Rumors: The McCaffertys. Lisa Jackson

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      Chapter 3

      “God help me,” Nicole whispered, trying to understand why in the world Thorne would embrace her so intimately and more to the point, why didn’t she stop him. Because you wanted him to, you idiot.

      As she wheeled out of the parking lot, she glanced in the rearview mirror, and saw him standing beneath a security light. Tall, broad-shouldered, bareheaded, rain dripping from the tip of his nose and the hem of his coat, he watched her leave. “Cocky son of a gun,” she muttered, flipping on her blinker and joining the thin stream of traffic. She hoped Thorne Almighty McCafferty got soaked to the skin. She switched her windshield wipers to a faster pace to keep up with the rain. Who was he to barge in on her, to question her and the hospital’s integrity and then…and then have the audacity, the sheer arrogance, to grab her as if she were some weak-willed, starry-eyed, spineless…ninny!

      Oh, like the girl you once were, the one he remembered?

      She blushed and her fingers curled around the steering wheel in a death grip. She’d worked hard for years to overcome her shyness, to become the confident, scholarly, take-charge emergency room physician she was today and Thorne McCafferty seemed hell-bent to change all that. Well, she wouldn’t let him. No way. No how. She wasn’t the little girl he’d left a lifetime ago—her broken heart had mended.

      As she braked for a red light, she flipped on the radio, fumbled with the stations until she heard a melody that was familiar—Whitney Houston singing something she should know—and tried to calm down. Why she let Thorne get to her, she didn’t understand.

      She cranked the wheel and turned into a side street where the neon lights and Western facade of Montana Joe’s Pizza Parlor came into view.

      She pulled into the lot, raced inside and waited in line between five or six other patrons whose raincoats, parkas and ski jackets dripped water onto the tile floor in front of the take-out counter. A gas flame hissed in the fireplace in one corner of the room that was divided by fences into different seating areas. Pickaxes and shovels and other mining memorabilia were tacked to bare cedar walls and in one corner, Montana Joe, a stuffed bison, stared with glassy eyes at the patrons who were listening to Garth Brooks’s latest hit while drinking beer and eating hot, stringy pizza made with Joe’s “secret” tomato sauce.

      As Nicole stood in line and dug into her wallet to check how much cash she was carrying, she couldn’t help but overhear some of the conversation of the other patrons. Two men in front of her were discussing the previous Friday’s high school football game. From the sound of it the Grand Hope Wolverines were edged out by an arch rival in a nearby town though there was some dispute over a few of the calls. Typical.

      Other conversations buzzed around her and she heard the name McCafferty more often than she wanted to. “Terrible accident…half sister, you know…pregnant, but no mention of a father and no husband…always was bad blood in that family…what goes around comes around, I tell you…”

      Nicole grabbed a menu from the counter and turned her attention from the gossip that swirled around her. Though Grand Hope had grown by leaps and bounds in the past few years and had become a major metropolis by Montana standards, it was still, at its heart, a small town, where many of the citizens knew each other. She placed her order, lingered near the jukebox and listened to three or four songs ranging from Patsy Cline to Wynona Judd, then, once her name was called, picked up her pizza and refused to think about any member of the McCafferty family—especially Thorne. He was off-limits. Period. The reason she’d responded to his kiss was simple. It had been over two years since she’d kissed any man and at least five since she’d felt even the tiniest spark of passion. She didn’t even want to think how long it had been since she’d been consumed with desire—that particular thought led her back to a path that she didn’t want to follow, a path heading straight back to her youth and Thorne. She was just susceptible right now, that was all. Nothing more. It had nothing to do with chemistry. Nothing.

      Once in her SUV again, she twisted on the key and the engine refused to fire. “Come on, come on,” she muttered. She tried again, pumping the gas frantically and mentally chiding herself for not taking the rig into the shop for its regular maintenance. “You can do it,” she encouraged and finally, on the fourth attempt, the engine caught. “Tomorrow,” she promised, patting the dash as if comforting the vehicle, as if that would help. “I’ll take you in. Promise.”