drew a shaky breath and wetted lips the color of ripe plums. Secrets shimmered like summer heat in wide-set eyes of dark clear amber. Beneath sweeping, honey-toned brows, feathery lashes of the same hue fluttered in a provocative invitation. Slender hips longed to sway beneath thin silk the color of fuchsia, while her blood heated and her skin glowed.
“Oh my,” she whispered in awe. This woman would never be invisible in a roomful of people. Her face was a perfect oval, her features delicate. Her unblemished skin had been sun-kissed to a golden hue, with a subtle hint of rose-petal pink brushed over exotic cheekbones.
Still reluctant to believe her own eyes, Kate lifted a tentative hand to the softly curling tips of her glossy auburn hair, now layered and blow-dried into a breezy, asymmetrical, shoulder-length shag that did terrific things for her cheekbones.
When she walked into the clinic on Monday morning her staff would stare. Her pint-size patients would giggle. When she joined her parents for their traditional Sunday brunch next week, both would express their disapproval with their customary multisyllabic eloquence. Father, in particular, would be outraged that she’d cut off her crowning glory. Hadn’t Mother worn her hair in the same sophisticated—and boring—French twist for the past thirty-odd years? The same French twist Kate had adopted as her own sometime around her fifteenth year.
It had been a brain warp or some kind of temporary insanity, of course, combined with the two margaritas she’d gulped down to give her the courage to bare her head to a stylist’s scissors.
Muy magnifico, Doctor Remson. Que linda!
Magnificent? Beautiful?
Her? The nerd who’d been two and then three years younger than everyone else in her class, even in medical school? The pathetic geek who’d had only one date in high school—and that arranged by the brother of her best friend, Sarah?
The same Sarah who had talked her into spending the last six days at El Puerto d’Oro, the outrageously expensive health and beauty spa located fifty miles south of San Diego on the Baja California peninsula.
“Give her the works,” Sarah had ordered. A major makeover.
If Sarah hadn’t been standing right there next to her, urging her on, Kate was pretty sure she would have leaped out of the fancy salon and run all the way back to the Bay Area.
So what if she wasn’t attractive to members of the opposite sex? She had a life, didn’t she? A boring one, sure, but it was richly rewarding, which was what she’d been raised to value above all things. Service to others had been a Remson tradition for generations. Teachers, doctors, scholars and philanthropists dotted her family tree. As her parents’ only child, she’d always known she had an obligation to carry on the tradition. Founding the Children’s Free Clinic in San Francisco’s Mission District three years ago had been both a joy and an obligation.
Unmarried, and rarely been kissed, she had a cozy, turn-of-the-century flat on Nob Hill, the same VW bug her father had driven as a graduate student at Stanford and a small, but beloved, group of women friends. Perhaps there were moments in the darkest hours of night when her heart wept for her lost dreams, but by the light of dawn she had banished her haunted memories to the back of her well-disciplined mind. Maybe she wasn’t always over-the-moon happy, but she was productive and valued.
“What’s taking you so long in there, Kates?”
Before she could answer, Sarah slipped through the yellow-and-white-striped curtain, her green eyes glittering with expectation. A brunette who was also highly intelligent and remarkably kind, Sarah had been Kate’s rock during the worst period of her life, and she loved the outrageously unpredictable woman like a sister.
“Wow!” Sarah murmured, her hand still clutching the curtain, her large, heavily fringed eyes going wide. “You look…dangerous.”
Kate snorted a self-conscious laugh. “It’s the dress, what there is of it.” Which was no more than a couple of yards of flowing silk, cut on the bias to fall from thin, rhinestone-covered straps. The bodice dipped into a V so deep it would be considered a misdemeanor in more conservative states. Below a slinky stretch of shimmering fuchsia, the ruffly hem hit her in midthigh, shorter even than her favorite man-tailored nightshirt.
Her father, the biblical scholar, and her mother, the primary-school principal, would be appalled to see their properly reared daughter parading around in a couple of flimsy scarves sewn together—and not much else.
“Um-hmm.” Pursing her lips, Sarah cocked her pretty head and studied Kate through those famous, sinfully thick Hunter eyelashes. “Give me a twirl, sweetie, so I can get the full effect.”
Kate reluctantly complied.
“Hmm, that sucker’s a definite keeper,” Sarah pronounced with a wickedly naughty grin Kate desperately wished she could replicate. But dull old Katherine had done only one naughty thing in her life—and she was still suffering the aftereffects.
“Oh, Sarah, I don’t know,” she wailed piteously. “I’ve already spent so much money on the spa and clothes and shoes I’ll never wear that the numbers are all but worn off my credit card.”
“So what? You’re a rich surgeon, aren’t you?” Eyes the color of sunshine on jade sparkled the way they always did when Sarah teased her childhood friend. Another pair of sun-dappled, jade-green eyes shimmered for an instant in Kate’s mind. Eyes that were haunted and bleak and…brutally angry. Years of practice helped her banish the image almost as quickly as it appeared.
“What I am is darn near broke after this past week,” she declared firmly. “I’ll be lucky to make the mortgage payment on my flat next month.”
Sarah dismissed that with typical Hunter imperturbability. Besides, she knew all about the trust fund from Kate’s maternal grandfather that had put her friend through medical school—with plenty left over. “Nonsense,” she declared airily. “Did you or did you not tell me only two weeks ago that you were…uh, let’s see, how did you put it exactly?” She lifted one winged brow. “Oh yeah, I remember, ‘fed up with looking in the mirror and seeing someone’s dried-up spinster aunt’?”
Kate felt her face warming. Her wine-soaked soliloquy on the night of her thirtieth birthday still had the power to make her wince. “Well, yes, I might have said something like that, but—”
“Did you or did you not tell me your sex life was a total dud?” The sudden glint in Sarah’s eyes dared her to disagree.
Damn her, Kate thought peevishly as she swallowed the skillfully worded denial already forming in her mind. “Yes, but I’d had a few glasses of champagne and—”
“Look at yourself, Katie!” Sarah demanded now. “A terrific, trendy hairdo instead of that awful retro-hippie look—”
“Thanks very much.”
“—and flattering makeup instead of that awful pink lip gloss.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Sarah, I spend most of my time behind a surgical mask. My patients don’t care whether or not I slather on mascara before I scrub.”
“But those studly residents prowling the halls do.”
“Attendings do not date residents,” Kate declared in her mother’s haughtiest tones.
Sarah,
