A Doctor's Watch

“Uh, yeah.” Brilliant. Very eloquent.

Sighing in resignation, she hopped up on the edge of the examination table. “Well, let’s get this over with. I have a son to get home to.” Her feet dangled off the floor, exposing the delicate bare ankles at the ends of two very long legs.

“Sure. Uh, yeah.”

Heaven help him.

Mia had prepared herself to do battle with some pasty-skinned, condescending head-shrinker who had his name sewn over the breast pocket of his lab coat and who spoke through his nasal passages. She was ready, or she thought she was.

Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined they’d send someone like young Dr. Handsome, here, to check up on her. One look at him, and her game plan fell apart with an audible crash.

He was tall and tanned and lean, but with enough bulk under his blue denim button-down dress shirt to hint at a fit body. His hair was conservatively cut, but just enough overdue for a trim that the light brown ends curled over his collar. A few flakes of snow still clung in the cowlick over his left temple.

The cold had left ruddy spots on his cheeks, and the beginnings of a slight shadow darkened his jaw, but not grimly. The stubble, combined with brilliant hazel eyes, a lazy smile that only reached one side of his mouth and the battered leather jacket slung over his shoulder gave him a slightly harried, sleepy, sexy look.

She wasn’t ready for him at all.

She wondered if he knew exactly how disarming that lopsided grin of his could be. She wondered whether it was genuine or part of his psychotherapy-babble bag of tricks.

“Ms. Serrat?” He lifted his eyebrows in question.

Polite, too, still waiting for her to invite him in. Not a common trait in doctors, in her experience.

Despite his charm and his manners, she jutted her chin when she nodded, reminding herself he was the man standing between her and Todd. She needed to get home to her son, preferably before school let out for the day. She didn’t want him to know anything about this little incident.

He shouldered his way through the door and eased across the room, stopping about three feet away and extending his hand. Tricky, he was. Making her go to him. A subtle but effective shifting of power in the room.

On another day, she would have refused to play his mind games. But today, she decided an antisocial display would not further her cause.

Hopping off the exam table and stepping forward, she accepted his hand. His knuckles were scraped and swollen as though he’d been in a fight, she noticed. Young Dr. Handsome was one surprise after another.

Before she thought better of herself, she swept her thumb over the abrasions. “Rough day at the office, Doc?”

He looked puzzled for a second, then glanced down and extricated his hand from hers. “Just a little difference of opinion.”

It was her turn to look puzzled, but she didn’t ask for an explanation, nor did he offer one. It was best they get down to business, anyway.

“I’m sorry you had to wait so long,” he said, throwing his jacket across the foot of the bed. “I’d have been here an hour ago, but the weather’s taking a turn for the worse and the roads are getting nasty.”

An hour. What was one hour? she wondered.

An eternity to an eight-year-old boy. A boy waiting for his mother.

“Why don’t we get this over with so you can get back on the road to wherever home is, then?”

“Sounds like a plan.” He rubbed his hands together to warm them, looking her up and down.

Her spine tingled as if he’d run his fingers up her back. The look hadn’t been sexual at all—it was definitely a doctor’s appraising gaze.

Still, she had felt it.

As if he’d felt it, too, he took a step back.

Even fully clothed and with four feet of distance between them, she felt naked. Bare to the soul. Unable to resist any longer, she set her tea down and crossed her arms over the buttercup-yellow flannel pajama top Nana had brought for her.

She wished Nana had brought clothes, instead.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Fine,” she lied. Her hip hurt like hell. “The doctor gave me a clean bill of health.”

“Good. Do you know why I’m here?”

Her lips pressed together in a bleak smile. “You’re a psychologist.”

“Psychiatrist, actually. You know what happens next?”

She nodded and sat on the edge of the bed, her legs hanging over the side. She’d been through this before. At least he wasn’t patronizing her.

He asked a battery of questions. Her name. The date. The name of the current president. The immediate former president. Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?

She looked up at him quizzically. “Grant?”

He grinned. “Just seeing if you were paying attention. Thought I had you there.”

“My son loves riddles. I hear that one, or some variation on it, at least once a week.”

“What happened this morning?” Dr. Handsome asked. His gaze followed her as she hopped off the bed and paced, limping. She didn’t want to do this, but he wasn’t going to let her go home to Todd until she did.

“Why don’t you just come right out and ask me?” she said, hating the impatience in her voice.

“Ask you what?”

“If I tried to kill myself again.”

“Did you try to kill yourself again?” he said without missing a beat.

“No.”

“But you have tried before.”

Statement, not question. No sense denying it, she thought. The facts would be in her medical record.

“A long time ago,” she said flatly.

“After you lost your husband?”

“And my sister six months before that, and my parents a year before that.” Her heart constricted painfully at the memory. Memories.