Melissa managed to make it through the rest of the weekend without obsessing too much about Eli, mainly because she and Skye spent Saturday running errands, then drove to Portland for the day on Sunday. By Sunday night, the prospect of going back to the clinic and spending the day in his company filled her with nerves.
She managed to push it away by baking strawberry shortcake Sunday evening and texting the other tenants of Brambleberry House, inviting them down to share after Skye was in bed.
Both Rosa and Sonia arrived at the same time, moments after her text went out. The three of them sat out in her screened porch, enjoying the evening breeze and the promise of rain.
“This is...delicious,” Sonia said in her slow, halting voice. She gave one of her rare smiles. “Thank you for inviting me.”
“You’re welcome.”
“What brought on your frenzy of baking?” Rosa asked. “Not that I would be complaining, only curious.”
Melissa couldn’t tell them she had been restless for two days, since leaving Eli at A Slice of Heaven. “We went to the farmers market in Portland yesterday, and the strawberries were so luscious I couldn’t resist buying four quarts of them. I have to do something with all those berries.”
“Shortcake...was a great choice,” Sonia said.
When Melissa offered the invitation, she hadn’t really thought their second-floor neighbor would join them, but every once in a while Sonia did the unexpected.
The woman was such a mystery to her. Melissa had tried to gently probe about what medical conditions she had, but Sonia was apparently an expert at the art of deflecting conversation away from herself.
Why did she keep to herself? What secrets lurked beneath her pretty features? Had she been abused? Was she in hiding?
Melissa didn’t feel darkness in Sonia’s past, only...sadness. She couldn’t explain it rationally, it was just a sense. There was a deep sorrow in Sonia. She wished she could get to the bottom of it.
Sometimes she thought becoming a nurse had heightened her compassion for others, giving her instincts she didn’t fully understand. Her hunches had been proved right too many times for her to question them any longer, though. Now she simply listened to them.
Fiona, who had trotted down from the third floor with Rosa, lifted her head at that moment and seemed to stare off at nothing in the corner, head cocked as if listening to something only she could hear.
A faint hint of roses seemed to stir in the air, subtle and sly, but that might have been her imagination.
She followed the dog’s gaze, then turned back to the other two women. “Do you ever get the feeling we’re not the only ones in this house?” she asked impulsively.
“What do you mean?” Sonia asked, brows furrowed. For one brief instant, she looked so panicked that Melissa regretted bringing it up.
“Just... I sometimes feel like the house is alive with memories of the past.”
“I know what you mean,” Rosa said with her slight Spanish accent. “I never feel like it is malicious or scary.”
“No,” Melissa said. “I find it comforting, actually. Like somebody is watching over the house and those who live here.”
“I don’t believe in guardian angels,” Sonia said flatly. “I wish I did. At times in my life, I could have used...a guardian angel...or two or twenty.”
Her eyes looked haunted, and Melissa wanted to hug her, but she sensed Sonia wouldn’t welcome the gesture.
“My grandmother used to say our family is always watching over you, whether you want them to or not.”
“Don’t you find that a little disturbing?” Melissa asked Rosa.
The other woman laughed and ate more of her strawberry shortcake. “Maybe. My mama’s Tio Juan Carlos was crazy. I don’t want him anywhere watching over me.”
“It’s not your crazy great-uncle. I get the feeling it’s someone kind. Does that make me as crazy as Juan Carlos?”
Rosa smiled. “A little. But I am crazy, too. Maybe Abigail, the woman who lived here all her life and died when she was in her nineties, didn’t want to leave. She’s the one who left the house to my aunt Anna and to Sage Spencer. It could be she’s sticking around to keep an eye on things.”
“I remember Abigail a little from when we first moved to Cannon Beach,” Melissa said. “I like the idea of a sweet older lady keeping watch over the house she loves.”
“I do, too,” Sonia said. “It’s comforting, somehow.”
While they finished their strawberry shortcake, they talked about the house and its history, what little Rosa knew from her aunt anyway. Eventually, the conversation drifted to men.
“How are things with the ex-husband?” Rosa asked. “Any updates after your frustration the other day?”
“No. I haven’t heard from him.”
At Sonia’s questioning look, she explained the situation with Cody to the other woman.
“Who was that...good-looking guy I saw you with...yesterday?”
So much for keeping Eli out of her head for five minutes. She fought down a sigh. “That’s my new boss. Dr. Sanderson’s son, Eli.”
“Oh! That’s Eli! Wendell...said he might be coming home.”
Melissa hadn’t realized her neighbor was such good friends with the elder Dr. Sanderson. As far as she knew, Sonia had only visited Dr. Sanderson once since she had been working there. It made sense, though, since he was the best doctor in town.
“If he’s that cute, maybe I need to schedule a physical or something,” Rosa teased.
“I think...I might be due for a follow-up appointment too,” Sonia said.
It was the first joke she had ever heard the other woman make. Rosa looked just as surprised, then grinned. “Maybe we should just drop by the clinic this week to take Melissa out to lunch. We can check him out then.”
“Good idea,” Sonia said with what could almost be considered a smile.
“You’re both terrible. Here. Have some more shortcake.”
The conversation drifted to Rosa’s work managing her aunt Anna’s gift store in town and then to Sonia’s plans for the garden.
“This was fun,” Rosa said a short time later, stifling a yawn. “But I have to run down to Lincoln City first thing tomorrow to pick up some pottery from one of our suppliers. I had better get to bed.”
“Same here,” Sonia said. “Thank you for the dessert...and the...conversation.”
She rose in her wobbly way.
“It was fun,” Melissa said. “We should get together more often. Maybe you two could come for pizza night on Friday. Skye would love hosting a dinner party.”
Sonia took on that secretive look she had sometimes. “I won’t be here this weekend. But maybe the week after that.”
Where do you go? she wanted to ask her secretive neighbor. And why are you so sad when you return?
“I’ll be gone, too,” Rosa said with regret in her eyes. “Fiona and I are going hiking with some friends next weekend.”
“No problem. We’ll do it another time. Maybe the week after that, then. Put it on your calendars.”
“Done,” Rosa said with a smile.
“I’ll have to look at my...schedule,” Sonia said.
She said goodbye to them both, then made her slow way out of the screened porch and to the entryway that led upstairs to her own apartment.
“I hate watching her make that climb,” Melissa said. “Why wouldn’t she take the ground-floor apartment? It would be so much easier.”
“I do not think that one wants the easy,” Rosa said, her Spanish accent more pronounced. She stood up, and her dog rose, as well.
“And you don’t know anything more about her...issues?” Melissa asked.
“No. She has been in town longer than I have, about four years. Anna said she showed up in town one day and started coming into the gift shop, mainly to pet Conan. That was the dog my aunt and Sage inherited from Abigail, who left them the house. Fiona’s sire. One day she asked if Anna knew of any place in town she could rent, and it happened the apartment she lives in now was available. My aunt said she knew of one but it was on the second floor of an old house, and Sonia said it would be perfect. She has been here ever since.”
One day Melissa wanted to get to the bottom of Sonia’s mystery, though she knew it really wasn’t any of her business.
After she said goodbye to Rosa and her dog, she straightened the kitchen, prepped a few things for breakfast in the morning, then headed to her solitary bedroom.
The apartment seemed too quiet and her mind was a tangle, wondering about Cody’s plans, about Sonia’s secrets, and about the disturbing knowledge that when she awoke, she faced an entire day of working in close proximity to Eli.
She dreamed that night that she was trapped on one of the rock formations off Cannon Beach in the middle of a storm. She was hanging on by her fingernails as waves pounded against the rock and a heavy rain stung her face. She was doing all she could to hold tight, to survive. And then suddenly Eli was there, shirtless but in a white lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck, like something off a sexy doctor calendar.
She might have laughed at her own wild imagination if she hadn’t been so into the dream. “I’ve got you,” he murmured in a throaty bedroom voice, and then he lifted her up with those astonishing muscles he had developed since leaving town. A moment later, she was in his arms and he was holding her tightly.
“I won’t let you go,” he promised gruffly, then his mouth descended and he kissed her fiercely, protectively.
Her alarm went off before she could ask him how they were going to get off the rock and why he needed a stethoscope but not a shirt.
She awoke aroused and restless to a fierce rain pounding the window, as if she had conjured it with her dream.
It took her a moment to figure out where her dream ended and where reality began. What was wrong with her? She had been divorced for three years, separated for longer, and had told herself she was doing just fine putting that part of her life away for now while she devoted her energies to raising Skye.
Since the divorce, she had dated here and there but nothing serious, only for company and a little adult conversation. She hadn’t been out at all since she came back to Cannon Beach.
She was lying to herself if she said she didn’t miss certain things about having a man in her life. Topping the list would probably be having big, warm muscles to curl up against on a cool, rainy morning when she didn’t have to get out of bed for another half hour. She sat up, wrapping her blanket around her, trying to push away the remnants of the dream.
Her wrist inside the brace ached, but it was more a steady ache than the ragged pain she had experienced over the weekend, further proof that it was only a sprain and not a break.
She looked up at the ceiling, listening to the rain click against the window. She didn’t have to get Skye up for another hour, so she decided to stretch out some of the kinks in her back and the tumult lingering from that dream with her favorite yoga routine, making concessions to work around her sore wrist.
It did the trick. By the time her alarm went off, signaling it was time to wake up Skye and start their day, she felt much more calm and centered, and that unwanted dream and the feelings it had stirred up inside her mostly subsided.
She would simply ignore whatever was left, she told herself, just as she planned to ignore this inconvenient attraction to Eli.
* * *
The word ignore became her watchword over the next week. She managed to put aside her growing attraction to Eli, focusing instead on work and her online coursework and Skye.
She wouldn’t exactly call this a good thing, but it helped that the area had been hit with an onslaught of fast-spreading spring viruses and a nasty case of food poisoning from bad potato salad at a spring church potluck.
They were insanely busy all week. Most of her time away from work was spent studying for final exams in the two online classes she had been struggling with, which left her little time to think about anything else.
Her relationship with Eli around the office was cordial and even friendly, but she tried hard not to let the ridiculous crush she was developing on him filter through.
By Friday morning, her wrist was almost completely back to normal except for a few twinges, and Melissa was more than ready for the weekend. It was her late day to go into the office and she decided to again take a quick run after she saw Skye off on the school bus.
She called Rosa to ask if she minded her taking Fiona.
“No!” Her friend said. “You will be doing me a huge favor. My day is shaping up to be a crazy one and I don’t know when I will find the time to walk her.”
A moment later, she and Fiona were heading out through the beach gate on the edge of the Brambleberry House garden, then running across the sand.
The water was rough this morning, the waves churning with drama. Clouds hung heavy and mist swirled around the haystacks offshore. She wanted to sit on the beach and watch the storm come in, but she had to finish her run in order to make it back for work.
As she and Fiona trotted down the beach, she spotted a few beachcombers and other joggers out. A couple holding hands stopped every once in a while to take selfies of each other and she had to smile. They were in their sixties and acting like newlyweds. For all she knew, they were.
She and Fiona made it to the end of the beach. As she neared home, she spotted a familiar figure running in the opposite direction with a little black schnauzer.
Eli.
This time, she gave him a friendly wave as she approached him, ignoring the nerves suddenly dancing in her stomach. His usually serious expression seemed to ease a little when he spotted her, but she wasn’t sure if that was her imagination or not.
He slowed and Max and Fiona sniffed each other happily. “Looks like we’re on the same running schedule.”
“At least on Fridays. I don’t get out as often as I like. The later opening for the office helps since I can go after Skye catches the bus.”
“That must make it tough, trying to work out around her schedule.”
“It wouldn’t be as tough except I’m a wimp and only run when the sun is shining, which hasn’t been very often this week.”
She didn’t want to talk about her sketchy workout habits. She’d done yoga twice. Counting that and her run a week ago when she’d met him on this very beach and today, that made four days in a week. That had to count for something, didn’t it? Especially when she had an injury.
“How is your dad?” she asked to change the subject. “When do the doctors say he can go home?”
“He’s doing great. The orthopedic doctor says maybe this weekend, but for sure by the middle of the week.”
“That’s terrific. I can only imagine how tough it must be to have double knee replacements, but I’m sure he’ll be happy he did it.”
“He already says it’s less pain than he was in before.”
The sun peeked through the steely clouds to pick up highlights in his hair. She ignored that, too—or at least she tried to tell herself she did.
“How’s your wrist?” he asked. “I’ve been meaning to ask, but things have been so crazy this week as I try to settle in that I keep forgetting.”
“It’s been a wild week, you’re right. You are getting a baptism by fire. We haven’t been this busy in a long time.”
“How did I get so lucky?”
She smiled. “Maybe all the women in town just want to meet the young, handsome new doctor.”
He made a face. “Nice theory. It doesn’t explain the food poisoning or the stomach bugs.”
“Good point,” she said.
Before he could respond, a cry rang out across the beach.
“Help! Please, somebody, help!”
For a split second, Eli went instantly on alert, muscles taut as he scanned the area.
An instant later, he took off at a dead run toward the older couple Melissa had seen earlier. Max wanted to chase after him, thinking it was a game, but Melissa took a moment to secure both dog leashes. As she sprinted after Eli, she saw the woman was kneeling beside the prone figure of her male companion, who was lying just at the spot where the baby breakers licked at the sand.
“What happened?” Eli was asking as he turned the man over to keep his mouth and nose out of the sand and the incoming tide.
“He was just standing there and then he fell over, unconscious. Please. What’s happening?”
The man didn’t appear to be breathing and his features had a gray cast to them. Melissa suspected a heart attack, but she didn’t say so to the woman.
“What can I do?” she asked Eli.
“Help me move him up the beach, out of the water,” Eli said urgently. The two of them tugged the unresponsive man six or seven feet up, just far enough that he wouldn’t continue being splashed by the incoming breakers.
“Call 911,” Eli instructed to Melissa as he started doing a quick first-aid assessment.
Adrenaline pumping, Melissa pulled out her phone and did as he asked.
“Does your husband have any history of heart trouble?” she asked while waiting for the dispatcher to answer.
“No. None,” she said.
“Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?”
“We’ve got a nonresponsive male approximately sixty-five years old...”
“Sixty-seven,” the woman said, her gaze fixed on Eli and her husband.
“Sixty-seven. He has no history of heart trouble but apparently collapsed about one to two minutes ago. Dr. Eli Sanderson is here attending to the patient, currently starting CPR. We are on Cannon Beach, near the water’s edge about three hundred yards south of the access point near Gower Street. We’re going to need emergency assistance and transport to the hospital.”
“Okay. Please stay on the line. I’m going to contact paramedics. We’ll get them to your location as soon as we can.”
“Thank you.”
“He’s a doctor?” The man’s wife was staring at Eli with astonishment filtering through her shock and terror.
“He is. And I’m a nurse. It’s lucky we were here.”
“Not luck,” the woman said faintly. “It’s a miracle. We were going to go up to Ecola State Park this morning beachcombing, but when we were in the car, something told me to come here instead.”
They hadn’t saved the man yet. She wasn’t willing to go that far. “My name is Melissa and this is Eli.” Though that adrenaline was still pumping through her, she spoke as patiently as she could manage. The woman would have plenty of time to break down later, after the paramedics took over the situation, but right now it was important to keep her as calm as possible under the circumstances.
“Ma’am, what’s your name and what is your husband’s name?”
“Carol,” she said faintly. “Carol Stewart. This is my husband Jim. We’re from Idaho. The Lewiston area. We’ve been here for three days and are supposed to go home tomorrow. Today is our w-wedding anniversary.”
Oh, she really hoped Eli and the paramedics could resuscitate the man. It would be utterly tragic for Carol to lose her husband on their anniversary.
“How long have you been married?”
“Th-three years. Three amazing years. It’s a second marriage for both of us. We were high school sweethearts but went our separate ways after graduation. I got divorced ten years ago and his first wife died about five years ago, and we reconnected on social media.”
“Is your husband on any medication?”
“High blood pressure and reflux medication. I can’t remember which one, but I have the information on my phone.”
“You can give it to the paramedics when they arrive.”
Carol gave a distracted nod, her hands over her mouth as she watched Eli continue compressions without any visible response. “Oh, what’s happening?”
Before she could answer, the dispatcher returned to the line. “Okay. I have paramedics on the way. They should be there shortly. I’ll stay on the line with you until they arrive.”
“Thank you. I’m going to hand you over to the patient’s wife so she can answer any questions about his medical history for you to pass on to the emergency department at the hospital.”
She turned to the other woman and handed over her phone. “Carol, take a deep breath, okay? I need to help Dr. Sanderson right now and someone has to stay on the line with the dispatcher until the paramedics get here. Will you do that for your husband?”
Melissa could see shock and panic were beginning to take over as the reality of the situation seemed to be becoming more clear. The other woman had turned as pale as the clouds, and her breathing seemed shallow and rapid. Carol took one deep, shuddering breath and then another, and appeared to regain some of her composure.
“I... Yes. I think so. Hello?”
When she was certain Carol wasn’t going to fall over, offering them an additional patient to deal with, Melissa knelt beside Eli, who was giving rescue breaths.
“Any response?” she asked quietly.
He returned to his chest compressions without pause. “Not yet,” he said, his voice grim.
“Do you need me to take over and give you a break?”
“Not with your bad wrist. I’ll continue compressions, but it would help if you handle the respirations.”
She moved to the man’s head and the two of them worked together, with Eli counting out his compressions, then pausing for her to give two breaths.
She wasn’t sure how long they worked together. It seemed like forever but was probably only five or six minutes before she spotted paramedics racing toward them across the sand.
In the summertime, this beach would have had lifeguards who could have helped with the emergency rescue, but the lifeguard stations had personnel only during the weekends in May, then daily from June to August.
She knew both the paramedics, she realized as they approached. One, Tim Cortez, had gone to high school with both her and Eli and the other was a newcomer to town but someone she had actually socialized with a few times at gatherings, Tyler Howell.
She had found him entirely too much like her ex-husband, with that same reckless edge, and had declined his invitation to go out. Fortunately, he hadn’t been offended and they had remained friends.
Two more paramedics she didn’t know were close behind them.
“Hey, Melissa. Hey, Eli,” Tim said as they rolled up. “What’s going on?”
Eli was still counting compressions so Melissa spoke up to give the situation report. “We’ve got a sixty-seven-year-old man, Jim Stewart, with no history of heart trouble, on blood pressure and reflux medication. He collapsed about seven minutes ago and has been unresponsive since then but has been receiving CPR since about a minute or so after he fell over.”
“Lucky for this guy, you two were close by,” Tim said. “We’ve got the AED now. You want to do the honors, Eli?”
“I’ll keep doing CPR while you set it up,” Eli said.
A moment later, the paramedics had the automated external defibrillator ready. Eli stopped compressions while they unbuttoned the man’s shirt and attached the leads.
Seconds later, Eli turned on the machine and followed the voice commands. A medical degree wasn’t at all necessary to run an AED, but Melissa was glad she didn’t have to do it.
The man shook a little when the electrical pulse went through him, shocking his heart.
When it was safe, the machine ordered them to check his pulse, and Eli felt for it. He grabbed a stethoscope that one of the paramedics handed over and listened for a heartbeat.
“Nothing,” he said grimly. “We’re going to have to do another round.”
He resumed compressions while waiting for the machine to power up again, then stood back to allow the paramedics to reattach the leads and went through the process again.
Again, Jim’s body shook, and Carol let out a little moan. Melissa went to her and put her arm around her as Eli again searched for a pulse.
“I’ve got something,” he said, his voice containing more emotion than Melissa had heard since they had rushed to the man.
He listened with the stethoscope. “Yeah. It’s getting stronger.”
Both paramedics looked stunned, and Melissa couldn’t blame them. She hadn’t expected Jim to survive, either. Not really. If she were honest, she had suspected a massive heart attack, possibly even the kind they called the widow-maker.
“Nice work, Doc,” Tyler said. He fastened an oxygen mask over Jim’s mouth and nose.
Eli stood out of their way and let the two paramedics load Jim onto a gurney. Beside her, Carol was shaking.
“That’s good, isn’t it? That his heart is working again?”
She didn’t want to give the woman false hope. Her husband wasn’t out of the woods yet, not by a long shot, though he was starting to regain consciousness.
“Yes. So far, so good. The nearest hospital is up the coast in Seaside, about a fifteen-minute drive from here. That’s where the paramedics will take him first. From there, they may decide he will need to go to Portland.”
“Can I ride in the ambulance with him?”
She looked at Tyler, who nodded.
“I’m going to give you my contact info,” Melissa said. “Where is your phone? I can enter it in for you. When you need a ride back to Cannon Beach, either to go to your hotel or to get your vehicle or whatever, you call me. I’ll come pick you up and bring you back here.”
The other woman burst into tears and hugged first Melissa and then Eli. “You’ve been so kind,” she said as she quickly handed over her phone to Melissa. “Thank you. Thank you so much for what you’ve done. You’re a miracle. Both of you. A miracle!”
Melissa was typing the last number of her contact info into Carol’s phone when the paramedics started carrying the gurney since the usual wheels wouldn’t work well on the sand.
“Let us know how things go with you.”
“I will. Thank you.”
A moment later, she and Eli stood alone.
“You didn’t ride with him,” she observed, a little surprised.
“The paramedics had things under control, and I would have just been in the way while they do their thing. I can put my ego aside enough to be sure that the cardiac specialist at the hospital is in a better position to treat Jim than I would be right now.”
They both walked to where the dogs were tied up, and Melissa could feel her knees tremble in reaction.
“That was a little more excitement than you probably bargained for this morning,” Eli said as he gripped Max’s leash.
She patted Fiona’s soft fur, wishing she could kneel right there in the sand and bury her face in it for a moment while she regained her composure.
“I would say the same to you. Way to step up, Dr. Sanderson.”
“Part of the job description. You help where you can.”
“It’s more than that for you, isn’t it? Even if you weren’t a doctor, you’re the kind of guy who would jump in and help in any emergency. You must get that from your dad.”
He looked surprised by her words and, she wanted to think, pleased, as well. “I don’t know about that. I do know that was probably enough of a workout for me today. I’m going to be buzzed on endorphins for at least another hour or two.”
“Same here. I need to go.” She smiled a little. “I’m supposed to be at work in an hour, and my boss won’t be happy if I’m late.”
“Sounds like a jerk.”
“He’s okay,” she said.
There was far more she wanted to say, but she didn’t trust herself. She had just watched him work tirelessly to save a man’s life and she wasn’t sure she had the words to convey how much that had moved her.