armour, his smile dripped with charm and he was thrusting a very pretty bunch of white daisies in her direction.
She remained unimpressed. Tilted her head to one side and looked at him from beneath her lashes. ‘Is that part of the apology?’
He frowned, and looked—but this was impossible—taken aback. ‘No, I bought them earlier.’ His voice dropped a little. ‘Maggie, I really am sorry about being late. I’ll explain while we eat.’
Maggie took the flowers, feeling the heat rise in her face. How had she managed to let him wrong-foot her so soon?
‘They’re lovely,’ she said. She hid her repentance by looking down at the simple blooms.
‘I thought they’d suit your place better than hothouse roses.’
She angled her head once more, and met those dark eyes. ‘How do you know…?’
‘I drove by it this afternoon,’ he explained. ‘You have a great setting, and that log-cabin look to your house fits it so well. Your practice is under the same roof as your home, right?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘But listen, let’s talk properly when we get inside. Our reservation is for seven-thirty. I was thinking we’d have time for a drink at the bar, but…’
She felt his hand beneath her elbow, guiding her confidently towards the restaurant, and all the old, unwanted feelings came flooding back. The wall of alien, chemical desire slamming into her like a rogue wave the moment he was near her. The seething irritation and shame at her own weakness in responding to a man she considered so…so…shallow and arrogant and unsubtle. The determination that he should never, ever guess that she wasn’t nearly as immune to him as she pretended to be.
For heaven’s sake, she thought in sudden panic, why hadn’t she just invented another commitment when he’d called last week? She had been Alison’s college room-mate. Both of them had been bright and ambitious, and both of them had scorned the frequent feminine tendency to hide the fact. They’d been close all through four years of premed studies and four years of medical school, but their internships had taken them in different directions. Contact over the past few years had dwindled to an annual Christmas card.
She knew that Alison and Will were divorced. Sad. They’d seemed like the perfect couple, with Alison’s classic, cool blonde beauty and Will’s dark good looks. Beyond Maggie’s disappointment that yet another modern marriage had failed to stay the distance, however, it meant that she and Will had no reason at all for any further connection. Why had he called? And why had she accepted?
Ah, yes, why had he called? Will wondered. That was what Maggie—now the cool, intimidating Dr Lawless—had to be thinking. He could feel it in the stiffness of her body as she walked beside him, and he’d heard it in that cynical, and perhaps exultant laugh of hers when he’d apologised for being late.
She’d always loved catching him out. She watched for opportunities, and never let one pass. She had never believed in his sincerity. Basically, she’d never understood him at all, and he knew this was partly…mostly…his own fault. She’d unsettled him for nearly eight years of regular contact. He’d deliberately played up to her poor opinion of his worth, and at the same time he’d experienced an unparalleled sense of impotence whenever they’d rubbed up against each other.
Metaphorically, of course.
The back of his neck prickled as he realised what a sexually suggestive phrasing he’d just used in his thoughts, and he wrenched them back to the question of why he’d called her, why he’d proposed dinner and why he’d proposed dinner here.
He had an interview scheduled for Monday morning at another family practice in the region, but it was located in a city centre, and that wasn’t what he was ideally looking for. In her annual Christmas card to himself and Alison several years ago, Maggie had written with enthusiasm about her own practice on the shore of the northern reaches of Lake George in the Adirondack mountains, several hours’ drive north of New York City.
She’d penned a vivid sketch of the spacious wooden house with an attached suite of professional rooms. She’d spoken with love about the wide windows looking onto the lake, the surrounding grandeur of tall trees and spreading grass, and the summer flowers which painted accents of colour. In fall, the mountains flamed a hundred different colours as the leaves changed, she’d said. In winter, the long, island-dotted lake was frozen solid enough to support a car. It was a beautiful part of the country.
She’d talked about the private boat dock, the motor launch, the canoe and the little sailboat.
‘Mark and I are just like the characters in The Wind in the Willows,’ she’d written in her bold hand. ‘Eight months of the year, we spend half our free time simply messing about in boats.’
Her description had stuck in his mind, even then, when he hadn’t yet been looking for something such as she’d described. Over the past year, his need to get away from Arizona, a long way from Arizona, had grown acute—more than enough to overcome his reluctance at subjecting himself to fearless, opinionated, maddening Maggie Lawless once again. He’d remembered the one night when their connection hadn’t generated sparks of hostility but sparks of something very different.
And he’d—stupidly, he now saw—clung to that memory and made too much of it. He’d joined it to his need to find a new place to live and work far from where he now was, a place like the one Maggie had described so glowingly in her card, and he’d taken the bull by the horns and called her.
Picnic Point would suit his needs a lot better than Wayans Falls, and infinitely better than Arizona, for several reasons. He was a good doctor. That wasn’t arrogance. It was simply a fact. He wouldn’t be asking her for a favour.
But, hell, Wayans Falls and Picnic Point weren’t his only options. He could have kept looking, found something in Vermont or Maine. Flying east from Arizona for a series of exploratory trips and professional interviews wouldn’t be convenient, but it would be worth it to find the right place.
Why had he pinned his hopes on maddening Maggie? And why had he thought he could bulldoze her into considering his proposition by making it with style and finesse in this glamorous setting? He should have remembered that she was the last woman on earth to be impressed by such a move.
He dropped back a pace as they were ushered to a table overlooking the terrace garden and the lake beyond. He let his hand slide from her elbow—she clearly didn’t want it there—and studied her rear view.
Did cool-headed, intellectual, difficult Dr Lawless have the slightest idea what she looked like from this angle? He doubted it. He knew from several conversations with Alison years ago that Maggie didn’t consider herself to be a particularly attractive woman.
She was dead wrong, and his visceral awareness of the fact had tortured him persistently for a long time. For a start, she had the best back view he’d ever seen on a woman. Neat, square shoulders, perfect shoulder blades, glossy dark hair that bounced when she walked…and, oh, that walk…oh, that very female and very sinuously curved behind!
They sat down, and the walk and the behind and the creamy scoop of skin above the low, curved back of her close-fitting black top were all lost to sight. They were facing each other now, only she had her head tipped forward and, distracted from her equally magnificent front view, he suddenly saw that her eyes were swimming with tears. Had she been crying the whole time he’d been ogling her?
It
