“Please call me Emma.” I tugged my hand until he released my fingers. “Although I appreciate the courtesy. There are plenty of people in the medical community who don’t want to give me the title of doctor.”
“You earned it, just like I did mine,” he replied. “By the way, I’m Deacon. I don’t stand on formality, either.” One side of his mouth ticked up before he spoke again. “I want to apologize for not being here when you started this job. If it hadn’t been an absolute emergency, I would’ve turned down NHC’s request, but once I knew you were on the way, I felt better about going to help them. I never even thought about what the transition would be like for you.”
“Everyone here has been very welcoming and kind . . . with a couple of notable exceptions.” I crossed my legs and rested my hands on my thigh. “And honestly, I think those were more misunderstandings than anything else. Your staff is extremely protective of you.”
Deacon winced. “I know. And part of that is my own fault—I left instructions, and there were reasons for some of the details to be considered unchangeable.” His eyes flickered up to rest over my head, unfocused. “A couple of the doctors who have privileges here, who consult on an occasional basis, might have been moved to take advantage of my absence to push their own ideas and plans. When I told Mira that I didn’t want my orders countermanded unless it was a matter of patient survival, I wasn’t thinking of you. I was concerned about those other doctors.”
This all made sense. “Your set up here is kind of unusual. I was surprised that you’d go out of the country without another primary doctor to oversee things here. A partner or someone like that.”
“We do things differently, yes,” Deacon admitted. “But I knew I had our nurse practitioners already up and running, and Mira is like my right hand in implementing the vision I have . . . and then there was you.” He smiled, and I suddenly thought of a term Jenny had used before: insta-lust. Yeah, I understood that now.
Glancing away for my own protection—spontaneous combustion was not something I wanted to experience here and now—I cleared my throat. “I don’t think that last part translated clearly to your head nurse. If Mira’s your right hand, that hand has been chasing me down with a fly-swatter for two weeks, trying to make sure I’m not stepping out of what she sees as the immutable line. From what she’s said, if an order comes from your mouth, it’s gospel. If it hasn’t, it’s suspect.”
Deacon rolled his eyes. “I can imagine. I’ll have a talk with her . . . but if you don’t mind, I think that will wait until Monday. I’m seriously too jet-lagged to be doing any good here today. I probably should’ve followed my gut instinct and stayed home. Your first impression of me might’ve been a little less antagonistic.”
“I understand.” I sat forward a little, about to stand up, and then hesitated. “I didn’t mean anything by what I said. I wasn’t making fun of the work you were doing in South America. I know it came out snarky, but that wasn’t at all my intention.”
He nodded. “It’s possible that I’m a little sensitive about that kind of thing. As much as my friends and some of my colleagues give me way too much latitude, I’m well aware that some people think I have a savior complex. What I do with No Hungry Child isn’t about saving the world—it’s about doing anything I can to help. I have a responsibility to Harper Springs, because I was born and raised here, and I want to give back. But I also see the benefit of offering my hand to the larger world.” He shrugged. “It’s not that big a deal. I should’ve just laughed along with you instead of getting all offended and acting like an ass.”
“Maybe we should both just say we got off on the wrong foot and decide to start again on Monday,” I suggested. “So I’m going to leave now and get to rounds. I’ll see you Monday.”
“Looking forward to it, Emma.”
I left his office without a backwards glance, but even so, it was as though I could feel the caress of his tongue on my name as I walked down the hallway. And although I felt utterly ridiculous in even thinking about it, I couldn’t hold in a smile.
Dr. Foxy, indeed!
6
Emma
“If I had half the intelligence I claim to have, I would have taken you up on your offer to move in here with you as soon as you mentioned it.” With a happy sigh, I turned over on my raft to grin at Jenny, who was stretched out on a chaise lounge alongside the pool. “This could be my life all the time. I wouldn’t have to worry about sweating through every night, trying to get lukewarm water for a shower, how to keep my food cold . . . or my new best friend, the skink.”
Jenny laughed and shaded her eyes to look at me. “You have a new best friend who’s a skank? Do tell. Do I know her?”
“Skink, not skank,” I corrected. “And no, I don’t believe you’ve had the pleasure. We met four nights ago . . . you remember the day we had that killer storm, and then instead of cooling things off the way storms do up north, it actually left us with more humidity? Remember that?”
She snorted. “Vaguely. I can’t be sure, since I live in the lap of air-conditioned luxury.”
“Nice. Well, anyway, that night I’d finally gotten to sleep—I’d stripped down to the skin because it was so stinking hot, and I was sleeping on top of the covers. Sleeping is a generous term for what I was doing, because I was actually just barely dozing. I’d had my eyes closed for maybe half an hour when I felt something on my hand.”
“Oh, my God.” Jenny’s eyes went wide.
“Yeah, my reaction exactly,” I agreed. “I wake up, and I immediately think it’s a palmetto bug, because those suckers are bold. They come right up and crawl on me, and when they see me, they don’t run away like regular roaches. No, these thingschargeme, like some kind of New York City thug hopped up on meth.” I shuddered and nearly fell off the raft into the water. After righting myself, I went on.
“But it wasn’t a palmetto bug. It was this . . . thing, kind of like a snake, but not quite. He has legs and a long, long tail—it’s blue—and he was staring up at me with big eyes. Well, okay, they weren’t that big, but he looked startled, for sure.”
“Um, and you took the time to think about this?” Jenny gave herself an all-over shake. “My ass would’ve been out of that bed, and I would’ve been screaming. And then I’d have been in my car and driving myself to a hotel. Or to this house. Whichever was more likely to be skink-free.”
“Yeah, that was my first inclination, too,” I admitted. “But for some reason—maybe I was still half-asleep—I didn’t move. He scurried off my hand before I could do anything else, and then he ran to the edge of my bed and just turned around, watching me.”
“Ughhhhh.” Jenny shifted, bending her legs. “Did you get him out of there? I wouldn’t be able to sleep, knowing he was in the house with me.”
“I thought about that, but then . . . I don’t know.” I lifted one shoulder. “He looked kind of scared. Like maybe he was more scared of me than I was of him. I got my phone and looked up what he was—I made sure he wasn’t, you know, like poisonous or able to bite me. I figured out what he is—a skink. So then I told him that as long as he didn’t climb on me while I was sleeping, he can have the run of the place at night. I can’t be sure, but I think he nodded.”
“Emma.” Jenny rolled her eyes. “I think you need to get out of that trailer. Seriously, girlfriend. I think it’s messing with your brain. You’re talking to skinks and making deals with them. Maybe there’s some kind of gas leak that’s affecting your cognitive process.”
“Trust me, there’s no gas leak, because the only gas there is propane, and I turn it off every night, ever since the guy at the gas station put the fear of God into me.” When I’d gone to get tanks filled to run my stove and oven, the man who had helped me had offered advice in handling propane. He’d found out that I’d never had to use bottled gas before, and he had warned me about hitting bumps in the road or leaving it on and then lighting a match in the trailer. His graphic descriptions had made sure that I wasn’t going to mess around with it.
