safe.
Purple four-by-four. Pink hair. She should work in some upscale cosmetic surgery center, not in a mobile clinic traveling through the neediest, most remote communities in the Appalachians. Sure, she might spend a couple weeks there doing charity work, especially if there was a mine explosion or some natural disaster, but she’d always go home before long.
Imogen definitely wouldn’t fit in, and she couldn’t even if she tried.
It was too bad. She looked fun to play with. At least, when she stopped talking.
Finding a place to turn around took forever. It was a good half hour before Imogen made it back up the fool’s mountain. She shouldn’t have let him run her off. Failure was not an option.
She marched straight for Wyatt and the look he gave her was a mixture of irritation and surprise. But his shirt was back on, thank God. It helped her keep the steam she’d built up in her aborted departure.
He opened his mouth to say something. She shushed him preemptively. “You just listen. I’m going to help you today. The only way you’re getting me off this mountain is by calling the cops. I’ll wear you down. I’m like…” She blanked, blinked, and hurried past it. “Something that wears people down.” Analogy failure wouldn’t stop her either. Imogen waved her gloves at him.
“Got my tire-changing gloves. Put on my boots.” She turned her foot out to show him those too. “If at the end of the day you can still say I’ll be no help, I’ll leave you alone.” And just as she got to the end of her tirade the analogy crystallized and she blurted out, “Water! I’m water. I’m so water, and I can move mountains if I keep at it. And you’re just like a mountain. All tall…and unmoving.”
“Okay, Water. It’s a nice offer, but—”
“But I can’t help you. You said that already,” Imogen cut in, trying to keep the shoulder-tensing frustration out of her voice. “Do you always make snap judgments about people?”
“I listen to my instincts.”
“And your instinct says?” She gestured impatiently for him to spit it out.
“Friendly. Cute. Unreliable. Insubstantial.”
Maybe she gestured too impatiently.
“Insubstantial? Good grief.” She retrieved a hairband from her pocket with such a rough touch it snapped her knuckles, the sharp sting wrecking her impulse-control efforts. People usually kept their masks polite, but Wyatt came at it backwards. If his mask was this surly and unpleasant, did it hide something worse?
Focus. His opinion only mattered as far as it affected her ability to cover Amanda’s leave. In six months she’d be gone and he wouldn’t matter anymore.
“Okay, give me a chance to prove I’m substantial enough to get the job done and then—as much as I think it’s ridiculous for a man to play with chainsaws all by himself in an area with no cellphone coverage—I’ll leave you in peace at the site of your future, accidental amputation.” Okay, so maybe she should’ve been trying harder to keep the frustration out of her words and been less worried about her tone.
“No.” Wyatt stepped over the stumpy wall and made for the logs again. “And no standing within fifty feet of the cabin.”
“You should wear gloves. Don’t you know doctors are supposed to have soft hands?” She thrust her gloves at him, refusing to abide by his fifty-foot decree. “Want mine? They aren’t seeing any use now.”
“I’m fine.”
With a grunt and a shake of her head Imogen dragged the gloves on and followed him. “I’ll help you by dragging the logs to the cabin, and you won’t have to wait so long to run your beloved chainsaw. Give me the rope.”
“No.”
Hadn’t the man figured out yet that she wasn’t going to leave until he said yes?
“It’s hard work. You’ll hurt yourself,” Wyatt added.
“The last place I worked was at a pediatrics unit.” She dropped her gloved hands to her hips, instantly aware of how stiff the gloves were. “Want to know what I learned there?”
“No.”
“Too bad! I’m telling you anyway.” Ass.
“You really don’t like being told no, do you?”
Wyatt actually chuckled a little then, but it was the kind of mirthless, superior man noise she noticed happening at those times the little woman tried to do man’s work—like learning to change spark plugs. Or move logs. Having drinks and passing the time with this man no longer sounded like much fun.
In fact, the urge to hurt him nearly overwhelmed her already limping impulse control. “I learned that if you want something and you’re told no, you should do other stuff that they don’t want you to do. Worse stuff. Until they reconsider your first, sensible request. Or you should just keep asking until they give up from exhaustion.”
He tied the rope around the notched end of the log and straightened, giving her a weird, almost amused look. “How often that work for you?”
“I’d say about three out of four times. People don’t like confrontation.” She amended, “Most people.”
“There’s nothing you can do on the mountain that will bother me enough to change my mind.” He looked at her a long moment then turned, pulling the rope over one shoulder to drag the former tree down to his cabin.
The man clearly had no idea how annoying she could be if she set her mind to it. She almost regretted him putting his shirt back on. Pine cones and prickly seedpods from the sycamores would be great for proving to him and his stupid amazing back how irritating she could be.
Imogen followed, barely resisting the urge to pelt him with prickly tree bits, her mind in a mad scramble for another way to handle him. Amanda didn’t want someone getting comfy in her job while she was away, and Imogen was the pit bull she’d chosen to turn loose on the problem.
But maybe she’d set this up wrong from the start when she’d made it sound like a request. He was under the illusion she was the one who would eventually give up from exhaustion. Or maybe firm but sensible would work where bratty and frustrated had failed.
“Please?” Please should help, at least a little. “I’m invested in this working,” She tried to keep her voice as level as possible—no easy task considering she was one of the people who generally avoided confrontation. Confrontation meant getting involved in subjects that caused big feelings and crossed lines she didn’t like to cross. “Give me a chance to prove myself. Or say yes. I’ll leave and see you tomorrow for work, Dr. Beechum.”
“So…” Wyatt looked her fully in the eyes, somehow making her feel short for once. A little intimidated. That’s the reason people liked to avoid confrontation. Uncomfortable. “Your offer to help move logs is to annoy me into saying yes to hiring you for the practice?”
“Um, no. Maybe that’s how it looks, but offering to help was not to annoy you.” Imogen rubbed her head with the still stiff rawhide glove. “That was a different plan to make you say yes. That plan involved showing you
