cheekbones and a strong, attractive chin. He looked like himself—though she wasn’t used to this vantage point.
She swallowed. The vantage point of lying next to him. In bed.
Again she thought, Oh, God.
Images flashed in her mind. His apartment at night. The whisper of clothing as it slid off their skin. Warm, wet, breathless kisses. Hands exploring. His and hers.
She’d never touched him before. Never like last night. She’d only looked—looked and tried not to see his masculine beauty. Tried not to want.
I don’t believe what we did.
She’d needed him last night. After what had happened in the E.R. she’d been desperate. A small child and his mother had come in, fresh from a car accident. The boy had looked so much like Melissa’s brother. Same age. Similar injuries. And this boy had died, too. Melissa hadn’t been able to save him. Informing his mother—
Usually she was able to maintain a doctor’s professional distance. Last night she hadn’t.
So, when her shift at the E.R. had ended, she’d turned to Kyle. She’d needed the solace he could give her and she hadn’t cared about anything else.
But they should not have become lovers. She and Kyle couldn’t be romantically involved. They had a very good, very comfortable friendship—and this was a sure way to mess it up. She valued their relationship too much to let it degenerate into another of Kyle’s light, temporary affairs.
Panic shot through her.
She had to get away.
Her pulse hammering, Melissa raised a hand to his arm. He didn’t stir as she painstakingly eased his arm off her torso and inched away from him, pausing once when the mattress creaked. She lowered a leg over the side of the bed.
Kyle caught her wrist as she started to rise. “Don’t go,” he murmured.
She’d never heard his voice so husky before, not even when he was sick with the flu. It was sexy husky, we-just-made-love-all-night-long husky. It made her shiver.
He pulled on her arm, urging her down. His hand, encircling her wrist, felt warm. “Stay. Stay here, Mel. Come back.”
“I…” She didn’t want to get into this now. She didn’t want a scene. She’d wanted to disappear quietly.
“Stay,” he repeated.
He pulled harder. She went. It happened so smoothly, so seamlessly. He turned her onto her side, facing outward, and curled his big, warm body around hers, spoon style. He clamped an arm around her waist. He buried his face in the back of her neck, nuzzling her there, kissing her nape.
“Your hair…” Kyle inhaled deeply. “Smells like gardenia. Mmm. Melissa. I just want to hold you,” he said drowsily.
The words undid her. Without her conscious volition, her eyelids fluttered shut. And then contentment seeped through her limbs.
She couldn’t help it. She didn’t want to. It felt too good.
But even as she let herself drift back to sleep, part of her knew this was wrong. Terribly.
Kyle. Oh, Kyle. What have we done?
CHAPTER ONE
October
KYLE DAVENPORT STARED at the pasty-faced, middle-aged man in front of him. They sat in the makeshift conference corner of his office, on a pair of scuffed metal folding chairs pulled up to a Formica-topped table salvaged from a diner. Boxes of medical supplies and free samples lined the shelves on the wall beside them.
Kyle clasped his hands on the tabletop. As the clinic’s director he usually spent more time on his administrative duties than he did interacting with patients, but he welcomed the chance to do so. Even when, like today, he had to play the heavy.
“Harry,” he said. “Sounds like we have a problem here. Barbara tells me you haven’t been taking your meds.”
The man gave him a cranky look. He brushed back a chunk of his badly cut gray hair and then inspected the fingerless wool gloves he wore. “Barbara’s a bully.”
“She only wants to help you get better. If you don’t take your meds, Harry, you won’t get better.”
“I hate the meds.”
“I know. I’d hate taking ’em, too. But it’s the only way to make you improve. And if you don’t take ’em you’ll probably get worse. Keep this up and you’ll end up in the hospital.”
They both knew Harry had no health coverage, which was why he came to the free clinic. He couldn’t afford another emergency-room visit like the one last spring. He hadn’t been able to afford that one.
“Harry, help me out here. I know it’s a pain in the ass to take ’em three times a day. But Barbara can’t do anything for you if you ignore everything she says.”
“She says too much. She’s always on my back. I’m going to start calling her Nurse Ratched.”
Kyle tried not to grin, knowing he shouldn’t encourage the guy. But he couldn’t wait to tell Barbara about her new nickname. “I don’t think that’ll increase her level of friendliness, Harry.” He flattened his palms on the table and adopted a serious tone. “Look, buddy, I really need you to take those pills. Why don’t you try it for a week and we’ll take the rest as it comes, okay?”
Harry shot him a defiant glare. “The meds,” he announced, “give me gas.”
Kyle raised his eyebrows. “Oh, do they, now? Well, I can’t say I’d like that, either…It’s bad?”
“You don’t want to know.” And that, apparently, settled the matter. Harry grasped the edge of the table and supported himself as he rose to his feet. He adjusted the ragged old tweed coat he wore 365 days a year, rain or shine, heat or snow. “Well. Guess I’ll be going now.”
Kyle stood, too. “Hey, not so fast. I just had an idea. Hear me out?”
The other man turned back, head tilted, expression doubtful.
“There might be a solution,” Kyle said. “We’d have to talk to Barbara, but it might be possible to change your prescription. We could try to find something that isn’t so hard on your system.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a nurse or doctor. But sometimes more than one med can treat the same problem.”
Harry had his new bottle of meds by the time Melissa arrived for her weekly shift as a volunteer physician at the clinic. Through the doorway of his office Kyle heard Melissa greet Harry by name and the older man give her a cheerful, flirtatious response before leaving the clinic.
Kyle tried to focus on his paperwork. He had plenty this week, and a long list of phone calls to make for the fall fund-raising drive.
But
