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Brandon perked up. “Can I answer the door?”
“No, I’ll do it.” She uncovered the phone and lifted it to her ear, intending to beg Mrs. Ham to watch the boy for just a few minutes, but it slipped from Elizabeth’s fingers and clattered to the counter. When she picked the phone up, she saw that she’d turned it off by mistake.
“Auntie!” Brandon nagged.
This was why she lived alone. To keep to herself. Oh, God, she felt like weeping. How was she supposed to manage sharing her time when she was just so greedy for privacy?
It couldn’t get any worse.
Her nephew tugged on her shirt. “I think it might be Jon Farell at the door.”
Jon? Her patient from the morning, with the beautiful blue eyes?
“I asked him to come,” Brandon said softly.
But it couldn’t be. It just could not be.
* * *
JON WAITED IN THE LOBBY, wondering if Lizzy was home. But at last he heard her voice answer from the intercom:
“Yes?” She sounded frazzled. In the background, the Scooby-Doo theme song played on a television set, a blast from his past.
That made him smile. “Hi, Dr. LaValley. It’s Jon Farell. Ah...I hope it’s okay, but Brandon asked me to stop by. I’m dropping off the autograph I promised him.”
“Jon! Jon! I knew you would come!”
A buzzer sounded, and Jon was on his way upstairs. She waited for him in the hallway before an open door, the light from an apartment shining behind her. Also behind her was Brandon, bouncing from side to side in his stocking feet, and wearing the huge grin of a typical, energetic eight-year-old glad to see his sports hero.
Jon felt relieved. The kid really didn’t look sick with cancer. Maybe he was okay?
Lizzy closed the door behind her so she was in the hall alone with Jon. “You should not have come,” she said to him in a low voice. Her face was pale. For the first time it occurred to him that this wasn’t a good idea to stop by unannounced.
“Sorry.” He held out a game ball he’d grabbed from his car for her nephew. He gave Lizzy his best “Mr. Helpful, I’m a Good Guy” smile, but she didn’t seem to be buying it. He shrugged. “I promised Brandon. The ball is from my last start of the season, against Toronto. We won.”
But New York had won their game, too, so the Captains hadn’t made a wild-card slot into the play-offs. Still, Jon had done his part, and Brandon, numbers kid that he was, should appreciate Jon’s stats from that outing.
“When did my nephew give you my private address?” she asked, not taking the baseball he offered. Her arms were crossed, and she was rubbing them, as if worried.
“Ah...Brandon and I talked in the recovery room. He asked me to stop by tonight to deliver an autograph for him.”
Her eyes grew huge. “Brandon was in the recovery room?”
“It’s okay, Lizzy. Lots of local kids are baseball fans. He probably just heard I was in the hospital, and he came to check it out. I’d have done it, too, at his age.”
“I did not give you permission to come to my house, and do not call me Lizzy.”
He gazed down at her. Why this woman intrigued him so much, he had no idea. She was buttoned up so tight—or in her case, zipped up, with a gray fitted turtleneck sweatshirt that went right up to her chin. He couldn’t help staring at that zipper pull, swinging back and forth from the force of her flustered breathing, and then he looked at her mouth.
Bow-shaped lips, without a speck of gloss or lipstick on them. They weren’t all plumped up, either. They were good, old-fashioned naked lips, and he would love to—
“Jon Farell!”
His gaze jerked to her face.
“Are you even listening to me?” she asked.
“Yes.” And she had said his name correctly, so that was a good sign. He smiled at her again.
Before she could react, pounding started on the other side of the door. Lizzy put her head in her hands.
“Let Jon Farell in, Auntie!” Brandon yelled.
“It’s okay,” he said to Lizzy. “I’ll give him the autograph I promised, then I’ll leave.”
“I don’t want you inside with us,” she hissed. “You can give the ball to him in the hallway, out here.”
“Sure.” He shrugged. “If that’s what you want.”
“It is what I want.”
“Auntie!” came Brandon’s muffled yell.
She seemed to cringe. “And furthermore,” she whispered to Jon, “you’ll tell no one you’ve been here, do you understand? I am a private person, and I find your public lifestyle abhorrent.”
Abhorrent, that was a big word just to say she didn’t like it.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” he said gently. “I won’t tell anyone I was here. And it’s not like I’m Brad Pitt. I don’t have paparazzi tailing after me everywhere.”
She still didn’t seem mollified. “I value my independence.”
And then she opened the door a crack and said to Brandon, “Please watch your TV program and be patient. Just give us a moment.”
There was her problem—she was too formal and too much of an adult with the kid.
She turned back to Jon, her gaze narrowed. “I do not want my name associated with a public person, do you understand?” Again, that whispering, as if he were a criminal at her door.
“I will honor your rules.” He crossed his arms now, to match her stance. “Remember though, you were the one who left me a coded message. In the recovery room. And your instincts were right. The lab called me already—it’s not cancer.”
Her breath expelled. “That’s...good.” She was nibbling those naked lips again, just like this morning. “That’s very good.” Her expression had softened.
“What about you?” he asked in a low voice. “Have you heard about Brandon?”
“No.” She sighed. “But I’ll be shocked if the test results aren’t favorable.”
“Why do you say that?”
She let out a breath, and her eyes darted from his face to his chest. She was starting to open up now ever so slowly, and it was fascinating to watch.
“It turned out my sister was being overly dramatic in thinking the cancer was recurring,” she said.
“Wow. That’s gotta be hard for Brandon.”
“He doesn’t suspect anything. He thinks it’s just a sleepover.” Again, that frown.
He squinted at her. “And you’re not comfortable with that?”
“I’m used to living alone.”
“Auntie!” Brandon was through being patient; he resumed his hammering on the door.
A door opened farther down the hallway. A head popped out.
Jon blocked Elizabeth from view by standing with his back to the curious neighbor. “You should let Brandon out to see me before the neighbors come over to investigate,” he pointed out.
She looked horrified. “Get inside,” she hissed. “Quickly.”
He’d never met a woman like her. Jon was willing to bet she didn’t know many of her neighbors. Holding out his hand, indicating she lead, he followed her inside. He liked the view of her in her street clothes rather than her hospital scrubs. This was the real Lizzy that she hid from the public. He appreciated seeing it.
Inside her apartment—smaller and homier than his, with lower ceilings instead of wide-open windows, and curtains drawn tight—he could see straight away that she’d been in the process of foraging up a meal in the kitchen. The wall cabinets were open, and cans of soup—he saw one labeled chicken noodle—were spread over the counter. An empty pot sat on the stovetop.
Brandon came up behind him, clasped Jon’s elbow and clung to him. Jon stiffened. Not cool, Brandon, he almost said.
“You can give him his autograph,” Lizzy remarked, “but then you have to leave. I need to run out to the store to grab us something for dinner.”
Her mobile phone rang and, flustered, Lizzy excused herself to go answer it.
Jon stared from Lizzy—in the kitchen whispering into the phone—to Brandon.
Maybe the boy just didn’t like chicken noodle soup. His own younger brothers were finicky eaters; one of them had consumed nothing but peanut butter sandwiches until he hit school age. Jon smiled at Brandon and took the boy’s hand. He thought again about telling the kid that it was a bad idea to grab a pitcher’s throwing arm—sort of like tugging on Superman’s cape—but given the kid’s and his aunt’s riled-up emotions, he figured he would let it go. The kid had been through enough. “I brought over the autograph you asked me for. Plus a game ball from my last start of the season.”
Brandon brightened. “That was your Toronto game!”
“It was.”
“I watched the whole thing on TV! My mom let me stay up late.”
“Are you behaving for your aunt tonight?”
Brandon scratched his head. “I’m hungry.”
Jon sat on the couch and motioned for the boy to sit beside him. He noticed a half-written grocery list on the coffee table. Lizzy obviously wasn’t used to having people drop by her house unexpectedly, like he was. She probably didn’t cook much for herself, either—too many long hours at her job. He could certainly relate.
Lizzy was still murmuring into her phone, in a low voice. She was flustered and out of her element with her nephew and him in the house. While she spoke on the phone, she glanced nervously at them, then opened her refrigerator and stared inside.
Jon smiled quietly at Brandon. His experience bringing up rambunctious younger brothers had taught him that if he acted calm, they were more likely to follow his lead and act calm, too.
“So you’re staying here for the night?” he asked Brandon.
The child nodded. “Do you want to see my room?”
“In a minute. For now, I’m wondering why you’re not in your pajamas. It’s pretty late. Do you have school tomorrow?”
Brandon brightened. “I didn’t go today, but Auntie is driving me tomorrow. I’m going to tell everybody I met you.”
“You can do that. But you know, it would really make me happy if you made things easy on your aunt. She works hard. Did you know she took care of a problem with my catching hand today?” Jon held up his bandage.
The kid looked awestruck. Jon’s wound did look impressive, all wrapped up like Frankenstein’s finger. It throbbed, too, but he was going to overlook that for now.
“It’s important you sit still and not bump it,” he told Brandon. “That way it will heal properly. Do you think you can do that?”
Brandon’s eyes widened. “Are you on the D.L?”
Disabled list. Jon smiled to himself. Yeah, this kid was a baseball fan. “I wish. That would mean the season wasn’t over for us yet.”
“I wish the season wasn’t over yet, too. Because then you could get tickets for us. We could sit in the players’ box and watch you pitch, couldn’t we? We could be on TV.”
“Ah...” The kid was a live wire, that was for sure. Jon stood and motioned for Brandon to follow. Jon would do this small act to help her, and then he would leave. Now that he knew Brandon was probably okay, he was feeling much better. “Let’s get you into your pajamas so you can eat dinner and go right to bed afterward for your aunt. Does your mom like you to take a bath at night, or do you do that in the morning?”
“I take a shower in the morning,” Brandon said. “But I don’t have my toothbrush with me. I forgot it.”
“We’ll add one to your aunt’s shopping list. What kind of toothpaste do you like?”
“The blue kind.”
“What’s that? Bubble-gum flavor?”
“Excuse me, Mr. Farell, but the five minutes is over and you’re going to have to leave now.”
He and Brandon stopped talking and stared over at Lizzy.
You’re in my bathroom, she mouthed to Jon, obviously annoyed.
Yeah, he was. But if anybody needed help with the boy, she did. Maybe it was time she removed that bug she carried up her butt.
Slowly, Jon straightened to his full height. “Brandon’s going to get into his pajamas for you, and I’m gonna take your shopping list and grab us all something for dinner. Then I’ll get out of your hair. Is that okay with you?”
She pulled him angrily aside, out of earshot from Brandon. He got that he was overstepping his bounds, and that she was probably going to throw him out the door, into the hallway.
Still, he rather enjoyed the feeling of her palm, curled into a fistful of fabric from his T-shirt and pulling him around the corner into her...bedroom.
It was Spartan. Too Spartan. A plain cotton comforter, beige walls, miniblinds. Not a throw pillow in sight. No television. No comforts or interesting things to look at. Certainly no silk ties, lubricant or sex toys...
“I,” she said, jabbing a finger to his chest, “can take care of my own nephew. Alone.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you can. All I’m doing is helping you.”
“Auntie?” Brandon said, standing plaintively in the doorway.
