Ethan nodded by way of a greeting, feeling about as uncomfortable as he’d ever been in his life. After a moment’s hesitation he took the burgundy leather chair she’d indicated and settled himself into it, striving to appear relaxed and knowing he was fooling absolutely no one.
He waited for Phoenix to seat herself, either in the mate to his chair or the big one behind the desk. When she did neither but remained standing with her backside propped casually against the desk behind her, he remembered suddenly what Father Frank had said to him in the conference room.
Oddly, he felt himself warming toward her then, actually admiring her cleverness. He almost smiled-before he remembered what her reaction had been the last time he’d done that. So he kept the smile inside and concentrated on keeping his outward demeanor somber.
She made a breathy sound-soft, ironic laughter-and blew smoke toward the ceiling. “Come on, Doc, don’t look so disapproving.”
“Not disapproving,” said Ethan. “Surprised, maybe.”
“Surprised? Why?” Her lips curved, forming a smile around the slender shaft of the cigar. Ethan’s stomach lurched oddly, as if the chair had just dropped out from under him.
He shrugged and leaned forward, elbows on the chair arms, hands clasped across the empty space in front of him. Trying to look-and think-more like a physician and less like a starstruck boy. “Oh, I don’t know-I guess I thought you’d have a little more concern for your health-and your voice.”
She took the cigar from her mouth, frowning critically at the glowing end. “I don’t smoke, actually. Just wanted something to play with.” She slid a sideways glance at him from under her lashes. “Looks kind of neat, though, doesn’t it?”
“I think I saw one in a Clint Eastwood movie.”
“Yeah,” said Phoenix with a hint of a smile, “me too.” She whistled a bar or two of haunting melody. When he recognized it as the theme from a famous spaghetti western, Ethan felt it was safe to return the smile. When he did, the whistling broke up into a husky chortle, the kind that provokes a similar one deep in the listener’s own chest.
“There, you see? Not a bad little icebreaker.” She looked around for an ashtray and seeing none, laid the cigar carefully on the glass desktop. “And now that we have-broken the ice, that is…” her eyes zeroed in on him with a directness that was, in an odd way, more seductive than flirting “…Dr. Brown seems kind of formal, doesn’t it? Don’t you have a first name?”
Ethan hesitated, wishing, not for the first time, that his parents had had the foresight to name him something like…Bobby, or James. As exhilarating as the idea was of being on a first-name basis with Phoenix, the combining of Ethan and Brown was just unusual enough to be recognizable. She hadn’t recognized him yet, and for reasons he couldn’t explain, even to himself, he wanted her to know him just as plain Dr. Brown for a little while longer. As long as possible, anyway. She’d have to know eventually, he supposed, but…not yet.
He cleared his throat and said quietly, “Under the circumstances, I think Dr. Brown is probably more appropriate.” And watched her eyes flare with the same indefinable emotion he’d seen in the conference room, when she’d caught him smiling at her. The one he still wasn’t sure was anger.
“Doc it is, then,” Phoenix said with a smile she didn’t allow to reach her voice or her eyes. Outwardly calm, she felt jittery inside, as if she’d missed a stage mark during a performance, or come in on the wrong beat. Nothing she couldn’t cover, but it rattled her nonetheless. She straightened and moved unhurriedly around the desk, putting it and some distance between herself and the oh-so-arrogant
“So, Doctor…Patrick tells me you work at a free clinic down there in the…neighborhood.”
Yes, and when Patrick had told her that, she’d remembered why the doc had seemed so familiar to her, remembered that she’d seen him before, coming out of the clinic that day, the day she’d gone for her little walk down memory lane. She wouldn’t tell him that, though. He would wonder what the likes of Phoenix had been doing in that neighborhood. He would wonder why.
“That’s right,” he was saying, watching her with neither judgment nor speculation in his brown eyes. Just a curious intensity that she found unnerving.
She picked up the cheroot, stared at the still-smoldering tip and then, annoyed with herself, put it back down. How was it that she felt edgy and nervous as a teenager in the principal’s office, while
He shrugged, his eyes narrowing just slightly, as if from a sudden and brief flare of light. After a moment he said evenly, “I don’t know, civic duty?”
She gave a soft snort of laughter. “Right. So, who’s minding the store? Or do you just shut it down when you have…a civic duty to attend to?”
His gentle gaze made her feel vaguely ashamed. “I have another doctor covering for me.”
What was it with this guy? Phoenix wondered. Her head was full of a million questions she wanted to ask him, a million things she wanted to know about him. Since when did she give a rip?
And where did he get off, this kid-younger than she was, he had to be-sitting there looking at her with such assurance…like some sort of shaman, as if he knew all the answers to the riddles of the universe? Who the hell did he think he was? Didn’t he know who
“Come on, Doc. Civic duty?” She threw it at him like an accusation. “Patrick told me you were there the night that woman-”
“Louise Parker.”
“What?” He’d spoken so softly she’d barely heard him. Or perhaps didn’t want to hear.
“The woman who died. Her name was Louise Parker. Yeah, I was with her when she died. I couldn’t save her. I tried, but I…couldn’t.”
Well, she for sure didn’t want to hear that-the pain in his voice. Suddenly claustrophobic, she paced to the edge of the desk, stopped with a jerk and turned to face him. Took a deep breath. “Look, I’m truly sorry about what happened. I am. I had no idea I owned those buildings. To tell you the truth, I own a bunch of things I don’t know about. Look-handling my money is Patrick’s job, and I don’t get in his way. I trust his judgment. If he thinks it’s a good investment, he goes ahead with it. That’s the way we’ve always done things, that’s the way I want it. Of course-” she paused, wondering why she felt a need to say it “-when I found out about this I fired him.”
“Of course,” the doctor said dryly, “I can see that.”
“I’m always firing people,” she said, shifting her shoulders as if that could get her out from under the burden of guilt he was dumping on her. Damn him. This doctor was making her feel defensive. And she hadn’t done anything wrong to feel defensive about. She
She was utterly mystified when he smiled.
Something-a noise, a slight movement-brought her back to her senses. Had he made that faint, embarrassed sound, or had she? How long had she been standing there staring at him? How long had she been smiling this goofy smile? She drew a shaken breath. The claustrophobia wrapped itself around her like a warm, wet blanket.
“Hey, Doc,” she said in the slightly thickened voice that in her case was most often the accompaniment of sexual foreplay or way too many Bloody Marys. “How about if we get out of here-go somewhere and grab some lunch?”
“Lunch?” Ethan repeated the word as if he’d never heard it before. The truth was, food was just about the farthest thing from his mind just then. He was feeling lightheaded and queasy, a little off-balance-symptoms that
