A Wife For Dr. Sam

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Coralie shut her mouth but seemed unable to shift her mind’s gears onto a different subject, so Kirsten managed a big smile and answered for her. “You bet. The scrambled eggs and bacon are still warm on the back of the stove, and Coralie made the most mouth-watering banana muffins.”

She pushed back her chair and stood up. “Sit down and I’ll fix you a plate.”

Amber waved her away and giggled. “Thanks, but we have rules around here. Anyone who’s not at the table when meals are served has to wait on themselves.”

Kirsten held up her hands in mock surrender. “Sorry. I wouldn’t dream of breaking any of the rules, so if you’ll all excuse me I’ll go back to my quarters and finish settling in.”

She started walking toward the back door, when Coralie’s voice stopped her. “Kirsten, I’ll be finished up here in about an hour and then I’ll come over. I want to talk to you. We have a lot to catch up on.”

Kirsten got the message. “Great. Bring a couple of those muffins and I’ll put the teakettle on.”

It was nearly ten o’clock when Coralie tapped on the door to Buck’s little house. Kirsten had spent the intervening time pacing the floor, berating herself for being so out-spoken about her dislike for Sam and wondering if she’d done irreparable harm to her treasured friendship with Coralie.

She hurried to open the door and admit her friend. “You don’t have to knock,” she said. “After all, this is your house.”

Coralie stepped inside. “It may be owned by the family corporation,” she acknowledged, “but it’s the home of whomever happens to be in residence at the time, and right now that’s you. I wouldn’t violate your privacy by just walking in.”

Kirsten uttered a wry, little laugh. “Believe me, my life’s an open book—or door as the case may be. Shall we sit over here on the sofa?”

They walked across the living room and sat down on the brown velour couch. There was also a rust-colored lounge chair and a deep leather easy chair, as well as a console television set and assorted small tables. A brick fireplace dominated the side wall, and a picture window took up most of the front one.

Coralie crossed one jeans-clad leg over the other and tried to appear relaxed, but the nervous twisting of her hands gave away her unease. Kirsten, also wearing jeans, had taken off her shoes and tucked her feet beneath her.

Coralie was the first to speak. “I…I’ve been thinking about our earlier conversation, and I’m so sorry if my good intentions seemed more like meddling—”

“No, Coralie, please,” Kirsten interrupted. “It wasn’t like that at all. It’s just that neither Sam nor I are ready for a long-term relationship with anybody. Even if we were, it wouldn’t be with each other. The chemistry’s just not right between us.”

Coralie looked thoughtful. “It’s not just you. It would have been that way with any woman I tried to fix Sam up with. I should have known better than to interfere in his hermitlike existence.”

Kirsten regretted that she’d made her friend feel guilty. All Coralie had done was introduce a man and a woman who were good friends of hers, and whom she was sure would be compatible.

“Don’t blame yourself,” Kirsten said gently. “You had no way of knowing Sam and I would be so antagonistic toward each other.”

Coralie shook her head. “That’s just it. I should have known. As I said before, it’s not you personally that he dislikes, it’s the fact that you’re a woman.”

Kirsten gasped. “You mean he doesn’t like women! But why would you—?”

Coralie looked as startled as Kirsten felt. “No, no, I didn’t mean that,” she hastened to say. “He likes women, but the one he fell in love with betrayed him and broke his heart.”

Kirsten sank back against the sofa. “Oh,” she exclaimed on a sigh. “You mean he’s divorced?”

“No, they’d been engaged for several years, but were waiting until he finished his internship before getting married.”

Kirsten found that hard to fathom. “But why—”

Coralie made a face. “Don’t ask me. Still, it’s not as if they were celibate all that time. They lived together while he was in medical school.”

Kirsten made a gesture of frustration. “I’ve never understood cohabitation. When a couple lives together, they make a strong commitment to each other whether they realize it at the time or not. They have most of the obligations of marriage but none of the legal protection, so why not take the vows?”

Coralie chuckled. “Hey, Ms. Old-Fashioned Gal, come on down off your soapbox. I’ve heard your fiery rhetoric before. In fact, as I remember, it was aimed at me once.”

“Yes, and you took my advice. If you’ll remember, you thanked me for it later. Said I’d saved you from making a big mistake.” Kirsten looked away, embarrassed. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to preach. I just hate to see any woman allow herself to be put in a vulnerable position.”

“Well, don’t worry about Belinda,” Coralie said emphatically. “She was the one who broke it off and took Sam for everything she could. I don’t have all the details. He never talks about it, so all I know is what Jim’s told me and what I’ve learned from gossip the local citizens were eager to impart. In a small town like Copper Canyon everybody knows everybody else’s business.”

Kirsten’s curiosity was nagging at her. “Well, for heaven’s sake,” she said impatiently, “what happened?”

“It’s a long story,” Coralie began. “Her name was Belinda Evans, and her and Sam’s parents were close friends, so they’d known each other all their lives. They’d been best friends in elementary and middle school, sweethearts in high school and lovers in college. I gather that it wasn’t until his last year in medical school that the trouble between them erupted.”

“But if they were so much in love, why didn’t they get married?” Kirsten repeated.

Coralie rolled her eyes. “I told you, I don’t know. You know how college kids are. They like to be independent. Maybe Sam and Belinda were rebelling against authority, or maybe they wanted to make a statement. Who knows. I asked Jim one time and he said he didn’t know and hadn’t asked, implying that it was none of anybody else’s business.”

Kirsten smiled sheepishly. “Yeah. Well, I have to admit he’s right…So go ahead. What happened to break them up?”

“When Sam started medical school in Chicago, Belinda went along with him and they set up housekeeping together. The idea was for her to work and help support them, but her college degree was in humanities, which didn’t qualify her for much of anything unless she did graduate work. She had trouble finding a job, and when she did find one it was as an entry-level salesperson in a department store at only slightly above minimum wage.”

Kirsten was puzzled. “I understood Sam’s father was a physician. Couldn’t he pay for his son’s schooling?”

“Well, yes, he could and did,” Coralie explained, “but physicians in small communities aren’t as well paid as those in the cities, and the tuition to medical school is terribly expensive. Sam didn’t want to burden him with Belinda’s living expenses, too. After all, there were other children in the family who had to be educated.”

“Yes, I see,” Kirsten said. “Was it their financial problems that caused Sam and Belinda to break up?”

Coralie frowned. “No, actually it was the long hours of work and study his training required that finally did them in. She was lonely, irritable and desperately unhappy, when so many of his nights as well as his days were spent at the hospital.

“He tried to explain to her that this was the type of thing all medical students went through and there was nothing he could do about it, but by then she was beyond reason and started accusing him of seeing another woman.”

“She didn’t!” Kirsten protested. “Students always work gruelingly long hours in medical school and during their internship, to say nothing of residency if they decide to specialize.”

Coralie shrugged. “Not everyone knows that,” she pointed out. “You and I do because we also studied in the medical field, but Belinda had no such frame of reference. Her dad’s a blue-collar worker who got excellent technical training in an apprenticeship program but never went to college. She got a degree, but chose easy courses and only studied hard enough to get by. According to Jim, she didn’t really want to work. She wanted to marry a wealthy man who would support her.”

“Lazy, wasn’t she,” Kirsten muttered through tight lips. She’d heard enough to thoroughly dislike this woman.

“Afraid so,” Coralie agreed, “but according to Jim nobody dared say that to Sam. Jim tried it once and nearly got his head taken off. Sam was blindly in love and couldn’t or wouldn’t see her faults.”

“So what finally happened?” Kirsten prodded again.

Coralie’s tone and expression deepened to sadness. “Sam came home to their apartment one night to find Belinda gone. She’d taken all her things with her and left a note saying she couldn’t live the way they were any longer.”

Coralie’s voice broke. “He had some critically important exams coming up in the next few days and couldn’t take time off to track her down and beg her to come back. By the time he found her a couple of weeks later she’d married a man who, he learned belatedly, had been keeping her company during the long hours when Sam was at the hospital.”

A surge of compassion for Sam temporarily displaced the anger Kirsten had been feeling. “What a rotten thing for a woman to do to a man!” she said indignantly. “He must have been devastated.”

“He was,” Coralie confirmed, “and he never got over it. Oh, he doesn’t dwell on it, but neither has he had anything but superficial relationships with any woman since. That’s why I was so eager to get you and him together. You’re so right for each other, but obviously he wants no part of it.”

Kirsten’s tender heart hurt for Sam, who had been so badly treated by this spoiled and selfish woman. She wished she could hold him, comfort him, take away the lingering pain, but that was her nurturing instinct reacting, not her good sense.

In fact, it was all the more reason for her to steer clear of him. She was too vulnerable to him, too empathetic to his anguish, and she sure didn’t want to get mixed up in that quagmire!

“You can’t blame him, can you?” Kirsten said. “He might never completely trust a woman again. I wish I could help him, but I can’t. Nobody can, until he admits he needs it and asks for it.”

She paused for a moment and softened her tone. “And, Coralie, you’re not doing the women you set him up with any favor by trying to interest him in another relationship. He’ll just drive them away like he did me.”

Coralie opened her mouth to say something, but Kirsten hurried on. “This is a problem he needs to work out on his own or with a counselor. You know that. We both had lots of psychology classes in college. Enough to know when we can help with a patient’s emotional problems and when we can’t.”

Finally Coralie got a word in edgewise. “As you said, I know all that, and I certainly wouldn’t try to involve him with just any woman, but you’re special and I have this gut feeling that you’re the one who can restore his belief in the female gender and teach him to love again.”

Coralie’s statement pushed the wrong button in Kirsten. “That’s nonsense!” she railed. “And besides, I don’t want to have to ‘teach’ a man to love me. If my future Mr. Right can’t fall in love with me without help, then I don’t need him.”

She realized she sounded strident and lowered her voice. “I don’t want warmed-over love, Coralie. That’s a surefire road to hell. I want a man who will cherish me because he can’t help himself. Who will marry me because he can’t imagine life without me. Not one who thinks of another woman every time he makes love with me.”

Chapter Four (#ulink_f486efa0-3486-55bc-988b-c5616b07e3a7)

Kirsten spent the remainder of the morning on the phone reporting the accident to her insurance company in California, then helping Coralie prepare dinner, which in the rural areas of Idaho was the big meal served at noon. According to Coralie, it always consisted of meat, potatoes, gravy, vegetables, salad, bread and butter and dessert. The night meal was a smaller one called supper, as Kirsten had found out yesterday.

Jim and the hired man, Will Tucker, came in promptly at noon, washed up, ate ravenously and then Will went back to work while Coralie and Jim disappeared upstairs for a little while. Not long enough for any serious lovemaking, but when they came back down they looked flushed and happy.

They obviously adored each other, and Kirsten felt a twinge of envy. Was there a man out there somewhere who would love her as much as Jim loved Coralie? She hoped so, but that kind of devotion was rare and precious.

Not many people were blessed with a soul mate.

By two o’clock Coralie and Kirsten had finished cleaning up the kitchen, and Kirsten was exhausted. She’d gotten up with the rooster at five, and the hours since had been busy and exciting, but tiring. She hadn’t quite realized how thoroughly her energy had been drained by her illness, and even though she’d followed her doctor’s orders and taken it reasonably easy driving from Eureka, the two and a half days on the road had been debilitating.

She excused herself to go back to the cottage and take a nap. Coralie not only agreed, but insisted that she rest until suppertime, which was just fine with Kirsten. She was asleep within minutes after she stretched out on the bed, and didn’t wake up until the phone rang nearly three hours later.

It was almost as jarring as the rooster had been, and she woke with a start. “Hello,” she mumbled fuzzily into the speaker.

“Kirsten?” It was a man’s voice and sounded vaguely familiar. “This is Sam Lawford. Did I wake you?”

Sam? Why on earth would he be calling her? She’d been under the impression that they had said a very unmistakable and permanent goodbye last night.

“What is it you want, Sam?” she snapped, still groggy from sleeping so soundly. “Yes, you did wake me, but that’s all right. If I’d slept any longer, I’d have had trouble sleeping tonight.”