Coltrain's Proposal Read online

  He thought she was cold, but she wasn’t. It was quite the reverse where he was concerned. She always jerked away when he came too close, when he touched her infrequently. It wasn’t because she found him repulsive but because his touch excited her so much. She trembled when he was too close, her breathing changed. She couldn’t control her shaky legs or her shaky voice. The only solution had been to distance herself physically from him, and that was what she’d done.

  There were other reasons, too, why she avoided physical involvement. They were none of his business, or anyone else’s. She did her job and avoided trouble as much as possible. But just lately, her job was becoming an ordeal.

  She drove home to the small dilapidated white house on the outskirts of town. It was in a quiet neighborhood that was just beginning to go downhill. The rent was cheap. She’d spent weekends painting the walls and adding bits and pieces to the house’s drab interior. She had it all but furnished now, and it reflected her own quiet personality. But there were other dimensions to the room, like the crazy cat sculpture on the mantel and the colorful serapes on the chairs, and the Indian pottery and exotic musical instruments on the bookshelf. The paintings were her own, disturbingly violent ones with reds and blacks and whites in dramatic chaos. A visitor would have found the combinations of flowers amid those paintings confusing. But, then, she’d never had a visitor. She kept to herself.

  Coltrain did, too, as a rule. He had visitors to his ranch from time to time, but his invitations even when they included the medical staff invariably excluded Louise. The omission had caused gossip, which no one had been brave enough to question to his face. Louise didn’t care if he never invited her to his home. After all, she never invited him to hers.

  Secretly she suspected that he was grieving for Jane Parker, his old flame who’d just recently married Todd Burke. Jane was blond and blue-eyed and beautiful, a former rodeo star with a warm heart and a gentle personality.

  Lou often wondered why he’d ever agreed to work with someone he disliked so much, and on such short acquaintance. He and Dr. Drew Morris were friends, and she’d tried to question Drew about her sudden acceptance, but Drew was a clam. He always changed the subject.

  Drew had known her parents in Jacobsville and he had been a student of her father’s at the Austin teaching hospital where he’d interned. He’d become an ally of her mother during some really tough times, but he didn’t like Lou’s father. He knew too much about his home life, and how Lou and her mother were treated.

  There had been one whisper of gossip at the Jacobsville hospital when she’d first gone there on cases. She’d heard one of the senior nurses remark that it must disturb “him” to have Dr. Blakely’s daughter practicing at this hospital and thank God she didn’t do surgery. Lou had wanted to question the nurse, but she’d made herself scarce after that and eventually had retired.

  Louise had never found out who “he” was or what was disturbing about having another Blakely practice at the Jacobsville hospital. But she did begin to realize that her father had a past here.

  “What did my father do at this hospital, Drew?” she’d asked him one day suddenly, while they were doing rounds at the hospital.

  He’d seemed taken aback. “He was a surgeon on staff, just as I am,” he said after a hesitation.

  “He left here under a cloud, didn’t he?” she persisted.

  He shook his head. “There was no scandal, no cloud on his reputation. He was a good surgeon and well respected, right until the end. You know that. Even if he was less than admirable as a husband and father, he was an exceptional surgeon.”

  “Then why the whispers about him when I first came here?”

  “It was nothing to do with his skill as a surgeon,” he replied quietly. “It’s nothing that really even concerns you, except in a roundabout way.”

  “But what…?”

  They’d been interrupted and he’d looked relieved. She hadn’t asked again. But she wondered more and more. Perhaps it had affected Dr. Coltrain in some way and that was why he disliked Lou. But wouldn’t he have mentioned it in a whole year?

  She didn’t ever expect to understand the so-controlled Dr. Coltrain or his venomous attitude toward her. He’d been much more cordial when she first became his partner. But about the time she realized that she was in love with him, he became icy cold and antagonistic. He’d been that way ever since, raising eyebrows everywhere.

  The remark he’d made this morning about her coldness was an old one. She’d jerked back from him at a Christmas party, soon after she’d come to work in his office in Jacobsville, to avoid a kiss under the mistletoe. She could hardly have admitted that even then the thought of his hard, thin mouth on hers made her knees threaten to buckle. Her attraction to him had been explosive and immediate, a frightening experience to a woman whose whole life had been wrapped around academic excellence and night upon night of exhaustive studying. She had no social life at all—even in high school. It had been the one thing that kept her father’s vicious sarcasm and brutality at bay, as long as she made good grades and stayed on the dean’s list.

  Outside achievements had been the magic key that kept the balance in her dysfunctional family. She studied and won awards and scholarships and praise, and her father basked in it. She thought that he’d never felt much for her, except pride in her ability to excel. He was a cruel man and grew crueler as his addiction climbed year after year to new heights. Drugs had caused the plane crash. Her mother had died with him. God knew, that was fitting, because she’d loved him to the point of blindness, overlooking his brutality, his addiction, his cruelty in the name of fidelity.

  Lou wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the chill of fear. She’d never marry. Any woman could wake up in a relationship that damaging. All she had to do was fall in love, lose control, give in to a man’s dominance. Even the best man could become a predator if he sensed vulnerability in a woman. So she would never be vulnerable, she assured herself. She would never be at a man’s mercy as her mother had been.

  But Copper Coltrain made her vulnerable, and that was why she avoided any physical contact with him. She couldn’t give in to the feelings he roused in her, for fear of becoming a victim. Loneliness might be a disease, but it was certainly a more manageable one than love.

  The ringing of the telephone caught her attention.

  “Dr. Blakely?” Brenda, her office nurse, queried. “Sorry to bother you at home, but Dr. Coltrain said there’s been a wreck on the north end of town and they’ll be bringing the victims to the emergency room. Since he’s on call, you’ll have to cover the two-hour Saturday clinic at the office.”

  “I’ll be right over,” she promised, wasting no more time in conversation.

  The clinic was almost deserted. There was a football game at the local high school that night, and it was sunny and unseasonably warm outside for early December. It didn’t really surprise Lou that she only needed to see a handful of patients.

  “Poor Dr. Coltrain,” Brenda said with a sigh as they finished the last case and closed up the office. “I’ll bet he won’t be in until midnight.”

  “It’s a good thing he isn’t married,” Lou remarked. “He’d have no home life at all, as hard as he works.”

  Brenda glanced at her, but with a kind smile. “That is true. But he should be thinking about it. He’s in his thirties now, and time is passing him by.” She turned the key in the lock. “Pity about Miss Parker marrying that Burke man, isn’t it? Dr. Coltrain was sweet on her for so many years. I always thought—I guess most people here did—that they were made for each other. But she was never more than friendly. If you saw them together, it was obvious that she didn’t feel what he did.”

  In other words, Dr. Coltrain had felt a long and unrequited love for the lovely blond former rodeo cowgirl, Jane Parker. That much, Lou had learned from gossip. It must have hurt him very badly when she married someone else.

  “What a pity that we can’t love to order,” Lou re
marked quietly, thinking how much she’d give to be unscarred and find Dr. Coltrain as helplessly drawn to her as she was to him. That was the stuff of fantasy, however.

  “Wasn’t it surprising about Ted Regan and Coreen Tarleton, though?” Brenda added with a chuckle.

  “Indeed it was,” Lou agreed, smiling as she remembered having Ted for a patient. “She was shaking all over when she got him to me with that gored arm. He was cool. Nothing shakes Ted. But Coreen was as white as milk.”

  “I thought they were already married,” Brenda groaned. “Well, I was new to the area and I didn’t know them. I do now,” she added, laughing. “I pass them at least once a week on their way to the obstetrician’s office. She’s due any day.”

  “She’ll be a good mother, and Ted will certainly be a good father. Their children will have a happy life.”

  Brenda caught the faint bitterness in the words and glanced at Lou, but the other woman was already calling her goodbyes and walking away.

  She went home and spent the rest of the weekend buried in medical journals and the latest research on the new strain of bacteria that had, researchers surmised, mutated from a deadly scarlet fever bacterium that had caused many deaths at the turn of the century.

  Chapter 2

  Monday morning brought a variety of new cases, and Louise found herself stuck with the most routine of them, as usual. She and Coltrain were supposed to be partners, but when he wasn’t operating, he got the interesting, challenging illnesses. Louise got fractured ribs and colds.

  He’d been stiff with her this morning, probably because he was still fuming over the argument they’d had about his mistaken idea of her weekend activities. Accusing her of lollygagging with the EMTs for excitement; really!

  She watched his white-coated back disappear into an examination room down the hall in their small building and sighed half-angrily as she went back to check an X-ray in the files. The very worst thing about unrequited love, she thought miserably, was that it fed on itself. The more her partner in the medical practice ignored and antagonized her, the harder she had to fight her dreams about him. She didn’t want to get married; she didn’t even want to get involved. But he made her hungry.

  He’d spent a lot of time with Jane Parker until she married that Burke man, and Lou had long ago given up hope that he would ever notice her in the same way he always noticed Jane. The two of them had grown up together, though, whereas Lou had only been in partnership with him for a year. She was a native of Austin, not Jacobsville. Small towns were like extended families. Everybody knew each other, and some families had been friends for more than one generation. Lou was a true outsider here, even though she was a native Texan. Perhaps that was one of many reasons that Dr. Coltrain found her so forgettable.

  She wasn’t bad looking. She had long, thick blond hair and big brown eyes and a creamy, blemish-free complexion. She was tall and willowy, but still shorter than her colleague. She lacked his fiery temper and his authoritarian demeanor. He was tall and whipcord lean, with flaming red hair and blue eyes and a dark tan from working on his small ranch when he wasn’t treating patients. That tan was odd in a redhead, although he did have a smattering of freckles over his nose and the backs of his big hands. She’d often wondered if the freckles went any farther, but she had yet to see him without his professional white coat over his very formal suit. He wasn’t much on casual dressing at work. At home, she was sure that he dressed less formally.

  That was something Lou would probably never know. She’d never been invited to his home, despite the fact that most of the medical staff at the local hospital had. Lou was automatically excluded from any social gathering that he coordinated.

  Other people had commented on his less than friendly behavior toward her. It puzzled them, and it puzzled her, because she hadn’t become his partner in any under-handed way. He had known from the day of her application that she was female, so it couldn’t be that. Perhaps, she thought wistfully, he was one of those old-line dominating sort of men who thought women had no place in medicine. But he’d been instrumental in getting women into positions of authority at the hospital, so that theory wasn’t applicable, either. The bottom line was that he simply did not like Louise Blakely, medical degree or no medical degree, and she’d never known why.

  She really should ask Drew Morris why, she told herself with determination. It had been Drew, a surgeon and friend of her family, who’d sent word about the opening in Coltrain’s practice. He’d wanted to help Lou get a job near him, so that he could give her some moral support in the terrible days following the deaths of her parents. She, in turn, had liked the idea of being in practice in a small town, one where she knew at least one doctor on the staff of the hospital. Despite growing up in Austin, it was still a big city and she was lonely. She was twenty-eight, a loner whose whole life had been medicine. She’d made sure that her infrequent dates never touched her heart, and she was innocent in an age when innocence was automatically looked on with disdain or suspicion.

  Her nurse stuck her head in the doorway. “There’s a call for you. Dr. Morris is on line two.”

  “Thanks, Brenda.”

  She picked up the receiver absently, her finger poised over the designated line. But when she pressed it, before she could say a word, the sentence she’d intercepted accidentally blared in her ear in a familiar deep voice.

  “…told you I wouldn’t have hired her in the first place, if I had known who she was related to. I did you a favor, never realizing she was Blakely’s daughter. You can’t imagine that I’ll ever forgive her father for what he did to the girl I loved, do you? She’s been a constant reminder, a constant torment!”

  “That’s harsh, Copper,” Drew began.

  “It’s how I feel. She’s nothing but a burden here. But to answer your question, hell no, you’re not stepping on my toes if you ask her out on a date! I find Louise Blakely repulsive and repugnant, and an automaton with no attractions whatsoever. Take her with my blessing. I’d give real money if she’d get out of my practice and out of my life, and the sooner the better!” There was a click and the line, obviously open, was waiting for her.

  She clicked the receiver to announce her presence and said, as calmly as she could, “Dr. Lou Blakely.”

  “Lou! It’s Drew Morris,” came the reply. “I hope I’m not catching you at a bad moment?”

  “No.” She cleared her throat and fought to control her scattered emotions. “No, not at all. What can I do for you?”

  “There’s a dinner at the Rotary Club Thursday. How about going with me?”

  She and Drew occasionally went out together, in a friendly but not romantic way. She would have refused, but what Coltrain had said made her mad. “Yes, I would like to, thanks,” she said.

  Drew laughed softly. “Great! I’ll pick you up at six on Thursday, then.”

  “See you then.”

  She hung up, checked the X-ray again meticulously, and put it away in its file. Brenda ordinarily pulled the X-rays for her, but it was Monday and, as usual, they were overflowing with patients who’d saved their weekend complaints for office hours.

  She went back to her patient, her color a little high, but no disturbance visible in her expression.

  She finished her quota of patients and then went into her small office. Mechanically she picked up a sheet of letterhead paper, with Dr. Coltrain’s name on one side and hers on the other. Irrelevantly, she thought that the stationery would have to be replaced now.

  She typed out a neat resignation letter, put it in an envelope and went to place it on Dr. Coltrain’s desk. It was lunchtime and he’d already left the building. He made sure he always did, probably to insure that he didn’t risk having Lou invite herself to eat with him.

  Brenda scowled as her boss started absently toward the back door. “Shouldn’t you take off your coat first?” she asked hesitantly.

  Lou did, without a word, replaced it in her office, whipped her leather fanny pack around her wai
st and left the building.

  It would have been nice if she’d had someone to talk to, she thought wistfully, about this latest crisis. She sat alone in the local café, drinking black coffee and picking at a small salad. She didn’t mingle well with people. When she wasn’t working, she was quiet and shy, and she kept to herself. It was difficult for strangers to approach her, but she didn’t realize that. She stared into her coffee and remembered every word Coltrain had said to Drew Morris about her. He hated her. He couldn’t possibly have made it clearer. She was repugnant, he’d said.

  Well, perhaps she was. Her father had told her so, often enough, when he was alive. He and her mother were from Jacobsville but hadn’t lived in the area for years. He had never spoken of his past. Not that he spoke to Lou often, anyway, except to berate her grades and tell her that she’d never measure up.

  “Excuse me?”

  She looked up. The waitress was staring at her. “Yes?” she asked coolly.

  “I don’t mean to pry, but are you all right?”

  The question surprised Lou, and touched her. She managed a faint smile through her misery. “Yes. It’s been a…long morning. I’m not really hungry.”

  “Okay.” The waitress smiled again, reassuringly, and went away.

  Just as Lou was finishing her coffee, Coltrain came in the front door. He was wearing the elegant gray suit that looked so good on him, and carrying a silver belly Stetson by the brim. He looked furiously angry as his pale eyes scanned the room and finally spotted Lou, sitting all alone.

  He never hesitated, she thought, watching him walk purposefully toward her. There must be an emergency…