Coltrain's Proposal. Diana Palmer

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ killing himself and his wife.

      Tears swelled her eyelids. Not a sound passed her lips as they overflowed in two hot streaks down her pale cheeks.

      He caught his breath. He’d seen her tired, impassive, worn-out, fighting mad, and even frustrated. But he’d never seen her cry. His lean hand shot out and touched the track of tears down one cheek, as if he had to touch them to make sure they were real.

      She jerked back from him, laughing tearfully. “So that was why you were so horrible to me.” She choked out the words. “Drew never said a word…no wonder you suffered me! And I was silly enough to dream…!” The laughter was harsher now as she dashed away the tears, staring at him with eyes full of pain and loss. “What a fool I’ve been,” she whispered poignantly. “What a silly fool!”

      She turned and walked away from him, gripping the car keys in her hand. The sight of her back was as eloquently telling as the words that haunted him. She’d dreamed…what?

      For the next few days, Lou was polite and remote and as courteous as any stranger toward her partner. But something had altered in their relationship. He was aware of a subtle difference in her attitude toward him, in a distancing of herself that was new. Her eyes had always followed him, and he’d been aware of it at some subconscious level. Perhaps he’d been aware of more than covert glances, too. But Lou no longer watched him or went out of her way to seek him out. If she had questions, she wrote them down and left them for him on his desk. If there were messages to be passed on, she left them with Brenda.

      The one time she did seek him out was Thursday afternoon as they closed up.

      “Have you worked out an advertisement for someone to replace me?” she asked him politely.

      He watched her calm dark eyes curiously. “Are you in such a hurry to leave?” he asked.

      “Yes,” she said bluntly. “I’d like to leave after the Christmas holidays.” She turned and would have gone out the door, but his hand caught the sleeve of her white jacket. She slung it off and backed away. “At the first of the year.”

      He glared at her, hating the instinctive withdrawal that came whenever he touched her. “You’re a good doctor,” he said flatly. “You’ve earned your place here.”

      High praise for a man with his grudges. She looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes wounded. “But you hate me, don’t you? I heard what you said to Drew, that every time you looked at me you remembered what my father had done and hated me all over again.”

      He let go of her sleeve, frowning. He couldn’t find an answer.

      “Well, don’t sweat it, Doctor,” she told him. “I’ll be gone in a month and you can find someone you like to work with you.”

      She laughed curtly and walked out of the office.

      She dressed sedately that evening for the Rotary Club dinner, in a neat off-white suit with a pink blouse. But she left her blond hair long around her shoulders for once, and used a light dusting of makeup. She didn’t spend much time looking in the mirror. Her appearance had long ago ceased to matter to her.

      Drew was surprised by it, though, and curious. She looked strangely vulnerable. But when he tried to hold her hand, she drew away from him. He’d wanted to ask her for a long time if there were things in her past that she might like to share with someone. But Louise was an unknown quantity, and she could easily shy away. He couldn’t risk losing her altogether.

      Drew held her arm as they entered the hall, and Lou was disconcerted to find Dr. Coltrain there. He almost never attended social functions unless Jane Parker was in attendance. But a quick glance around the room ascertained that Jane wasn’t around. She wondered if the doctor had brought a date. It didn’t take long to have that question answered, as a pretty young brunette came up beside him and clung to his arm as if it was the ticket to heaven.

      Coltrain wasn’t looking at her, though. His pale, narrow eyes had lanced over Lou and he was watching her closely. He hadn’t seen her hair down in the year they’d worked together. She seemed more approachable tonight than he’d ever noticed, but she was Drew’s date. Probably Drew’s woman, too, he thought bitterly, despite her protests and reserve.

      But trying to picture Lou in Drew’s bed was more difficult than he’d thought. It wasn’t at all in character. She was rigid in her views, just as she was in her mode of dress and her hairstyle. Just because she’d loosened that glorious hair tonight didn’t mean that she’d suddenly become uninhibited. Nonetheless, the change disturbed him, because it was unexpected.

      “Copper’s got a new girl, I see,” Drew said with a grin. “That’s Nickie Bolton,” he added. “She works as a nurse’s aide at the hospital.”

      “I didn’t recognize her out of uniform,” Lou murmured.

      “I did,” he said. “She’s lovely, isn’t she?”

      She nodded amiably. “Very young, too,” she added with an indulgent smile.

      He took her hand gently and smiled down at her. “You aren’t exactly over the hill yourself,” he teased.

      She smiled up at him with warm eyes. “You’re a nice man, Drew.”

      Across the room, a redheaded man’s grip tightened ominously on a glass of punch. For over a year, Louise had avoided even his lightest touch. A few days ago, she’d thrown off his hand violently. But there she stood not only allowing Drew to hold her hand, but actually smiling at him. She’d never smiled at Coltrain that way; she’d never smiled at him any way at all.

      His companion tapped him on the shoulder.

      “You’re with me, remember?” she asked with a pert smile. “Stop staring daggers at your partner. You’re off duty. You don’t have to fight all the time, do you?”

      He frowned slightly. “What do you mean?”

      “Everyone knows you hate her,” Nickie said pleasantly. “It’s common gossip at the hospital. You rake her over the coals and she walks around the corridors, red in the face and talking to herself. Well, most of the time, anyway. Once, Dr. Simpson found her crying in the nursery. But she doesn’t usually cry, no matter how bad she hurts. She’s pretty tough, in her way. I guess she’s had to be, huh? Even if there are more women in medical school these days, you don’t see that many women doctors yet. I’ll bet she had to fight a lot of prejudice when she was in medical school.”

      That came as a shock. He’d never seen Lou cry until today, and he couldn’t imagine her being upset at any temperamental display of his. Or was it, he pondered uneasily, just that she’d learned how not to show her wounds to him?

      Chapter 3

      At dinner, Lou sat with Drew, as far away from Coltrain and his date as she could get. She listened attentively to the speakers and whispered to Drew in the spaces between speakers. But it was torture to watch Nickie’s small hand smooth over Coltrain’s, to see her flirt with him. Lou didn’t know how to flirt. There were a lot of things she didn’t know. But she’d learned to keep a poker face, and she did it very well this evening. The one time Coltrain glanced down the table toward her, he saw nothing on her face or in her eyes that could tell him anything. She was unreadable.

      After the meeting, СКАЧАТЬ