The Awakening of Dr. Brown

her order pad down in front of him “-could I just have your autograph?”

Oh, Lord, it was too funny. Phoenix made a strangled sound and clapped a hand over her mouth to hold back the laughter. The doc threw her a desperate look.

The waitress was suddenly mortified. “Oh-God. You are him, aren’t you? Ethan Brown? I was so sure… Oh, God, I feel really stupid…”

Ethan? Ethan Brown… Where had she heard that name?

The doc was smiling at the poor girl and saying in his quiet way, “No, no-that’s all right. I mean, you’re not wrong. And it’s okay. Here-I’ll sign that for you if you want me to…” He took the pen from the waitress’s trembling fingers and scrawled something on her order pad, then handed both pen and pad back to her.

“Oh, God…thank you. Thank you so much.” The girl all but dropped a curtsy. She was whispering as she scurried away, “Ethan Brown…my sister is just going to flip out when I tell her…”

And the doctor turned slowly back to Phoenix, wearing that same guilty look he’d had stepping out of the elevator in the parking garage. Very much like a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“Ethan…” she purred, low in her throat, a smile hiding the shock, the cold, trembling anger that had come on the heels of revelation. “So…that’s the name you didn’t want me to know. Ethan Brown. Okay, my next question is-were you ever going to let me in on your little secret?”

Chapter 4

“It was never a secret,” Ethan said, squirming in his chair. “I don’t go around announcing it.” But he felt completely fraudulent.

Phoenix made a soft breath sound that wasn’t quite laughter. “You must think I’ve been living under a rock.” She said it lightly, but Ethan didn’t believe it for a minute.

She must feel like a fool, he thought. I’ve humiliated her. He had an idea that wasn’t something this-or any- woman would easily forgive.

“Not really,” he said, leaning toward her, eager to make amends for having deceived her. “It’s understandable. I’ve tried pretty hard to-” he smiled wryly “-keep a low profile.”’ He waited, but she didn’t smile back. He cleared his throat and ploughed on. “It helps that the tabloids are easily bored, and the mainstream media know better than to intrude-if they want to keep on good terms with the White House, that is. So it’s been a while since my picture’s been in the papers or the six o’clock news…” He was babbling.

He forced himself to meet those incredible eyes…an incredible risk, he knew. For a moment he felt as if he were balanced on the very edge of a high diving board, and vertigo one scant breath away. He had the impression of something lurking beneath the shimmering surface of her eyes but didn’t trust his balance enough to look closely to see what it was. Hoping it might be forgiveness, he gestured toward his beard and smiled.

“And then, I guess I have my own little ways of disguising myself. You said it-people see what they expect to see. And the president’s son would have to be about the last person you’d have expected to run into in a meeting with a committee of slum tenants.”

“True.” But she was brittle, still. Unmollified. Her eyes shimmered through the curtain of her lashes like sunlit water through a forest. “All the more reason you should have warned me, don’t you think?”

“I was trying to keep-”

“-a low profile. I know.” She leaned sharply forward, like a cat pouncing on a mouse. “Tell me, Doc-or I guess I can call you Ethan, now-what else were you trying to do?”

“I beg your pardon?” The suddenness of her anger was as shocking to him as a slap.

“What is it you’re after? Is it some kind of political thing?” She was braced on her forearms, shoulders hunched and eyes shooting cold blue fire. “If it’s the publicity-”

“Publicity would be the last thing any of us want,” Ethan countered in a voice as cold as her eyes, but much, much softer. Because it was his way, when faced with violence of any kind-actions or emotions-to retreat to his calm, quiet place, he said, oh, so calmly…oh, so quietly, “What I’m trying to do is exactly what I said I was trying to do, which is help some people get their apartments fixed up. And hopefully stay out of the news in the process.” He paused, which was a mistake; he could feel the walls of his quiet place creaking under the pressure of the emotions they were trying to hold at bay. “I didn’t ask you to pick me out of that group. Why did you do that, by the way?” And he could hear the tension in his voice, now. “What, exactly, were you trying to do?”

The question left behind a ringing silence, like the crash of cymbals in a stunning finale. As Phoenix listened to its dying echoes she was conscious of an overwhelming sense of frustration, even failure. It was the same way she felt when the perfect word, the perfect lyric, the perfect golden note eluded her…which made no sense at all.

What was it she’d expected…hoped for? With a few exceptions, she was used to either intimidating men or exciting them. She was used to seeing lust, awe, even fear in a man’s eyes. She didn’t know what to do with this man, this doctor who seemed neither intimidated nor excited, who gazed at her with his shaman’s eyes and spoke to her without any nervousness at all. Like Patrick, she thought. Except that, unlike Patrick, with this man she had no doubt in her mind that the emotions were there. She knew it…felt it, like a tremor beneath her breastbone…like a knot in her stomach.

With their eyes locked and all senses focused with laserlike intensity on each other, it was a moment or two before either Phoenix or Ethan noticed the waiter. When he announced himself with a discreet cough, they sprang back from each other, straightening, Ethan thought, like two tied-down saplings when the ropes binding them are sliced through with an axe. They sat in a twanging silence while their plates were set before them, murmured identical automatic thank yous and barely noticed when the waiter asked if there was anything else they required and, unanswered, went away.

“What’s the matter?” Ethan ventured, picking up his fork. Phoenix was simply staring at her plate.

“Spaghetti and marinara sauce. You ordered spaghetti and marinara sauce?”

“Yeah? So did you,” said Ethan, mystified. She was muttering under her breath, now, shaking her head.

And suddenly she was laughing, silently but he could hear real amusement in it. “I can’t believe you. You’re having lunch with Phoenix. You have a beard. And you order spaghetti with red sauce. Now, that’s confidence.”

Ethan was smiling too as he stabbed his fork into the pile of spaghetti on his plate, though he still wasn’t sure what the joke was. He did know it felt good to have her pleased with him again. Surprisingly good. Unbelievably good.

He watched, bemused, as Phoenix attacked her own plate with a gusto more in character with the rock star she was than the businesswoman she pretended to be. Phoenix. This is Phoenix. He wondered why he kept having to remind himself of that fact. And when the reality of it would set in.

“Were we quarreling just now?” She asked it casually, not looking up from her plate.

Ethan chewed and swallowed before he answered. “Nah-we don’t know each other well enough to quarrel.” But deep inside he felt a quiver of something… Awareness? Anticipation? Excitement?

She nodded. “That’s what I thought.”

They ate in silence for a few minutes. Phoenix wondered whether the doc was just concentrating hard on getting spaghetti from plate to mouth without embarrassing mishaps, or if maybe he was thinking about what might be happening between them. And whether she was thinking about it, too. Which she was. She was thinking this Doc Brown, the president’s son, was going to be more of a challenge than she’d expected. One she was actually looking forward to. She was enjoying herself more, in fact, felt more excited, more alive than she had since she’d come back to this miserable town.

She put down her fork and picked up her water glass. She sipped, and still holding the glass, motioned with her head toward a nearby table. “The guy in the dark blue suit. I just figured it out-the phone call, the stalling tactics in the garage-he belongs to you, doesn’t he?”

She felt a shiver of pleasure when the doc turned ever so slightly pink. Though the color may have been attributable to his sudden fit of coughing.

“Belongs to me? Not hardly.” He drank some water to bring himself under control again. “His name is Tom, by