the condition of her future workplace. “How do you plan to clean up this mess?”
“My buddy’s got a construction business. He’s here hunting down the source of the leak and hopefully shutting it down.”
“Only the two of you? You need to get more people in here.”
Zach didn’t let the judgmental remark goad him into a retort. “I called your father. He’s rounding up some volunteers.” She had grown up in this town. Surely she realized people would pitch in to help once word went out? Or had she been living in the rarified world of a Big Ten medical school so long she’d forgotten her roots?
She might have blushed but he couldn’t be sure with the lousy lighting. “Of course they’ll come.”
Though she didn’t offer to pitch in and grab a mop herself. Great, was she going to be one of those kinds of doctors, the ones with the God complexes and the egos to go with it?
“We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow,” he said as the ominous sound of dripping water filled the silence between them.
“I left Ann Arbor a day early.” She peered around at the boxes of rescued lab supplies and disintegrating cartons of exam gloves, the empty, wide-open refrigerator with the remains of a collapsed ceiling tile still piled on top, balanced precariously on the carcass of the shorted-out police scanner. A frown drew her arched brows together. “Do you have an assessment of the damages?” She didn’t bother to make eye contact this time, just clipped out the question. “Will we be able to see patients on schedule Monday morning?”
Great, she was going to be one of those ramrod-and-ruin kinds. It was going to be a long summer. But two could play at her game. “We lost the computer system and the police scanner, ma’am. That’s the worst so far. I don’t believe there’s any structural damage to the building.”
“But the mess.” She made a little sweeping gesture with her right hand. “There’s water everywhere—”
“Incoming,” Rudy yelled from the doorway. Zach reached out and wrapped his fingers around Callie’s wrist, hauling her forward and almost into his arms as three overhead tiles crashed to the floor, splattering Zach and Callie with water and soggy, cardboardlike shrapnel.
He was wearing old cargo shorts and an even older T-shirt, and he was already wet through, but his new boss hadn’t been expecting a dousing. She let out a shocked gasp as the cold water cascaded down her back and soaked her to the skin.
* * *
“SORRY ABOUT THAT, Doc.”
Callie shifted her attention to the man in the doorway, a short, ruddy-faced, stocky guy with a buzz cut not doing anything to hide his receding hairline, and laughing blue eyes. He was wearing a faded red T-shirt emblazoned with U*S*M*C in equally faded gold letters, and shorts that exposed the prosthesis that replaced his left leg below the knee. His leather tool belt hung low on his hips, as if he were an old-time gunslinger. Rudy Koslowski. She remembered him from high school, even though he’d been a couple of years ahead of her. He’d joined the Marines immediately after graduation and lost his leg in a suicide-bomb attack in Afghanistan.
“Hi, Rudy,” she said, swallowing a sharp comment about the inadequacy of his warning. Rudy had always been a gossip even as a kid. She doubted he’d changed much over the years, and the last thing she wanted was to be reported to all and sundry as a bitch her first day on the job. “Quite a welcome home you arranged for me.”
“We aim to please. You still got the moves, Doc,” he said next.
“I beg your pardon?” But Rudy wasn’t looking at her; he was grinning at the man beside her.
“Oops.” Rudy chuckled, his expression as mischievous as Callie remembered from high school. “Guess we’re going to have to figure out another nickname for you, Corpsman. Can’t have two Docs in the place, can we?” He paused as if waiting for his barb to strike home.
Rudy was smiling, but Zach wasn’t. “Stow it, Rudy. She outranks us.”
“Sure thing.” Rudy raised both hands, signaling surrender, but his grin grew a little wider as he stared pointedly at their joined hands. “Whatever you say.” Belatedly Callie tugged herself free of Zach’s grasp. Why hadn’t she noticed Zach was still holding her hand before Rudy did? Maybe because she had enjoyed the feel of Zach’s long, strong fingers wrapped around her wrist. He had big hands, but his hold on her had been gentle. He would have no trouble setting a bone or reducing a dislocation with those hands and that strength, even in a combat situation. Experience she certainly didn’t have.
“Zach’s patients may call him whatever they and he are comfortable with,” she said, appalled at how condescending the remark sounded. She hadn’t meant it that way. She avoided speaking to colleagues in that manner, although she’d been talked down to plenty of times herself. Medicine, for the most part, was still a man’s world.
“Sure thing, Dr. Layman,” Rudy said. He wasn’t smiling anymore.
“What can I do to help?” she asked, hoping to make some kind of amends. This was not how she’d wanted to start her relationship with Zach Gibson, especially not with a witness as talkative as Rudy.
“Nothing, ma’am.”
She wished he wouldn’t call her that, but she could hardly ask him to call her Callie so soon, and insisting on being addressed as Dr. Layman would only add insult to injury at this point. “I want to help,” she said. “It’s my practice now,” she couldn’t stop herself from adding.
Zach’s face hardened momentarily. “You don’t know where a bloody thing is yet, or where it goes.” His tone softened, probably when he remembered he was talking to his boss. “You’re soaking wet and covered with fiberglass. Go on over to the White Pine and get changed. Besides, Leola and Bonnie are on their way to lend a hand.” The two women, both of whom Callie knew from her childhood, were the clinic’s nurses and receptionist/bookkeepers, both essential to the efficient functioning of the practice. “Everything’s under control here, ma’am.”
“I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” she snapped before she could censure her words.
“Yes, ma’am.” A corner of his mouth ticked up in what might have been a grin, but it was so fleeting Callie couldn’t be sure. “Go, Dr. Layman,” he said, the words just shy of being an outright command. “Let your dad and your new stepmother know you’re in town. Get yourself settled in and we’ll have this place ready for business on Monday morning.”
So this was the way he wanted things to go. Where he continued to call the shots and she had no say in the decisions.
Zach Gibson didn’t want her here; that was easy enough to figure out. The problem was...he was right. She would be more of a hindrance than a help to these people, who were used to working together as a team. She was the outsider. And the one thing she could never let any of them guess, especially her new PA, was that she was afraid she would never fit in.
CHAPTER TWO
THERE WAS NO PARKING space in front of the White Pine Bar and Grill, though Callie would have been surprised to find one on a Saturday evening in midsummer. She drove on by, turned left at the corner onto Perch Street, climbed the low hill, turned left again and angled her Jeep into the narrow gravel alleyway
