someone borrow her spare room, she told them, it wouldn’t be an inconvenience at all.
Alex left Brent a few moments later to move on to her next patient. But as she headed for elderly Maria and her shiny new knee, she couldn’t help wondering if Chase had ever known what it was like to truly need something and not be able to get it.
She was thinking about him again. Irritated with herself for not being able to get him out of her mind, she started down the hall, deliberately humming a repetitive tune from one of Tyler’s tapes. Once that melody got started in her head, she knew it would take forever to get it out. It drove her positively nuts. But she figured even that was better than wondering what it was that drove the compound femur in three-fifty-four.
Chapter Three
The mind-numbing melody had been replaced by the theme from Tarzan by the time Alex and Tyler arrived at Granetti’s for dinner at six o’clock that evening. Parking her sedate silver Saturn in her spot at the hospital, since the restaurant they were going to was across the street, she explained to her son for the third time that she wasn’t going to work, that they were going to dinner and, no, they couldn’t go to Pizza Pete’s.
“But I want pizza.”
“You can have pizza here. Or spaghetti,” she told him, which reminded her to grab a handful of wet-wipes from the glove box to stuff into her purse. “You like spaghetti better, anyway.”
Alex stifled a sigh as she watched her little boy scrunch his nose. The tiny golden freckles scattered over it seemed to merge as he considered her observation. Sometime in the last twenty-four hours, his baby-fine blond hair had managed to grow to below his eyebrows. He now needed a haircut as badly as he needed new tennies.
She supposed she should see if Brent wanted a haircut, too. The boy was beginning to look like a sheep dog.
Tyler’s frown suddenly changed quality. She could practically see the mental gears shifting behind his dark brown eyes as he unbuckled his seat belt and opened his door.
“How fast will a Viper go?”
“A viper?” she repeated, doing a little mental shifting of her own. She had no idea how he’d gone from pizza to reptiles. “I don’t know, honey. Is that the kind of snake that goes sideways?”
“It’s not a snake.” he informed her, as if she should have somehow known that. “It’s a car.”
“It is?”
“Yeah. And they go really fast. Does it go as fast as a Cobra?”
That, she knew, was definitely a car. Her next door neighbor’s son-in-law drove one. Tyler loved that thing. Especially when its tires squealed.
“It sure sounds like it should.” Checking her purse to make sure she had her pager, she looped the strap over her shoulder while Tyler scrambled out. She truly had no idea how his mind worked. The challenge was simply to keep up with him.
“Can we get a video with a Viper in it?” Tyler hollered, running around the back of the car.
Absently straightening the skirt of her sleeveless shift as she stood, Alex patiently told her forty-pound bundle of energy she didn’t know if they made Viper videos, then tucked the back of Tyler’s favorite T-shirt—a blue one sporting a green lizard—into the waistband of his cargo pants before she reached for his hand.
He was still talking as they crossed the street, informing her now that Tom, their cat, could watch the video with him, which somehow reminded him that he’d forgotten to feed his gerbil. With the low sun slanting its warm rays against her face and her precious, precocious little boy chattering away beside her, she should have been enjoying the moment.
Instead, she was trying to figure out what it was about Chase Harrington that disturbed her most. The way she’d seemed to absorb his agitation or the fact that she couldn’t seem to get him out of her mind.
The afternoon had been blessedly uneventful—if she discounted the fact that she’d discovered a new leak in her washing machine. After she’d finished rounds, she’d picked up Tyler at the hospital day-care center and headed for home. The guest room now had fresh sheets, the washing of which had revealed the leak, there was milk in her refrigerator and she and Tyler were on their way to a relatively quiet, uninterrupted dinner with her two closest friends and their families. There was no reason for her to be thinking of Chase now. She wouldn’t have to deal with him again until tomorrow.
Grasping that thought, she pushed open Granetti’s brass-trimmed door. The homey Irish-Italian pub-cum-restaurant was a comfortable, neighborhood sort of place that felt like a home away from home. On this particular evening, the atmosphere was even more welcoming.
Under the lattice-and-faux-grape-leaf-covered-ceiling and the Guinness beers signs on the back wall, a wide swath of black paper shouted Happy XXXII, Alex in bilious green. Neon-pink balloons hovered over the chairs.
Below the banner, tables had been pushed into a long line to accommodate the thirty-odd people who greeted her with a deafening “Surprise!” when she walked in holding Tyler’s hand.
“Wow! It’s a party, Mom!”
Stunned, Alex let his hand slide from hers. Before she could blink, her wide-eyed little boy had darted for the dark-haired preschooler dashing toward him. When he reached Griffin, his “very best” friend, they slugged each other and grinned.
“It’s about time you caught up with us. I hate it when you’re younger.” Kelly Hall wrapped Alex in a quick hug. Her honey-blond hair was plaited in its usual French braid and her hazel eyes were laughing. “Happy belated birthday.”
“We’d planned to do this yesterday, but you got called in.” Ronni Powers-Malone, Ryan Malone’s new wife and a good friend, moved in with a hug of her own. “Hi, Alex. Happy Birthday.”
“I can’t believe this.” Feeling her smile spread, Alex hugged her friends back and took in the banner once more. “I feel like I’m a superbowl.”
“The Roman numerals were the guys’ idea. Ronni and I would have preferred to give you a quiet dinner with a gorgeous male at Le Petit Cinq,” Kelly confided. “But we knew you were on call and it wouldn’t be worth the arm-twisting to get you to go if you’d just get called away anyhow. It was either this or Pizza Pete’s.”
Petite and pregnant, pediatrician Ronni tugged her toward the tables. “We figured this was better, since it was closer to the hospital.”
“And they have garlic-cheese bread. Ronni’s been craving it,” Kelly explained. “We’re also fresh out of gorgeous males. We got the last of ’em.”
“The lady has impeccable taste.” The hug this time came with the scent of aftershave. Tanner Malone, Kelly’s dark-haired, impressively built fiancé flashed a hint of his dynamite smile. “Hey there, Alex.”
“Hey yourself, Tanner.” Beyond them, the music of laughter and conversation underscored the strains of an Irish ballad. Wonderful aromas scented the air. “Where’s the baby?”
Alex fully expected Tanner to tease her, to express some sort of feigned exasperation over having fought his way through the crowd to get to her only to have her ask about his child. Instead, looking unusually subdued, he simply murmured, “She’s over there with Ryan and the nurses.”
Despite his oddly reticent manner, pride lit his eyes as he nodded toward the people collectively cooing over his adorable infant daughter. Alex and Tanner had a lot in common. He’d been a single parent himself, until Kelly had rescued him, and he was intimately familiar with trying to manage parental responsibility and a demanding career. He owned the construction company building the hospital’s new wing.
The thought of asking him if he could recommend anyone to fix her washing-machine leak was cancelled by the greetings of her colleagues from the clinic and the hospital as she was coaxed farther into the room.