Stepping to the side, she moved away from him. “Take care of my grandmother.”
A high-pitched laugh reached them from within, escaping through the fraction of an inch where the window sash failed to meet the sill. They turned and April could see her grandmother was standing right next to the window. From all appearances, she was vamping the socks off the gray-bearded man she was with. Jimmy, eyeing Yuri Bostovik, noticed that he looked almost besotted with April’s grandmother.
Nothing he liked better than to see seniors enjoying their lives. Jimmy grinned and looked at April. “Looks to me like your grandmother is taking care of herself.” More than a touch of admiration mingled with his amusement.
The way April saw it, Gran was doing the exact opposite. She should have been at home, resting, not out at the saloon. The woman had angina, for heaven’s sake. But there had been no talking her out of coming. Gran had been insistent. Until this moment, despite Gran’s blatant allusions to Yuri, April had thought it was to insure her coming here. Now she wasn’t so sure.
She watched the older couple move and meld into the crowd. April shook her head. “Gran’s headstrong. She absolutely refuses to let me take her to Anchorage—to the hospital there.”
The woman looked healthy enough, even glowing, but Jimmy knew how deceptive appearances could be.
“Can’t Shayne treat her? Alison says he’s the best.” He remembered feigning jealousy when Alison had told him that, but they’d both known he’d been kidding. He hadn’t an envious bone in his body. And he knew that while Alison was kind, she wasn’t recklessly lavish with her praise. She called them as she saw them.
“I’m sure he is for the common everyday things, but it’s her heart—”
“What about her heart?”
Because they’d been preying on her mind ever since she’d received June’s letter, the words were out before she realized that she was sharing them. “She has angina and Shayne suggested an angiogram to see if there’s any sort of blockage. Her EKG looks good, but an electrocardiogram is almost useless in determining the actual condition of a heart—and she’d been having these pains.”
Jimmy wondered how much was true and how much had been fabricated by Ursula Hatcher for April’s benefit. From what Alison had told him, he had a hunch the crafty-looking woman on the other side of the pane had exaggerated her condition to get something she wanted—her granddaughter in the area. “What kind of tests have been done?”
Interest mingled in with her suspicion. “What kind of a doctor are you?”
“A good one, I’d like to think.” He regarded Ursula’s profile with interest before turning back to one that interested him more at the moment. “I can take a look at her for you if you’d like.”
“I don’t need her looked at, I need her scanned.”
Jimmy laughed. “You make her sound like some sort of digitalized cartoon character.”
“No, she’s a person,” April said softly as she watched her grandmother shamelessly flirt. “A very precious person.”
Jimmy watched as moonbeams tangled themselves in April’s hair. Urges whispered softly through him. It was hard keeping his mind on the conversation. “She’d have to be, to get you to come back to a place you hate so much.”
April didn’t like having things presumed about her, or having words put in her mouth. “I never said I hated Hades.”
Was she serious? He looked at her expression, clearly challenging him, and realized that she was. Very serious. “In every way but to actually use the word,” he contradicted.
She opened her mouth to put him in his place then closed it again, deciding the argument wasn’t worth the effort. Not when he was right. It was just that she didn’t like having someone read her so well, not a stranger at any rate.
Shrugging, she looked away. “It’s just that I find it stifling here, confining.”
“Oh, I don’t know. When something’s unformed like Hades, there’s a world of possibilities in that vastness. You can do anything, be anything. It’s like a huge empty canvas you can paint on.”
He’d said he was visiting, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe he was checking things out. “You sound like somebody who’s fixing to make a monumental move.”
Not hardly, he thought. He had everything set up for him at the hospital back in Seattle. That had taken some doing. Besides, Kevin was having enough trouble with Alison being so far away. His older brother would seriously flip out if two members of his family were more than an hour away by regular route. Jimmy supposed, after sacrificing so much for them, Kevin felt he deserved to be part of their lives once those lives took shape.
Jimmy shrugged casually. “No, just somebody who’s always got his eye out for possibilities.”
“I would have thought that someone like you would have restricted his possibilities to women.”
“There’s that field, too.” His grin was wide and it tugged at her, pulling her in against her will. “But not restricted, never restricted.”
When he looked into her eyes like that, she found she had trouble thinking. Good thing she’d stepped out for some air when she had. She’d definitely been in danger of light-headedness. “So, where do you practice—medicine, I mean.”
“I don’t have to practice,” he told her, his voice low, moving slowly around her, hypnotizing her. “I have it down pat—medicine, I mean.”
April shivered, trying to snap out of the trance she felt herself falling into.
“Cold?”
It was as good an excuse as any. “Yes. Spring here is only a little warmer than winter at times.”
Too late she realized it was the wrong thing to say because he slipped his arm around her shoulders, then shielded her against the wind with his body. “Maybe we’d better get you inside.”
She’d gotten good at rejecting men who came on to her. She could do a put-down with just a well-aimed glance. There was no doubt in her mind that James Quintano was definitely coming on to her. She could feel it in every bone in her body. But when she turned her head toward him, no words came, no well-honed, belittling glance found its way into her eyes. Instead, she felt a definite pull toward this man she didn’t know.
“Maybe,” she agreed, her voice hardly above a whisper.
Reaching around her, he put out his hand to push open the door. And wound up wrapping that same hand around her other side instead. Pulling her to him.
He’d meant to be on his best behavior, he really had. But when she looked at him like that, with the moonlight caressing her face and moonbeams getting lost in that tangle of hair that invited his fingers to touch it, he felt something stronger than his good intentions stir within his gut.
Before he quite knew what he was doing, natural born instincts had him cupping her cheek and tilting her face up to his. Had him touching his mouth to hers to break the spell because nothing could taste as good as her lips looked.
He was wrong.
They could.
Maybe it was because he’d been at loose ends ever since Melinda had canceled out on him, begging off from the cruise because of some personal emergency at home that now eluded his brain.
The real emergency, he’d had no doubt at the time, was that she’d had marriage on her mind and he’d had nothing more serious than a pleasant interlude on his. It wasn’t that he had anything against marriage in general, just nothing for it in particular when it came to himself. He reasoned that he saw enough dying at the hospital, he didn’t need to be part of something that, no matter what, had a finite lifespan. His parents had driven that lesson home long before he’d ever put on his first pair of scrubs.
But that belief in no way made him monastic. For him, relationships lasted as long as they were mutually beneficial, comforting and light. While he was involved, he could be counted on for emotional support, a kind word and to be summoned in the middle of the night in case of a breakdown—as long as he wasn’t on call. Even after a relationship had run its course, he usually remained on good terms with the woman. But he’d made it a rule never to meet the woman’s family or to discuss anything more romantically serious than pending plans for the weekend. He didn’t believe in committing himself to anything longer than that.
