The Last First Kiss

No doubt about it, when it came to wielding guilt, her mother knew no equal. “Stop, Mom,” Kara pleaded, holding the receiver away from her ear. “I’ll see what I can do.” Pulling her calendar over, she picked up a pen, intending to mark the date. “When do you need it by?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow?” Kara echoed. Talk about being last minute. “Mother, that’s—” She stopped herself. She knew better than to attempt to argue with the woman who’d made it into an art form. Instead, she said, “I’ll see what I can do, Mom.”

“That’s my girl.” Warmth radiated from the phrase. “I told Lisa you’d come through. By the way, would you mind dropping it off with Dave when you get it? Tomorrow is his day to work at the Seventeenth Street Clinic. He volunteers there, you know.”

As if her mother hadn’t already told her that little tidbit countless number of times. “You don’t say.”

“The clinic isn’t all that far from you,” Paulette went on, ignoring the sarcasm in her daughter’s voice.

Kara suppressed a sigh. If she sighed too often, she was going to wind up hyperventilating. Worse, she’d have her mother fussing over her, which was the last thing she needed.

“I know where Seventeenth Street is, Mother.” This time, a hint of impatience came through.

Sadly, it appeared that her mother hadn’t perceived it. “Wonderful, then we’re all set. Dave’ll be there all day,” Paulette stressed. “That young man is positively selfless, never takes any time off for himself,” Paulette marveled.

This was getting a little too thick. Kara smelled a rat—the kind that wore high heels and was given to being sneaky.

“Mother—”

“Oops,” Paulette exclaimed abruptly. “I’ve got to go. Talk to you later, Kara. Bye!”

Her mother’s flood of words came at her fast and furious—just before the receiver on the other end went “click.”

She’d been right, Kara thought as she leaned forward and replaced the receiver into its cradle. The universe was out of whack today. Now all she had to do was figure out why.

There were times, like today, when Dr. David Scarlatti wished he’d been blessed with an extra set of hands. Either that, or had learned to increase his energy level and work twice as fast as he normally did. There just never seemed to be enough hours in the day for him to do everything he needed to.

That was especially true whenever he volunteered at the free clinic. He’d been here since seven and he didn’t feel as if he was making a dent. For every patient he saw, two more seemed to pop up to take his or her place. After six hours straight, the waiting room was still jammed. So much so that some of the patients were sitting cross-legged on the floor.

Nobody was here for something as mundane as a routine checkup. Everyone had something wrong, usually something that they had been enduring for at least several weeks before grudgingly swallowing their pride and making the pilgrimage to the clinic.

It was one o’clock. Typically, most doctors’ offices were closed for lunch at this hour. But for him, lunch was only a faraway dream. Other than a candy bar, he hadn’t had anything to eat—nor the time to consume it if he’d thought to bring something with him.

He didn’t like being hungry, but they were down one doctor today, which made him not low man on the totem pole but sole man on the totem pole. Added to that, one of the nurses didn’t show and the one who did looked as if she were running on empty. Clarice, a normally no-nonsense nurse whose age he wouldn’t dare attempt to guess—he knew she had grandchildren—had been out sick for a week, and it was rather obvious to him that she needed a couple more days.

Too bad neither he nor the clinic had that kind of luxury. There were patients to attend to, and there was no putting that on hold.

As Dave walked out Mrs. Rayburn and her allergy-challenged twins, Megan and Moira, he paused by the reception desk to pick up the next file. There had to be a break coming soon, right?

“How many more, Clarice?” he asked the full-figured dynamo, who was, among other things, his first line of defense.

“You don’t want to know,” the woman informed him darkly.

Since the clinic had originally opened its doors, Clarice Sanchez had seen doctors come, burn out and go. For reasons he wasn’t quite sure of but was eternally grateful for, after an initial butting of heads, the somber nurse had taken him under her large, protective wing. Clarice was the one who kept things moving, even when she was operating at less than her usual maximum efficiency.

Dave read the side of the folder and was about to call the name of his next patient when suddenly, someone was calling out his instead.

“Dave!”

Caught off guard, he momentarily forgot about Ramon Mendoza and glanced about the waiting area to see who had just addressed him by his first name. No one did that around here. It was disrespectful. If they spoke to him, they always invoked his title in a grateful voice.

He didn’t have far to look. His line of sight was immediately engaged by a vaguely familiar, rather sexy-looking blonde. She was striding across the packed room, heading toward him as if she were the bullet and he was the bull’s-eye. From the expression on her face, he could see that she seemed agitated.

One thing was for damn sure. She certainly didn’t look as if she belonged here. It was like a lily suddenly sprouting in the middle of a field of weeds.

Before he could acknowledge the woman—God, that face looked familiar—Clarice stepped in. “I already told you,” she snapped at the blonde, giving her a withering look, “you’re gonna have to wait your turn, lady.”

“I just need to see the doctor for a minute,” the blonde insisted.

“That’s what everyone says,” Clarice told her coldly. “Now either sit down and wait your turn or I’m going to get someone to escort you out of here.”

Kara decided that she was going to give this one more try and then leave. Lunch was almost over and she was hungry. More to the point, she really didn’t need this kind of abuse.

“Dave,” she called to him again, deliberately ignoring his guard dragon. “It’s Kara Calhoun. Your mother sent me.”

Chapter Two

Dave found himself staring at the blonde, stunned. While the face was vaguely familiar in a distant sort of way, the name was familiar in a far more vivid, in-your-face kind of fashion.

He knew only one Kara, God help him.

That would be the only daughter of his mother’s oldest friend, Paulette Calhoun. Every single memory associated with Kara Calhoun was fraught with either embarrassment or frustrated annoyance—or both. He didn’t even try to remember one good moment spent in her company. There weren’t any.

Back when he was a little boy, his parents and hers would get together frequently. All the summer vacation memories of his childhood had Kara in them. Kara and turmoil. He’d been rather shy and introverted. Two years younger, Kara had been the exact opposite, as wild as a hurricane, and just as fearless. He’d felt inadequate.

And then mercifully, just before he turned thirteen, his father’s company began moving him, and thus them, from location to location. They traversed the Northwest and then the Southwest. Changing addresses so frequently made it hard for him to make any friends, but the upside was that at least during the rest of the year, he didn’t have to spend time confined in some remote summerhouse with the wild tomboy, counting the hours until September and the beginning of school.

If, after all these years, this gorgeous woman really was Kara Calhoun, then God, he couldn’t help thinking, had a very macabre and somewhat sadistic sense of humor.

Despite the pressures generated by an incredibly hectic morning stapled to the makings of an equally insane afternoon, Dave stopped what he was doing and waved his next patient into the first open room.

“Be right there, Mr. Mendoza,” he promised.

Then, instead of following the man, Dave rounded the reception desk and walked toward the sexy-looking blonde with the long legs.

That just couldn’t be Kara.

Still, why would she say she was if she wasn’t? He wasn’t going to have any peace until he found out for certain one way or the other, so, warily, he asked, “Kara?”

“Yes,” she cried with the same sort of feeling a contestant might display when their partner finally guessed the right answer after being supplied with countless clues.

He still couldn’t get himself to believe it. Why, after all these years, would she suddenly appear here, in a place where she was clearly out of her element? Her shoes alone looked as if they might equal a week’s salary for one of his patients—the ones who actually had a job.

“Kara Calhoun,” he said, trying to reconcile the image of a bratty, skinny girl with pigtails and a nasty sense of humor with the clearly gorgeous young woman who was standing in the packed waiting room. Obviously nature could work miracles.

Why all the drama? Kara wondered. The Dave she remembered had been a super-brainy geek. Had he been forced to trade in his brains for looks? Was that how it worked?