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AS HE TALKED, I TRIED my best to stay focused.
Why hadn’t Mom mentioned how cute he was? Yeah, she had told me he was a little younger than the guy who had been here before, but this...this was something else entirely. He looked as though he could have strolled straight off the pages of a fashion magazine or something, and I was having a hard time keeping my head straight in the face of someone as downright sexy as him.
His dark eyes, dark hair, and olive skin popped against the pale blue of his perfectly pressed shirt; it was rolled up to his elbows, and I could see his strong hands and forearms as he gestured while he talked. He had a deep voice, the kind of full, lovely sound that seemed to fill the room around us, and it took everything I had in me not to lean across the table and brush my fingers over the stubble on his jaw just to work out how it actually felt.
I swallowed heavily and pushed all of that to the back of my mind. I was here for my mom. I had dropped my stuff off at the house, and she had suggested I go to the doctor’s office to talk to the guy who had been handling her case so far. I hadn’t been prepared for him to catch me quite so off-guard, but I promised myself it was nothing more than jetlag throwing me off.
I felt a little tongue-tied as I listened to him talk, hoping I wasn’t making too big a fool of myself. How long had he worked here, exactly? I could already guess how many of the women of my mother’s generation were trying to set up their daughters with the new hot young doctor, especially since I couldn’t see a wedding ring on his finger. As far as they were concerned, that meant he was totally single and available, and trying to convince them of anything else would have been futile.
“So, when it comes to her recovery, rest is the most important thing,” he continued. I was trying to take in everything he was saying, I knew it was important, but it seemed impossible when my brain was fraying around the edges. I needed to get myself the fuck together, I was probably just sitting there in front of him looking like a total idiot—slack jawed and staring as I tried to catch up with it all.
“But what I think is most important in future is making sure that we stop something like this happening again,” he continued. “Which is why I’d like to go over some of the safety measures we can put in her home now that you’re here. They’ll take some installation and some testing, but it’ll make her chances of having a fall like this in future far less likely.”
“Does she really need all of that?” I asked, furrowing my brow. “I mean, the house is fine, at least from what I saw.”
The house had looked okay when I stopped in earlier, and I wondered if he was just trying to sell me something I didn’t need to make some money for a friend of his or something. I cocked an eyebrow and looked him up and down, trying to get the measure of him. I could tell a salesman when I saw one, and he didn’t give me those vibes. He seemed a little serious for my liking, but not as though he was trying to sell me something I didn’t need just for the sake of making a little extra cash.
“You need to take a closer look,” he replied. “And consider the state your mother’s in at the moment. If it’s been a while since you last saw her, she may have gone downhill since the last time you spent time together.”
I didn’t reply to that. I didn’t know how. What did he know about how long I had spent away from my mother? I chewed on my lip as I tried to work out how long it was in months, weeks, days. I didn’t even want to imagine it. I hated thinking about how long I had left her, but he was likely right—there was so much for me to consider about how her body might have changed since I had been with her last. She had seemed strong enough when I saw her earlier, but that didn’t mean she was doing fine. She would put on a brave face for me for the sake of keeping me from worry, but it didn’t mean she was cured.
“There are a few places I think you need to change things up,” he explained, and he pulled out a pad of paper and hovered a pen over it—but, before he could start writing, he looked up at me again.
“I could come to the house and show you in person,” he remarked. “Might be easier that way. You could get an idea of the kind of changes we need to make, and why we need to make them. Does that sound good?”
I paused for a moment, a little surprised he would be so forward. But then, I remembered where I was—in Maple Valley, life rolled a little differently than it did anywhere else in the world. Things which might have seemed like an overstep from anyone else had long-since become normal here. Everyone knew everyone, and nobody saw any reason to pretend any different. The privacy and anonymity I’d had while I had been abroad was all but out the window now, and I had to remember exactly what this town had to offer. How it would treat me now I’d returned.
He talked me through a few of the changes he’d like to see made, and then walked me to the door of his office. I was doing my best to take it all in, but in truth, I was having a hard time keeping up with it all. It was just...so much to think about, so much to consider, when there was already a whole heap piling up inside my head as it was.
I smiled and extended my hand to his at the door.
“Thanks for meeting with me today,” I told him. “And I’ll see you at the house tomorrow night, right?”
“That’s right,” he replied, and he took my hand. I tried to ignore the little flutter of electricity that seemed to emanate from his fingers when he touched me. It turned out I wasn’t immune to hot doctor energy either.
“Thanks,” I repeated. I turned and left before he could see the flush threatening to inch up my neck and give me away.
I closed my eyes and gathered myself before I went outside to meet my mom. She had insisted on coming with me, sitting out in the fresh air to relax before we headed home, and I was glad she was there when I came out. She so often got distracted chatting to whoever she ran into, I had half-expected her to have wandered off and got caught up in someone else’s life before I had a chance to stop her.
“How did it go?” she asked me, her face brightening as soon as she saw me.
“It’s fine,” I replied. “It was good to meet him. The doctor, I mean.”
“Yes, Nate’s wonderful, isn’t he?” She remarked. Nate? So, they were on first-name terms already? No wonder she had been so confident telling me to just stroll on into his office without an appointment.
“He says we need to make some changes to the house,” I remarked, and she shrugged, then winced, seemingly forgetting her bad arm kept her from moving like that.
“Well, if that’s what he says we need to do, I say we listen to him,” she replied. “He knows what he’s talking about when it comes to this stuff.”
“You don’t think it’s overkill?” I asked her. “I mean, the house is okay, isn’t it? You just had an accident...”
I trailed off, realizing as I talked how selfish I sounded. If she needed some changes to be made around the house to make sure she was safe, then I would make sure she got them. I had come here to make her life easier, and it wasn’t going to happen if I just brushed off what the doctor had said to me. If she needed some new installations around the house, then so be it. I could pay for them. I had come here to help her, not to question how best to take care of her.
“You know, forget that,” I replied, waving my hand. “We’ll put in anything he thinks you need. He said he’d come around tomorrow to show me what needs to change, so we can talk about it all then.”
“Oh, he’s coming to the house?” She asked, perking up. “I need to cook something.”
“You need to rest,” I warned her. “That’s what he said to me. And I think he’ll kick my ass if he knows I’ve been letting you do anything other than sit and read in your front room.”
“I’m really not that bad,” she replied, but I didn’t believe her. She had always played down what was happening with herself to me, whether it was physical or emotional.
“Yeah, I think I’m going to take his word for that over yours,” I told her, as gently as I could. I didn’t want to come off like I was dismissing her, but honestly, she needed to realize how much she was struggling right now. He wouldn’t have even let her go home if there wasn’t someone there to take care of her, that’s what she told me when I had arrived, and I doubted he would have let her take up a bed at the clinic for so long if it hadn’t been serious.
I helped her to her car and climbed in the front seat, taking the wheel. She had wanted to drive down here, but I had told her in no uncertain terms I wasn’t about to let that happen. She needed someone to take care of her, and I refused to allow anything to get in the way of her healing.
“So, he’s coming to visit, is he?” she asked me, as we pulled out of the parking lot. I could tell from the tone in her voice just what she was thinking, but if she really believed I was going to let her spin it that way, she had another thing coming.
“Yeah, Mom, he’s coming to look at the house to make sure you've got everything you need to heal properly,” I reminded her. She grinned. Whether or not she would have said it out loud, she was thinking something far from the truth about this. Something I couldn’t even allow her to entertain.
“He’s a very good doctor,” she remarked, her words laced with far more meaning than she would ever have admitted to. I glanced at her. If she thought she was going to be able to turn this into a date, she was wrong. Just because I had come back to take care of her didn’t mean I was looking for her to set me up with some local guy. Once she was back on her feet, I would be back at my normal life again, and I wouldn’t be giving any thought at all to Doctor Nate Burgess.
Or the way his beautiful eyes happened to make me feel.
