Chapter Two
Real smooth, Wells!
I’d done a lot of stupid things in my life, but this one definitely took the cake. Why the hell I’d agreed to have drinks with Declan Ross, I hadn’t the foggiest idea.
I’d done a good job forgetting about the asshole who’d occupied my every thought for too many years. But the minute he waltzed back into town, I jumped at the opportunity to let him drag me right back down. Talk about a glutton for punishment.
But it was done. I’d agreed to have a drink with him, and that’s exactly what I’d do. I’d have one drink with Declan, tell him it was great to see him again and then get my ass out of there.
Besides, he was just being polite. I might not be a teenager anymore, but he probably didn’t see me any differently than he had back then. So, there was no sense in acknowledging he was even hotter than he’d been the last time I saw him. Or that the tattoos I’d seen peeking out from beneath the cuff of his shirt had me wondering just what new artwork adorned his chiseled body.
There was absolutely no point in wondering what he thought of me, anyway. Nope. Absolutely none. It’d just be a drink between old acquaintances, and then we’d both go back to the way we’d been before I nearly stumbled into him in the coffee shop and dropped my files all over the floor.
Smooth one, Wells. Real smooth.
Minutes later, I forced the encounter to the back of my mind as I stepped through the doors of the town’s community hospital. It was strange working there. Before, I’d been an intern…a resident…a doctor amidst a big city of people I’d never seen before, and probably would never see again.
But here, it was different. I knew these people, and they knew me. And while sometimes it was nice to see a familiar face, I also couldn’t help but notice the dubious glances from most of my patients. They knew me as a seventeen-year-old kid, and to them it was like I’d been frozen in time, no more competent in the medical field than I’d been back then when my knowledge had been limited to removing splinters and bandaging scrapes and cuts.
I’d often wondered since my return if perhaps I’d made a mistake; if I wouldn’t have been better off in a city where I was a faceless cog in the medical machine. But I needed to be here; I needed to be in the house I’d spent so many years with my father, and in all the places I remembered him so clearly—even if they were few and far between. So, like all the days before, I plastered a confident smile on my face, greeted my coworkers and got to work.
I don’t know if I was meant to be a doctor here, but I was definitely meant to be a doctor. It fit like nothing else ever could.
I thrived under pressure; every facet of my brain sprang to life in emergencies, and I was never more sure of myself than when I was standing in the midst of a medical crisis. Diagnoses, lifesaving measures, treatment options…they were puzzles that, most of the time, only needed to be fitted together the right way to turn a patient’s health around.
Small-town medical care wasn’t as intense or fast-paced as what I’d become accustomed to in the city, but I’d adapted well, taking pleasure and satisfaction in easing a child’s earache and other things that my fellow doctors in the city would have seen as mundane.
Ten hours after my shift began, though I’d spent the day treating cuts and minor fractures, I left that evening with the same sense of satisfaction as I’d left the hospital each day in Baltimore. I was a doctor, and I helped people.
But as I made my way down the few blocks to my father’s house, I experienced something I never had before; a strange, eerie sensation that prickled along my skin and made all of my senses spring to life.
I looked around for something out of the ordinary, but aside from the occasional elderly woman peeping out her front windows, I saw nothing alarming. I willed my ears to pick up odd sounds, but aside from my own heels clicking along the sidewalk and the occasional hum of a car engine down the main street a few blocks over, I heard nothing. The scents were all familiar—pungent pines, the soft scent of roses wafting from Mrs. McGill’s garden and the charred smell of seasoned wood from a fireplace somewhere nearby.
I’d walked along these same streets every day for the past several months, not to mention the years prior when I had walked, skipped, biked and even drove up and down these streets. Nothing ever happened in Westport, plain and simple. It was nothing more than an overactive imagination at work. Perhaps the hospital wasn’t as satisfying as I was trying to lead myself to believe. It would explain why I was suddenly trying to concoct something bizarre out of small-town nothing.
Ignoring the shiver down my spine, I continued the rest of the way home—with nary a sight of a ghost, goblin or whatever creature my mind was hoping to brew up. Once safely behind closed doors, though, my mind was free to turn to what came next on the day’s agenda.
Declan Ross.
I could cancel, except I hadn’t thought to ask for his phone number or where he was staying. So, unless I was going to tell him to take a hike at my door—not an altogether terrible idea—I was stuck. Besides, it was just one drink. So why I stood in front of my bedroom closet, rummaging through my meager wardrobe for something that would knock any guy’s socks off…well, I’d rather not think about the reason why.
Armed with a fitted pair of jeans and an open-back top, I hesitated at the door on my way to the shower, lingering in my room for just a moment longer. It was comforting there, in the same room I’d occupied when I was a kid. My father hadn’t done a thing to change it in all the years I’d been away, so posters of my teen idols still hung on the wall, and the double bed was still covered with the ivory lace canopy Dad had bought for me when I was nine.
I closed my eyes, and I could still see him there, tucking me in on the nights he was home. He might have been away often, but when he was home, he gave a hundred and ten percent. What daughter could have asked for more than that?
Shaking off the memories, I hurried through a shower, washing off the day’s grime and willing the hot water to soothe the tension that had begun to tighten my shoulder muscles.
Just when I’d begun to settle into a comfortable routine in Westport, Declan had waltzed into town to screw it up. I should have been reviewing medical books, or sorting through my dad’s old stuff…not searching for my makeup bag that had remained at the bottom of my suitcase since the day I arrived home. Just a little mascara and lipstick—a woman wasn’t exactly at her most sparkling after a ten-hour shift. I’d have been doing the same no matter who I was having a drink with, I reasoned—and I almost believed it.
That was it, though, since it was just about nine-thirty, and there was no way I was going to let Declan find me primping for our non-date.
Play it calm and cool, and he’ll be out of my life once again in less than an hour, I told myself.
Leaving the bathroom, I barely made it to the kitchen before a knock sounded at the front door. This was it.
I took a deep breath, willed the calmest face I could muster and opened the door to the most gorgeous man I’d ever known. And damn it, it had to be a sin to look that good.
Jeans that looked like they’d been custom-made for his frame—which, of course, they probably were. The man and his family had more money than could be spent in ten lifetimes. His button-down shirt was open at the collar, giving a tantalizing glimpse of the solid chest beneath and the colored edges of whatever tattoo adorned him there. The five-o-clock shadow that had sprouted along his jaw made my lips tingle in anticipation of what it would feel like to drag kisses from his ear to his chin.
“Hey, Sarah.”
Before I could respond, he leaned in and wrapped his arms around me, and it was all I could do to force my hands up in reciprocation as every receptor in my body quivered at the feeling of his rock-hard frame so damn close.
The chaste handshake at the coffee shop hadn’t been accidental; the less touching, the better. Sure, I was a grown woman, no longer the obsessed teenager, but Declan Ross seemed even more potent than he ever had back then. And there was no way in hell I would be that girl ever again.
“Hi, Declan,” I replied as I eased myself out of his grasp.
“You smell incredible,” he told me, his voice not exactly a whisper, but huskier than it had been a moment before. At least, it seemed that way, though it was probably just my imagination.
And so what if I’d used the jasmine-scented wash a friend at work had brought back as a gift from her trip to the Iberian Peninsula? It wasn’t like I’d been saving it for a special occasion or anything.
“Thanks. Are you ready to go?” The sooner I got this over with, the sooner I could get back to the way life was supposed to be.
I looked past him then and noticed the car in my driveway—if one could call the hunk of metal a car. He hadn’t seriously been driving that, had he?
His gaze followed mine and he chuckled. “It’s perfectly safe, I assure you. Well, the guy at the rental shop said it was. And you know how intimate a relationship is between a guy and his car rental agent—he wouldn’t have lied to me.”
The damn boyish grin on his face caused a visceral response I chose to ignore, focusing instead on if I should put the same trust in the car rental guy.
“I never pictured you as a clunker kind of guy. Hell, your first car was a Mercedes, right?”
“Actually, my first car wasn’t a car, it was an Ecosse bike…and that’s my vehicle of choice these days, too. But, I decided to fly in at the last minute and didn’t bother making plans for something built this century. Are you up for roughing it?”
There was a challenge in his tone and in his eyes; the man knew how to get exactly what he wanted. Maybe it was a good thing he’d up and left me behind. What extremes would I have gone to if he’d turned even a little of that know-how on me back then?
“Alright, daredevil. I promised you one drink; let’s go.” I closed and locked the door behind me, and prayed to whatever deity might be out there circling the universe to just get me through the evening with my dignity intact.
Ten minutes later, we sat in a quiet, back booth in one of the only two bars in town. I should have insisted on a table out in the center of the room, but he’d led the way back to the dimly-lit area and I hadn’t said a word. So, it served me right that I was forced to struggle to not notice the muscled thigh that pressed casually against me or the way my skin tingled every time his arm brushed mine.
It was my own damn fault.