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Inside the house was just as old-fashioned and homey as it was on the outside. The rooms were large, the ceilings high and the furniture mostly antiques that had been in the family for generations. The air was redolent with the aroma of roasting beef, and Kirsten remembered that they served dinner at midday on the farm.
Coralie proudly introduced her stepdaughters. Gloria was fifteen, tall with dark brown hair and brown eyes, and Amber, at thirteen, was short with blond hair and blue eyes. It wasn’t easy to tell who were the daughters and who was the stepmother. It was on the tip of Kirsten’s tongue to tease them about it, but she stopped herself just in time when she remembered that the almost thirteen-year age difference between Coralie and her husband was a sore subject with Jim.
According to Coralie he’d fought against falling in love with her because of it, and even though they were now married he was still embarrassed when someone mistook his new wife for one of his daughters.
Instead, she told the girls how pleased she was to meet them, and how much she was looking forward to her visit.
“I know you’re eager to meet Jim,” Coralie told Kirsten, “but he’s out working in the fields. He’ll be home in about an hour for dinner, and I’ve got the pot roast, potatoes and carrots cooking in a roaster in the oven. Gloria and Amber will do the last-minute things, so why don’t we go over to Jim’s dad’s house and get you settled in?”
“I’d love to,” Kirsten said enthusiastically. “Are you sure your father-in-law doesn’t mind me staying there?”
Coralie’s eyebrows rose. “Buck? Of course not. He’s happy to have somebody occupying it while he’s gone. The only thing he’s upset about is that he probably won’t be back from his old army buddies’ reunion in Missouri in time to meet you.”
Coralie had a last-minute discussion about dinner preparations with the girls, then joined Kirsten as they left the house and walked out to the car. It was only then that Coralie noticed the dents in the front fender and grille, which had been partially hidden by the shrubbery along the driveway.
“Kirsten, what happened to your car?” she asked. “Those dents look new.”
“They are,” Kirsten admitted. “I had a fender bender with another car between here and Grangeville.” She went ahead to explain what had happened. “I can’t deny it was my fault,” she concluded, “and the man I hit was really mad. I just hope my insurance will cover all the damage.”
Coralie looked at her askance. “You did exchange names, phone numbers and insurance companies, didn’t you? Who was he? Maybe Jim knows him.”
“Oh, yeah, we did all that,” Kirsten assured her. “He gave me a business card, but I tossed it in my purse without reading it. I’ll show it to you later.”
The two women took Kirsten’s car and drove approximately a city block through wheat fields to a beige cottage neatly trimmed in brown, which was set in the middle of a grove of huge, old shade trees. It was far enough away from the big house for privacy, but close enough to ensure against loneliness.
The cottage was considerably newer than the house and consisted of a living room, kitchen, two bedrooms and a bath. All the rooms were small, but it was ideal for one or two people. Kirsten and Coralie chatted happily as they unpacked Kirsten’s suitcases and put her clothes away.
“So, how are things back in Eureka?” Coralie asked as she put a stack of pastel-colored silk panties in a drawer.
“Well, we haven’t had any more of those California earthquakes that drove you away,” Kirsten answered.
Coralie shivered. “Thank God for that. After losing everything for the third time in six years in that last one, I just couldn’t stay in California any longer.”
“So you answered an advertisement in a magazine for a mail-order wife and wound up marrying the handsome hunk who placed the ad and living on a farm in Idaho,” Kirsten teased.
Coralie laughed. “It wasn’t as simple as that, as you very well know, but if I hadn’t run away from earthquakes I would never have met the man who turned out to be the love of my life.” She sobered. “And Jim is that, Kirsten. I firmly believe we were destined to be together.”
Now it was Kirsten who shivered. Was it possible that some couples were bound together by destiny?
Dr. Sam Lawford turned off the shower and reached for a towel, which he rubbed briskly over his trim, wet body, then knotted around his waist. As usual he was running late. He’d hoped to have time to unwind with a leisurely bath and a long, cool drink to revitalize his flagging energy. Instead, Thad Tucker’s youngest boy had stumbled while running with a wicked-looking knife in his hand, which his parents didn’t know he had, and Sam had spent the hour he’d saved for relaxation cleaning out the cut in the kid’s arm and putting five stitches in it.
Now he had just ten minutes to dress and drive out to the Buckley farm, if he was to arrive at the appointed time of six o’clock. Obviously that was impossible. He slapped shaving lotion on his newly shaved face, and rummaged in the dresser drawer for clean underwear.
What he really wanted to do was stay home, fix himself a thick turkey sandwich and stretch out with the new detective novel he’d received from the book club the week before. The last thing he wanted was to go to Jim and Coralie’s for supper. He loved Jim like a brother, and Coralie was a real sweetheart when she wasn’t singing the praises of her best friend, Kirsten something-or-other, whom he was supposed to meet for the first time tonight.
Sam hated blind dates, and it annoyed him no end when the wives of his friends insisted on playing matchmaker. He was perfectly capable of finding his own companions, and he had no intention of getting married.
He selected a pair of brown slacks and a short-sleeved green plaid shirt to wear. While summers in the mountains of Idaho were fairly mild, it was still too warm to be comfortable in a tie and sport coat. He wasn’t out to impress Ms. Whatever-her-name-was.
When he’d finished dressing, he ventured outside and was again jolted by the sight of the crumpled fender on his BMW. He’d only had it for a week, and in that time he’d protected and sheltered it like a baby. Then, in the blink of an eyelid, that sexy young airhead who didn’t have sense enough to keep her eyes on the road had run a stop sign and crumpled one side of its shiny white magnificence.
His rage ignited again. She had no business driving a car. She was a menace on the road. Who had issued her a driver’s license in the first place?
It was probably a man. All she would have to do was pout and bat her long, thick eyelashes at a man, and he would give her anything she wanted. Sam figured he should know. She’d even had him going there for a while.
When she’d first looked up at him with those wide doelike eyes, he’d felt a rush of tenderness that took his breath away. She’d looked so shocked and vulnerable, and for a moment he’d had an urge to take her in his arms and assure her that she was innocent of any wrongdoing. That he would take care of everything, if she would just smile at him.
He snorted with self-disgust as he backed the battered car out of the driveway. He’d been so swamped with patients all day that he hadn’t even had time to take it to the garage. Fortunately, the damage was only to the body. The V-12 engine still purred like a kitten.
As he drove down the tree-lined streets on his way out of town, his unruly mind returned to the accident and the woman responsible. Her driving skills left a lot to be desired, but her looks sure didn’t. Even though he’d been mad as hell at her at the time, he couldn’t help but notice her.
She was a real beauty. Quite tall, approximately five-seven to his five-eleven, and she’d fit into his embrace as if she’d been custom-made for him.
A wave of warmth washed over him and he groaned and shifted his thoughts back to the present. Obviously it had been too long since he’d had a date! He’d been so busy that he barely had time for sleep, let alone a social life.
But why was he attracted to this woman he didn’t even know?
Because he’d made the mistake of catching her when she stumbled, that was why. She’d snuggled into his arms, so soft, so warm and inviting, and she’d smelled faintly of lilacs, his favorite floral scent. He’d held her close and had a hard time letting her go when she pulled away from him.
Then another thought caught him off balance. Could that fall have been deliberate? Had she been using her femininity to distract him and make him feel protective?
Sure she could have. Not only could have, but probably did. She’d no doubt been bewitching males all her life, to get what she wanted.
Well, he’d learned his lesson early on, and he wasn’t going to be caught in that particular hell again. He had good reason to distrust women.
A few minutes later he turned off the two-lane country road onto the Buckleys’ driveway. There was the usual assortment of automobiles, trucks and farm machinery scattered around the barnyard, and he paid little attention as he stopped near the front of the house.
Before he got to the top of the steps the screen door was flung open and Coralie walked out grinning happily. “Well, if it isn’t the late Dr. Sam,” she said gaily. “What was it this time? Mandy Hoover’s overdue baby, or old Mr. Proctor’s rheumatism?”
“Neither one, smarty,” he said as he gave her a friendly hug. “It was the Tuckers’ youngest son. He fell while running with a knife, and I had to put sutures in his arm. How long before we eat? I’m starved.”
Coralie laughed and disengaged herself as she turned toward the door. “I’m not going to feed you until I’ve introduced you to my best friend in all the world,” she said as she walked into the house with Sam right behind her.
The sun was still bright, and it took him a few seconds to adjust his eyes to the darker living room. As he blinked, Coralie indicated a woman who had just risen from the couch and was standing a couple of feet away.
“Sam, I want you to meet my friend, Kirsten Reinhold,” she said, and there was excitement in her tone. “Kirsten, this is Sam Lawford, the doctor I’ve told you so much about.”
One final blink cleared Sam’s vision, and he saw himself gazing into those same doelike brown eyes that had been haunting him since this morning.
Kirsten Reinhold was the airhead who had trashed his brand-new car!
Chapter Two (#ulink_895bae29-7e2b-506e-9587-f3a36087b993)
“No!”
“No!”
Their denials were spoken in unison, even in perfect harmony, as though a conductor had lowered his baton to signal the first fortissimo notes of a fiery duet.
But this was no duet. It was an anguished protest to a fate that seemed intent on bedeviling two nice, unsuspecting people caught in a web of circumstances through no fault of their own.
“You are Kirsten Reinhold? The angel of mercy and paragon of virtue whose praise Coralie has been singing to me for months?” Sam sputtered.
“And you… You are Sam Lawford? The world’s most eligible bachelor, who only needs the right woman to turn him into the world’s most perfect husband?” Kirsten stammered sarcastically. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were this morning?”
“Why didn’t I? I did. I gave you my business card. Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”
She couldn’t believe he could be so obtuse. “I did. I wrote it all out on a piece of paper and handed it to you. It’s not my fault you didn’t look at it.”
Her sense of fair play finally caught up with her, and she sighed. “Although, I…I have to admit I didn’t read your card, either.”
A second male voice boomed through the room. “What’s going on here?”
It was Jim Buckley. In the few hours she’d been at the farm, Kirsten found him to be every bit as handsome and loving toward his family as Coralie had said. And he was just plain nice. Now he was standing next to Coralie, and they both looked surprised and perplexed.
Kirsten was the first to offer an explanation. “This…this is the man who was involved in the accident with me on the road this morning.” Her tone still rang with resentment.
“She caved in the whole side of my car,” Sam inter-jected, angrily.
“I did no such thing.” Her denial was heated. “It was only a slight dent in the front fender. The way you carry on you’d think I’d run over one of your children.”
“I don’t have any children, but I’ve only had that car for a week. Six days to be exact,” he said, fuming. “I had to go all the way to Boise to find a BMW dealership, and it hardly had a fingerprint on it until you came roaring down the road and rammed into it.”
Kirsten’s mouth dropped open. “Roaring down the road!” she raged. “I was barely moving. Twenty miles an hour at the most when you came out of nowhere and drove right in front of me—”
“Whoa there, take it easy!” Jim interrupted as he stepped between the two combatants. “Let’s cool down a little and find out what really happened.” He nodded to Kirsten. “Okay, you first.”
Belatedly Kirsten realized that both she and Sam were being rude, to say nothing of tacky, by waging their quarrel in the home of their host and hostess. She was regretful and embarrassed, but they’d gone too far now not to try to settle it.
She recounted how she’d taken her eyes off the road for just a second to turn off the radio. “I don’t know where he came from. There wasn’t a car in sight when I looked,” she concluded.
“You claim you didn’t see the stop sign, either,” Sam pointed out, “so you couldn’t have even looked to the sides of the road.”
Kirsten knew what he said was undoubtedly true, and she would have admitted it if he’d been reasonable. But he wasn’t reasonable, so she wasn’t going to be either. She’d already apologized, and she wasn’t about to do it again.
“I did, too—” she started to insist, but again Jim interrupted.
“Now hold on a minute, both of you.” Jim’s tone was stern. “Kirsten, you’ve told your side of the story, now let Sam tell his.” He looked at the other man. “Okay, pal, go ahead.”
Sam wished he’d used more restraint when he first realized that Coralie’s friend and houseguest was the woman who’d bashed in his car. Unfortunately he’d shot off his mouth, and now all he could do was take a deep breath and try to control his aggravation. “I had a full schedule of patients at my office this morning when I had to drop everything and hurry out to Chester Atkinson’s farm to help one of his cows deliver a calf that was turned wrong and couldn’t be expelled…”
“A calf?” Kirsten broke in, too astonished to be polite. “I thought you were an M.D.!”
He looked at her and nodded brusquely. “I am, but there’s only one veterinarian in this whole area, and he had to fly back East a couple of days ago to attend the funeral of a family member, so I was the next best thing. Delivering baby animals isn’t that much different from delivering baby humans, and without medical intervention both the cow and the calf would have died.”
Kirsten was stunned by an unexpected rush of admiration for this pugnacious man. She’d worked with a lot of physicians, but she doubted that any of them would have interrupted office hours to make a house call way out in the country to deliver a calf!
“Are they all right?” she asked softly.
He nodded and smiled. “Yeah. All the little guy needed was to be repositioned and he popped right out.”
He looked altogether different when he smiled. His cold brown eyes warmed and softened, and his whole expression lightened. For the first time she saw the slight indentations of dimples on either side of his mouth.
Was it possible she’d misjudged him? If he’d had an office full of sick patients waiting for him to return from an emergency house call, it was no wonder he’d been so harried and impatient with her. She’d delayed his return even longer, as well as damaging his new car.
“That…that’s very commendable of you, Doctor,” she said, suddenly shy as she basked in the warmth of his smile. “I’m a nurse, and I don’t know any physicians who make house calls for humans, let alone animals.”
He chuckled, and there was a sensual sound to it that made her tingle. “I assure you, going to the cow was the only way to handle the situation. Can you just imagine the reaction of my waiting room full of patients if Farmer Atkinson had led his bellowing pregnant bovine into their midst?” He extended his hand. “And please, call me Sam.”
She put her hand in his. His was smooth and well cared for, as most doctors’ hands were, but it was also hard and muscular and his grip was strong.
Their gazes met, and for the first time he was looking at her as an attractive woman instead of an incompetent ditz who couldn’t even steer a car down a deserted highway without running into his new and expensive toy.
“All right, Sam,” she said. “And I’m Kirsten. Coralie’s told me so much about you that I feel as if I already know you.”
He still held her hand, and she couldn’t seem to summon the willpower to pull it out of his grasp.
“Did she tell you that I sometimes act like a real jerk?” he asked seriously.
“No, that came as a surprise,” she blurted and felt the hot blush of embarrassment stain her face as soon as she realized what she’d said. “Oh, I mean…That is…”
He squeezed her hand and released it. “Don’t apologize,” he admonished her. “I had that coming. I’ve been acting like a spoiled five-year-old throwing a tantrum because one of my playthings got broken. I am sorry. I’m not usually so impatient and childish. It must have been the pressure of time constraints. I’ve been literally running from one patient to another all day long, and I’m afraid I got my priorities screwed up. Will you please forgive me?”
There was a twinkle in his deep-set eyes, and she would have forgiven him anything. “Of course,” she agreed readily, “if you’ll forgive me for damaging your beautiful car.”
He shrugged. “It’s nothing a little bodywork won’t fix.”
He was being amazingly casual about the accident, considering how upset he’d been just a few minutes earlier.
Coralie finally spoke from her position beside Kirsten. “If you two have settled the matter of who did what to whom, we’d better sit down to supper before everything gets cold.”
For the next couple of hours Kirsten thoroughly enjoyed herself. The food she and Coralie had prepared was delicious; Jim was a gracious host; his daughters were bright and well mannered, and Dr. Sam Lawford had made a lightning change from ogre to charmer.
Her innate good sense told her she shouldn’t be captivated by his illusive charm, but she couldn’t help herself. He was seated next to her at the table, and she was again aware of the fresh, clean aroma of the forest that she’d noticed that morning. The scent was uniquely his and it drew her attention no matter how hard she tried to ignore it.
Contrary to Coralie’s efforts at matchmaking, Kirsten hadn’t come to Idaho to find a groom. Oh, her long-term goal was to settle down with a husband and children, but she’d only recently celebrated her twenty-sixth birthday, and there were still a lot of things she wanted to do before she got to that point.
She wanted to advance in her profession. She loved nursing, and hoped someday to go back to school to become a nurse-practitioner. She also wanted to travel, to see the world a little at a time: Europe, Asia, and especially Scandinavia where her dad’s family had its roots. Her parents were middle-class people who had trouble making ends meet, so she’d had to put herself through college with scholarships and part-time jobs.
Now she wanted to be free, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t date and have fun. Far from it. She had a very satisfactory social life in Eureka and dated often, but never exclusively with one man. She had many male friends, but drew the line at taking any of them as lovers.
Sam finished his strawberry shortcake smothered in fresh whipped cream and sank back with a contented sigh. Coralie had moved the adults into the comfort of the living room before serving dessert, but Gloria and Amber had taken theirs and gone upstairs to watch television in their rooms.
He and Kirsten were seated together on the sofa. If she hadn’t been wearing a full-skirted cotton dress that billowed on either side, their hips would have been touching. His thigh muscles twitched at the thought, and it was all he could do to keep his hand from inching over to caress her leg.
He hated to admit it to himself, but his usual keen assessment of people had been really flawed this time. Kirsten Reinhold was neither airheaded nor conniving. She was not only beautiful, as he’d discovered this morning before he knew who she was, but she was also well above average in intelligence and shared many of his interests. They were both trained in medicine, but they also shared a love of country-and-western music, mystery novels and the Oakland A’s.
There was one thing he’d been right about this morning, however. She was one sexy lady! Not flashy or blatant. She did nothing to call attention to herself, but there was a warmth about her, a radiant appeal that drew him like a magnet and made him itch to touch her, hold her as he had for a few moments that morning when she had literally fallen into his arms, and caress the soft curves of her high breasts, small waist and enticing hips.
