doesn’t like me.”
“It’s not you….” Mark turned his head, taking in the beauty of the woman beside him. Susan’s hair was short, dark, sassy. Her eyes big and luminous. Nothing like the long red-gold hair and soft green eyes of the woman who’d made his day ten times more difficult than it had needed to be.
He liked short, dark and sassy.
“Kelsey’s not used to sharing me.”
“We’ve been dating for almost six months.”
“But she had me to herself for almost three years before that.”
Her hand trailed down the side of his face to his neck. “I might believe that, if you two didn’t still have three nights a week alone,” she said and shook her head. “I’m not that great with children. I like them, I just don’t know how to relate to them. Put me in an operating room and I’m calm and confident, but leave me alone with a child who’s not a patient and I’m completely out of my element. I don’t know what to say.”
“You just talk to them,” Mark explained, touched by her earnestness. “They’re people like everyone else, only shorter.”
“They don’t think like adults.”
“So, you were a kid once. Think back to that.”
She sighed, resting her head against his shoulder. “I don’t ever remember being a kid. My folks had me on the fast track before I was five.”
Her parents were older; he’d met them several times. And she’d been something of a child prodigy. She was four years younger than he was and she’d been in medical school when he’d still been an undergraduate in college. She hadn’t had many chances to make friends her own age. He knew all this. He’d just never considered the possibility that her unusual upbringing might have robbed her of childhood thoughts as well as everything else.
“We’ll work on it,” he told her, reminding himself to think of some ways to do that. Tomorrow.
Tonight his mind was tired and his body was restless. He slid an arm around Susan, enjoying the slender shapeliness of her athletic body. She came to him eagerly, raising her mouth for his kiss.
They wouldn’t sleep together tonight. Mark never had sex in his house when Kelsey was home. But he needed to—tonight more than many other nights.
Her lips opened and he slid his tongue inside, finding the rhythm that had become familiar to them over the months, relishing her response. Until he reminded himself that he had to stop.
“Being a parent’s tough sometimes,” he said with a groan.
“Did you get a sitter for tomorrow night?” Susan’s whisper was hoarse and not quite even.
She’d invited him to her place for grilled steak—and a couple of hours in her bed.
“Not yet.” Mark’s mood dropped as the day—the week—came back to him. “It’s the spring dance,” he said. “But I have one more person to try.”
“If you can’t find anyone else, I’m sure Meredith would do it.”
“No.” Mark regretted his tone the second he’d responded. Regretted, too, that being friends with people at work wasn’t against policy—unlike dating. It would be a damned fine reason to keep Meredith Foster out of his life a whole lot more.
Susan leaned back to look at him. “Uh-oh.”
He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. Meredith Foster was Susan’s best friend. Meredith had introduced them to each other.
“What’d she do?” Susan asked, her eyes serious, concerned, but with a hint of a smile on lips still wet from his kisses.
With as few words as possible, he told her. And wasn’t at all pleased when Susan sat back after a moment and said softly, “She’s probably right, you know.”
“No, I don’t know.” He was tired. Cantankerous. He’d been cussed out a second time by Larry Barnett that afternoon. His daughter was being snippy. He needed to make love. Meredith Foster was his scapegoat.
“How many times have you called her into your office over the past four years?”
Mark sank down on the couch, his feet on the floor straight out in front of him, his head resting against the cushion. “I have no idea. Too many.”
The lights were low, and soft new-age jazz played in the background. He should be relaxed.
“And how many times has she been wrong?”
“Every one of them. She steps outside her position, she apologizes and life goes on. Until it happens again. She’s a damn good teacher, Suze, I’d hate to lose her, but she butted heads with a powerful man this time and I don’t know how long I can keep explaining things away.”
“I mean about the kids, Mark,” Susan said, her voice filled with compassion—whether for him or her friend, he wasn’t sure. Knowing Susan, it was probably a bit of both. “How often has she been wrong about the kids?”
In a way, he resented her generosity. Meredith Foster deserved anger tonight, not compassion.
“She’s good with the kids, no one’s arguing about that.”
Susan straightened up on the edge of the couch, facing him. “How many times have her predictions turned out to be true?”
“I honestly couldn’t tell you,” he said. “The point is irrelevant. Anyone can guess and be right fifty percent of the time.”
“I’d bet my retirement fund that her percentage is closer to eighty or ninety than fifty.”
He highly doubted it—but he couldn’t prove either of them right without a hell of a lot more work than he had time for. Meredith Foster was stepping outside the boundaries of her position and she could cost both of them their jobs. If she’d wanted to psychoanalyze, she should have gone into psychology.
“What about Amber McDonald?”
“Who?” He opened an eye to glance at Susan. Other than her current choice of topic, she was good company. He was glad she was there.
“That little girl two years ago. She was being sexually abused by a family friend and no one suspected anything until Meredith came forward.”
She was Amber Walker now. Her mother had remarried and moved the child to a different state. Last he’d heard, she’d joined Girl Scouts and was starting to socialize a bit.
“Amber must have told her something,” he said.
“Testimony revealed that she’d been threatened and manipulated so completely that she couldn’t even tell the police, her mother or counselors about it—not even after the guy was arrested.”
He’d forgotten that. It had been a minute detail compared to the anguish everyone—including Mark—had experienced over the incident. That event had branded within him a fierce need
