Holmes kid bristled anew. For a second, Patrick thought the two would go at it again.
Jack Harrison, the principal, came out on the sidewalk, a petulant expression on his face. “Do you realize you’re ten minutes late?” he said. “Ten minutes! And some of the students were telling me there was a fight!”
Patrick swallowed a retort and presented the two boys to Harrison. “They’re all yours. Don’t know what it was about, but I expect you can sort it out.”
Harrison stepped back and peered at the students’ faces. “Good Lord! Well, don’t just stand there! They need medical attention. That one has started bleeding from the nose.”
Patrick didn’t bother suppressing a roll of his eyes. “C’mon, fellas. Appears you get to visit the school nurse.”
“See?” Royce said in a singsong voice. “Told you we wouldn’t get in trouble.”
“Now, that’s where you’re wrong,” Patrick replied. “Because I’m not just a substitute bus driver. I happen to be chairman of the board of education, and I can make certain that you, mister, won’t have to put up with other students for just a week. I’m thinking a month’s suspension from the bus. Nah. Two. Nah. Maybe for the rest of the year.”
The fight went out of Royce. “Oh, man,” he moaned. “My mom is gonna kill me.”
Patrick was sure he saw begging in the Holmes kid’s eyes. Satisfied that he had the boys’ attention, he pointed them toward the nurse’s office. “Time to visit the new school nurse. Good thing for you two Nurse Nellie had to retire. Hope the new one doesn’t have any more of that stinging antiseptic Nurse Nellie liked so much.”
T O BE AN OCTOPUS !
Dana Wilson pushed aside the thought and pressed into service the only two arms the Lord had seen fit to give her.
“Here, Ritalin for you,” she said, edging a pill cup over to a rail-thin kid, “and a lovely dose of Zithromax for you.” The liquid sloshed in the cup as she handed it to a pint-size girl with dreadlocks.
“You’re not supposed to be saying what we take,” the older kid admonished. “It’s the law or something. We’re not even s’posed to be in here at the same time. Our old nurse handed out meds to us one at a time.”
Dana quashed a snort of incredulity. Of course she knew that. But try holding back a wave of kids. No thanks to the prankster who had locked her out of her clinic this morning, she was doing well to get the right pills in the right squirmy little bodies before those bodies zipped off to class.
Now, why am I putting up with this? Oh, yes. Kate. One beautiful blue-eyed angel baby—although I can’t call a three-year-old a baby anymore .
Dana’s line of kids waiting for morning meds stretched out the door and down the hall. Well, waiting might create the wrong impression. They shuffled, fidgeted, jostled one another, picked at the staples on the poster of a big laminated hand exhorting them to lend health a hand by actually washing their own hands.
If Dana didn’t get them out of her little clinic soon, they’d be late for class and she wouldn’t have a staple left on that bulletin board.
“Hey! Cut it out! Leave those staples alone!” she yelled as she noticed one kid steadily slipping a fingernail under an already loosened staple. The gesture of the newly positioned middle finger wasn’t difficult to discover. Of course, she could be wrong. This only her third week at the school. She was still getting over how many kids needed morning meds after the school-issued breakfast.
The Ritalin and Zithromax dispatched, Dana called out, “Next!”
But before any other patients could step up to her counter, a man rounded the door and stopped short at the line.
“Whoa. We got an epidemic I don’t know about?” he inquired.
Dana couldn’t remove her eyes from his face. How absurd, plain absurd, to focus on a man’s face to the point when you could look nowhere else. But the last place she expected to find a man that handsome was in a small-town elementary school. With his silvered dark hair, movie-star white teeth and intense blue eyes, he had a face made for a cologne ad.
His voice, though, held a south Georgia twang and his clothes—khakis and a worn chambray work shirt with some sort of logo on it—tagged him as a native of Logan.
A parent? A teacher? The guy did have two kids by the scruff of the neck.
“Oh, my gracious! What happened?” Dana had managed to take her eyes off his face long enough to see obvious injuries. “Bring them on in and I’ll have a look.”
In quick order, she had a pack of ice on the little kid’s eye—Mike Holmes, he’d said his name was—and was tilting the bigger, surlier boy’s head forward, ordering him to pinch his nostrils together.
Only then did she dare return her gaze to the man who’d brought the two boys in.
She found his dark blue eyes assessing her with more than a little interest. At her regard, he spoke up. “They got into a fight on the bus.”
A bus driver? Man, oh, man, she wished they’d had bus drivers like this when she was in school. But no, she’d had all the oogy ones.
Dana yanked her brain back from its descent into a hormone lovefest. Marty had been that good-looking in his own way, and when the going had gotten tough, her ex-husband had run as though demons were after him. So why imbue a guy with wisdom just because genetics had graced him with a gorgeous face?
Mr. Gorgeous stretched out a hand. “Patrick Connor, substitute bus driver and sucker—once, but nevermore.”
She couldn’t accept his extended hand because she was occupied with the two young combatants. Just as well, because she sure knew where casual little handshakes with the likes of Patrick Connor led.
“Um, hi, I’m Wilson Dana—I mean, I’m Wana—” Oh crap. Why wouldn’t her mouth work for a simple introduction?
He chuckled. “Can I help you? You seem a little swamped.”
“Someone locked me out of my clinic—” The morning announcements over the intercom interrupted Dana and she fell silent in response to the loud “Shh, shh” she heard from the students still in line. They weren’t shushing her; they were taking the opportunity to shush one another. She used the moment of calm to hand out the next round of medications.
The medicine assembly line went quicker now, and Dana managed to dispense the meds in record time. She double-checked her list, ticked off the last name and breathed a sigh as the door shut.
“That bad?”
“I had no idea kids could be so inventive.” She leaned against the bulletin board. “I thought that after three weeks I had run the gauntlet of every practical joke a kid could come up with. Maybe I’m not cut out for this job.”
She was rewarded with a frown as Patrick surveyed the room as if inspecting it. The frown eased a bit, but concern still tightened his forehead.
“So things aren’t settling down for you?” Patrick asked
