was his birthday and that she was taking him out to lunch whether he liked it or not.
She had assumed that as with everything else that didn’t involve his operating skills, he had forgotten about his birthday.
He had.
But, in his defense, he’d pointed out to her patiently, he’d stopped thinking of birthdays as something to celebrate around the time he’d turned eighteen. That was the year that his father had died and immediately after that, he’d had to hustle, utilizing every spare moment he had to earn money in order to pay his way through medical school.
Oh, there had been scholarships, but they didn’t cover everything at the school he had elected to attend and he was not about to emerge out of medical school with a degree and owing enough money, thanks to student loans, to feed and clothe the people of a small developing nation for a decade. If emerging debt free meant neglecting everything but his work and his studies, so be it.
Somewhere along the line, holidays and birthdays had fallen by the wayside, as well. His life had been stripped down to the bare minimum.
But he couldn’t strip away his mother that easily. He loved her a great deal even if he didn’t say as much. The trouble was his mother was dogged about certain things, insisting that he at least spend time with her on these few occasions, if not more frequently.
And, once he was finally finished with his studies, with his internship and his residency, it was his mother who was behind his attending social functions that had to do with the hospital where he worked. She had argued that it was advantageous for him to be seen, although for the life of him, he had no idea how that could possibly benefit him. He had no patience with the behind-the-scenes politics that went on at the hospital. As far as he was concerned, glad-handing and smiling would never take the place of being a good surgeon.
In his book, the former didn’t matter, the latter was all that did.
And that was where his mother had finally gotten him. On the doctor front. She had, quite artfully, pointed out that because of new guidelines and the changing medical field, getting doctors to volunteer their services and their time was becoming more and more of a difficult endeavor.
He never saw it coming.
He’d agreed with her, thinking they were having a theoretical conversation—and then that was when his mother had hit him with specifics. She’d told him about this shelter that took in single women who had nowhere else to turn. Single women with children. She reminded him how, when his father was alive, this was the sort of thing he had done on a regular basis, rendered free medical services to those in need.
Before he was able to comment—or change the subject—his mother had hit him with her request, asking him to be the one to volunteer until another doctor could be found to fill that position at the shelter. In effect, she was asking him to temporarily fill in.
Or so she said.
He knew his mother, and the woman was nothing if not clever. But he was going to hold her to her word. He planned to fill in at the shelter only on a temporary basis. A very temporary basis.
Mitch knew his way around surgical instruments like a pro. Managing around people, however, was a completely different story. That had always been a mystery to him.
People, one of the doctors he’d interned with had insisted, wanted good bedside manner, they wanted their hands held while being told that everything was going to turn out all right.
Well, he wasn’t any good at that. He didn’t hold hands or spend time talking. He healed wounds. In the long run, he felt that his patients were much better served by his choice.
This was just going to be temporary, Mitch silently promised himself, pulling up into the small parking lot before the two-story rectangular building. He’d give this place an hour, maybe ninety minutes at most, then leave. The only thing he wanted to do today was get a feel for whatever might be the physical complaints that the residents of this shelter had and then he’d be on his way home.
It was doable, he told himself. No reason to believe that it wasn’t.
Getting out of his serviceable, secondhand Toyota—he’d never been one for ostentatious symbols of success—Mitch took a long look at the building he was about to enter.
It didn’t look the way he imagined a homeless shelter would look. There was a fresh coat of paint on the building and an even fresher-looking sign in front of it, proclaiming it to be the Bedford Rescue Mission. A handful of daisies—white and yellow—pushed their way up and clustered around both ends of the sign. Surprisingly, he noted almost as an afterthought, there were no weeds seeking to choke out the daisies.
As he approached the front door, Mitch was vaguely aware of several pairs of eyes watching him from the windows. From the way the blinds were slanted, the watchful eyes belonged to extremely petite people—children most likely around kindergarten age, he estimated.
He sincerely hoped their mothers were around to keep them in line.
Those uncustomary, nagging second thoughts crept out again as he raised his hand to ring the doorbell.
He almost dropped it again without making contact. But then he sighed. He was here, he might as well see just how bad this was. Maybe he’d overthought it.
The moment his finger touched the doorbell, Mitch heard the chimes go off, approximating the first ten notes of a song that he found vaguely familiar, one that teased his brain, then slipped away into the mist the moment the front door was opened.
A young woman with hair the color of ripened wheat stood in the doorway, making no secret of the fact that she was sizing him up. It surprised him when he caught himself wondering what conclusion she’d reached.
“Dr. Stewart,” she said by way of a greeting.
A greeting he found to be rather odd. “I know who I am, who are you?” he asked.
For such a good-looking man—and she could easily see all the little girls at the shelter giggling behind their hands over this one—he came across as entirely humorless. Too bad, Melanie thought. She’d take a sense of humor over good looks any day.
A sense of humor, in her eyes, testified to a person’s humanity as well as his or her ability to identify with another person. Good looks just meant a person got lucky in the gene pool.
“Melanie McAdams,” she told him, identifying herself as she stepped back and opened the door wider for him.
Mitch noticed there was a little girl hanging on to the bottom of the young woman’s blouse. The girl had curly blond hair and very animated green eyes. He assumed she was the woman’s daughter.
“You run this place, or live here?” he asked her bluntly.
“Neither.”
Melanie’s answer was short, clipped and definitely not customary for her.
She wasn’t sure if she liked this man.
One thing was for certain, though. Theresa was right. He was definitely going to need someone to guide him through the ins and outs of dealing with the residents here. Especially the little residents.
She could tell by the expression
