he’d been needling her precisely in the hope of stripping away all the lacquered perfection that made up this new Olivia Whitfield, success should have tasted sweet. Instead, it left a bitter taste on his tongue and filled him with a strange remorse. None of the things he’d thought he wanted—to have the last word, to be the one who walked away and left her standing—were nearly as tempting as the urge to wrap his arms around her and hold her close the way he had in the early days, when love was new and a kiss could work miracles.
Fortunately, a less welcome ghost from the past barreled onto the scene and put paid to any such nonsense. “So it is you,” Sam Whitfield huffed, panting to a standstill in front of him and glaring at him from eyes embedded in too much florid flesh. “I was hoping I’d been mistaken. What persuaded you to slither back into town?”
“Same thing that brought you out from under your personal rock, Sam. Attending a wedding.”
“Is that a fact? And how soon will you be leaving again?”
“Not for quite some time.”
Sam assumed his familiar bulldog stance, legs planted a yard apart, jaw thrust forward pugnaciously. “I wouldn’t have thought even you had the brass nerve to stay where you’re so clearly not wanted. We’ve got a fine, well-staffed hospital here, and we don’t need the likes of you hanging around, so take my advice, Dr. Madison, and go back to wherever it is you came from.”
The chance to inflict a little torture on the man Grant despised above all others was too delicious to squander. Savoring every moment, he said, “But you do need me, at least for a while.”
“What in the name of Hades are you talking about?”
“I’m standing in as Justin Greer’s locum while he and Valerie are away on their honeymoon. I’m going to be in your face every day for the next two months, Sam, running his practice. Naturally, I assumed you already knew that, seeing you’re chairman of the hospital board and a take-charge kind of guy.”
Sam turned faintly purple. “You’re delusional, Madison. I would never sanction any move that allowed you to cross the town limits, let alone set foot inside Springdale General again.”
“Well, gee, Sam, then someone else must have okayed it when you weren’t looking. Maybe you were on the ninth hole with your good buddy John Polsen at the time?”
It was a bone of contention that had lain buried for over eight summers, but it still raised Sam’s hackles. Grant’s internship hadn’t been more than a month old when a freeway accident had swamped the emergency unit with casualties. One of them had happened to be John Polsen and, although his injuries hadn’t been serious, Sam had pulled rank and had him bumped to the head of the line for treatment.
Brash, and as politically naive as they came, Grant had done what no one else had dared do: told the chairman of the board to stick to what he knew best—managing the hospital budget—and to leave the medical decisions to those who could recognize one end of a stethoscope from the other.
The fact that Sam had been indisputably in the wrong hadn’t altered the fact that he’d been publicly humiliated by a lowly intern. The new Dr. Madison had needed to be taken down a peg or two, and Grant had known from then on that he didn’t have a hope of serving his residency at Springdale. From that day forward, Sam had seen to it that Grant always wound up at the end of whatever line he chose to stand in.
Rubbing the man’s nose in the fact that he’d been out-maneuvered yet again by his old upstart of an enemy gave Grant a special kind of satisfaction now. In his view, no amount of punishment he could dole out would ever even the score between him and Olivia’s father. The bitterness ran too deep. On both sides.
“Even with the ink on your diploma barely dry you were an arrogant bastard, and nothing’s changed, obviously,” Sam growled. “It’s no thanks to you that John Polsen didn’t die, the day they brought him into Emergency.”
“Bull, Sam!” Grant said cheerfully. “John Polsen’s like you—too mean to die.”
“Stop it, both of you!” Olivia begged, observing the old warhorse fearfully. “For heaven’s sake, Grant, can’t you see my father isn’t a well man? This kind of strain is bad for his heart.”
Too many sixteen-ounce steaks, after-dinner ports and foot-long cigars are the real culprit in that department, Grant could have told her. But there was a limit to everyone’s tolerance for stress and Olivia had clearly reached hers. Her eyes were dark with worry and she slipped her arm part-way around the old man’s girth as tenderly as a mother. “Don’t upset yourself,” she told him soothingly. “It isn’t worth it. He isn’t worth it.”
“Maybe you should find him a seat in the shade,” Grant offered, a little alarmed himself at Sam’s stertorous breathing and the sweat suddenly popping out on his brow.
The glare she flung at him would have stopped traffic. “I hardly need you to tell me how to take care of my father. In fact, given the circumstances, you’re the last person I’d turn to for advice.”
“Suit yourself.” He shrugged and inclined his head at the crowd lined up at a buffet groaning under the weight of lobster mayonnaise, cracked Dungeness crab, prawns in aspic, smoked turkey and roast beef. “But you’d be doing him a favor if you steered him away from all that rich food.”
Not deigning to acknowledge what she surely knew was a sound recommendation, she carted Sam off to a table set in the shade of a grand old oak, and plunked him down in a chair. Shortly after, Henry Colton joined them. What a sight they made, with him fawning all over the old man and practically drooling on her, Sam sitting there like a king holding court, and Olivia, the ever-dutiful daughter, anticipating her father’s every need and waiting on him hand and foot.
Collaring Justin, who happened to stroll past at that moment, Grant nodded at the trio. “Do you see anything wrong with that picture?”
Justin didn’t miss a beat. “Apart from the fact that you’re no longer in it, you mean?”
Grant snorted and muttered a satisfyingly obscene expletive. “I hardly think I’ve been missed! But there’s something sadly lacking in a twenty-eight-year-old woman whose idea of high living is to act as handmaiden to her tyrant of a father.”
“Yeah.” Justin nodded. “So what do you propose to do about it, pal?”
“Me?” Grant grimaced. “Not a blasted thing!”
“Why not? Isn’t that why you really came back to Springdale?”
Incensed, he snapped, “You know very well it’s not!”
But Justin was no more the type to back away from a scrap than Grant himself was. “Come off it, Grant! I agree you’re doing me a favor by covering my practice while I’m away, but would you have been so eager to stand in if it were anyone else—or, more to the point, anywhere else? Admit it, you’ve got another, less altruistic reason for being here. So what’s on that private agenda of yours? Going another ten rounds with Sam Whitfield for the sheer hell of it—or trying once more to wean Olivia away from him?”
An hour ago, Grant could truthfully have declared Sam the hands-down winner. That the situation had changed, however, wasn’t something he was prepared to admit to anyone. Deeming ambiguity the better part of discretion, he merely grinned at Justin and raised his glass in a mocking toast. “Let’s just drink to marriage, pal,” he said. “May the honeymoon never end.”
Up to her neck in bubbles, Olivia lay back in the soaker tub, rested her head against the inflatable pillow, and wallowed in the scented warmth of the water. Gradually, the tension seeped out of her limbs, eased away by a languor that crept along her shoulders and up the back of her neck. Only when a slight ache swept the length of her jaw did she realize she’d been clenching her teeth for longer than was good for her, or them.
Of course, she knew why she’d been coiled tight as a spring. She’d behaved like a complete idiot at the wedding. By now, everyone else