Flirting with the Society Doctor / When One Night Isn't Enough (25 page)

Wanda giggled again. “Oh, Mikey,” she said a moment later, her words ending in a moan.

Just great. Here she stood caught like a fish on a hook, forced to listen to the man she’d planned to marry make love to the woman he’d chosen over her. To make the situation all the more nauseating, Wanda was a moaner. The only bright spot was that Michael made love like Speedy Gonzalez on stimulants. The torture would be over quickly.

Not quick enough to suit Ali, however, who spent the minutes of their lovemaking continuing her futile efforts to escape the filing cabinet’s clutches. By the time the conference room door closed behind the lovebirds, not only was Allison still stuck but she’d managed to twist and turn to the point that the lower portion of her dress was now bunched up around her hips.

The conference room door opened again.

She held her breath.

It closed.

Her body tense, she listened, waited for someone to walk in and find her, braced herself for the questions, the laughter. Her heart rate shot up. But she heard nothing. No footsteps. No voices.

She sighed with relief, but still had to free herself. Now. Before someone stumbled upon her. Freedom was all that mattered.

Then it happened, like it usually did whenever her desperate need to escape a situation overrode her capacity for rational thought: she did something that would inevitably make the situation worse.

In a fit of desperation, she yanked and tugged and pulled with all her might, until the side seam of her dress split open, a portion of her skirt still stuck.

“No,” she cried out in frustration. A week’s salary, fifty hours of bedpans, IVs, catheters, dressing changes, medications and back-breaking patient transfers destroyed as efficiently as if she’d used scissors to hack her paycheck into hundreds of tiny, unidentifiable pieces.

“Ali?”

Ali recognized Jared’s voice instantly. She froze, near tears.
Please, please, please, not him, not now.

The rear door to Lyle Crenshaw’s office creaked open. Bright light blazed from the overhead fixtures. Allison
squinted in response, trying to hold the side of her dress closed with one hand, splaying her other hand in front of her hips, seriously regretting her choice of panties, knowing the translucent pale pink thong she wore left her lower body, for the most part, totally exposed.

His shiny black dress shoes came into focus first. As she lifted her head, her eyes traveled over the black pants covering his long legs, the black tuxedo jacket, perfectly fitted over his broad shoulders, the satiny black bow tie tucked beneath his snow-white shirt collar, finally meeting the peridot-green eyes of Dr. Jared Padget. As good as he looked in a pair of hospital scrubs, strutting around the emergency room, nothing could compare to the man decked out in a tux. His dark brown hair was cut shorter than the last time she’d seen him. He looked smart, astute. He looked hot.

Don’t think like that!
Jared was a womanizer, a toxic pollutant contaminating the dating pool.
No. Don’t think of him as Jared. He’s Dr. Padget. A colleague. That’s all. He is not your friend.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, hoping if she ignored the absurdity of her situation maybe he would, too.

“Looking for you,” he replied innocently. “As if you didn’t know.”

“You have some nerve showing up uninvited.” Unannounced. Unwanted.

“I think you’re pretty lucky it’s me who showed up and not someone else.” His eyes scanned up the length of her legs to her bare hips, leaving a trail of warmth. They paused at her breasts, his heated gaze as effective as a caress, making her nipples harden. They traveled to the spot where her dress connected to the filing cabinet. He had the nerve to smile. “What the heck did you do to yourself?”

Ali looked around for something to throw at him. Never a bowling ball around when you needed one.

“Dare I ask what led to your current predicament?”

She’d been trying to avoid
him!
“Not if you want to walk out of here with all your body parts intact.”

He laughed. “You’re awfully feisty for someone in obvious need of assistance.”

A good point. She let out a deep breath. “Sorry. It’s been a rough night.” And she had an ominous feeling it would get worse before it was over.

He stood there looking at her, his eyes slightly squinted.

“When you’re done staring, do you think you could find a pair of scissors on that desk and cut me loose?” She tugged to show him she was, in fact, stuck.

He continued to study her, tilted his head and ran his fingers over his chin.

“Hello?” Ali waved her hands in front of him. “In need of a little assistance here.”

He snapped back to life. “I think I like you right where you are.”

He interrupted Ali’s protest, holding up a hand to stop her from talking. “Just for a few minutes. I have a proposition.”

“You have got to be kidding me. Your prospects are so slim you’d stoop to propositioning a woman in dire circumstances?” Unable to slap his face after what he’d said insulted her.

He chuckled. “Your circumstances are hardly dire. Are you uncomfortable?”

No, she wasn’t. But … “Yes. Terribly uncomfortable. Release me this instant.”

He scrutinized her face. “You’re an awful liar,” he said.
“Two minutes. I have a few things I’d like to say, and I’d rather not have to chase you around while I do.”

Ali looked at her watch and made like she’d activated a stopwatch feature, even though she didn’t have one. “Okay.

Go.”

“I think we got off to a bad start.”

“Ya think?” Her voice came out laced with sarcasm.

“I’m not going to apologize. Whether you realize it or not, I did the right thing.”

“According to you.” As a result of his actions, Ali was once again alone, with no prospects for the future of contentment she’d hoped to have with Michael.

“I’d like for us to start over.”

“Ah.” Ali nodded. “I get it. No luck getting laid over in Buffalo? You figure I took pity on you once, maybe I will again?”

Jared looked like she’d slapped him. “Once?”

Too late she remembered finding evidence he’d shared her bed the night before he’d left town. “I mean twice.” Shoot. Her “twice” came out more question than statement.

“You don’t remember?”

Ali thought about refusing to answer on the grounds she might incriminate herself.

“Three times, Ali.” He held up three fingers to emphasize his point. “After the bench by the river, when I tucked you into your bed, you dragged me in there with you.” He folded down his ring finger with the index finger on his other hand.

He was big and strong. If he’d wanted to fight her off he could have. Fight her off. How humiliating.

“After the second time, I tried to leave again. You begged me for more.” He folded down his middle finger.

If a giant sinkhole were to form beneath her, it would be perfectly okay.

“And the third time …” He folded down the last finger standing. “Let’s just say I will never again call you Kitten.”

Her face felt like she’d fallen asleep in the midday sun on a tropical island beach. Maybe the erotic dreams that plagued her sleep were actually snippets of memory. Wait a minute. Ali felt sick. Three times? They’d had sex without a condom three times. Because she hadn’t found any wrappers at her condo—she’d checked. Everywhere. If the filing cabinet hadn’t been holding her up, she’d have collapsed down to the floor.

Someone jiggled the front doorknob to the office. Ali spun her head in that direction. It sounded like a group of people stood just outside in the hallway. In his southern drawl Lyle called out, “Hold on there, darlin'. I’ve got the key right here.” The ticking time bomb counting down the seconds to disaster echoed in Ali’s ears.

J
ARED
glanced at the door, then back at Allison, who stiffened, her eyes wide, a look of absolute horror on her otherwise beautiful face. “That sounds like Lyle Crenshaw,” she said.

The key slid into the lock.

“If he finds me like this I will never forgive you.”

Because he hadn’t freed her the minute he’d found her. Selfish ass, so concerned with keeping Ali in one place so she couldn’t run from him, he’d never considered the ramifications of his actions.

The light switch beside them was closest, so Jared dove in that direction, plunging the room into darkness. He’d planned to run for the door to the hallway next, prepared to throw his body against it to push everyone back before they had a chance to look inside, but the blackness slowed him down, disoriented him.

Jared figured he could make it to the entryway in four, maybe five giant steps, assuming he didn’t collide with anything on the way. He tried to map out the office from memory. The desk. The guest chairs. The huge cactus in the left corner. And what if the door swung open before he reached it? Ali would be left exposed, literally, way too much of her creamy smooth skin on display for all to see. That was the last thing he wanted.

The door pushed open. Light from the hallway flooded the far end of the room.

Lyle Crenshaw babbled about his cactus. “I had this giant Fishhook Barrel Cactus species
Ferocactus wislizenii
hauled up here from Arizona. It’s over six feet tall and weighs several hundred pounds.”

“Too late,” Jared whispered, moving in front of Ali, positioning his back to the door so his larger frame would block her from view. Please let this work, he prayed as he slid close until her full breasts flattened against his chest, until his hips met hers. He opened the sides of his tux jacket and she ducked inside. God he’d missed the feel of her. For five long, lonely weeks she’d invaded his thoughts. At work. At home. In bed, alone in the darkness was by far the worst, the memory of their night together taunting him, the illusion of her far from satisfying.

The overhead lights came back on.

He pulled her close.

“What the …?” Lyle asked in a shocked voice. “Give us a minute, will you?” Jared faked a cocky calm.

“Hey, I recognize that shoe,” a man that sounded like an outraged Michael said. “Allison, is that you? What do you think you’re doing, Jared?”

Assorted voices spilled in from the hallway.

“What’s going on?”

“Who’s in there?”

“Why isn’t anyone moving?”

A man called out, “Dr. Padget from the E.R. is doing Ali Forshay in Crenshaw’s office.”

Ali’s forehead banged against his chest.

“Put down that cell phone, you jerk,” a woman said.

“Get out,” Jared yelled, fiercer and louder than he’d meant to. It took all the willpower he could muster to keep
from storming the doorway and beating every last one of them until their eyes and mouths were swollen shut, and they had no memory of what they’d just heard. But Ali clung to him, her hands gripping the lapels of his jacket.

Lyle sounded enraged when he said, “You’ve got five minutes.” He slammed the door shut behind him.

Jared didn’t move. Neither did Ali.

He tried to lighten the mood. “You know, we could …” He swiveled his hips, knowing she wouldn’t agree, half hoping she would.

“No, we can’t.” She flattened her hands on his chest and tried to push him away. “What on earth compelled you to do that?”

He stepped back. “I was trying to block you with my body so no one would see you. I was being gallant, sacrificing myself to protect you. How was I supposed to know someone would recognize your shoe?” What a mess.

“Michael,” she almost growled. “He couldn’t remember my birthday or the combination to my locker at work, but he remembered my one pair of outrageous heels.”

“Those are some sexy shoes,” Jared agreed. The stiletto heels had to be at least three inches high, with one thin strip of plum-colored leather at the base of her toes and thin, matching straps crisscrossing from her heel midway up her bare calf. She had long, smooth, slender legs that were the topic of many of his dreams, and splendid curves partially wrapped in a short, once form-fitting, plum-and-lavender-colored dress.

A deep purple chopstick held her light brown hair in a seductive knot. He fought the urge to yank it and watch the waves fall loosely around her shoulders. “Have I told you how beautiful you look tonight?”

“I can already hear the gossip,” Ali said, ignoring his
compliment.
“'Did you hear about Ali Forshay? Sex in Lyle Crenshaw’s office. She’s just like her mother.'”

Who’d been caught having sex with Ali’s high school principal in his office. “Would you rather have been found half dressed all alone in the dark? Because I’ve got to tell you, either way you were destined to be the topic of conversation.”

“Thank you for your insightful observation.” It was obvious from her deadpan tone she was not amused. “If you’d unhooked me as soon as you found me, this never would have happened.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it more than any apology he’d ever uttered. “I didn’t think …”

“No. You didn’t.” Ali twisted around and yanked her dress so hard the filing cabinet wobbled.

He steadied it then swatted her hands away. “Let me do that.”

“Now you’re ready to help me?”

He set to work trying to do just that, once again praying, this time, that he hadn’t ruined his chances for a four-week reconciliation.

“Why did you come back to Madrin Falls anyway?” she asked.

“I wanted to see you.” Talk to you, cheer you, banish the memory of your anguish from my brain. Okay. So he wasn’t a total altruist. He also wanted to hold her, kiss her and make her scream with pleasure. Again. And again and again. “I thought it’d be nice to ring in the New Year together.”

“You said you make it a point not to work at the same hospital twice in one year.”

To avoid the snare of ongoing relationships, of expectations he never seemed to meet, no matter how hard he tried, and disappointment in himself and others as a result. Yet
here he was, unable to decline Madrin Memorial’s offer of another temporary assignment, unable to pass up a chance to spend more time with Ali. “It’s a good thing I happened to be here, don’t you think?”

“I’m not one hundred percent sure I wouldn’t have done better on my own,” she muttered.