“Where are you going?”
“Adam!” Nikki called. “Adam, please. I need your help down here. My mother fell and hit her head.”
In moments he was on the ground and hurrying toward her. “What happened?”
“I don’t know. She gets these dizzy spells. And this time she fell backward. She hit her head on the floor.”
“She’s conscious?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, calm down. Let me take a look at her.” Adam touched her reassuringly on the shoulder, then apparently got a whiff of himself. He smelled pretty ripe, but so would any guy who’d been working on a roof all day.
Nikki took him inside and introduced him to her mother. “Mom, this is my friend Adam. He’s—”
“Dear Lord!” Her mother fanned herself with a magazine after getting a good look at Adam’s sweaty, bronzed chest and tool belt. “I think I’m going to faint
again.
”
“Mrs. Fine, I’m not a doctor, but—”
“You did stay at a Holiday Inn last night?” Tara said, a tongue-in-cheek reference to the hotel chain’s ads.
“He’s in medical school,” Nikki broke in.
Tara stopped fanning herself and glowered at him.
“I’d like to ask you some questions, if you don’t mind.” Adam knelt beside her and put two fingers to the inside of her wrist.
“You’re training to become a quack?”
“Mom!”
Adam looked taken aback but laughed. “Well, for a lady who just took a big fall, you sure are a firecracker.”
“I don’t believe in doctors.”
“Mom,
stop it,
” said Nikki.
Adam’s eyebrows rose. “Well, it’s a good thing that I’m not one, then, isn’t it?”
Tara eyed him suspiciously, but then her gaze fell to his nude, sweaty chest again, distracting her from his evil future profession.
He took full advantage of this. “So what happened, exactly?”
“I got very dizzy,” Tara told him, “and tried to grab on to something but lost my balance and fell.”
“Did you have a headache?”
“Not really. I do now,” she said ruefully, rubbing at the back of her head.
“Look into my eyes for a moment, okay?”
“If you insist,” said Tara, “but quite honestly I’d rather look at your chest.” She shot a mischievous glance at Nikki.
Adam reddened a little, but he took it in stride. “Hmm. Your pupils are a little enlarged.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well, this is only a quack theory, you understand—” Adam’s eyes twinkled “—but it
could
be a sign of concussion. Mrs. Fine, are you having any double vision or blurriness in your eyes?”
She shook her head.
“Okay. What about chest pain, difficulty breathing, leg or arm weakness?”
Again she shook her head to each question.
“Good.” Adam placed his palm on her forehead. “I don’t think you have a fever…but I don’t like the dizziness, the fall or your enlarged pupils. I’d suggest that we get you to the nearest E.R. and have a real doctor take a look at you.”
“No, no, that won’t be necessary,” said Tara.
“Yes, it will,” Nikki told her.
Tara glared at her. “You know how I feel about the Western medical/pharmaceutical racket. And even if I believed in it, I don’t have the cash—”
Adam once again manfully ignored the insult and focused on the real problem. “Do you have medical insurance, Mrs. Fine?”
“No,” Nikki said baldly. “She doesn’t. It’s an issue.”
Adam looked from her to Tara and back again. “Okay. Hang on a sec.” He dug into his pocket for his phone, pulled it out and stepped into the next room. Nikki heard him speak in a low voice to someone, his tone concerned. He repeated her mother’s symptoms. “All right, thank you. Thanks very much. We’ll come right over.”
He came back into the living room. “I’ve arranged for you to see an instructor of mine. He’s going to meet us at his office. He’s an ENT guy.”
“Another quack,” moaned Tara.
“No, Mrs. Fine,” Adam said firmly. “He’s very good.”
“ENT?” asked Nikki.
“Ear, nose and throat doctor. Your inner ears have a lot to do with your sense of balance, Mrs. Fine. So he’ll be able to test you to see if what you’re experiencing is a little bit of BPPV or something else. He’ll also do a scan to make sure you don’t have a severe concussion. Okay?”
“BPPV?” To Nikki’s relief, Tara seemed to have responded unconsciously to the note of authority in Adam’s voice.
“Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo,” Adam explained. “Quite common, actually.”
“But—”
“There won’t be any charge. Look at it this way—he’s a teacher, I’m a student. You’re my very own quack case study. How about that?”
Reluctantly, Tara smiled at him. Then she nodded.
Nikki lost her own balance at that moment. Because she fell hopelessly, irretrievably in love with Adam Burke right then and there, with no reservations at all.
Forget Aunt Dee’s experience and clichés about starter wives.
I’m going to marry him,
Nikki thought.
Even if, God forbid, Dev is his best man.
24
ADAM AND NIKKI WAITED outside the examination room as Adam’s instructor, the ENT doc, took a look at her mother. Nikki paced back and forth, clearly worried. Even in her oversize T-shirt, jeans, old shoes and batter smears, Adam thought again how beautiful she was.
Women seemed to think they looked their best in full makeup and a fancy outfit, but he disagreed. This Nikki was the real one, the tangible one—as opposed to the fantasy girl who’d jumped out of the cake at Mark’s bachelor party.
“Nikki,” Adam said. He crossed the room and took her hand. “It’s going to be okay.”
She looked up at him, her face pale, her mouth working. She’d chewed a spot on her lip until it had turned angry and swollen, and now she couldn’t stop touching it.
He reached out a finger and ran it gently over the tiny wound. “Hey, stop that. I have a vested interest in keeping your mouth intact.”
That won him the ghost of a smile. “Oh, yeah? And what would that be?”
“Well,” Adam murmured, pulling her closer, “I like to kiss it.” And he did, cupping her face in his hands and doing his best to communicate, wordlessly, how he felt about her.
She broke the kiss first. “Thank you for being so understanding and sweet with my mom. She’s not crazy about doctors, as you may have guessed by now.”
He shrugged and chuckled. “It’s actually a refreshing change to have a girl’s mother disapprove of my chosen profession.”
“Oh, most of them start planning the wedding immediately, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, you definitely won’t have that problem with my mom. Not only doesn’t she like doctors, but she isn’t sold on the whole concept of marriage, either. She feels that she’s done pretty well raising me on her own.”
“I’d have to agree,” Adam said lightly.
“And her sister was married to an orthopedic surgeon, until he dumped her—after she’d helped to pay off all his school loans and had his children.”
“That explains a lot. So I’m literally Dr. Evil to her?”
“You handled her beautifully,” Nikki said, the little diplomat.
“Listen.” Adam drew her to a seating area in the corner. “I want to talk to you about something you said to me.”
“Uh-oh.” Nikki sat gingerly on the edge of a chair. “Something I said when I was mad?”
“Yes. But I deserved it. And I want to explain. You accused me of blowing hot and cold—and I can see how you might have thought that. But I never meant to be cold to you. I guess I just felt that I had to compensate for being so distracted by you. I’d spend time with you and then panic because I had to catch up on studying. I’m very disciplined, but I’m afraid that if I slip up then it’ll create a domino effect—a disaster.”
“Why does it have to be so all or nothing, Adam?”
“That’s what I’m trying to explain. See, I haven’t always been a great student. I screwed up big-time in high school when I fell for a girl and got so wrapped up in her—and partying with her—that I let my grades go. Then I couldn’t get into any of the colleges that had pre-med programs.”
He sighed. “I ended up hating her for it, and that wasn’t fair.
I
made the choices that I did, not her.
I
messed up my plans for my future.”
Nikki nodded. “But it’s true that she distracted you.”
Adam ran a hand over the back of his neck. “What seventeen-year-old kid isn’t sidetracked by his first sexual relationship? You think you’re in love. You think nothing else could possibly matter.”
Nikki’s mouth curved in understanding, possibly memories of her own first love. He found himself fiercely jealous of the unknown boy and pushed away the emotion.
“Anyway. Once I figured out that the sun and the stars didn’t revolve around that girl or my dick, I had to work my butt off in junior college to even get considered for a transfer to a four-year school. I had to work even harder—and do extra courses—to get admitted to the pre-med program. And I swore that I would never screw up my life for a girl again, because I won’t get a third chance at med school.”
She opened her mouth, but he held up a hand. “Just let me say this, okay? So then, Nikki, I met you. I kept telling myself that I didn’t have time for a relationship, a girlfriend. But you weren’t just any girl. You were
you.
Impossible to ignore or forget, no matter what.”
“You tried to forget me?” Nikki asked in mock outrage.
“Yeah, I did. I’m glad it didn’t work, though.”
She smiled and kissed him, but he wasn’t done talking yet. “Here’s the thing, Nikki. I want to see you. I want you to be my girlfriend. But I’m not going to lie—I have very little time and it’s not fair to you. You’d probably be happier with a guy who could get away with you on the weekends and have fun—”
Nikki poked him in the chest. “Hold it right there, Doctor Burke. I do believe you’re misdiagnosing things.”
His eyebrows shot up.
“Don’t you think it’s up to me to decide who I’m happiest with?”
“Well—”
“And besides, I’ll be working a forty- to fifty-hour week, plus researching and writing a business plan on the side. So I may not have as much free time on my hands as you think. Let’s put it this way, Adam—I won’t be waiting by the phone. You might even have to make an appointment to see me.”
He started to laugh. “That’s my girl.”
“Oh, I’m your girl now, huh?”
Adam sobered in an instant. “Oh, yeah. If you’ll have me, Nikki, then you’re
definitely
my girl.”
NIKKI’S MOTHER WAS DIAGNOSED with a mild concussion and a case of vertigo which had been aggravated by an inner-ear infection. Since she double-checked with a local practitioner of Chinese medicine and he concurred, she was willing to concede that Adam and his instructor were among the more talented “quacks” of Western medicine. Both managed a grave thanks and gladly accepted payment in cheesecake and other pastries.
Gib and the rest of the boys not only fixed Tara’s roof, but installed a cat door in the new garden room and cut chicken wire inserts for the indoor planters so that they were no longer attractive feline latrines.
Tara went full-time as a student and gave in, with exasperation, to her daughter’s demand that she finally get health insurance through the university.
Adam ended up a finalist for the Perez scholarship, but was not the final winner. He applied for four others.