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Vaughn released me with a shove, and I slammed into my front door, banging my right knee against the metal siding. Blinding white streaked across my vision as debilitating pain crackled from my leg to my teeth. I grasped the handle tightly to keep from falling. “Go,” I choked out. “I mean it, Vaughn. My answer is no.”

“You will change your mind,” he seethed. He came up behind me, and crowding me with his body, he slammed his hand against the door next to my face. I gasped, curling inward. He’dnever been violent like this… not really. He’d yelled at students and snapped at waiters, but he’d never threatened me physically like this. My hand shook on the doorknob as he hissed in my ear. “You can play hard to get, but we both know you’ll do anything for me.”

I withered on the inside like a torched dandelion. My shoulders shrank inward, and my breath froze in my lungs. “Please go,” I whispered brokenly.

He left, and I fumbled with my keys struggling to open the door before wrenching it open and twisting myself inside. The pain in my knee slammed against the hurt in my chest, and with a sob, I crumpled to the ground. I gave into the tears that had clawed up my throat, and lying down on my side, staring at my kitchen counters, I let them wash away the flood of insidious feelings that had awakened with Vaughn’s return.

It wasn’t until hours later that I managed to move. And then I lost myself in the pain and burning fever that swept through my body.

Chapter thirteen

Cal

Cal

The lines on the chart in front of me blurred, seeping together and merging into a gray, muddled mess. I had my elbow on the desk and my forehead in my hand, and I swiped my hand over my eyes, rubbing them wearily.

“You look like my kids when the Wi-Fi goes down,” Dr. Reynolds commented, coming to stand at the nurses’ station desk next to me. She leaned her elbows on the white surface, craning her neck to look at me.

I lifted my face from my hand and gave her a slow blink. “That was uncomfortably specific.”

“Long week?” She flipped open a chart, making a note and glancing at me again.

“It’s Wednesday,” I pointed out.Actually, I got ditched by my fake date after I for-real kissed her and freaked her the hell out. It’sbeen an eternally torturous week.

“Are your parents upset that you didn’t have a date on Friday? I know that matchmaking thing didn’t work out.” She licked her thumb and turned a page in the file because Reynolds had kids and apparently didn’t fear germs the way most of us did.

I let out a sardonic chuckle. “It actuallydidwork in a roundabout way. But I scared off my date. She ghosted me.”

“She didn’t show up?” she asked, looking up with a concerned tilt to her brown eyes.

“She ghosted meafterthe date.” I slapped the file closed. “And I don’t blame her. It’s fine.”

“Wait a minute.” Annie looked up from where she was sitting at the other end of the nurses’ station desk. “Are you telling me Dr. Perfect Datestruck out?”

Of course, she would use a baseball analogy to illustrate how catastrophically I screwed things up with Shortstop.“I lost the fucking game,” I muttered. I reached over the counter and slid the file into a metal file keeper. “I’ve got at-home patients, so call me if you need me.”

“What did youdo?” Annie insisted, standing and following me. She had her dark brown bob in a crazy, half-up thing that looked like water spouting from a sprinkler, and her bright pink clogs matched the heart pattern on her scrubs. “Or was she as bad as the last match?”

I sighed, gathering the remnants of my patience. “She’s great. I’m an oaf.” I’d just had two visits with feverish, obstinate kidsback-to-back, and neither of them had wanted to get an examination. I’d also had averycranky octogenarian who’d insisted she had “the thing that killed Dorris,” and she’d had no compunction about letting me know how she felt. I needed this day to end.

Annie halted, tilting her head. “Oh dear.”

“What?” Michael asked, coming out of an exam room. He wore his usual deep blue scrubs and had his hair swooped into a perfectly arranged, black coif that made him look like a C-pop star.

“Dr. Reed whiffed it with his date,” Annie said.

“What is it with all the baseball metaphors?” I asked, dividing a testy look between bewildered Michael and sympathetic Annie.

She and Michael exchanged loaded looks. “It’s America’s pastime,” Michael said unhelpfully.

Annoyance pricked at my patience like a needle to a rapidly deflating balloon. “Do no harm,” I repeated to myself under my breath, wrenching my office door open. “Do no harm.”

“Did you not even make it to first base, then?” Michael called out before I closed the door on their smothered laughter.

I snatched up my bag from the surface of my desk before ham-handing the stack of files for patients I’d be seeing today. “First base,” I muttered. “First base is what got me into this state.” Or my over-eagerness to ease Ruth over the plate, anyway.

She had seemed interested. I’d let her make the first move, andshe’d melted into the kiss in a way that sent my blood roaring just thinking about it. I’d kissed plenty of women, but none of them had felt like Ruth had. Her lips were cashmere smooth and just as pillowy soft, and I’d lost myself in the feel of her.