So much for refreshments. Back to the original question. What was he doing here?
A smile so faint it was little more than a shadow lifted the corner of his mouth. “You’re wondering why I’m here, aren’t you?”
“Well, as a matter of fact…”
“I’d like to take you to the Heart Ball.”
She was not prepared for that. Not prepared at all. “The Heart Ball,” she repeated, like a fool. Like someone who’d never heard of such a thing.
“Yes. It’s the twelfth. Of February.”
She knew that, of course. The Heart Ball was a very big deal in Honeygrove. It took place every year, around Valentine’s Day. Memorial’s auxiliary put it on and most of the doctors in town made an effort to attend.
He was looking at her so intently. “You have a date,” he said, his tone flat.
“I…” Lie, her mind ordered. Tell him you do. But she didn’t have a date. And she just couldn’t lie about it. “No. No, I don’t have a date.”
“Then?” He waited, his face composed, his eyes anything but.
The problem was, she wanted to say yes.
“If you say no, you’ll destroy me.” He spoke lightly, but still, somehow, the statement rang true.
And she found herself thinking, Why not? It’s only one evening….
“Come on.” There was that shadow of a smile again, haunting the edges of his mouth.
It actually might be fun, she rationalized. And it was an event she really should attend. Both Marty and Randall had been after her not to back out this year.
“Say yes.”
“All right, yes.”
“There. Was that so difficult?”
The question sounded rhetorical, but she answered, anyway. “No. It wasn’t. Not at all.” In fact, it had been much easier than it should have been—given that she was a woman with a plan for her life. A plan that did not include a man at this point.
But one date. For the Heart Ball. What harm could that do?
He stood. “Well. I guess I should let you get back to that rash.”
She should have said, Yes, I really do have to work now.
But she didn’t. She asked him, “So how was Pizza Pete’s?”
And then he asked her how she knew about that.
And then she had to tell him of Lily’s visit—the bare facts of it, anyway. That Lily had returned her anorak and brought along a nice lunch. That they’d had a pleasant conversation and Lily had mentioned that he and the children were off with his brother at Pizza Pete’s.
That was just the beginning.
It was so strange. Once they started talking, they somehow never seemed to stop. He told her more about his job. He really did seem to love his work as much as she loved hers.
She’d just never met a man who was easier to talk to. Time seemed to melt away, as it had the night before. When she followed him to the entrance hall and said goodbye, it was almost 11:00 p.m.
Lily made no appearance at Ronni’s door the next day. Not that Ronni would have been likely to know if she had. She was up at six and out the door by seven. She didn’t get home until eight-thirty that night.
On Thursday, she bought a new dress to wear to the Heart Ball. She had no time for shopping sprees, really. But still, somehow she managed to fit in a trip to the mall between her office hours, the three patients she needed to check on at Children’s Hospital and the stop at her condo, where she argued with the electrician and tried not to have a fit when she saw they’d delivered the wrong bathtub—a pink one, for heaven’s sake. She had ordered cobalt blue.
At eight o’clock that night, when she finally got back to the guest house, she hung her new dress in the closet and reminded herself again that it was only one date.
Her beeper went off about five minutes later. She called the office exchange and got the number: a distraught father calling to report that his six-year-old daughter, who’d been suffering from the flu, had been vomiting with scary regularity for the past several hours. Ronni made arrangements to meet them at Children’s Hospital.
It was well after midnight when she once again pulled into the long driveway beside the imposing brick house. A big black Lincoln swung in right behind her. Ryan. His headlights shone hard and white through her rear window, almost blinding her as she glanced in the rearview mirror.
Ronni blinked, focused front and kept going, steering her little Toyota around the curve to the front of the guest house and nosing it into the small carport there. She grabbed her purse and emerged from the car, shivering a little as she stepped out into the cold night air.
Ryan’s headlights had vanished. He had pulled into the garage, near the main house, on the opposite side of the drive.
Ronni shoved her car door shut. It closed with a ka-thunk that sounded way too loud in the late-night stillness. She went around the end of the car and came out from under the shadow of the carport.
Once she reached the driveway, she paused, knowing she was easily visible in the light from the pole lamp about thirty feet away at the rear edge of the property. She was waiting. She shouldn’t have been, but she was. Hoping he might decide to stroll back here and—what? Keep her talking all night again?
Take her in his arms and kiss her until she couldn’t think straight?
Oh, stop this, she ordered silently. You don’t need to talk all night. You don’t need to be kissed. You need to go inside, Ronni Powers. Go inside right now.
But she didn’t move. She just stood there.
And she heard footsteps. Coming in her direction. Ryan appeared around the curve of the driveway, so tall and commanding, in a finely cut suit, with a wool town coat slung casually across his wide shoulders. He saw her and kept coming, stopping at last just a few feet from where she stood.
“Working late?”
She clutched her purse a little tighter, wished she were taller, wished her lipstick hadn’t worn off hours ago. “It’s part of the job—and I could ask you the same question.”
“You’d get the same answer. A meeting ran over. And I had a few things to catch up on.”
She smiled at him cautiously, wanting to ask him inside—wondering what was the matter with her. She’d said yes to one date. But no more. It was supposed to be a casual thing.
Casual.
Hah!
“Well,” she said. “At least we’re not in our pajamas this time.”
“Shall we
