflip. She hadn’t ruined it. He wanted to see her.
Almost afraid that this was too good to be true, she asked, “You mean tonight?”
“Yes—unless you want to go slower,” he qualified.
Mikki had wanted to see him even before her mother’s phone call had gotten her thinking that she had made a huge mistake. She had behaved in a manner that she had always detested—she’d been cowardly. Her fear of giving her heart away and having it broken could have very well cost her the experience of a lifetime: love.
When Jeff had called just now, she had been debating calling him—and praying that he wouldn’t just hang up.
Having him ask to come over was an answer to a prayer.
“No, no, tonight’s fine,” Mikki told him, hoping she didn’t sound too eager. She didn’t know if that would make him step back.
Just then the doorbell rang.
Why now, she thought. Of all the times she didn’t want to see someone...
Determined to tell whoever was there to either go away, or that she’d get back to them, Mikki made her way across the room.
“Hold on, there’s someone at the door,” she told Jeff. Reaching the door, she closed one eye and looked through the peephole with the other.
“I know,” Jeff said. He completed his sentence just as she opened the door. “It’s me.”
She knew she’d been the one to put up the boundaries, the one who had honestly thought she’d wanted to go slow, but right at this moment, none of that mattered or held true.
Rather than hang back or maintain decorum, or even express surprise at seeing him on her doorstep, Mikki skipped right over that and went straight to throwing her arms around his neck.
Before he could say a single word of greeting, she was kissing him.
Kissing him with all the pent-up passion she’d been denying, passion that had been brewing within her for the last few days and was now tottering on the very brink of release.
Jeff kissed her back, relieved that she wasn’t standing on ceremony or telling him that she still wanted him to keep his distance.
Relieved to just be holding her like this again.
And then, just for a moment, he drew back and looked down into her eyes. “I’m sorry, is this what you meant by ‘slow’?”
He’d scared her just now. She’d thought that he’d suddenly changed his mind and realized that he’d rather be without her after all. When she saw he was only teasing, she could have cried.
Instead, she raised herself back up on her toes, her heated body pressed urgently against his. “Shut up and kiss me!”
“Yes, ma’am,” he answered dutifully, amusement dancing in his eyes. “But I think we should close the door first before your neighbors start talking about the hot doctor who lives at 2712 Mayfair Circle.”
The very suggestion of that happening made Mikki start to laugh. Laugh so hard at the image he’d created of gossiping neighbors that it caused every drop of tension that had invaded her body to totally dissipate and disappear.
The sound was infectious, and Jeff wound up laughing right along with her.
Mikki relaxed. It felt wonderful to laugh, and even more wonderful to have Jeff standing here, in her house, being part of her life.
Regaining some of her composure, Mikki finally locked the door. Turning back toward Jeff, she asked, “Can I get you anything?”
He shook his head, almost amused by her question. “I just spent an entire day at the restaurant. I didn’t come here to eat, Mikki. I came to find out if I could start seeing you again or if you still wanted me to go slower.”
Since it had been eating away at her, she had to ask. “Is that why you didn’t come with your mother when she came in for her postsurgical checkup?”
He was honest with her. “I thought if I brought her, you’d think I was using my mother’s condition as an excuse to see you.”
Mikki shook her head, reviewing the myriad thoughts that had gone through her head when Sophia came in, accompanied by her daughter rather than Jeff. She couldn’t remember ever being that disappointed before—not even when her parents had divorced.
She debated keeping that to herself, but then she decided if this relationship was going to work, it had to be based on honesty. No more hiding emotionally for self-preservation purposes.
“When your sister brought your mother in instead of you, I thought I was never going to see you again.”
“I was just trying to do what I thought you wanted me to do,” he told her simply. Jeff studied her face now, fighting the strong urge to pull her back into his arms. But he needed to get some things cleared up before he could allow himself to move forward. “What do you want me to do?”
She didn’t want to waste any more precious time. “I want you to forget everything I said before. I want us to go forward.”
This was a complete 180 from the wishes she’d expressed when he’d been here the last time. It sounded too good to be true, and that had him feeling just slightly leery.
“Why the change of heart?” he asked her. “What happened?”
“My mother’s getting married,” Mikki told him bluntly.
He tried to remember what she’d told him when she’d mentioned her mother’s unions the last time. “This is husband number five?”
“Maybe six,” she allowed.
And then he remembered. “Right, the possible annulment.” But why had her mother’s pending marriage made her change her feelings about commitment? “Help me out here. Aren’t all your mother’s marriages the reason why you wanted me to back off?”
Mikki flushed. “Yes.”
He shook his head, still not able to make sense out of the change in her attitude. “I’m confused.”
She tried her best to explain what she was feeling. “When my mother called to tell me she was getting married and to invite me to the wedding, I finally confronted her and asked why she was going through this again, especially since we both know that her track record when it comes to marriage is less than stellar. Why get married if there’s the very real possibility that she’ll just divorce this one, too?”
It was a legitimate question. So far, he followed her. “What was her answer?”
“She said that if she didn’t keep on trying, then she’d never be able to find the happiness she was hoping for. That she knew it wasn’t just going to fall in her lap. And that this latest guy to enter the marital sweepstakes just might be the one. As long as that possibility existed, she was going to go for it.”
Jeff laughed shortly. “You know, in its own way, that makes sense,” he told her. “If you don’t try, you don’t stand a chance of winning.”
She looked up at him, her eyes meeting his. “I know,” she replied.
He ran the back of his hand along her cheek. “You know what else?”
She could feel desire spiking within her. “What?” she asked almost breathlessly.
“You’re not your mother. You haven’t been frantically going through men, trying to find Mr. Right behind every rock and tree. You’ve been much too busy, saving the world one patient at a time.”
It was a wonderful thing to say, but she knew he wasn’t into empty flattery. What was he basing this on? “How would you know?”
“I looked you up,” he told her simply. Seeing the surprised look on her face, he quickly assured her, “I wasn’t trying to spy on you. I just thought that the more I knew about you, the better my chances were of winning you over.”
He touched on a couple of the highlights he’d learned. “You have an awful lot of accolades written about you, not to mention that you’ve gotten a lot of awards for your ‘selfless service,’ I think the wording was.”
She nodded. That was all well and good, and once upon a time, that had been enough.
But not anymore.
Not after she’d met him. “None of that matters when I come home to an empty house night after night.”
“They say pets help fill up the emptiness,” he told her, doing his best to keep a straight face.
Seeing the glimmer in his eye, Mikki doubled up her small fist and punched his arm.
“Wow, you have a violent streak. Who knew?” he teased.
And then he kissed her long and hard. When he drew back, he saw the look of surprise on her face. Jeff wasn’t finished reviewing the ground rules, because this time around, he wanted to get it right.
“So, if I promise to go very, very slow, can we start seeing each other again? Really start seeing each other again?”
“I don’t know,” she answered, and for a moment, he thought he was back on shaky ground again—until he heard her ask, “Just how slow is slow?”
Drawing her into his arms, he smiled at her. “As slow as you want.”
“What if I don’t want to go slow at all?”
“Even better,” he answered, tightening his arms around her.
There was a look he could only describe as mischievous in her eyes as she asked, “Does this mean that you’ll make love with me tonight?”
He was already pressing a kiss to the side of her neck, igniting her. “Twist my arm.”
“Why would I ever do that?” she breathed, tugging at his shirt and unbuttoning it.
“Beats me,” he replied, the words all but burning along her skin.
“Only if you stop,” she warned.
“Then I’d say we’ve got nothing to worry about,” he told her as his lips covered hers again, taking what was already his.