AT FIRST GLANCE, the slim redhead sitting on the funeral chapel’s front pew epitomized poise and grace. But as she politely accepted the sympathy being expressed her fingers clenched and unclenched around the crumpled tissue in her hand. Dr. Sloan Trenton would like to hold her hand, let her cling to him to help her get through the next few days, to share the pain they both felt.
No matter how much he felt he knew Dr. Cara Conner, she saw him as a stranger.
Only she wasn’t a stranger to him.
From the time Sloan had joined the Bloomberg, Alabama family medicine practice the year before, Preston had enthusiastically talked about his amazing daughter who worked in a downtown Manhattan emergency room. That must be why Sloan had thought of her so much since he had officially met her only yesterday.
He’d stopped by Preston’s house to offer his sympathies. His heart had raced like crazy when he’d rung her doorbell, knowing he was finally going to meet her. Despite his exhaustion, his grief over Preston’s heart attack, he hadn’t been able to stay away. He’d had to go to her, to offer his condolences. He felt as if his own heart had been ripped to shreds at the death of a man who’d treated him as a son. Something Sloan had never had anyone do, blood kin or otherwise.
Probably that was why he felt such a connection to Cara.
Regardless of the reason, he’d been shocked at Preston’s daughter’s reaction.
She hadn’t been out-and-out rude, but she hadn’t been receptive to his visit, either, had failed to even invite him into the house and had failed to hide her dislike. He’d stood on Preston’s front porch, a house the man had given him a key to, and he’d felt like an awkward inconvenience in Cara’s world, like an outsider in a place where he’d, up to that point, finally felt at home.
Maybe it was just grief making her so prickly toward him. After all, she’d just lost her father. Still, his gut instinct warned her reaction ran much deeper than grief over Preston’s death.
Sloan swallowed the lump that formed in his throat every time the reality that his mentor and best friend was gone hit him. He moved closer to the brushed steel casket he’d stood vigil by all evening.
Dr. Preston J. Conner had been the best man and doctor Sloan had ever known. He’d been the doctor Sloan aspired to be like. No matter how much he tried, he’d never be half the physician Preston had been.
Just fifteen feet away, Cara stood, wobbling slightly in her black stilettos and slim skirt. Sloan moved forward, determined to catch her if she didn’t straighten. Without glancing his way, she headed out of the room, unaware that he couldn’t drag his gaze away from her more than a few seconds at a time.
He excused himself from the bank president and a local preacher who had been carrying on a conversation around him and he followed Cara.
Leaving the large old Victorian-style house that had served as one of Bloomberg’s two funeral parlors for more than a hundred years, she slipped around to the side garden.
If Sloan followed her, was that outright stalkerish or just the action of a man who was worried about a woman who had just experienced great loss?
He had to at least make sure she was all right.
Hadn’t Preston’s last words been for him to take care of Cara?
Sloan headed around the side of the building. She was sitting on a bench, looking up at the sky. A pale sliver of moonlight illuminated her just well enough that he could tell she was speaking, but he was too far away to make out what she said or even the sound of her whispered words.
His ribs broke loose and lassoed themselves around his heart, clamping down so tightly that he could barely breathe.
Never had he seen anything more beautiful than the ethereal image she made in the moonlight. Never had he felt such a fascination with a woman.
A commotion behind him had him spinning to see the source, but not before he saw Cara’s head jerk toward the noise also, catching him watching her. Great. Now she’d add stalker to whatever other crimes he’d possibly committed.
But he didn’t have time to dwell on that. The cause of the noise now had his full attention.
Mrs. Goines, a blue-haired little elderly lady, had fallen while going down the three steps leading out of the funeral parlor. Why she hadn’t taken the handicap ramp Sloan could only put down to her stubbornness that she wasn’t handicapped or disabled. She had lost her footing and down she’d gone.
He got to the frail little woman almost as quickly as the woman who’d been right behind her—her daughter, if Sloan remembered correctly.
“Mom? Are you okay?” she asked, confirming Sloan’s memory of who she was. She leaned over her mother, who moaned in pain.
“I can’t move.” Ignoring her daughter, Mrs. Goines’s gaze connected to Sloan’s and she groaned in obvious agony. “I can’t get up.”
Assessing the position in which she’d fallen and how she’d landed, Sloan winced. She’d landed on her right hip, leg and arm. Her hip and her shoulder had taken the brunt of her weight. He’d seen her in clinic several times since he’d come to Bloomberg. He knew her health history. She was on a biphosphanate medication to strengthen her thin bones, having struggled with osteoporosis for more than a decade. Her weakened bones hadn’t been able to withstand the impact of her fall.
“Don’t try to move, Mrs. Goines,” he ordered in a low, confident tone. “I’m going to check you, but I will need to send you to the hospital for X-rays.”
“Is everything okay?” Cara asked, joining them and hunching down next to Sloan. At his dash at the noise, she’d apparently come to investigate. Taking the elderly woman’s hand, her expression softened with a compassion that caused Sloan’s breath to catch in his throat.
“Mrs. Goines,” she chided with a click of her tongue and the twinkle in her eyes that had captured his imagination in Preston’s office photos, “were you sliding down the railings again? You know my dad warned you about that.”
The woman’s pain-filled eyes eased just a tiny bit with Cara’s distracting words. “Remember that, do you, girlie?”
“I remember a lot of things about growing up in this town. Like that you used to sneak me extra peaches when I’d go through school lunch line,” Cara told her in a gentle voice. “Can you tell me where you are?”
The woman frowned. “If you don’t know, then it should be you being checked by a doctor, not me. It’s your father’s funeral we’re at, girlie.”
“You’re right,” Cara agreed, not explaining that she was checking the woman’s neurological status with her question. “Did you hit your head when you fell?”
“If only,” Mrs. Goines
