crush on Adam had been. A bad habit that she’d had the hardest time breaking. But she had. Finally.
Right?
Absolutely. Maybe karma really did have a twisted sense of justice. She couldn’t give him what he wanted. In more ways than one.
“If you’re sure,” he said.
“I am.”
He glanced at her face, lingering there for what seemed like an eternity before his gaze brushed down her nose...across her lips. She swallowed, then his index finger came up and tapped under her chin. “I like your hair down, by the way. I don’t think I’ve seen it that way in...well, a long time.”
Her mouth popped open, but before her sluggish brain could even think of a response he’d dropped his hand to his side with a lopsided smile. “I’d better go. I have a patient to recheck before I clock out. And you evidently have a hot date.”
That’s right. She was supposed to be going out on a date with someone besides a bowl of yakisoba from a nearby takeout joint. If her food was hot, it counted, right? Why had she ever concocted that lie? Maybe because she’d been so flustered to have been caught there in her underwear by the very man she’d fantasized about for so many years. “Yep. I’d better go and get ready then.”
He started to say something, and then gave his head a brief shake. He took a step or two in the opposite direction and then threw a single line over his shoulder without looking back. “Call me when you get home from your date.”
What? Oh, no!
She would be home in a half-hour. Forty-five minutes, tops. And then she would have to come up with a plausible reason why her “date” hadn’t lasted longer than it had. She could ignore his order. And have him call Sebastian and very possibly the police?
Not if she could help it. A slow smile curved her lips. That was fine. She’d call him. But she’d wait a couple of hours and make him sweat a little.
He rounded the corner, leaving her standing alone in the hallway with nothing more than her thoughts—which were now running wild with all sorts of possibilities.
But one thing she did know. When she finally put that call through, she was going to have a tale to tell that beat all tales. Of being wined and dined long into the night. She could pick up a bottle of wine with her takeout and watch a romantic movie. So it wouldn’t be a total lie. Right?
And he would stay on the other end of that line and listen to the whole darned thing. After that, it was doubtful that Adam Cordeiro would ever try to play big brother to her again.
* * *
She was stranded.
Dammit. She turned the key in the ignition of her small car again, only to hear the same ominous click she’d heard for the last five minutes. She’d tried to call three of her girlfriends, including Maggie, but so far two of them had gone to voicemail. The other was working the graveyard shift and Natália hadn’t had the heart to ask her to leave the nurses’ station right after she’d gotten to work.
She could call Sebastian. And have him give her a lecture about having her car serviced regularly? She tried to remember when the last time had been. But life was so busy with all these hot dates and everything...
She rolled her eyes. Natália had had one serious relationship in her life. And in reality she was too self-conscious about her scar and the questions that would invariably come up. Plus the fact that her chemo treatments meant she could develop lymphoma at some point in her life. And, really, how did one bring up subjects like that with someone you were just getting to know? And yet to not talk about the realities she faced seemed dishonest somehow. To let someone fall in love with her and then suddenly spring it on him: “Hey, I had cancer. And chemo. And a complicated surgery that included having most of my arm bone removed. Oh, and by the way, I’m sterile and might not live to a ripe old age.”
Her lungs went tight all of a sudden at the thought of not ever having a baby. Dammit, Nata, you hold babies every single day.
But it wasn’t the same. She sighed in exasperation.
So, yeah, she never could figure out how to deal with any of that so she just did the next best thing. She didn’t date. Or at least she rarely dated. Her boyfriend hadn’t even lasted long enough for her to think about The Talk. Maybe because she’d been an uptight neurotic mess the whole time they’d dated. Undressing in the dark had been a huge turnoff for him, and she hadn’t wanted him to see her scars so that she didn’t have to go into explanations... And, well, it had just been too exhausting to keep up the act.
It was easier just to deal with eating takeout and sleeping alone.
She was going to have to do what she’d vowed not to do. But at least she had the great story she swore she’d have before she talked to him—she had her bottle of wine right next to her. Ugh! She could just catch one of the many buses that came through the area, but in São Paulo, leaving a car unattended was just asking to have it stolen. Or at least stripped down to almost nothing.
Kind of like she’d been in that exam room.
That got a smile out of her.
He had told her to call him, right? And she had wanted to make it uncomfortable for him, hadn’t she? Well, what could be more uncomfortable than having to come and give her a ride back to her apartment—after calling for a tow truck to have her car transported to her place, at least until she could find a service station that had time to fix it.
Securing the carton of yakisoba behind her purse on the seat so it wouldn’t dump out all over her floorboards, she fished out her cellphone. She didn’t bother wondering if his number had changed since the last time she’d called him, because she was pretty sure it hadn’t. Adam had had the same phone number for the last several years. He didn’t deal well with change.
So his divorce had probably not been the easiest thing for him to deal with. But he’d survived. Just like she’d survived a life-changing illness. His ex had been bad news. In Natália’s book he was much better off without her.
She took one deep breath and then two, her lips moving as she went through the story she was going to give him when he answered the phone. Then she found his number in her list of contacts and hit the dial button. The phone rang. And rang. And rang again before clicking to voicemail. Natália ground her teeth. Okay, so maybe Adam wouldn’t get the satisfaction of rescuing her after all. There was no choice. She had to call Sebastian. Just as she punched in the first two numbers, the cellphone began to ring. She glanced at the screen.
Adam.
Only now she was all frazzled, the planned words swept away.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Adam, it’s me, Natália.”
“I know who it is. Sorry, I was in the shower and didn’t hear the phone right away.”
The image of Adam standing on a bathmat with water streaming down his chest was something that made her brain freeze even further. “I know I said I’d call you when I got home, but I’m...um...kind of stranded.”
“Stranded? What do you mean, stranded?” There was silence for a second or two, then his voice came back. “Meu Deus do céu. I want a
