be a breeze.”
The two boys rolled their eyes and snickered.
Dana ignored the noises. The man’s familiarity with her set all inner alarms on full alert. Maybe new school nurses were hot gossip in a small town like Logan.
Again, he must have read her expression. “Sorry. When I’m not completely screwing up bus routes and letting kids like these pull each other apart limb by limb, I manage a glass company and am chairman of the board of education. I voted to hire you—on the principal’s and superintendent’s recommendations, of course.”
Dana couldn’t subdue the cringe overtaking her. The chaos in her office this morning created exactly the wrong impression she wanted to give the powers that be. She swept the clipboard and other paperwork littering her desk into as tidy a pile as she could.
“No, no, things are settling down nicely. It, uh, just, takes time, I guess.”
Patrick skewered her with a stare. She dropped her gaze first to her messy desk, and then swiveled it to the floor, to the copy box of office things she hadn’t gotten around to unpacking. Only the loud ticking of the clock and the boys’ renewed snickers punctuated the silence. If she could have departicalized and slipped through the molecules of the floor, she would have.
Patrick cleared his throat, obviously preparing for a speech of some sort. To occupy her hands and give her some reason not to meet his eyes, Dana once again shifted the items on her desk from one pile to another.
“Ms. Wilson, could you stop that? It’s driving me nuts.” His voice was sharp.
She met his gaze, her pulse pounding in her ears, and prepared for the worst.
CHAPTER TWO
P ATRICK C ONNOR WAS moving his mouth again, but Dana couldn’t focus on his words because of the humiliation humming through her veins. Fired. She was going to get fired.
She saw his frustration and knew he realized she wasn’t paying the slightest attention. She bit her lip and covered up the action by turning to the two malingerers still lounging in clinic. “Boys, out. You’re okay. I’ll put your visit slips into your teacher’s box, all right?”
They went, grumbling, and Dana recovered some of her composure. She forced a smile at Patrick. “You were saying?”
“Oh. Yeah. Just wanted to be clear that you knew how important getting daily status checks on our asthmatic students was. Nellie prepared weekly reports for me.”
Bureaucracy. Red tape had a way of slithering around you until it nearly strangled you. Dana sighed. “Sure. The principal mentioned it to me, though I think daily checks for every asthmatic student we have are a little much. I was hoping we could scale back to perhaps an as-needed basis.”
Patrick’s eyebrows lowered a fraction of an inch, and his eyes cooled ten degrees. “The board and I would like to be certain our students are okay. It wasn’t that much trouble for our other nurse.”
Way to go, Wilson. She had wowed him with her disorganization, and now she was questioning his first request. She didn’t see the need for the twice daily checks, but she did see the need for food on the table, and that meant keeping her bosses happy. “Of course. You still want morning and afternoon checks, correct? Or can we—”
“Yes. Morning and afternoon checks.”
“For all twenty-four asthmatic students?”
“All twenty-four,” he confirmed crisply.
“And any new ones that pop up.”
“Especially the new ones that pop up.” Patrick inclined his head. “Well, I’ll let you get back to your day. No doubt you’ve got a lot to keep you busy.” He stared at her littered desktop, then started for the door.
She sighed as she surveyed the mess Patrick had found so offensive. No point kicking herself now over what qualities not to show your new boss. Dana swept the whole mess into the upturned lid of the copy box leaving a clean desk—and a pile of paperwork to get through before the day was done.
He was right. She had a lot to keep her busy.
T HE DAY WAS OVER . Finally. The last bell had rung, the buses had pulled out, the halls were eerily quiet—and her copy box was empty. Dana celebrated by stretching her tired body on the exam table in the clinic. The tissue paper crinkled and snapped under her as she wiggled her backside a little lower.
“Comfy yet?” Suze Mitchell, the school vice principal, asked from where she’d collapsed in the plastic chair at Dana’s desk. “I come in here to find out whether you survived your day, and you’re bent on taking a nap.”
“Ha! On this thing? If I were four-foot-nothing, maybe.”
“How tall are you?” Suze asked. “I’d kill to be anything more than armpit high.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Try being five-ten for a while.”
“You’re just five-ten? I would have sworn…”
The petite brunette cast an assessing eye up and down Dana’s pretzeled frame.
“I am five-ten. Okay…in bare feet…if I scrunch. I’m five-eleven-and-a-half with good posture. Which might explain why I’ve had such a tough time with relationships. Men get weirded out when the gal is taller than the guy.”
Suze chuckled derisively. “Men get weirded out about a lot of things. Commitment. Fidelity. Bank accounts. And even when you find the right man, he still has trouble accepting that he needs to come home every once in a while instead of going hunting and fishing all the time.”
“Tell me about it, sister,” Dana agreed.
Dana had known from the instant she’d met Suze on her first tour of the school a month ago that the woman would be a keeper friend.
She couldn’t explain the connection. It wasn’t just the way Suze had jumped in and found her a new place to rent after the house Dana had thought she’d secured had fallen through. It wasn’t even that Suze reminded her of her big sister, Tracy, who was older by four years but shorter by at least that many inches. Dana’s little sister was smaller than Dana was, too.
No, it had to be the snap of mischief in Suze’s dark eyes—a snap you might miss behind the otherwise professional mask. But Dana had spotted it. And that glint had told her she’d found a kindred spirit.
Suze stretched and yawned, her own weariness from the day showing. “So, if I can be nosy, how long have you and your ex been divorced?”
“Three years.” Dana stared up at the ceiling and calculated when Marty had presented the papers to her with a flourish. “No, make that nearly four.”
“But…” Suze hesitated. The silence hung, awkwardly the ticking of the clock bringing to Dana’s mind the morning’s earlier awkward silence between her and Patrick.
“But what?”
“Well, it’s none of my business, but I assumed your ex was the father of your
