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The little girl yawned and stretched. “But I’m tired, Mommy,” she protested, still half-asleep.
“You’re at school, honey,” Patrick said. “It’s time to go in. Who’s your teacher?” he asked.
Brown eyes—thank God they were brown and not blue like Annabelle’s—rounded in panic. Then the panic subsided and she nodded. “Miss Elephant.”
Patrick raised his eyebrows. “Miss Elephant?” He considered the list of pre-K teachers. “Oh, you mean Miss Ellison?”
“That’s what I said,” the little girl told him, sweeping by him in the grand manner of a queen. “Miss Elephant.”
Patrick got up on creaky ankles and knees and watched her go.
He checked the rest of the seats. The bus was empty save for the two defiant, sulking boys. Patrick shepherded them down the steps.
“We gotta go to the office? So what?” Royce mouthed off. “All the principal’s gonna do is suspend me from taking the bus for a week. Fine by me. That way I won’t have to put up with dorks like him.”
The Holmes kid bristled anew. For a second, Patrick thought the two would go at it again.
Jack Harrison, the principal, came out on the sidewalk, a petulant expression on his face. “Do you realize you’re ten minutes late?” he said. “Ten minutes! And some of the students were telling me there was a fight!”
Patrick swallowed a retort and presented the two boys to Harrison. “They’re all yours. Don’t know what it was about, but I expect you can sort it out.”
Harrison stepped back and peered at the students’ faces. “Good Lord! Well, don’t just stand there! They need medical attention. That one has started bleeding from the nose.”
Patrick didn’t bother suppressing a roll of his eyes. “C’mon, fellas. Appears you get to visit the school nurse.”
“See?” Royce said in a singsong voice. “Told you we wouldn’t get in trouble.”
“Now, that’s where you’re wrong,” Patrick replied. “Because I’m not just a substitute bus driver. I happen to be chairman of the board of education, and I can make certain that you, mister, won’t have to put up with other students for just a week. I’m thinking a month’s suspension from the bus. Nah. Two. Nah. Maybe for the rest of the year.”
The fight went out of Royce. “Oh, man,” he moaned. “My mom is gonna kill me.”
Patrick was sure he saw begging in the Holmes kid’s eyes. Satisfied that he had the boys’ attention, he pointed them toward the nurse’s office. “Time to visit the new school nurse. Good thing for you two Nurse Nellie had to retire. Hope the new one doesn’t have any more of that stinging antiseptic Nurse Nellie liked so much.”
T O BE AN OCTOPUS !
Dana Wilson pushed aside the thought and pressed into service the only two arms the Lord had seen fit to give her.
“Here, Ritalin for you,” she said, edging a pill cup over to a rail-thin kid, “and a lovely dose of Zithromax for you.” The liquid sloshed in the cup as she handed it to a pint-size girl with dreadlocks.
“You’re not supposed to be saying what we take,” the older kid admonished. “It’s the law or something. We’re not even s’posed to be in here at the same time. Our old nurse handed out meds to us one at a time.”
Dana quashed a snort of incredulity. Of course she knew that. But try holding back a wave of kids. No thanks to the prankster who had locked her out of her clinic this morning, she was doing well to get the right pills in the right squirmy little bodies before those bodies zipped off to class.
Now, why am I putting up with this? Oh, yes. Kate. One beautiful blue-eyed angel baby—although I can’t call a three-year-old a baby anymore .
Dana’s line of kids waiting for morning meds stretched out the door and down the hall. Well, waiting might create the wrong impression. They shuffled, fidgeted, jostled one another, picked at the staples on the poster of a big laminated hand exhorting them to lend health a hand by actually washing their own hands.
If Dana didn’t get them out of her little clinic soon, they’d be late for class and she wouldn’t have a staple left on that bulletin board.
“Hey! Cut it out! Leave those staples alone!” she yelled as she noticed one kid steadily slipping a fingernail under an already loosened staple. The gesture of the newly positioned middle finger wasn’t difficult to discover. Of course, she could be wrong. This only her third week at the school. She was still getting over how many kids needed morning meds after the school-issued breakfast.
The Ritalin and Zithromax dispatched, Dana called out, “Next!”
But before any other patients could step up to her counter, a man rounded the door and stopped short at the line.
“Whoa. We got an epidemic I don’t know about?” he inquired.
Dana couldn’t remove her eyes from his face. How absurd, plain absurd, to focus on a man’s face to the point when you could look nowhere else. But the last place she expected to find a man that handsome was in a small-town elementary school. With his silvered dark hair, movie-star white teeth and intense blue eyes, he had a face made for a cologne ad.
His voice, though, held a south Georgia twang and his clothes—khakis and a worn chambray work shirt with some sort of logo on it—tagged him as a native of Logan.
A parent? A teacher? The guy did have two kids by the scruff of the neck.
“Oh, my gracious! What happened?” Dana had managed to take her eyes off his face long enough to see obvious injuries. “Bring them on in and I’ll have a look.”
In quick order, she had a pack of ice on the little kid’s eye—Mike Holmes, he’d said his name was—and was tilting the bigger, surlier boy’s head forward, ordering him to pinch his nostrils together.
Only then did she dare return her gaze to the man who’d brought the two boys in.
She found his dark blue eyes assessing her with more than a little interest. At her regard, he spoke up. “They got into a fight on the bus.”
A bus driver? Man, oh, man, she wished they’d had bus drivers like this when she was in school. But no, she’d had all the oogy ones.
Dana yanked her brain back from its descent into a hormone lovefest. Marty had been that good-looking in his own way, and when the going had gotten tough, her ex-husband had run as though demons were after him. So why imbue a guy with wisdom just because genetics had graced him with a gorgeous face?
Mr. Gorgeous stretched out a hand. “Patrick Connor, substitute bus driver and sucker—once, but nevermore.”
She couldn’t accept his extended hand because she was occupied with the two young combatants. Just as well, because she sure knew where casual little handshakes with the likes of Patrick Connor led.
“Um, hi, I’m Wilson Dana—I mean, I’m Wana—” Oh crap. Why wouldn’t her mouth work for a simple introduction?
He chuckled. “Can I help you? You seem a little swamped.”
“Someone locked me out of my clinic—” The morning announcements over the intercom interrupted Dana and she fell silent in response to the loud “Shh, shh” she heard from the students still in line. They weren’t shushing her; they were taking the opportunity to shush one another. She used the moment of calm to hand out the next round of medications.
The medicine assembly line went quicker now, and Dana managed to dispense the meds in record time. She double-checked her list, ticked off the last name and breathed a sigh as the door shut.
“That bad?”
“I had no idea kids could be so inventive.” She leaned against the bulletin board. “I thought that after three weeks I had run the gauntlet of every practical joke a kid could come up with. Maybe I’m not cut out for this job.”
She was rewarded with a frown as Patrick surveyed the room as if inspecting it. The frown eased a bit, but concern still tightened his forehead.
“So things aren’t settling down for you?” Patrick asked after that moment of inspection. “Your résumé said you could run trauma codes in big-city emergency rooms with one hand tied behind your back. Our superintendent figured that operating a little old school clinic would be a breeze.”
The two boys rolled their eyes and snickered.
Dana ignored the noises. The man’s familiarity with her set all inner alarms on full alert. Maybe new school nurses were hot gossip in a small town like Logan.
Again, he must have read her expression. “Sorry. When I’m not completely screwing up bus routes and letting kids like these pull each other apart limb by limb, I manage a glass company and am chairman of the board of education. I voted to hire you—on the principal’s and superintendent’s recommendations, of course.”
Dana couldn’t subdue the cringe overtaking her. The chaos in her office this morning created exactly the wrong impression she wanted to give the powers that be. She swept the clipboard and other paperwork littering her desk into as tidy a pile as she could.
“No, no, things are settling down nicely. It, uh, just, takes time, I guess.”
Patrick skewered her with a stare. She dropped her gaze first to her messy desk, and then swiveled it to the floor, to the copy box of office things she hadn’t gotten around to unpacking. Only the loud ticking of the clock and the boys’ renewed snickers punctuated the silence. If she could have departicalized and slipped through the molecules of the floor, she would have.
Patrick cleared his throat, obviously preparing for a speech of some sort. To occupy her hands and give her some reason not to meet his eyes, Dana once again shifted the items on her desk from one pile to another.
“Ms. Wilson, could you stop that? It’s driving me nuts.” His voice was sharp.
She met his gaze, her pulse pounding in her ears, and prepared for the worst.
CHAPTER TWO
P ATRICK C ONNOR WAS moving his mouth again, but Dana couldn’t focus on his words because of the humiliation humming through her veins. Fired. She was going to get fired.
She saw his frustration and knew he realized she wasn’t paying the slightest attention. She bit her lip and covered up the action by turning to the two malingerers still lounging in clinic. “Boys, out. You’re okay. I’ll put your visit slips into your teacher’s box, all right?”
They went, grumbling, and Dana recovered some of her composure. She forced a smile at Patrick. “You were saying?”
“Oh. Yeah. Just wanted to be clear that you knew how important getting daily status checks on our asthmatic students was. Nellie prepared weekly reports for me.”
Bureaucracy. Red tape had a way of slithering around you until it nearly strangled you. Dana sighed. “Sure. The principal mentioned it to me, though I think daily checks for every asthmatic student we have are a little much. I was hoping we could scale back to perhaps an as-needed basis.”
Patrick’s eyebrows lowered a fraction of an inch, and his eyes cooled ten degrees. “The board and I would like to be certain our students are okay. It wasn’t that much trouble for our other nurse.”
Way to go, Wilson. She had wowed him with her disorganization, and now she was questioning his first request. She didn’t see the need for the twice daily checks, but she did see the need for food on the table, and that meant keeping her bosses happy. “Of course. You still want morning and afternoon checks, correct? Or can we—”
“Yes. Morning and afternoon checks.”
“For all twenty-four asthmatic students?”
“All twenty-four,” he confirmed crisply.
“And any new ones that pop up.”
“Especially the new ones that pop up.” Patrick inclined his head. “Well, I’ll let you get back to your day. No doubt you’ve got a lot to keep you busy.” He stared at her littered desktop, then started for the door.
She sighed as she surveyed the mess Patrick had found so offensive. No point kicking herself now over what qualities not to show your new boss. Dana swept the whole mess into the upturned lid of the copy box leaving a clean desk—and a pile of paperwork to get through before the day was done.
He was right. She had a lot to keep her busy.
T HE DAY WAS OVER . Finally. The last bell had rung, the buses had pulled out, the halls were eerily quiet—and her copy box was empty. Dana celebrated by stretching her tired body on the exam table in the clinic. The tissue paper crinkled and snapped under her as she wiggled her backside a little lower.
“Comfy yet?” Suze Mitchell, the school vice principal, asked from where she’d collapsed in the plastic chair at Dana’s desk. “I come in here to find out whether you survived your day, and you’re bent on taking a nap.”
“Ha! On this thing? If I were four-foot-nothing, maybe.”
“How tall are you?” Suze asked. “I’d kill to be anything more than armpit high.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Try being five-ten for a while.”
“You’re just five-ten? I would have sworn…”
The petite brunette cast an assessing eye up and down Dana’s pretzeled frame.
“I am five-ten. Okay…in bare feet…if I scrunch. I’m five-eleven-and-a-half with good posture. Which might explain why I’ve had such a tough time with relationships. Men get weirded out when the gal is taller than the guy.”
Suze chuckled derisively. “Men get weirded out about a lot of things. Commitment. Fidelity. Bank accounts. And even when you find the right man, he still has trouble accepting that he needs to come home every once in a while instead of going hunting and fishing all the time.”
“Tell me about it, sister,” Dana agreed.
Dana had known from the instant she’d met Suze on her first tour of the school a month ago that the woman would be a keeper friend.
She couldn’t explain the connection. It wasn’t just the way Suze had jumped in and found her a new place to rent after the house Dana had thought she’d secured had fallen through. It wasn’t even that Suze reminded her of her big sister, Tracy, who was older by four years but shorter by at least that many inches. Dana’s little sister was smaller than Dana was, too.
No, it had to be the snap of mischief in Suze’s dark eyes—a snap you might miss behind the otherwise professional mask. But Dana had spotted it. And that glint had told her she’d found a kindred spirit.
Suze stretched and yawned, her own weariness from the day showing. “So, if I can be nosy, how long have you and your ex been divorced?”
“Three years.” Dana stared up at the ceiling and calculated when Marty had presented the papers to her with a flourish. “No, make that nearly four.”
“But…” Suze hesitated. The silence hung, awkwardly the ticking of the clock bringing to Dana’s mind the morning’s earlier awkward silence between her and Patrick.
“But what?”
“Well, it’s none of my business, but I assumed your ex was the father of your little girl. And she’s, what, three?”
Dana agreed. It was none of Suze’s business. She didn’t tear her gaze from the ceiling tiles. “He is,” she answered cryptically.
“Oh.”
Dana could hear the thrum of vacuum cleaners starting up in the halls. Trash cans rattled as they were emptied room by room, the sound nearing the clinic door.
Suze made a show of groaning. When Dana glanced the vice principal’s way, Suze wiggled toes she’d liberated from pointy high heels.
“It’s getting better, isn’t it? You? The job?”
Dana groaned for real. “I’m as tired as if I’d worked a full-moon shift in the E.R. on New Year’s Eve. I think I seriously underestimated what a school nurse does. I was darn busy, I didn’t even get a chance to pee. And I had at least two kids in here upchucking.”
“Pizza,” Suze said.
“Pizza?”
“Yeah. They served pizza in the lunchroom today, and we always have kids upchucking whenever they serve pizza. It’s some immutable law. You’re lucky it was only two.”
“Cooks can’t figure out what’s going on?”
