Allison Crane on his porch.
His pleasure quickly turned to concern when he realized she had a bleeding elbow. A huge tear in the leg of her sweatpants revealed a nasty case of road rash along the side of her leg. Her bike was lying in the grass in his front yard with a bent wheel, telling the rest of the story.
“Hi, Jeff,” she said quickly before he could express his concern. “I’m fine, don’t worry, I just slid in a patch of gravel, hit a pothole, and got myself two flat tires. Since I was right up the street—” she shrugged “—I just want to use your phone.”
Jeff dragged her inside. “Hell, Allie, you’re going to kill yourself on that bike if you don’t slow down.”
“I wasn’t going that fast,” she protested as he led her into the kitchen. “Can I use your phone?”
“To call 911?”
She laughed. “I’m not hurt that badly, just a scratch. I was going to call Anne and see if she could run me and the bike home in her van.”
In the kitchen, he took a piece of sterile gauze from the cabinet where he kept his first-aid supplies, then poured some antiseptic onto the gauze and faced Allison with a determined expression.
“Get away from me with that stuff. It stings.”
“You can use my phone after you let me fix you up. God knows what kind of germs are lurking in gravel.”
“Oh, you and your germs.” But she capitulated, sitting in a chair at his kitchen table and rolling up the sleeve of her oversize T-shirt.
“I can give you a ride,” he offered.
“That’s not necess—ouch!” She jerked her arm out of his grasp when he tried to clean the cut on her elbow. “Surely medical science has invented a disinfectant that doesn’t sting by now.”
“Stop being a baby.” After wiping away some of the blood, he inspected the cut more closely. “You’re bleeding like Niagara Falls here. You need stitches.”
“No way. I’ll just apply pressure. It’ll stop bleeding in a minute.”
Jeff shook his head. “You are the most pigheaded person when it comes to medical care. You’d bleed to death before you let someone take a couple of stitches.”
“Pigheaded! You’re the one who hasn’t seen a dentist in three years.”
“My teeth are fine.”
“And my elbow is fine. You and your needles can just keep away from me.”
Despite her protests, he managed to clean out the cut to his satisfaction. The bleeding had already slowed. “All right, maybe some antibiotic ointment and a couple of butterfly bandages will do the trick,” he said. “Can I at least do that?”
Allison frowned. “If it’ll make you feel like a hero.”
Jeff stifled the smile that threatened. Taking care of a patient, any patient, always made him feel like a hero. Most people thought he’d gone into medicine simply because his father was a doctor. But that had little to do with his career choice. In fact, he’d been planning a very different path, something related to business or marketing, leading to a fast-paced job and a corner office and all the big-city excitement he could handle. Then his mother had gotten sick, and he’d watched, helpless, as this doctor and that one tried futilely to save her.
Jeff’s father, himself a physician, had accepted her death. He’d accepted the fact that medical science had limits, and he’d let his wife go, knowing he’d done his best. But Jeff hadn’t let go so easily. He’d disappeared into the woods for hours, screaming at the unfairness of it all. Then he’d vowed that he would never be that helpless again. He would learn the healing arts, learn them better than anyone ever had, so no one he loved would get sick and die like that.
As he got older, he realized his outlook had been naive. Doctors weren’t gods, and sometimes patients died. But he always took it hard when one of his patients slipped away. And he’d never gotten over the thrill of finding a cure, easing pain, giving comfort and occasionally pulling off something that bordered on miraculous.
He would never say it aloud, because it sounded so sanctimonious, but being a doctor truly was his calling.
ALLISON WINCED as Jeff deftly cleaned the scrapes on her leg.
He looked up with clear, blue eyes that could melt a glacier. “I’m sorry, did I hurt you?”
“It’s okay,” she said. It wasn’t the pain that made every nerve ending in her body stand at attention. It was the touch of Jeff’s hands on her bare skin. They’d played doctor once, when they were children, but ever since then she had assiduously avoided letting Jeff practice his medical arts on her. It wasn’t that she mistrusted his skill. He was one of the best doctors in all of East Texas. But she was deathly afraid that if he touched her, her bodily reactions would give her away.
Thank goodness he thought her fidgeting and shortness of breath were due to discomfort, rather than the fact she was so hot and bothered she couldn’t sit still.
She was crazy in love with Jeff Hardison, had been since she was thirteen. Unfortunately, Jeff had never given her any indication that he reciprocated, so she had pined away in secrecy. He’d always been a good friend to her—really, her best friend—but nothing more, and she would die a thousand deaths if he ever found out her true feelings.
She’d known since high school that he would never be the one for her. Jeff gravitated toward sophisticated females with style, panache and long legs. She had none of those things. Even losing sixty pounds—a result of her newfound passion for bicycling—hadn’t turned her into the sort of femme fatale Jeff went for.
It was hopeless, completely hopeless. She never should have opened her dental practice back home in Cottonwood, where she saw him all the time. They hung out with each other. She even spent time with his family at the Hardison Ranch, which Jeff’s brother Jonathan ran. She was constantly reminded of everything she couldn’t have. Yet, a certain perverse part of her enjoyed being with him. It was torture, but sweet torture.
Jeff applied a couple of bandages over the worst scrapes on her legs. “There, that ought to keep you from bleeding all over my car.”
“You don’t have to take me home. Anyway, I couldn’t fit a loaf of bread in the trunk of your Porsche, much less a bicycle.”
“You can pick up the bike later. I trust you won’t be riding it right away.”
“Of course I will.”
He gave her a disapproving frown.
“Oh, all right, you can take me home,” she said. as if it were a great concession on her part. In truth, she loved riding in Jeff’s luxurious, dark-green sports car, loved the buttery feel of his calfskin seats and the powerful purr of the engine, barely contained on the calm streets of Cottonwood. “I need to take the bike into the shop, anyway, to have that wheel straightened out.”
She would ride her mountain bike until the racing bike was repaired, but Jeff didn’t have to know that.
“That road rash will be a great topic of conversation next weekend,” Jeff commented as they headed for his garage.
“Next weekend?”
“The convention? You’re going, aren’t you?”
“That’s next weekend? Oh, shoot, I think I forgot to send my money in. I’ve probably got back-to-back patients next Thursday and Friday, too.”
“Allie, you have to go.”
She was surprised by the urgency in his voice. “Why?”
“Because it’s no fun without you. Anyway, you have to save me from Sherry McCormick.”
“That nurse with the curly blond hair?”
“That’s the