“You don’t want to know,” the woman informed him darkly.
Since the clinic had originally opened its doors, Clarice Sanchez had seen doctors come, burn out and go. For reasons he wasn’t quite sure of but was eternally grateful for, after an initial butting of heads, the somber nurse had taken him under her large, protective wing. Clarice was the one who kept things moving, even when she was operating at less than her usual maximum efficiency.
Dave read the side of the folder and was about to call the name of his next patient when suddenly, someone was calling out his instead.
“Dave!”
Caught off guard, he momentarily forgot about Ramon Mendoza and glanced about the waiting area to see who had just addressed him by his first name. No one did that around here. It was disrespectful. If they spoke to him, they always invoked his title in a grateful voice.
He didn’t have far to look. His line of sight was immediately engaged by a vaguely familiar, rather sexy-looking blonde. She was striding across the packed room, heading toward him as if she were the bullet and he was the bull’s-eye. From the expression on her face, he could see that she seemed agitated.
One thing was for damn sure. She certainly didn’t look as if she belonged here. It was like a lily suddenly sprouting in the middle of a field of weeds.
Before he could acknowledge the woman—God, that face looked familiar—Clarice stepped in. “I already told you,” she snapped at the blonde, giving her a withering look, “you’re gonna have to wait your turn, lady.”
“I just need to see the doctor for a minute,” the blonde insisted.
“That’s what everyone says,” Clarice told her coldly. “Now either sit down and wait your turn or I’m going to get someone to escort you out of here.”
Kara decided that she was going to give this one more try and then leave. Lunch was almost over and she was hungry. More to the point, she really didn’t need this kind of abuse.
“Dave,” she called to him again, deliberately ignoring his guard dragon. “It’s Kara Calhoun. Your mother sent me.”
Chapter Two
Dave found himself staring at the blonde, stunned. While the face was vaguely familiar in a distant sort of way, the name was familiar in a far more vivid, in-your-face kind of fashion.
He knew only one Kara, God help him.
That would be the only daughter of his mother’s oldest friend, Paulette Calhoun. Every single memory associated with Kara Calhoun was fraught with either embarrassment or frustrated annoyance—or both. He didn’t even try to remember one good moment spent in her company. There weren’t any.
Back when he was a little boy, his parents and hers would get together frequently. All the summer vacation memories of his childhood had Kara in them. Kara and turmoil. He’d been rather shy and introverted. Two years younger, Kara had been the exact opposite, as wild as a hurricane, and just as fearless. He’d felt inadequate.
And then mercifully, just before he turned thirteen, his father’s company began moving him, and thus them, from location to location. They traversed the Northwest and then the Southwest. Changing addresses so frequently made it hard for him to make any friends, but the upside was that at least during the rest of the year, he didn’t have to spend time confined in some remote summerhouse with the wild tomboy, counting the hours until September and the beginning of school.
If, after all these years, this gorgeous woman really was Kara Calhoun, then God, he couldn’t help thinking, had a very macabre and somewhat sadistic sense of humor.
Despite the pressures generated by an incredibly hectic morning stapled to the makings of an equally insane afternoon, Dave stopped what he was doing and waved his next patient into the first open room.
“Be right there, Mr. Mendoza,” he promised.
Then, instead of following the man, Dave rounded the reception desk and walked toward the sexy-looking blonde with the long legs.
That just couldn’t be Kara.
Still, why would she say she was if she wasn’t? He wasn’t going to have any peace until he found out for certain one way or the other, so, warily, he asked, “Kara?”
“Yes,” she cried with the same sort of feeling a contestant might display when their partner finally guessed the right answer after being supplied with countless clues.
He still couldn’t get himself to believe it. Why, after all these years, would she suddenly appear here, in a place where she was clearly out of her element? Her shoes alone looked as if they might equal a week’s salary for one of his patients—the ones who actually had a job.
“Kara Calhoun,” he said, trying to reconcile the image of a bratty, skinny girl with pigtails and a nasty sense of humor with the clearly gorgeous young woman who was standing in the packed waiting room. Obviously nature could work miracles.
Why all the drama? Kara wondered. The Dave she remembered had been a super-brainy geek. Had he been forced to trade in his brains for looks? Was that how it worked?
“Want to see my driver’s license?” she offered, wondering what it would take to convince this man who she was.
The touch of sarcasm in her voice was all he needed to convince him. “It’s you, all right. Still have the sunny disposition of an armadillo, I see.”
She stretched her lips back in an obviously forced smile. “You’ve filled out since I last saw you.” Which, she added silently, was putting it mildly. If the way his lab coat fit was any indication, the man now had muscles instead of arms that could have doubled for toothpicks. “Too bad your personality didn’t want to keep up.”
He would have liked nothing better than to turn his back on her and walk away, but she hadn’t just appeared here like some directionally challenged genie out of a bottle. There was a reason Kara had sought him out after all these years and he had just enough curiosity to wonder why.
He made it simple for her. He asked. “What are you doing here?”
“I was wondering the same thing myself,” she cracked. But then, as he apparently lost patience and began to turn on his heel to walk away, she relented. There was no point in coming all the way over here and not giving him the game. “I brought you a copy of the latest version of ‘The Kalico Kid’ video game. Your mother told mine that your cousin’s little boy’s birthday is coming up and he’s dying to get his hands on one.”
If this were anyone else, he would have expressed his gratitude, paid for the game and taken it. But this was Kara, and the ordinary rules didn’t apply here. His memory was crowded with a host of different sneaky tricks that a gangly ten-year-old played on his trusting twelve-year-old body. Spending summers trapped in her company had taught him to hold everything she was involved in suspect.
His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. Motioning her closer to create at least a semblance of privacy, he asked, “What’s the catch?”
“Catch?” Boy, talk about not being trusting. But then, looking back, maybe she couldn’t quite blame him. She
