LITMIR.BIZ

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      “But the mess.” She made a little sweeping gesture with her right hand. “There’s water everywhere—”

      “Incoming,” Rudy yelled from the doorway. Zach reached out and wrapped his fingers around Callie’s wrist, hauling her forward and almost into his arms as three overhead tiles crashed to the floor, splattering Zach and Callie with water and soggy, cardboardlike shrapnel.

      He was wearing old cargo shorts and an even older T-shirt, and he was already wet through, but his new boss hadn’t been expecting a dousing. She let out a shocked gasp as the cold water cascaded down her back and soaked her to the skin.

      * * *

      “SORRY ABOUT THAT, Doc.”

      Callie shifted her attention to the man in the doorway, a short, ruddy-faced, stocky guy with a buzz cut not doing anything to hide his receding hairline, and laughing blue eyes. He was wearing a faded red T-shirt emblazoned with U*S*M*C in equally faded gold letters, and shorts that exposed the prosthesis that replaced his left leg below the knee. His leather tool belt hung low on his hips, as if he were an old-time gunslinger. Rudy Koslowski. She remembered him from high school, even though he’d been a couple of years ahead of her. He’d joined the Marines immediately after graduation and lost his leg in a suicide-bomb attack in Afghanistan.

      “Hi, Rudy,” she said, swallowing a sharp comment about the inadequacy of his warning. Rudy had always been a gossip even as a kid. She doubted he’d changed much over the years, and the last thing she wanted was to be reported to all and sundry as a bitch her first day on the job. “Quite a welcome home you arranged for me.”

      “We aim to please. You still got the moves, Doc,” he said next.

      “I beg your pardon?” But Rudy wasn’t looking at her; he was grinning at the man beside her.

      “Oops.” Rudy chuckled, his expression as mischievous as Callie remembered from high school. “Guess we’re going to have to figure out another nickname for you, Corpsman. Can’t have two Docs in the place, can we?” He paused as if waiting for his barb to strike home.

      Rudy was smiling, but Zach wasn’t. “Stow it, Rudy. She outranks us.”

      “Sure thing.” Rudy raised both hands, signaling surrender, but his grin grew a little wider as he stared pointedly at their joined hands. “Whatever you say.” Belatedly Callie tugged herself free of Zach’s grasp. Why hadn’t she noticed Zach was still holding her hand before Rudy did? Maybe because she had enjoyed the feel of Zach’s long, strong fingers wrapped around her wrist. He had big hands, but his hold on her had been gentle. He would have no trouble setting a bone or reducing a dislocation with those hands and that strength, even in a combat situation. Experience she certainly didn’t have.

      “Zach’s patients may call him whatever they and he are comfortable with,” she said, appalled at how condescending the remark sounded. She hadn’t meant it that way. She avoided speaking to colleagues in that manner, although she’d been talked down to plenty of times herself. Medicine, for the most part, was still a man’s world.

      “Sure thing, Dr. Layman,” Rudy said. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

      “What can I do to help?” she asked, hoping to make some kind of amends. This was not how she’d wanted to start her relationship with Zach Gibson, especially not with a witness as talkative as Rudy.

      “Nothing, ma’am.”

      She wished he wouldn’t call her that, but she could hardly ask him to call her Callie so soon, and insisting on being addressed as Dr. Layman would only add insult to injury at this point. “I want to help,” she said. “It’s my practice now,” she couldn’t stop herself from adding.

      Zach’s face hardened momentarily. “You don’t know where a bloody thing is yet, or where it goes.” His tone softened, probably when he remembered he was talking to his boss. “You’re soaking wet and covered with fiberglass. Go on over to the White Pine and get changed. Besides, Leola and Bonnie are on their way to lend a hand.” The two women, both of whom Callie knew from her childhood, were the clinic’s nurses and receptionist/bookkeepers, both essential to the efficient functioning of the practice. “Everything’s under control here, ma’am.”

      “I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” she snapped before she could censure her words.

      “Yes, ma’am.” A corner of his mouth ticked up in what might have been a grin, but it was so fleeting Callie couldn’t be sure. “Go, Dr. Layman,” he said, the words just shy of being an outright command. “Let your dad and your new stepmother know you’re in town. Get yourself settled in and we’ll have this place ready for business on Monday morning.”

      So this was the way he wanted things to go. Where he continued to call the shots and she had no say in the decisions.

      Zach Gibson didn’t want her here; that was easy enough to figure out. The problem was...he was right. She would be more of a hindrance than a help to these people, who were used to working together as a team. She was the outsider. And the one thing she could never let any of them guess, especially her new PA, was that she was afraid she would never fit in.

      CHAPTER TWO

      THERE WAS NO PARKING space in front of the White Pine Bar and Grill, though Callie would have been surprised to find one on a Saturday evening in midsummer. She drove on by, turned left at the corner onto Perch Street, climbed the low hill, turned left again and angled her Jeep into the narrow gravel alleyway that ran behind the building. Her stepmother’s minivan was parked in the spot next to her dad’s SUV, but there was just enough space alongside the storage shed to park her car, if she didn’t ever need to open the passenger-side door.

      She wiggled out of the Jeep and brushed at the front of her slacks. The fiberglass had made her itchy, not to put too fine a point on it. She wanted a hot shower and a change of clothes. She tugged her overnight bag out of the car and headed toward the kitchen entrance. There was an outside stairway leading to the family quarters on the second floor but she didn’t have a key to the door at the top, so the back stairs through the kitchen was her only option. She just hoped the White Pine’s longtime head cook, Margaret McElroy—Mac to everyone who knew her—would be too busy to question Callie on her unexpected arrival and bedraggled appearance.

      She was in luck. As Callie entered, Mac, pushing sixty, wiry-haired, and as short and round as a fireplug, was haranguing her staff of college students and long-suffering grill cooks like the army drill sergeant she used to be. The high, screened windows, although open to the cooling evening breeze, did little to dispel the heat and humidity in the too-small room. The dishwasher was rumbling away, fire flared in the grill, and the smell of seared beef and hot grease caused Callie’s stomach to rumble. She hadn’t eaten since she left Ann Arbor and she suddenly realized just how hungry she was. The White Pine served great steaks, but what the restaurant was really famous for was the all-you-could-eat perch and bluegill dinners.

      She’d return to the kitchen for some of each as soon as she was clean and dry. She grabbed her duffel, holding it to her chest, and hurried up the steep, narrow stairs. In the days when the building was a hotel, the stairs would have been used by the maids to carry hot water to the patrons in the rooms above. Nowadays it led to a door that opened into the family kitchen she and her dad had seldom used. She hesitated for a moment before the closed door. Should she knock? After all, it really wasn’t her home anymore. It was her father’s—and Ginger’s. She was only a guest. She settled on a quick, light tap, the kind of combined warning and greeting you’d give anyone before you opened a closed door in a house. No response. She opened the door. The kitchen was empty. The light was on, since it was now almost nine and the windows faced away from the lake into the lower branches of the pines and maples on the hillside. Ginger hadn’t gotten around to changing much in the small, functional room beyond painting the old pine cabinets a creamy white and adding a colorful valance above the utilitarian white blinds on the windows. Although the changes were minimal, Callie had to admit the room was a lot more inviting than it had been in the past.

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