LITMIR.BIZ

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was sweet on her for so many years. I always thought—I guess most people here did—that they were made for each other. But she was never more than friendly. If you saw them together, it was obvious that she didn’t feel what he did.”

      In other words, Dr. Coltrain had felt a long and unrequited love for the lovely blond former rodeo cowgirl, Jane Parker. That much, Lou had learned from gossip. It must have hurt him very badly when she married someone else.

      “What a pity that we can’t love to order,” Lou remarked quietly, thinking how much she’d give to be unscarred and find Dr. Coltrain as helplessly drawn to her as she was to him. That was the stuff of fantasy, however.

      “Wasn’t it surprising about Ted Regan and Coreen Tarleton, though?” Brenda added with a chuckle.

      “Indeed it was,” Lou agreed, smiling as she remembered having Ted for a patient. “She was shaking all over when she got him to me with that gored arm. He was cool. Nothing shakes Ted. But Coreen was as white as milk.”

      “I thought they were already married,” Brenda groaned. “Well, I was new to the area and I didn’t know them. I do now,” she added, laughing. “I pass them at least once a week on their way to the obstetrician’s office. She’s due any day.”

      “She’ll be a good mother, and Ted will certainly be a good father. Their children will have a happy life.”

      Brenda caught the faint bitterness in the words and glanced at Lou, but the other woman was already calling her goodbyes and walking away.

      She went home and spent the rest of the weekend buried in medical journals and the latest research on the new strain of bacteria that had, researchers surmised, mutated from a deadly scarlet fever bacterium that had caused many deaths at the turn of the century.

      Chapter 2

      Monday morning brought a variety of new cases, and Louise found herself stuck with the most routine of them, as usual. She and Coltrain were supposed to be partners, but when he wasn’t operating, he got the interesting, challenging illnesses. Louise got fractured ribs and colds.

      He’d been stiff with her this morning, probably because he was still fuming over the argument they’d had about his mistaken idea of her weekend activities. Accusing her of lollygagging with the EMTs for excitement; really!

      She watched his white-coated back disappear into an examination room down the hall in their small building and sighed half-angrily as she went back to check an X-ray in the files. The very worst thing about unrequited love, she thought miserably, was that it fed on itself. The more her partner in the medical practice ignored and antagonized her, the harder she had to fight her dreams about him. She didn’t want to get married; she didn’t even want to get involved. But he made her hungry.

      He’d spent a lot of time with Jane Parker until she married that Burke man, and Lou had long ago given up hope that he would ever notice her in the same way he always noticed Jane. The two of them had grown up together, though, whereas Lou had only been in partnership with him for a year. She was a native of Austin, not Jacobsville. Small towns were like extended families. Everybody knew each other, and some families had been friends for more than one generation. Lou was a true outsider here, even though she was a native Texan. Perhaps that was one of many reasons that Dr. Coltrain found her so forgettable.

      She wasn’t bad looking. She had long, thick blond hair and big brown eyes and a creamy, blemish-free complexion. She was tall and willowy, but still shorter than her colleague. She lacked his fiery temper and his authoritarian demeanor. He was tall and whipcord lean, with flaming red hair and blue eyes and a dark tan from working on his small ranch when he wasn’t treating patients. That tan was odd in a redhead, although he did have a smattering of freckles over his nose and the backs of his big hands. She’d often wondered if the freckles went any farther, but she had yet to see him without his professional white coat over his very formal suit. He wasn’t much on casual dressing at work. At home, she was sure that he dressed less formally.

      That was something Lou would probably never know. She’d never been invited to his home, despite the fact that most of the medical staff at the local hospital had. Lou was automatically excluded from any social gathering that he coordinated.

      Other people had commented on his less than friendly behavior toward her. It puzzled them, and it puzzled her, because she hadn’t become his partner in any under-handed way. He had known from the day of her application that she was female, so it couldn’t be that. Perhaps, she thought wistfully, he was one of those old-line dominating sort of men who thought women had no place in medicine. But he’d been instrumental in getting women into positions of authority at the hospital, so that theory wasn’t applicable, either. The bottom line was that he simply did not like Louise Blakely, medical degree or no medical degree, and she’d never known why.

      She really should ask Drew Morris why, she told herself with determination. It had been Drew, a surgeon and friend of her family, who’d sent word about the opening in Coltrain’s practice. He’d wanted to help Lou get a job near him, so that he could give her some moral support in the terrible days following the deaths of her parents. She, in turn, had liked the idea of being in practice in a small town, one where she knew at least one doctor on the staff of the hospital. Despite growing up in Austin, it was still a big city and she was lonely. She was twenty-eight, a loner whose whole life had been medicine. She’d made sure that her infrequent dates never touched her heart, and she was innocent in an age when innocence was automatically looked on with disdain or suspicion.

      Her nurse stuck her head in the doorway. “There’s a call for you. Dr. Morris is on line two.”

      “Thanks, Brenda.”

      She picked up the receiver absently, her finger poised over the designated line. But when she pressed it, before she could say a word, the sentence she’d intercepted accidentally blared in her ear in a familiar deep voice.

      “…told you I wouldn’t have hired her in the first place, if I had known who she was related to. I did you a favor, never realizing she was Blakely’s daughter. You can’t imagine that I’ll ever forgive her father for what he did to the girl I loved, do you? She’s been a constant reminder, a constant torment!”

      “That’s harsh, Copper,” Drew began.

      “It’s how I feel. She’s nothing but a burden here. But to answer your question, hell no, you’re not stepping on my toes if you ask her out on a date! I find Louise Blakely repulsive and repugnant, and an automaton with no attractions whatsoever. Take her with my blessing. I’d give real money if she’d get out of my practice and out of my life, and the sooner the better!” There was a click and the line, obviously open, was waiting for her.

      She clicked the receiver to announce her presence and said, as calmly as she could, “Dr. Lou Blakely.”

      “Lou! It’s Drew Morris,” came the reply. “I hope I’m not catching you at a bad moment?”

      “No.” She cleared her throat and fought to control her scattered emotions. “No, not at all. What can I do for you?”

      “There’s a dinner at the Rotary Club Thursday. How about going with me?”

      She and Drew occasionally went out together, in a friendly but not romantic way. She would have refused, but what Coltrain had said made her mad. “Yes, I would like to, thanks,” she said.

      Drew laughed softly. “Great! I’ll pick you up at six on Thursday, then.”

      “See you then.”

      She hung up, checked the X-ray again meticulously, and put it away in its file. Brenda ordinarily pulled the X-rays for her, but it was Monday and, as usual, they were overflowing with patients who’d saved their weekend complaints for office hours.

      She went back to her patient, her color a little high, but no disturbance visible in her expression.

      She finished her quota of patients and then went into her small office. Mechanically she picked up a sheet of letterhead

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