they’d been talking—and she’d been running around town—a lot longer than she’d expected. Technically time didn’t matter; it wasn’t as if she was on a schedule. But the queasiness that plagued her earlier in the morning was suddenly back. So was exhaustion. Not exhaustion from doing anything; she just had a sudden, consuming urge to curl up in a ball like a cat and close her eyes, just nap for a few minutes.
She’d never been a napper. Until eight weeks ago. Now she could suddenly get so tired she could barely stumble around. It was crazy. She felt crazy. And in a blink of a minute, she just wanted to go home.
“Well, Ginger. I don’t know how to say this but bluntly. Your grandfather needs to move out of that big old place. But he won’t. He needs to hire someone to take over the tea plantation before it’s in complete ruin. But he won’t do that, either. And the best advice I can give you is to just leave him alone. Go on about your life. It’s what I’d want, if I were in Cashner’s situation. He doesn’t need or want someone telling him what to do, where he needs to be, what rules he should be following. It won’t help. If you want to help, be a good granddaughter and love him. But then just go on with your own life.”
Ginger heard her. Alarm shot sparks straight to her bloodstream. Gramps was in trouble, in ways the attorney knew about, separate from the problems Ike knew as Gramps’s doctor. Urgency made her heart slam. She rushed to her feet—or she tried to.
For the second time that morning, the world turned green and everything in sight started spinning.
“Well, my word!”
She heard Louella’s husky voice. Heard it as if it was coming from a hundred yards away. After that, everything went smoky black.
Chapter Three
When the last patient of the morning canceled, Ruby let him know with a fervent “Hallelujah!”
Ike was still smiling when he heard the front door slam—Ruby did like a long lunch when she could get it. But his mind was really on Ginger, and had been all morning.
There was no question that he’d see her again. She’d seek him out because she had to; he was the best source of information on her grandfather. Ike needed that connection just as much, because he happened to love the old man, and something had to be decided about Cashner before the situation turned into a real crisis.
Still, when the office phone rang, he never guessed it would be Ginger contacting him again this soon. Nor would he have thought he’d hear from Louella Meachams—one of his most reluctant patients. She told him she “had no truck with doctors” every single time he took her blood pressure. Louella was at least part guy. Not gay. Just an exuberantly male kind of female. People trusted her in town. He did, too. She just had a lot of coarse sandpaper in her character.
“Don’t waste your time telling me you’re busy with a patient, Ike MacKinnon. I don’t care if you have fifty patients. I have a woman in my office on the floor. Fainted dead away. Now you get right over here and do something about her.”
“Since you asked so nicely, I’ll be there right away. But in the meantime … do you know who she is, why she fainted, what happened?”
“I don’t care what happened. I want her off my floor. When she went down, it scared the bejesus out of me. I thought she was dead!”
“I understand—”
“I don’t care if you understand or not. You get her out of here somehow, someway, and I’m talking pronto.”
“Yes, ma’am. But again …” Hell. Ike just wanted a clue what the problem could be. “Do you know her?”
“Her name is Ginger Gautier. Cashner’s granddaughter. What difference does it make? The problem is I thought she’d stopped breathing. Almost gave me a heart attack. I don’t do first aid. I had a sister who fainted all the time, but that was to get our mother’s attention. It was fake every time. This is not fake. I’m telling you, she went down. Right in front of my desk.”
“Okay, got it, see you in five, max six.”
“You make that three minutes, Doc. And I’m not whistling Dixie.”
If Louella really believed there was an emergency, she’d have called 911—but Louella, being stingy, would never risk an ambulance charge unless she was absolutely positive there was no other choice. So Ike took the time to shove on street shoes, grab a jacket and scribble a note to Ruby before heading out.
He could jog the distance faster than driving it—the lawyer’s office was only three blocks over, faster yet if he zigzagged through buildings. Pansy let out an unholy howl of abandonment when he left without her, but sometimes, darn it, he just couldn’t take his favorite girl.
Less than five minutes later, he reached the bakery and zipped up the steps to the second floor. When he turned the knob of Louella’s office, though, something heavy seemed to be blocking it. “Louella, it’s me, Doc,” he said as he knocked.
Louella opened it. Apparently she’d been the something heavy blocking the entrance. “She keeps trying to leave. Doesn’t have a brain cell in her head. I told her she wasn’t going anywhere until you checked her out, and that’s that.”
“I must have said a dozen times that I’m feeling better—and that I was going straight home from here.” Ginger’s voice was coming from the floor—but it certainly sounded healthy and strong.
“Yeah, I heard you. And I told you a dozen times that there could be liability issues if you left here in shape to cause yourself or others harm.”
“You’re the only person I’ve met in a blue moon who’s more bullheaded than I am, bless your heart. But keeping a person against their will is called kidnapping. Or is there another legal term?”
While the two women continued this pleasant conversation, Ike hunkered down—apparently Louella had threatened Ginger with death if she tried to get up before the doctor got there. He went through the routine. Pulse. Temp. Whether she could focus, whether she had swollen lymph glands.
Wherever he touched her, she jumped.
He liked that. If he was stuck feeling walloped this close to her, he at least wanted her to suffer the same way.
He got some extra personal contact—judicious, but lucky for sure—when he helped her to her feet. She didn’t wobble. Of course, with his arm around her, she couldn’t have wobbled—or fallen—even if she’d wanted to. But she shot him one of those ice-blue looks to indicate he could remove his hands. Now. Right now.
“Okay, Louella, I’m taking her from your office.”
“And don’t let her come back here until she’s fit as a fiddle.”
“My. I had no idea that fiddles had health issues. Like whether they could be fit or sick. I had no idea they were alive at all—”
Ike saw the look on Louella’s face, could see she was in a rolling up the sleeves to get into another squabble, so he shuffled Ginger quickly into the hall.
He saw her sudden choke when they reached the top of her stairs, so he suspected she was still a little on the dizzy
