LITMIR.BIZ

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to question her and the hospital’s integrity and then…and then have the audacity, the sheer arrogance, to grab her as if she were some weak-willed, starry-eyed, spineless…ninny!

       Oh, like the girl you once were, the one he remembered?

      She blushed and her fingers curled around the steering wheel in a death grip. She’d worked hard for years to overcome her shyness, to become the confident, scholarly, take-charge emergency room physician she was today and Thorne McCafferty seemed hell-bent to change all that. Well, she wouldn’t let him. No way. No how. She wasn’t the little girl he’d left a lifetime ago—her broken heart had mended.

      As she braked for a red light, she flipped on the radio, fumbled with the stations until she heard a melody that was familiar—Whitney Houston singing something she should know—and tried to calm down. Why she let Thorne get to her, she didn’t understand.

      She cranked the wheel and turned into a side street where the neon lights and Western facade of Montana Joe’s Pizza Parlor came into view.

      She pulled into the lot, raced inside and waited in line between five or six other patrons whose raincoats, parkas and ski jackets dripped water onto the tile floor in front of the take-out counter. A gas flame hissed in the fireplace in one corner of the room that was divided by fences into different seating areas. Pickaxes and shovels and other mining memorabilia were tacked to bare cedar walls and in one corner, Montana Joe, a stuffed bison, stared with glassy eyes at the patrons who were listening to Garth Brooks’s latest hit while drinking beer and eating hot, stringy pizza made with Joe’s “secret” tomato sauce.

      As Nicole stood in line and dug into her wallet to check how much cash she was carrying, she couldn’t help but overhear some of the conversation of the other patrons. Two men in front of her were discussing the previous Friday’s high school football game. From the sound of it the Grand Hope Wolverines were edged out by an arch rival in a nearby town though there was some dispute over a few of the calls. Typical.

      Other conversations buzzed around her and she heard the name McCafferty more often than she wanted to. “Terrible accident…half sister, you know…pregnant, but no mention of a father and no husband…always was bad blood in that family…what goes around comes around, I tell you…”

      Nicole grabbed a menu from the counter and turned her attention from the gossip that swirled around her. Though Grand Hope had grown by leaps and bounds in the past few years and had become a major metropolis by Montana standards, it was still, at its heart, a small town, where many of the citizens knew each other. She placed her order, lingered near the jukebox and listened to a three or four songs ranging from Patsy Cline to Wynona Judd, then, once her name was called, picked up her pizza and refused to think about any member of the McCafferty family—especially Thorne. He was off-limits. Period. The reason she’d responded to his kiss was simple. It had been over two years since she’d kissed any man and at least five since she’d felt even the tiniest spark of passion. She didn’t even want to think how long it had been since she’d been consumed with desire—that particular thought led her back to a path that she didn’t want to follow, a path heading straight back to her youth and Thorne. She was just susceptible right now, that was all. Nothing more. It had nothing to do with chemistry. Nothing.

      Once in her SUV again, she twisted on the key and the engine refused to fire. “Come on, come on,” she muttered. She tried again, pumping the gas frantically and mentally chiding herself for not taking the rig into the shop for its regular maintenance. “You can do it,” she encouraged and finally, on the fourth attempt, the engine caught. “Tomorrow,” she promised, patting the dash as if comforting the vehicle, as if that would help. “I’ll take you in. Promise.”

      On the road again, Nicole drove through the side streets to her little cottage on the outskirts of town. Her stomach rumbled as the tangy scents of melting cheese and spicy sauce filled the rig’s interior and her mind, damn it, ran back to Thorne and the feel of his lips on hers. He was everything she despised in a man: arrogant, competitive, in control and determined—a real corporate Type A and the kind of man she had learned to avoid like the plague. But beneath his layer of pride and his take-charge mentality, she’d caught glimpses of a more complex man, a gentler soul who stumbled through the awkwardness of talking to his comatose sister. He’d tried to communicate with Randi, the back of his neck flushing in embarrassment, his steely gray eyes conveying a sense of raw pain at his sister’s condition—as if he somehow blamed himself for her accident.

      “Don’t read more into it than there is,” she warned herself as she cranked the wheel and braked in her driveway. She pulled to a stop in front of her garage and made a mental note that between helping at preschool, the twins’ dance lessons, the housework and the grocery shopping, she should call a roofer for a bid on the sagging roof.

      Juggling her briefcase and boxed pizza, she made a mad dash to the back porch and was able to unlock the door, then shove it open with her hip.

      Patches, her black-and-white cat, streaked through the opening and Nicole nearly tripped on the speeding feline. Tiny footsteps thundered through the house. “Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!” the twins cried, flying pell-mell into the kitchen and sliding on the yellowed linoleum as Patches slunk down the bedroom hallway. Molly and Mindy were dressed in identical pink-and-white-checked sleepers that zipped up the front and covered their feet in attached slippers. Their hair was wet and curled in dark-brown ringlets around cherubic faces and bright brown eyes.

      Nicole slid the pizza onto a counter, knelt and opened her arms wide. The four-year-old imps nearly bowled her over. “Miss me?” she asked.

      “Yeth,” Mindy said shyly, nodding her head and smiling.

      “You got pizza?” Molly demanded. “I’m hungry.”

      “I sure do. Lots of it.” She dropped kisses on each wet head, then standing once again, she stripped out of her coat and hung it in a tiny closet near the eating alcove.

      Jenny Riley appeared in the archway separating the kitchen from the dining room. Tall and willowy, with long straight black hair and a nose ring, the twenty-year-old had been the twins’ nanny since Nicole had moved to Grand Hope.

      “How were they today?” Nicole asked.

      “Miserable as usual,” Jenny said, her green eyes twinkling, sarcasm lacing her words.

      “Were not!” Molly said, planting her little fists on her hips. “We was good.”

      “Were,” Nicole corrected. “You were good.”

      “Yeth,” Mindy said, nodding agreement with her precocious sister. “Real good.”

      Jenny laughed and bent down to retie the laces of her elevated tennis shoes, “Oh, okay, I lied,” she admitted. “You were good. Both of you. Very good.”

      “It’s not nice to lie!” Molly said with a toss of her wet curls.

      “I know, I know, it won’t happen again,” Jenny promised, straightening and slinging the strap of her fringed leather purse over her shoulder.

      “Want a piece of pizza?” Nicole offered. Using her fingers and a spatula she’d grabbed from a hook over the stove, she slid piping hot slices onto paper plates. The girls scrambled onto the booster seats. Nicole licked a piece of melted cheese from her fingers and looked questioningly at Jenny.

      “No thanks, Mom’s got dinner waiting and—” Jenny winked broadly “—I’ve got a hot date after.”

      “Oooh,” Nicole said, licking gooey cheese from her fingers. “Anyone I know?”

      “Nope. Not unless you’re into twenty-two-year-old cowboys.”

      “Only in the ER. I have been known to treat them upon occasion.”

      “Not this one,” Jenny said with a wide grin and slight blush.

      “Tell me more.”

      “His name is Adam. He’s a hired hand at the McCafferty spread. And…I’ll fill you in more

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