appeal beyond the eighteenth hole,” Rebecca insisted dismissively.
“Hmm,” was all Hazel said to that—a speculative tone that Rebecca knew well by now. “Anyway,” the rancher went on briskly, “I guess I would like to schedule an appointment after all.”
“I thought you were fit as a fiddle?”
“Hon, even a fiddle needs its strings tuned now and then.”
Hazel’s ironic tone turned the words strings tuned into a bawdy innuendo. Rebecca couldn’t help feeling it was also a little nudge from Hazel, the only person in town besides Lois who knew she was still a virgin with “untuned strings.”
Hazel added quickly, “I just want to ask Dr. Saville some questions about my diet since the gall bladder surgery.”
“Uh-huh,” she replied skeptically as she checked Lois’s appointment calendar. “Seems like a lot of female patients in the Mystery area suddenly want to discuss something with their new doctor.”
“So what? We gals of a certain age aren’t as finicky as you proud and stubborn little twenty-three-year-olds. That’s because you don’t feel Time nipping at your taut little fannies yet. We can feel it, in the form of gravity.”
Rebecca laughed as she scheduled her friend. But Hazel was wrong about one thing—she did feel Time nipping. And the question wasn’t lack of desire or fear about her first time. The one man she had felt like “giving it up to” had coldly rejected her as his social inferior. And once burned, twice shy.
“Ten o’clock next Tuesday sound all right?” she asked Hazel.
“That’s hunky-dory, hon. See you then.”
Even as she put the handset back in its cradle, however, Rebecca was already wondering what the sly Matriarch of Mystery was really up to.
Two
“Miss O’Reilly, when you’re free, may I see you in my office?”
Only my third week under Dr. Dry-As-Dust, Rebecca thought, and I’ve got all his imperious tones filed like everything else in this office.
She glanced at him. The tone he used now included the hardening of his mouth, and it sure wouldn’t have been so irritating if his mouth wasn’t so blamed handsome.
Whatever I’ve done now, he’s really going ballistic over it, she decided, having become a great judge of the doctor’s moods after all she’d observed of him the past weeks.
But she had to admire his nearly flawless control as he stood there in the tiled hallway where the waiting room met the reception area. Only the slight twitch of the muscles of his throat hinted at his anger.
Against her will, Rebecca noticed something else: the way his shoulders were so wide they stretched his pristine oxford-cloth shirt tight across his chest. Even the simple act of removing a pen from his shirt pocket showed the lines of his muscles. Another irritation. If he was going to look so good, why couldn’t the man have a corresponding personality to go with it.
She’d never know why God was so fickle.
“Miss O’Reilly?” he repeated impatiently, still watching her from a stern frown. His arrogant tone made her instantly feel hostile again.
“Yes, Doctor, of course. I’ll be there as soon as I’ve checked in everyone in the waiting room.”
No trace of their personal clashing showed in her face, for the day’s patients had arrived. First on the appointment calendar was Elizabeth Kent, two years older than Rebecca, who had requested a consultation regarding minor surgery to remove bone spurs in her heel. Rebecca had noticed how, ever since John took over the practice, so many women in Mystery Valley had suddenly decided to take care of various elective surgeries they had been postponing.
And they showed up dressed to the nines, looking far more gorgeous than they had bothered to look for Dr. Winthrop. Elizabeth, for example, wore a graceful garland-print dress of crepe de chine silk. And her neatly coiffed hair suggested she had just come from the salon.
But Brennan Webb, too, had already shown up, exactly forty-five minutes early, as he always was. Brennan was eighty-one, frail but courtly, and had always been one of Dr. Winthrop’s—and Rebecca’s—favorite patients. He sat, content and in no hurry, in the waiting room’s most uncomfortable chair, an uncushioned ladderback. He wore a ranch suit with a square-tipped bow tie, an American-flag pin in his lapel. Brennan liked to boast that he was “still strong as horse radish.”
“You sure you don’t want the headphones and remote, Brennan?” she offered, deliberately taking her time to anger her waiting boss. “Won’t take me a second to turn the TV on for you.”
He waved off her suggestion. “I get enough of that crap at home, honey,” he groused at her. “I get more ’n’ fifty channels, hardly any of ’em worth a tinker’s damn.”
Immediately, however, Brennan altered his tone and added, with no logical connection, “This new doctor is young, but I’m told he knows B from a bull’s foot, all right.”
“Yes, he’s certainly a blessing,” Rebecca drawled with mild irony.
Not mild enough, however, to fool Brennan.
Fancy bridgework brightened the old man’s big smile. But he replied in a phony, quavering tone, “Methinks you protest too much, dearie, but I’m just a senile old man. What would I know?”
“Senile schmenile,” she tossed back at him, choosing to ignore his sly hint that romance was in the air. She also ignored the dirty look Elizabeth sent her way.
Since John Saville’s arrival in town, the young and available women treated her like a rival for the doctor’s attention, not the office nurse.
Even old curmudgeon Brennan has been sucked in, she marveled as she headed down the hallway toward John Saville’s private office. The whole town acted as though Apollo had just descended into Mystery Valley from Mount Olympus.
Lois was alone in examination room A, setting up Rebecca’s station for initial patient screening before Brennan saw the doctor.
Their eyes met as they passed in the hallway.
Rebecca paused a moment. “I’ll be ready in a few minutes.”
Lois nodded.
Rebecca didn’t have to explain where she was headed— Lois had overheard Dr. Saville’s strained request.
“Temper, temper,” she reminded Rebecca quietly. “That vein is pulsing in your left temple.”
“I’m fine,” she insisted. “You’re right, we just need to play it cool and break him in right. I’m not going to lose it around him.”
Lois, however, had worked with Rebecca going on six years now and trusted that pulsing vein the way weather-men trusted Doppler radar.
“If you’re fine, then put this on,” Lois dared, picking up the blood pressure cuff and separating the Velcro tabs.
“Take
