The Texan Way
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Diana Palmer
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34
CHAPTER ONE
“HOW ARE YOU TODAY?” Drew Morris asked his first patient of the day, smiling in his usual remote, but kind way. “Mr....” He glanced at the file, glanced at the patient, bit back a curse and smiled in a different way. “Excuse me just a minute, will you?”
Before the patient could say a word, Drew was out the door and marching down the hall to his receptionist’s desk. He threw the file down in front of her with curt irritation.
“I said Bill Hayes, not William Haynie,” he said shortly.
Kitty Carson grimaced, and the green eyes behind her large wire-rimmed lenses winced. “Sorry, Dr. Morris,” she stammered, jumping up to thumb through the files until she found the right one and handed it to him. “If Mrs. Turner was here, I wouldn’t get so rattled,” she defended, mentioning the office nurse who was off sick today.
“Bad way to start off the day, Ms. Carson,” he muttered and went straight back to his patient.
Kitty sat down, hard, letting out the breath she’d been holding. The former receptionist, Mrs. Alice Martin, had retired two weeks previously, and Kitty had been hired through a local professional agency in Jacobsville, Texas, to replace her. She hadn’t met Drew Morris when she applied for the job, which was a good thing. If she’d met him first, she wouldn’t be working here.
On the other hand, it was nice to be treated like a normal employee. She was asthmatic, and in at least one job, her well-meaning boss had been so wary of triggering an attack that he actually had another girl in the office ask her for pressing work. He was sweet, but her asthma wasn’t brought on by emotional upheavals; it was triggered by pollens and dust and smoke. Probably since Dr. Morris did some pediatric work, he knew more about asthma than any routine employer. An increasing number of children seemed to have the chronic illness.
She pushed back a wisp of dark hair that had escaped the huge bun at her nape and stared blankly at the file he’d given her. She got up again to replace it, but by then the phone was ringing again—both lines.
It wasn’t that she couldn’t handle the pressure of a busy doctor’s office, but she did wish he’d take a partner. He had no life at all. He worked from dawn until dusk daily through Saturday, and on Sunday he had an afternoon clinic for children. He did minor surgery through the week as well—tonsils and adenoids—and he was always willing to stand in for other doctors in the local hospital’s emergency room on weekends. No wonder Mrs. Turner had come down with the flu, she mused. It was probably exhaustion. It didn’t surprise her that Dr. Morris wasn’t married, either. When would he have the time?
He’d been married, though. Everyone talked about his eternal devotion to Eve, his wife of twelve years until her untimely death of cancer. No woman in Jacobsville ever set her cap at Drew because of the competition. His marriage had been one of those rare, blissful matches. It was said that Drew would much rather have his memory of it than any new relationship.
Not that Kitty was interested in him that way. She had her eyes on a local cowboy named Guy Fenton, who was something of a rounder but a nice man when he wasn’t drinking. He’d broken a bone in his hand the day after Kitty started working for Drew. He’d known Kitty for years, but only then had he noticed that she’d grown up. He seemed to like her, too, because he teased and picked at her. He had a habit of stopping by the office at lunchtime to talk to her, and he’d just asked her to go to the movies with him on Saturday night. She was so flustered that she was all thumbs. Dr. Morris, she reflected, had no patience with the course of true love.
By lunchtime, she’d dealt, calmly and efficiently, with two emergencies that required Drew’s presence at the local emergency room, and a waiting room full of angry, impatient people. Her soft voice and reassuring smile defused what could have been a mutiny. She was used to calming bad tempers. Her late father had been a retired colonel from the Green Berets, a veteran of Vietnam with a habit of running right over people. Kitty, an only child, had learned quickly how to get along with him. He was difficult, but he was like Drew Morris in one respect; he never overemphasized her asthma attacks. His very calmness helped avert many of them. But if they led her to the emergency room, he was always the soul of compassion.
Her mother was long dead, so there had been just the two of them, until six months ago. She still missed the old man terribly. The job she’d left to come here had held just too many memories of him. Her father had known Drew, but only socially, so there were no close associations with him in this office.
“Don’t daydream on my time,” a harsh voice called from the doorway.
She jumped, glancing toward Drew, whose dark eyes were filled with dislike. “I’m...on my lunch hour, Dr. Morris,” she faltered.
“Then why the hell are you spending it staring into space? Go eat.”
As she got up, she caught her sleeve on the knob of the middle desk drawer and was jerked back down onto the chair.
“Oh, for God’s sake...!” Drew moved forward and caught her just as the swivel, rolling desk chair crashed to the floor. He stood her upright with an angry sigh and noticed at the same time that the buttons on her bulky gray cardigan were done up wrong.
“You are an albatross,” he muttered as he undid buttons, to her shocked surprise, and efficiently did them up again, the right way. “There. I’m amazed that the agency would risk sending me a receptionist-stenographer who can’t even button a sweater properly.”
“I usually can,” she said nervously. “It’s just that Guy asked me out. I’m a little unsettled, that’s all. I’m sorry.”
His dark eyes cut into hers. They were alarming at close range, big under a jutting brow. The pupils were black-rimmed. “Guy?” he asked curtly.
“Guy Fenton,” she said with a demure smile.
His eyes narrowed. “Broken metacarpal, left hand,” he recalled with a frown. “Works for the Ballenger brothers out at their feedlot. And drinks to excess on weekends,” he added firmly.
“I know that. He won’t drink when he’s with me, though. We’re just going to a movie,” she said, and began to feel as if her father had come back.
His eyebrows lifted. “Don’t you date much?”
She flushed. It was too much work to explain that she didn’t, and why. Her father, God rest his soul, had terrified most of the shy young men she’d brought home. Eventually she stopped bringing them home. The thought flashed unwanted through her mind that her father would have made mincemeat of Guy Fenton. She wondered how he would have stood up to Dr. Morris, who was quite obviously the offspring of adders and scorpions.
The thought almost brought a laugh from her pretty mouth. She barely bit it back in time and transformed it into a cough.
“Watch yourself,” Drew said. “Fenton’s trouble, any way you look at it. His ex-girlfriend would eat you for breakfast.”
“Ex-girlfriend?”
He glanced impatiently at his watch. “I have rounds to make. I don’t have time... All right, his girlfriend dropped him because of the drinking, but she still feels that he’s her personal property and she doesn’t like him seeing other women.”
“Oh.”
“I’ll be back at two,” he said, shedding his white lab coat as he headed to his office. “How many more appointments do I have?” he asked without looking back.
She picked up her pad and followed him, almost running to keep up with his long-legged stride. She read them off. She managed to run right into him as he barreled back out into the hall, dignified in a gray vested suit and red striped tie. He made another impatient sound and ran a hand through his thick dark hair, making it just a bit unruly.
“Do you have to walk into me every time you come down the hall?” he muttered.
“Sorry. New glasses.” She grinned gamely and pushed them back on her nose again.
He kept walking. “If I run a little late, make the usual excuses.” He turned with the doorknob in his hand. “And try to keep the files straight, will you? I’m all for true love, but I have a practice to run.”
He went out while she was still searching for a reply.
HE GOT INTO his new black Mercedes and slammed the door impatiently. The girl was going to have to go, that was all there was to it. She was a positive disaster when she wasn’t trying to get involved with a man. Fenton’s presence was going to make her into an accident waiting to happen.
He started the car and pulled out into traffic. Really, it was too bad that she had no one. She needed looking after. She was all thumbs when he spoke harshly to her, and she drank far too much coffee. She couldn’t seem to button blouses or dresses or jackets with any degree of competency. Once she’d come to work wearing two different shades of ankle-high hose, looking like a refugee from two-tone body tanning.
A faint smile touched his firm mouth. All the same, the patients seemed to like her, especially children. She was good with asthmatics, too, possibly because she was one herself.
One day when his nurse had been out sick—funny just how often Mrs. Turner was sick lately, he mused—he’d come to get a small patient from the waiting room and found her sitting on Kitty’s lap while she typed up forms. The child had a sprained wrist and had been wailing, accompanied by a grandmother who didn’t seem to care much whether she was seen or not. Kitty cared all too much.
The memory touched him in a way he didn’t like. His late wife, Eve, had been sensitive like that. She’d loved kids, too, but they’d lost the only one Eve had been able to conceive due to a miscarriage. Despite their lack of offspring, it had been an idyllic marriage. He missed Eve. He still spent holidays with his in-laws. It was like being near her. He didn’t date and he didn’t want involvement, despite the unending efforts of local people to set him up with eligible young women. His twelve years with Eve were precious enough to last him the rest of his life.
Kitty, with her foibles, wasn’t enough to threaten his peace of mind, but if she kept mixing up patients, she was going to endanger his practice.
On the other hand, if Fenton was really interested, she might be the making of him. A man in love was ready enough to give up bad habits. Everyone knew that Fenton drank to excess; no one knew why. Drew had tried to drag it out of him while he was putting the man’s hand in a lightweight cast, but he couldn’t make him talk. Fenton just ignored him.
The tall, gangly cowboy didn’t seem as if he were Kitty’s sort of man, really. He might like her, but he had a reputation and he dated a variety of women. Kitty was naive. She could get into real trouble there, if Fenton was just playing around. And he didn’t seem the sort of man to worry overmuch about Kitty’s asthma. Drew himself pretended that it didn’t exist, but he kept a close eye on her just the same. He’d talked with her own doctor and discovered that in the past she’d had to be rushed to the emergency room with those attacks, especially during heavy pollen levels in spring.
The hospital loomed ahead in the gray misting September rain and he put Kitty and her problems right out of his mind.
GUY FENTON WAS TWENTY-NINE, dark-headed and gray-eyed with a lean physique and a wandering eye. He wasn’t handsome, but Kitty found him very attractive. Actually she found his attention attractive. In her young life, attention had been a luxury. She was making up for lost time.
She’d bought new makeup and learned how to apply it. She’d given up her high-necked blouses and started wearing things that were flimsier, looser. She wore her hair in a braid coiled around her head instead of in its former tight bun. And sure enough, Guy had noticed her and asked her out to this great movie.
The thing was, she was watching it, and he was leaning over the next row of seats talking to Millie Brady, a cute little redhead who worked in the local bank where Guy did business.
Kitty was feeling left out and miserable. She’d worn a pretty pink-and-gray-plaid skirt with a nicely fitting pink sweater, and her hair had been curled and intricately pinned up. She looked very nice indeed, glasses and all. But that didn’t make up for the sort of personality that little Millie had in such abundance. Perhaps Millie hadn’t been raised in a military environment where her life was filled with orders instead of affection.
Even now, Kitty found it difficult to interact with people. She had very few social skills. She’d had classes at business school in human relations, but that hardly made up for a lifetime of being loved and wanted. Even if the late Colonel Carson had been a well-respected military war hero, he’d been a dead bust as a loving parent. In his way, he’d been fond of his daughter, but he’d lived in the comfort of past glories, especially after his wife’s death.
She sighed without knowing it. If she’d stayed home, she could be watching one of her favorite television programs, about a duo of detectives tracing down exciting phenomena. Instead she seemed to be double-dating with Millie.
She tapped Guy on the shoulder. “I’m going to get some popcorn,” she said.
He didn’t even look her way. “Sure, you go right ahead. Now, Millie, let me explain to you how that roping is done. It’s sort of tricky...”
He was going on and on about how to sit a quarter horse while bulldogging a calf in the rodeo ring. Although Kitty liked him, she couldn’t have cared less about horses and ranching. She was a city girl.
She went to the snack bar, paused, and suddenly turned and walked right out the front door. She only lived two blocks from the theater. It was a cloudless summer night and the air smelled nice.
Just as she made it to the corner, a carload of bored teenage boys pulled up to the curb, with the windows open, and began to make catcalls.
She tried ignoring them, but they only got louder, and the car began to follow her. She wasn’t frightened, but she might yet have to go back to the theater. It would be the perfect end to a perfectly rotten date.
Furious at her predicament, she whirled and glared straight into the eyes of the boy in the passenger seat. “If you want trouble, you’ve come to the right place,” she assured him. She dug into her pocket for a pencil and pad and walked right to the back of the car to write down the license plate number.
When they realized what she was about to do, they took off. One of the real advantages of living in a small town was the fact that most cars were instantly recognizable to the local police; and they knew where the owners lived. A license plate number would make the search even easier. But these guys weren’t too keen to be located. They left rubber on the street getting away.
She stood staring after them with her eyebrows raised, the pencil still poised over the blank paper. “Well, well,” she murmured to herself. She made a check on the paper. “That’s one for my side.”
She turned the corner and walked briskly to the alley that cut between one street and another. It took her right to her apartment house. She went inside and up to her small apartment, muttering furiously to herself all the way. Some great date, she thought furiously. Not only had her date ignored her, but she’d been catcalled on the street like a streetwalker.
“No wonder Amazons only used men for breeding stock,” she told her door as she inserted the key in the lock.
She went into her lonely apartment, locked the door and unplugged the telephone. She had a small glass of milk and went to bed. It was barely nine-thirty, but she felt as if she’d worked hard all day.
Somewhere around eleven she heard knocking on her door, but she rolled over and pulled the pillow over her head. Guy Fenton could stand there until hell froze for all she cared.
THE NEXT MORNING she went to church, surprised to see Drew Morris there. He went to the same church, but he didn’t often attend services, due to his erratic schedule. Several times she’d seen him check his beeper and leave right in the middle of the offering. A doctor couldn’t be certain of any sort of normal social attendance, especially a family doctor who specialized in pediatrics. It must make his weekends nerve-racking, she thought.
After the service, he stopped her on the sidewalk, his face somber.
“What happened last night?” he asked abruptly.
Her eyebrows arched. “What?” she exclaimed, shocked.
“I saw you,” he said impatiently. “You were walking—no, you were running—down an alley, alone, about nine-thirty last night. Where was Fenton?”
“Enjoying his date. Sadly it wasn’t me.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“He likes Millie,” she explained. “She was sitting in front of us, and she’s much more interesting to talk to than I am. She actually likes rodeo.”
Her tone tugged a corner of his mouth up. “Imagine that!”
“I hate cattle,” she said.
“Our economy locally would suffer if we didn’t have so many of them,” he said pointedly.
“Oh, I know that, but I thought we were going to see a movie,” she muttered. “It was a fantasy movie,” she recalled wistfully, “with a computer-created dragon that looked so real...” She flushed at the amusement in his eyes. “I like dragons,” she said belligerently.
“I’m partial to them myself.”
She shrugged. “I’ll see it another time,” she murmured. “It wasn’t important.”
He barely heard her. He was amazed to find himself outraged on her behalf. Kitty wasn’t bad-looking at all. She had pretty legs and a neat little figure. She was intelligent and she had a fine sensitivity that was refreshing.
Millie, on the other hand, was a born flirt and something of a man-eater. She had a reputation locally for stealing men away from their girlfriends. She and Guy Fenton were a match made in heaven. Poor Kitty.
“I have to go,” she said with a quiet smile.
She walked to the small used foreign car she drove, patting its white hood affectionately before she got in and started the engine. Dr. Morris was so nice, she thought, smiling as she watched him get into his Mercedes. He was a handsome man, too, and despite his impatience and sometimes unexpected bursts of temper, she liked him. If she wasn’t careful, he could become very important to her, and that would never do. He lived with a beautiful ghost. No mortal woman could ever compete with his Eve.
She spent an uneventful day watching old movies on television and went to bed early. Guy Fenton didn’t phone. She didn’t really expect him to. She decided to write him off as a bad experience and get on with her life.
SHE LEARNED THE office routine slowly but surely as the summer ended and autumn began. As the weeks slipped away, her filing improved, too. So did her people skills. She got to know the patients who came in regularly, and as the holidays approached, she found herself on the receiving end of all sorts of delicious recipes for turkey and dressing and pies.
She noticed that Guy Fenton didn’t come back to have his cast off and mentioned it to Nurse Turner, to be told that he’d gone to the emergency room for the procedure. She supposed he’d been too embarrassed about their disastrous date to come to the office. It was history, anyway.
She accepted jars of preserves with enthusiasm. She didn’t bother to put any of her own up, as she had nobody to cook for except herself. Thanksgiving and Christmas came and went and she spent them alone, having no close relatives to consider. Dr. Morris, as usual, went to his late wife’s family for both occasions.
Winter turned slowly to spring and Kitty began to feel like part of the office furniture, in the nicest possible way. Dr. Morris had started calling her “Kitty Cat,” to the amusement of some of his smaller patients who wanted to know if she could purr.
She marveled at the change in Dr. Morris’s treatment of her. His gruff, abrupt manner at first had given way to a casual friendliness that stopped just short of affection. He was forever dressing her, though, unfastening buttons and doing them up the right way, righting hair bows, grimacing when she wore one dark blue sock with one dark green one because she couldn’t see the difference between dark shades.
“I can’t wake up on time,” she muttered one day when he was rebuttoning her patterned blazer on a nippy day. “I’m always in a rush when I leave home.”
“Go to bed earlier,” he advised.
“How can I? The neighbors below me have one of those monster sound systems,” she muttered. “They like to listen to it until the wee hours. My floor vibrates.”
“Complain to the landlord,” he persisted.
“The landlord lives in Kansas City,” she said irritably. “He doesn’t care what they do if they pay the rent on time.”
He smiled wickedly as he finished the buttons and dropped his hands. “Buy a set of drums and practice constantly. Better yet, get bagpipes.”
Her eyes brightened. “But I have a set,” she said, laughing at his amazement. “They belonged to my father’s cousin, and we inherited them when he died. I never learned to play them.”
“No better time to practice.”
She chuckled. She hadn’t thought of her taciturn boss as a kindred spirit. “I’ll get them out tonight and see if the moths have eaten them.”
“Do you have Scottish ancestry?” he asked suddenly.
“Yes. Clan Stuart.”
“My mother’s forebears were Maxwells,” he mused. “They came over just after the Revolutionary War.”
“I don’t know anything about mine,” she replied. “Dad was too busy talking about wars to care much about ancient history. He was a retired colonel in the Green Berets. He served three tours of duty in Vietnam.”
He searched her eyes quietly. “You poor kid.”
She flushed. “Why do you say that?”
“Your mother died when you were in grammar school, didn’t you say?”
She nodded.
“Just you and the colonel and the war,” he pondered aloud, dark eyes narrowing. “I’ll bet he scared the hell out of any prospective dates.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” she murmured, recalling some fraught encounters. “He tried to teach one of my dates a hand-to-hand combat move.” She grimaced. “He accidentally threw him out the window instead. Fortunately it was open at the time and on the first floor. He actually left his car, he was in such a hurry to get away.”
He tried to smother a laugh. “I get the idea.”
“Dad loved me, in his way,” she continued wistfully. “And I loved him. But I didn’t like growing up like a soldier.”
“Taught you everything he knew, I’ll bet.”
“Oh, I could win medals in target shooting and karate,” she agreed. “But it would have been so much nicer if I could have learned to cook and sew. I liked those ‘sissy’ hobbies, even if he didn’t. I had to sneak over to my girlfriend’s house to knit, for God’s sake!”
“But you miss him, don’t you?”
“Oh, yes,” she confessed. “Every day. But he was a horrible father.”
“I’m not surprised.” He checked his watch and grimaced. “I’ve got to get going. I’ll be late for rounds, and there’s a hospital board meeting tonight.”
“You’ll be medical chief of staff one day,” she said proudly.
He chuckled. “Not if I start being late for meetings.” He heard her sigh—actually heard it, with its accompanying wheeze.
His eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Used your preventive medicine?”
She gaped at him. “What?”
“Your nedochromil sodium,” he replied, and then added the brand name she was prescribed.
“Yes,” she said shortly. “That and the albuterol as well. Religiously. I don’t like ending up in the emergency room.”
“See that you keep using them properly. You’ve got a wheeze.”
“Cold nights and warm days for a week,” she said.
He shrugged. “Yes. I’ve noticed the increase in my little asthmatics’ visits.” He picked up his jacket. “Is the medicine giving enough cover?”
His concern touched her, but she wasn’t going to let him know. “Yes, sir.”
“Good.” He checked his watch, nodded and left her in the waiting room as he went out the back way to his car. She felt a warm glow at the personal conversation they’d had. Nothing in their relationship had been the least personal until now.
But when she realized what she was thinking, she clamped down hard on her wandering attention. She’d have to be crazy to let Dr. Morris get under her skin. Even crazier than she’d been to go out with Guy Fenton.
Dr. Morris was just being the ideal boss, concerned for his workers’ welfare, she told herself. So she’d better concentrate on just doing her job and not trying to make intimate comments out of impersonal observations about her health. He was a doctor, after all. It was natural for him to be concerned with someone’s health.
