soon as the doctor walked into the room.
Cam had been at the office since 8:00 a.m.
He knew that the nature of a family practice required a certain degree of flexibility with respect to unexpected emergencies, but as the day wore on and he worked through lunch, he wished that Courtney—the receptionist and general office manager—would show some appreciation of the same fact and schedule appointments with more than ten minutes between them.
By five o’clock, the number of patients in the waiting room had diminished sufficiently that there were enough chairs for those still waiting. By that same time, he’d managed to take half a dozen bites of the sandwich that Courtney had brought back for him when she returned from her lunch break. The thinning of the crowd combined with the silencing of his stomach gave him hope that he might actually get out of the office before he needed to return the following morning.
He was reaching for the file in the slot outside of exam room number two when Irene—Dr. Alexander’s sister and longtime nurse—slipped out of room number four. The guilty flush in her cheeks warned him that she’d squeezed in yet another patient who didn’t have an appointment.
He sighed. “I thought you wanted to go home as much as I do.”
“You need a home in order to go to it,” she said.
“I’ll have one soon enough,” he told her. “And you’re not going to distract me that easily.”
“I’m not trying to distract you at all.” She took his arm and steered him towards the door she’d just exited.
“I thought Mrs. Kirkland was next.”
“Mrs. Kirkland is a hypochondriac, but this patient is really bleeding.”
He sighed again and took the folder she thrust into his hands, not even having a moment to note the name on the tab before he walked in the room.
And found himself face-to-face with Ashley Roarke.
He faltered, at a sudden loss for words since “Hello, Ashley, I’m Dr. Turcotte”—the standard greeting he’d given to Dr. Alexander’s other patients—seemed a little ridiculous in light of their history.
But it was long ago history and he’d seen her only once since he’d left town more than a dozen years earlier—just a few months before at their high school reunion. Ashley had made it clear to him then then that she didn’t forgive him for leaving her and that she had no interest in reminiscing with him.
She’d also told him that she was getting married in a few months, he remembered now. But her purse was clutched in her left hand and the impressive diamond she’d worn at the reunion wasn’t on it.
Her other hand was wrapped in a bloody towel, and it was the blood that jerked him out of the past and firmly back into doctor mode.
He couldn’t think of her as the first woman he’d ever loved, the only woman he’d never forgotten. She was a patient, and it was his job to ascertain the nature of her injury and prescribe treatment.
“I, uh, came to see Eli,” she told him, breaking the awkward silence.
“He’s at the hospital.”
“Oh. Well.” She cleared her throat. “Okay. I’ll go there then. To the hospital. To catch up with him there.”
She was babbling, obviously not any more prepared for this unexpected meeting than he was. And though he was tempted to let her go, it was apparent that she hadn’t come to chat with Eli but for medical attention, and he wouldn’t shirk his duty.
“You’re dripping blood,” he told her.
She glanced down, and quickly averted her gaze again.
“I think I should take a look at that before you go anywhere.” He reached into a box on the counter to pull out a pair of disposable gloves.
“I’d rather have Eli look at it,” she said.
“Stop being stubborn, Ash.”
“I’m not being stubborn,” she denied. “I’d just feel more comfortable seeing my doctor.”
Despite her close relationship with Elijah Alexander, she obviously hadn’t heard that he wasn’t doing patient rounds at the hospital but spending time with his wife, who was in ICU after suffering a near-fatal heart attack the previous evening.
So all he said to her was, “And I’d let you go if I didn’t think it was likely you’d pass out while you were driving and potentially cause more harm to yourself and/or others.”
He wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but her face got even whiter. “Have I lost that much blood?”
He chuckled as he tugged on the second glove. “Hardly.”
She scowled. “Then why do you think I’d pass out?”
“Because I was there when you fell off the stone wall at Eagle Point Park and cut your knee open. You said you were okay, then you saw the blood and your face went white just before your eyes rolled back in your head.”
He shouldn’t have mentioned the incident, because it was an admission that he still remembered that day, even so many years later. As he remembered so many things they’d done and moments they’d spent together. He had too many memories of Ashley. Memories that haunted his waking moments and taunted him in dreams.
“I was nine,” she said, her indignant response forcing his attention back to the present.
“And you’re as pale now as you were then,” he told her.
Since she couldn’t see her face, she really wasn’t in a position to deny his accusation. Instead, she lifted her arm and thrust her towel-wrapped hand toward him.
“Fine. Take a look and give me one of those butterfly bandage things so I can go home.”
Cam took her hand and carefully began unwrapping the towel. At another time, he might have lifted his brows at the parade of little goslings embroidered along the hem, but now it was the blood soaked into the fabric that held his attention.
“How did it happen?” he asked.
“Broken glass.”
He was a doctor—he’d seen far worse than a three-inch gash in the flesh of a woman’s hand. Except that this was Ashley’s hand, and the gash ran down the side of her palm before abruptly detouring toward her wrist. Luckily, it stopped short of her ulnar artery, but his heart skipped a beat in his chest when he realized how close it had come.
“Must have been a big piece of glass,” he noted.
“Eleven-by-fourteen.”
It only took him a second to figure out the reference. “A picture frame.”
She nodded, but kept her gaze firmly affixed to the opposite wall.
He tore open the packaging of a gauze pad, dabbed gently at the skin around the wound. “Well, I think
