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Just please, please, don’t let it be Reid…
Northbridge and Reid.
The place she was afraid she could never come to again without feeling embarrassed and ashamed.
And the man who had grown from the boy she’d had to hurt.
Northbridge and Reid Walker and shame and embarrassment and pain and remorse—no, not a chapter in her life she wanted to revisit.
And she hadn’t thought she would have to.
When her parents had been killed in a boating accident eleven months earlier, Chloe had inherited the house they’d all lived in in Northbridge. The house her parents had employed a Realtor to rent out since they’d all hurriedly left the small town.
But Chloe hadn’t wanted any part of anything connected to Northbridge or her past and so, after considering the financial aspects of selling the place, she’d finally decided to do it.
The same Realtor who had handled the house as a rental property had put the place up for sale, assuring Chloe that selling the old house could be accomplished without Chloe’s personal appearance in town. Which had been the plan.
But once the Realtor had buyers, she’d called.
There was some furniture, some clothes, some Carmichael belongings packed in boxes in the attic. Did Chloe want it all sent to her?
Chloe had considered it. She’d even looked into the cost of having it brought—sight unseen—to Arizona. But the cost was substantial and since she was unsure what she would want to keep and what she would merely throw away, it seemed unwise to bring everything to Tucson only to toss it out there. She needed to go through the things herself before paying to have anything shipped to her.
So she’d resigned herself to making this trip. She’d intended to slip into Northbridge, do what needed to be done at the house and slip out again, not attending the closing. No more than a few people would ever know she had been back where the events of fourteen years ago had been the talk of the town.
But now here she was, brought in by a police officer, her rental car in need of towing after being smashed into a pole. That was a commotion that would never go unnoticed in Northbridge. That was a story that would be told. And repeated. And repeated. Along with the fact that Chloe Carmichael had been behind the wheel.
That was certainly not slipping quietly in and out of Northbridge’s back door.
Best-laid plans…
The curtain that was pulled most of the way around the bed opened just then and Chloe’s eyes shot from the pyramided covers to the person who had thrown it wide.
She didn’t need to read his hospital badge to know who he was, even though he’d changed considerably since she’d last seen him. She would have recognized those staggeringly handsome features anywhere. After all, the younger version of them had materialized in her mind’s eye more times than she could count in the last fourteen years.
“Reid,” she whispered more to herself than in greeting.
He took it as a greeting, though, and responded in kind, “Chloe.”
Well, maybe in kind wasn’t exactly accurate. There was nothing kind in that single utterance of her name. Clearly Reid Walker wasn’t any happier to see her than she was to see him. In fact, if the grim expression on his face and the cutting tone of his voice were any indication, he was even more unhappy than she was. More than unhappy, actually. He seemed ticked off, disgusted, put out and all-round disgruntled.
Probably no more than she should have expected.
Chloe took a deep breath and tried to make the best of a bad situation. “It is you. The nurse said Dr. Walker would be in and I wondered if maybe Cassie or one of your brothers had ended up going to medical school. Or if it was you. Apparently it was you…”
“Apparently.”
Snide. Sarcastic. Downright nasty.
This was not going to be nice.
His gaze dropped to the chart he held in his hands but Chloe had the sense that more than studying whatever was written on it, he just couldn’t stand to look at her.
“Single?” he said after a moment, obviously reading what she’d marked on the papers she’d filled out. “Is there anybody you want notified of the accident? I know your parents are gone—”
“I appreciated the flowers and sympathy card your mom sent. I wondered how she knew—”
“The newspaper ran a small article,” he explained curtly, still looking only at her chart and wasting no time going back to what he’d been saying. “Is there anyone else you want notified of the accident or asked to come here to be with you? Friends? Other family? A boyfriend or fiancé?”
Was he being persistent about that as a matter of course or was he trying to find out if she was unattached?
Given his attitude, Chloe thought it must be a matter of course.
“No, there’s no boyfriend or fiancé or anyone else who I want called.”
He didn’t so much as nod to acknowledge her answer. He merely shot her another question. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”
For a split second she thought he was talking about what had happened fourteen years ago. But of course that wasn’t the case and she realized it a little belatedly. She was in an emergency room. He was her doctor.
“The weather was fine when I left the Billings airport,” she began to explain. “But about halfway here it started to snow. Hard. The roads iced up and even though I was driving at a snail’s pace, the rental car spun out and I hit a telephone pole. The engine died. The doors wouldn’t open. The air bag was in my face. I couldn’t do anything but use my cell phone to dial 911 for help.”
“Any loss of consciousness?”
“No. But the cop who finally got there had to pry one of the doors open to get me out. Once I was out, it didn’t seem like any bones were broken or anything, but he insisted that he bring me here anyway.”
Was she rambling? She was afraid she was. But she was so unnerved both by the accident and by seeing Reid again unexpectedly that she sort of didn’t know which end was up.
“Are you having any pain?” he demanded, deigning to look at her again but with such scorn she wished he hadn’t.
“No, not really. It kind of shook me up but like I said, I’m not hurt. The air bag took most of the impact. There are a couple of scrapes on my arms and a bruise on my knee, but otherwise, I’m fine.”
“I’ll still need to check you over.”
He sounded as if he’d rather walk barefoot through toxic waste—she wasn’t giving him high marks for bedside manner.
Not that Chloe was any more thrilled with the prospect of Reid Walker—of all people—examining her…
“There isn’t another doctor?” she ventured.
“Molly, you want to come in here?” he hollered over his shoulder rather than answering Chloe’s question.
The nurse she’d seen before joined them.
“Is the next shift in yet?” he demanded.
“No,” the nurse answered. “And they may be a while. This storm took everybody off guard—J.T. just called and his car won’t start so he’s walking in. I’d just hung up from talking to him when Shauna called to say her husband had to go out to deal with a frozen water main and she’s having to find someone to come stay with the kids before she can leave home.”
Reid stabbed Chloe with another glance. “And if you want to wait for them you should know that you won’t be seeing a doctor. Shauna is a nurse and J.T. is a nurse-practitioner—they do our overnights and call for help if something too serious for them to handle comes in. Or I can do the exam but have Molly stay in the room, if that makes you more comfortable. Your choice.”
Nothing in the world could make Chloe more comfortable at that moment. All she wanted was to get this over with and slink away from the entire situation. And waiting for another shift to come in in a snowstorm didn’t seem like the fastest route to that.
“What will you have to do?” she asked before she committed to anything.
“I’ll check for head, neck and spinal cord injuries. Check your extremities—” He paused to address the nurse once more. “Did you look for seat belt signs?”
“I did. There weren’t any,” the nurse responded.
“Seat belt signs?” Chloe inquired.
“If there’s been a lot of force against the restraint of the seat belt and there’s bruising, that can be an indication of internal injury,” he said as if any idiot should know that.
“The seat belt unsnapped itself before the accident ever happened. I’d had to take it off. I guess it was lucky the air bag came up when it did.”
“Then we don’t need to worry about injury from the seat belt, do we?”
More sarcasm before the unpleasant physician continued outlining the exam he would need to perform on her.
“I’ll listen to your abdomen with the stethoscope, apply some pressure to see if that causes you pain you might not otherwise be aware of, listen to your heart and lungs. I can do everything on the outside of the gown and I’ll be as hands-off as possible. Believe me, I’ll be as hands-off as possible.”
Because he didn’t want to touch her.
And she didn’t want him to touch her.
Did she?
Of course she didn’t.
So why was it so insulting that he seemed to abhor the idea?
It just was, that’s all. But Chloe tamped down on that to deal with what she was being forced to deal with. “And it won’t take long?” she asked.
“Not one split second longer than it has to.”
So not only didn’t he want to touch her, he didn’t want anything between them prolonged either—that was the message he was relaying.
“Okay,” Chloe conceded reluctantly.
“Shall I go or stay?” the confused-sounding nurse asked then.
“Stay!” both Chloe and Reid said at the same time.
Then Reid added, “Definitely stay.”
As he went to the nearby sink and washed his hands the nurse stepped to the side of the bed, smiling reassuringly but still appearing as if she didn’t understand what was going on.
But then she’d already told Chloe that she was new in town. Which meant that she likely didn’t know that once upon a time Chloe and Reid had been teenagers madly in love with each other.
Until Chloe had turned up pregnant.
And all hell had broken loose.
Chapter Two
Monday morning came to life with a clear blue sky full of sunshine falling on more than two feet of pristine white snow. And Reid was there to see it all because he was awake and out of bed and watching the day break as he stood at the picture window in the living room of the house he and Luke owned together and shared. Directly across the street from the Carmichael house they were about to buy.
But it wasn’t the sunrise or the snow that was on Reid’s mind at that early hour. It was Chloe Carmichael and himself and the past and the present and what a mess everything seemed to have turned into again in the blink of an eye.
It was also the fact that he knew he’d earned a swift kick in the ass for his behavior the night before.
Fourteen years ago Chloe Carmichael, together with her parents, had taught him a harsh lesson in frustration and helplessness.
But fourteen years was a long time. And in the early hours of the morning, once his unreasonable anger had subsided somewhat, he’d decided he wasn’t proud of the way he’d acted the previous evening. And he definitely wasn’t proud of the way he’d treated Chloe professionally.
In fact, while behaving like a scorned adolescent was dumb, not doing what he should have as a doctor was inexcusable.
Okay, so he didn’t think that he’d missed anything during the exam or that Chloe actually had been more hurt than she’d seemed to be. He’d seen enough accident victims to recognize the difference between severe injuries and minor ones like the scrapes on her arms and the bruise on her leg.
But still, he’d gone about the examination at the same inept level he’d gone about his very first patient exam in medical school—he’d been as reluctant to actually put his hands on her as some rookie.
It was just that touching Chloe even slightly had shot him back to a time when touching her, kissing her, holding her, had been almost the only things he’d ever thought about. It hadn’t been something he could do professionally—medically—without remembering that. Without reliving it.
Without wanting even now to do more of it. In a private setting. And in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with his job.
Inexcusable, unacceptable, unwarranted and inappropriate.
And it sure as hell wasn’t the kind of physician he was. Any more than being a surly SOB was the kind of man he was.
Which led him to the conclusion that this had to be fixed.
Not that he was looking to be overly friendly toward Chloe Carmichael at this juncture. Or to rekindle anything. He’d done his damnedest to do the right thing fourteen years ago and it had blown up in his face; he didn’t want to get into anything with her again now.
But as long as she was in Northbridge, as long as he was in the situation he’d discovered when he’d arrived home last night, he’d rather have a temporary coexistence with Chloe that was amicable. And in order for it to be amicable, he knew he had to rise above his old wounds and make the best of things as they were right now.
“Hey. What’re you doing up so early?”
Reid’s brother surprised him from behind and Reid turned to find Luke obviously just out of bed, padding in on bare feet from the bedrooms down the hall.
“You won’t believe it when I tell you,” Reid responded, leaning one shoulder against the cold glass.
“The snow? It was falling before I went to sleep,” Luke said with a nod towards the big plate glass window that was bracing Reid’s weight.
“Not the snow. What the snow brought in with it.”
“Yeah? What did the snow bring in with it?” Luke asked.
“Chloe Carmichael,” Reid said as if he were dropping a bomb.
Bomb enough to wake up Luke. His eyes opened wide beneath arched brows and for a moment he was gape-jawed before he said, “Chloe Carmichael? She’s here? In Northbridge?”
