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Joyce made another loud tsking sound. “I don’t do nearly enough.”
“You’re here and that frees me to work without worrying about what kind of care Momma is getting. That’s huge.” As she thought about how different life would be without someone she trusted to care for her mother, Carly’s eyes misted. “If I don’t say thank you often enough, please know how grateful I am that I met you while doing my clinical rotation at the nursing home where you worked.”
Joyce’s eyes filled with love. “You say thank you about every other breath, and you know the feeling is mutual. Gerald and I love you and Audrey.” The woman hugged Carly in a big bear hug, gathered her belongings, and got ready to leave. “Don’t work too late into the night. You have to rest, too, you know.”
Carly nodded. She worked a side job for an insurance company going through medical claims. The more claims she processed, the better her extra pay. While sitting next to her mother’s bed, she’d work late tonight, processing as many claims as she accurately could.
“See you bright and early in the morning,” she told the woman she truly didn’t know what she’d do without.
Carly peeked in at her mother, saw she was resting, and went to the bathroom to grab a quick shower. When she’d finished and was dressed in old gray sweats and a baggy T-shirt, she checked her mother again, then went to make herself a sandwich before logging into the insurance company’s website.
Work waited. It always did.
But when she went back into her mother’s room, Audrey was awake.
“Hi, Mom. How was your day?” Some days her mother would answer. Some days her mother just stared blankly.
“S-same a-as a-always-s.” Although slurred, her mother answered, which made Carly’s heart swell. Did she know who Carly was today?
“Mine, too. Busy, busy, busy. Some of my patients are the same ones I mentioned to you last night, but I did have a couple of new ones.” Carly never gave names or identifying information, but chatted about her patients. She tried to make her stories interesting, to give her mother a link to the outside world as often as she could.
Audrey rarely left the house these days. When she did it was usually to go to a doctor’s appointment.
Before Carly knew it she was telling her mother about walking in on the new surgeon and how he’d been holding his patient’s hand, comforting her.
“I-i-is h-he h-h-handsome?”
“Gorgeous,” she admitted. “He’s also very kind and funny. The man makes me smile.”
Realizing she was going on too much about Stone, she glanced at her mother.
Her mother who was staring oddly at her. “Y-you l-like h-him?”
Oops. Not the first time today she’d been asked that.
But, unlike at the hospital, to her mother, she nodded. “He seems like a great guy.”
“Y-you sh-should g-go out with h-him.”
Her mother knew her. If she thought Carly was Margaret, she’d be scolding rather than encouraging her mother to cheat on her father.
“Mom, he’s a doctor. I’m a nurse. How cliché can you get?” She tried to keep her voice teasing and fun and similar to conversations they might have had during Carly’s teenaged and college years when Carly had dated, when she’d been wrapped up in Tony and thought he was her forever person. “Besides, Stone’s way out of my league.”
“Wh-why?”
“Because he’s such a great catch.”
“S-so a-are y-you.”
“You, my dearest mother, are the tiniest bit biased.” Carly stood, bent over and kissed her mother’s cheek. While her mother was with her, really with her, Carly wanted to milk the moment for every precious second. “Truly, he’s out of my league. Even if he wasn’t, it would never work.”
“Be-because of m-me?”
“Of course not,” Carly gasped. Never would she want her mother to think such a thing, never would she want her feeling guilt over Carly taking care of her to the exclusion of everything else. It was a privilege to take care of her mother. One Carly treasured and had never thought twice about...until Stone.
Darn him. That he made her discontent with the status quo was enough that she should dislike him.
“To-Tony,” her mother began.
Despite the slight thrill that her mother’s memory was working at the moment, Carly stopped her. “Tony was an idiot and I was lucky to be rid of him.”
She was. Any man who couldn’t understand that Carly had to take care of her mother, that her mother came first, well, he needed to hit the road. She’d needed Tony’s support; instead, he’d resented everything about Audrey.
“Tony has nothing to do with why Stone and I would never work. He and I are just not physically or economically compatible. That’s all.”
“I-if h-he th-thinks that then y-you are b-better off wi-without h-him.”
“Exactly.” Before her mother could talk more about Tony or Stone—why on earth had Carly mentioned him?—Carly launched into a tale about another patient, exaggerating to make the recounting more entertaining.
Because tonight her mother looked at her and saw her daughter. Sometimes that wasn’t the case.
Sometimes it was all Carly could do not to cry.
Sometimes she did cry.
But not tonight. Tonight she smiled and enjoyed talking to the weak woman lying in the hospital bed that took up a good portion of the bedroom.
Tonight her mother was mentally her mother.
* * *
“Any regrets?”
Having just stepped out of a patient room, Carly spun toward the sound of Stone’s voice near her ear and almost collided with him.
“About what?” she asked, stepping back because of his close proximity. He wore dark navy scrubs that made his green eyes pop.
She glanced up and down the empty hospital hallway. Although the nurses’ station was within view, no one was paying them the slightest attention.
“Not going to dinner with me last night.” His voice teased, but his eyes asked real questions.
“Not a single one.” The truth. She prized the evening she’d spent with her mother until she’d dozed off and Carly had worked on insurance claims late into the early morning hours.
Stone’s sigh was so dramatic someone should give him an award. “Pity.”
Despite knowing the best thing was to walk away, to not encourage him in any shape, form, or fashion, she couldn’t resist asking, “Why’s that?”
His gaze locked with hers, sparkled like an emerald sea. “We’d have had a good time.”
She rolled her eyes. “Spoken like a true man.”
“Meaning?”
“Men automatically think you getting to spend time with them means you’ll have a good time.” Tony had thought that. “That’s not always the case, you know.”
His grin was quick. “We should test that theory.”
Step away, Carly. Don’t get pulled in by his charm.
“By?” she asked, unable to follow her own advice, and wondering how long they could linger in the hallway prior to someone taking notice.
“Going to dinner with me tonight.”
Her gaze met his. “I’ve already told you no to going to dinner tonight.”
“That was yesterday. Today’s a new day.”
“My answer hasn’t changed.”
“It should.”
Rosalyn stepped out of a patient room, glanced toward Carly and Stone, and stopped to stare.
“That’s a matter of opinion,” Carly quipped.
Obviously, Rosalyn’s opinion ran more along the lines of Stone’s. Grinning big, she gave a thumb up.
“Your opinion is that you should deprive yourself of dinner with me?”
“Deprive myself?” Carly snorted, then shook her head at Rosalyn. “I’ll survive just fine if we never go to dinner.”
Turning, Stone shot a grin at Rosalyn, who smiled back, then headed toward the nurses’ station.
“You won’t know what you’re missing.”
Shifting her weight, Carly squinted at him. “Is that supposed to bother me?”
His eyes flashed somewhere between serious and teasing. “It should.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s something between you and I.”
Her breath caught. She felt it. He felt it. Thoughts of her mother were all that kept her from throwing herself at the mercy of whatever he wanted. She had no time for a relationship, no energy for a relationship. Everything she had, and more, was already claimed.
“You’re wrong.” She smiled tightly. “There’s nothing I want from you.”
“Why don’t I believe you?”
Because I’m a horrible liar and usually pride myself on being a person who tells the truth, but with you...
She didn’t want his pity. Or his rejection if he felt the same as Tony had.
“I don’t know,” she replied, not meeting his eyes. “Why don’t you?”
“Because you’re not telling the truth.”
She hadn’t expected him to call her bluff, and her gaze shot to his. “How dare you say such a thing?”
“Because it’s true.”
She lifted her chin in indignation, partly feigned, partly real, at his arrogance. “So your word gets taken as the truth, but not mine?”
“In this case, yes.”
“What an ego you have, Dr. Parker.”
“Stating facts doesn’t make me egotistical.”
Carly put her hands on her hips and glared at him with the sternest look she could muster. Not an easy thing to do when he was grinning at her with his brilliant smile and twinkling eyes.
“Is there a point to this conversation?”
“Just enjoying your company.” His tone was teasing, but the glint in his eyes said he told the truth.
If she were honest, she’d admit she was enjoying his company, too. Which was ridiculous considering what their actual words were. Was she really that desperate for any scrap of his attention?
“I’ve work to do.” She glanced down the hallway and caught Rosalyn and a nurse’s aide watching them.
“Am I interfering with your work, Carly?”
“Yes.” Carly’s head hurt. Or maybe it was her heart.
“How so?”
“You’re distracting me.”
His eyes danced. “You’re admitting you find me distracting? Finally, we’re getting somewhere.”
She bit the inside of her lower lip, then shook her head. “Dr. Parker, I shouldn’t be having lengthy personal conversations while on the clock.”
“Which is why you should go to dinner with me tonight. We could have lengthy personal conversations to our hearts’ content.”
She wanted to. She wanted to say yes, go to dinner with him, and stare into his eyes all evening. Longer.
But, even if she could, how unfair would that be to him? Very. To lead him, or anyone, on was wrong.
She should tell him, should apologize for smiling when he sat with her at break, for laughing at his corny jokes, for looking at him and longing for things outside her grasp.
