in it. She thought that he’d never felt much for her, except pride in her ability to excel. He was a cruel man and grew crueler as his addiction climbed year after year to new heights. Drugs had caused the plane crash. Her mother had died with him. God knew, that was fitting, because she’d loved him to the point of blindness, overlooking his brutality, his addiction, his cruelty in the name of fidelity.
Lou wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the chill of fear. She’d never marry. Any woman could wake up in a relationship that damaging. All she had to do was fall in love, lose control, give in to a man’s dominance. Even the best man could become a predator if he sensed vulnerability in a woman. So she would never be vulnerable, she assured herself. She would never be at a man’s mercy as her mother had been.
But Copper Coltrain made her vulnerable, and that was why she avoided any physical contact with him. She couldn’t give in to the feelings he roused in her, for fear of becoming a victim. Loneliness might be a disease, but it was certainly a more manageable one than love.
The ringing of the telephone caught her attention.
“Dr. Blakely?” Brenda, her office nurse, queried. “Sorry to bother you at home, but Dr. Coltrain said there’s been a wreck on the north end of town and they’ll be bringing the victims to the emergency room. Since he’s on call, you’ll have to cover the two-hour Saturday clinic at the office.”
“I’ll be right over,” she promised, wasting no more time in conversation.
The clinic was almost deserted. There was a football game at the local high school that night, and it was sunny and unseasonably warm outside for early December. It didn’t really surprise Lou that she only needed to see a handful of patients.
“Poor Dr. Coltrain,” Brenda said with a sigh as they finished the last case and closed up the office. “I’ll bet he won’t be in until midnight.”
“It’s a good thing he isn’t married,” Lou remarked. “He’d have no home life at all, as hard as he works.”
Brenda glanced at her, but with a kind smile. “That is true. But he should be thinking about it. He’s in his thirties now, and time is passing him by.” She turned the key in the lock. “Pity about Miss Parker marrying that Burke man, isn’t it? Dr. Coltrain was sweet on her for so many years. I always thought—I guess most people here did—that they were made for each other. But she was never more than friendly. If you saw them together, it was obvious that she didn’t feel what he did.”
In other words, Dr. Coltrain had felt a long and unrequited love for the lovely blond former rodeo cowgirl, Jane Parker. That much, Lou had learned from gossip. It must have hurt him very badly when she married someone else.
“What a pity that we can’t love to order,” Lou remarked quietly, thinking how much she’d give to be unscarred and find Dr. Coltrain as helplessly drawn to her as she was to him. That was the stuff of fantasy, however.
“Wasn’t it surprising about Ted Regan and Coreen Tarleton, though?” Brenda added with a chuckle.
“Indeed it was,” Lou agreed, smiling as she remembered having Ted for a patient. “She was shaking all over when she got him to me with that gored arm. He was cool. Nothing shakes Ted. But Coreen was as white as milk.”
“I thought they were already married,” Brenda groaned. “Well, I was new to the area and I didn’t know them. I do now,” she added, laughing. “I pass them at least once a week on their way to the obstetrician’s office. She’s due any day.”
“She’ll be a good mother, and Ted will certainly be a good father. Their children will have a happy life.”
Brenda caught the faint bitterness in the words and glanced at Lou, but the other woman was already calling her goodbyes and walking away.
She went home and spent the rest of the weekend buried in medical journals and the latest research on the new strain of bacteria that had, researchers surmised, mutated from a deadly scarlet fever bacterium that had caused many deaths at the turn of the century.
Chapter 2
Monday morning brought a variety of new cases, and Louise found herself stuck with the most routine of them, as usual. She and Coltrain were supposed to be partners, but when he wasn’t operating, he got the interesting, challenging illnesses. Louise got fractured ribs and colds.
He’d been stiff with her this morning, probably because he was still fuming over the argument they’d had about his mistaken idea of her weekend activities. Accusing her of lollygagging with the EMTs for excitement; really!
She watched his white-coated back disappear into an examination room down the hall in their small building and sighed half-angrily as she went back to check an X-ray in the files. The very worst thing about unrequited love, she thought miserably, was that it fed on itself. The more her partner in the medical practice ignored and antagonized her, the harder she had to fight her dreams about him. She didn’t want to get married; she didn’t even want to get involved. But he made her hungry.
He’d spent a lot of time with Jane Parker until she married that Burke man, and Lou had long ago given up hope that he would ever notice her in the same way he always noticed Jane. The two of them had grown up together, though, whereas Lou had only been in partnership with him for a year. She was a native of Austin, not Jacobsville. Small towns were like extended families. Everybody knew each other, and some families had been friends for more than one generation. Lou was a true outsider here, even though she was a native Texan. Perhaps that was one of many reasons that Dr. Coltrain found her so forgettable.
She wasn’t bad looking. She had long, thick blond hair and big brown eyes and a creamy, blemish-free complexion. She was tall and willowy, but still shorter than her colleague. She lacked his fiery temper and his authoritarian demeanor. He was tall and whipcord lean, with flaming red hair and blue eyes and a dark tan from working on his small ranch when he wasn’t treating patients. That tan was odd in a redhead, although he did have a smattering of freckles over his nose and the backs of his big hands. She’d often wondered if the freckles went any farther, but she had yet to see him without his professional white coat over his very formal suit. He wasn’t much on casual dressing at work. At home, she was sure that he dressed less formally.
That was something Lou would probably never know. She’d never been invited to his home, despite the fact that most of the medical staff at the local hospital had. Lou was automatically excluded from any social gathering that he coordinated.
Other people had commented on his less than friendly behavior toward her. It puzzled them, and it puzzled her, because she hadn’t become his partner in any under-handed way. He had known from the day of her application that she was female, so it couldn’t be that. Perhaps, she thought wistfully, he was one of those old-line dominating sort of men who thought women had no place in medicine. But he’d been instrumental in getting women into positions of authority at the hospital, so that theory wasn’t applicable, either. The bottom line was that he simply did not like Louise Blakely, medical degree or no medical degree, and she’d never known why.
She really should ask Drew Morris why, she told herself with determination. It had been Drew, a surgeon and friend of her family, who’d sent word about the opening in Coltrain’s practice. He’d wanted to help Lou get a job near him, so that he could give her some moral support in the terrible days following the deaths of her parents. She, in turn, had liked the idea of being in practice in a small town, one where she knew at least one doctor on the staff of the hospital. Despite growing up in Austin, it was
