Authors: Carol Rose
Julia's skin suffused with a sudden flush of warmth.
The clean, familiar smell of him was all around her. Irritated, she reached to turn up the cold water. How the heck did she know how the man smelled anyway? They hardly got within handshaking distance of each other.
Determined to subdue her wayward thoughts, Julia turned into the stream of cool water, letting it rush over her as she scrubbed the residue of grainy cement out of her hair.
If anything, Caleb was more of an irritant than a temptation. From their first meeting three weeks ago, she'd recognized that besides intelligence and skill, he had an unusual attitude toward the employer-employee relationship. He thought he was God, responsible to no one.
When it came to how he ran a project, he was decisive and opinionated, and it didn't matter one speck who disagreed with him.
Unfortunately, it took a fair amount of expertise to handle a building project this specialized. Log home construction experts weren't lined up at her door begging for the job.
If she hadn't needed the man to build the house of her dreams, he'd he out of a job so fast his head would spin.
Julia tugged at the shower curtain where it gaped and went back to scrubbing her hair. Caleb wasn't anything like she'd expected a foreman to be. But she was stuck with him.
Shampooing her hair for the second time, Julia brooded. From the way his eyes lingered on her
,
he clearly had a healthy appreciation of female anatomy. But she'd known from the first that he wasn't thrilled to be building the house for her. He was never rude, but he had made their roles clear. He was in charge, and she was a burden he had to bear.
Regardless, after her clumsy tumble into the cement, she'd have to do battle to get on the lot again. Despite the fact that he'd bumped into her, Caleb would claim she was a liability.
Fifteen minutes later, Julia stepped out of the shower, a turban-wrapped towel on her head and another tucked around her body, barely covering her from breast to thigh. Realizing for the first time that she had nothing to wear, Julia considered the possibilities. There wasn't anything extra in the car today and her clothes were certainly in no condition to be worn.
Stepping out of the bathroom warily, Julia looked into the kitchen. Although the thought of wearing Caleb's clothes against her bare skin was oddly disturbing, she needed something other than a towel in which to drive home.
The kitchen was empty. Since there wasn't a lot of space in the trailer where he could hide, she assumed Caleb had gone back out to work. Tucking the corner of the towel more securely between her breasts, Julia glanced around and saw nothing she could borrow to cover her nakedness.
She was still pondering when Caleb suddenly opened the doo
r and stepped into the trailer.
Startled, Julia jumped and nearly let go of her skimpy covering.
He stood there just looking at her for a long, long moment. IRS audits weren't as thorough as the inscrutable sweep of his eyes. Julia could feel the flush starting from her scalp and spreading down her face. Her shoulders were probably bl
ushing, she thought, as she re-
tucked the towel. Why on earth did such a big man have towels the size of postage stamps? When tucked over her breasts, it barely managed to cover the essentials.
Leaning back against the door, Caleb said finally, "Dr. Adams, you do not make my life easier."
"You were the one who bumped into me," she said, annoyed all over again by the satisfied smirk hovering on his face.
"It wouldn't have happened at all if you'd done as I asked." He straightened from the wall, strolling into the tiny kitchen.
Julia shifted to face him, feeling overpowered in the small space. "You expect me to ask your permission to set foot on my own property?"
"Yes," he answered, smiling enigmatically. "If I'm going to do the job right, I don't need you getting in the way."
"I won't wait till you find time in your busy schedule to make an appointment and walk me through," she retorted.
His eyes darkened as if a cloud had moved over the sun. Few people challenged the man. That much was obvious. His gaze, hard and filled with displeasure, never wavered from her face.
Julia glared back at him. "Has anyone ever men
tioned your tendency to be over-
controlling?"
An almost palpable tension filled the silence that fell between them.
"No," he said finally. "Anyone ever accuse you of being incredibly stubborn?"
"No," she lied, "but I
am known for being tenacious."
The faintest of smiles appeared on his face, a devastating curve of his lips that sent her pulse up several notches. Caleb leaned back against the kitchen counter.
Following the sweep of his gaze, Julia remembered her half-dresse
d state. "Do you have something...
I could put on?"
"Maybe. Let me see what I can find," he said, still smiling as he disappeared down the hall.
He returned a minute later with a blue plaid flannel shirt and held it out to her. The smile was now a definite smirk. "This ought to cover everything of importance."
Julia had an insane impulse to drop the towel. The shock would at least wipe the damn smile off his face.
"Thanks." She took the shirt and, walking carefully around him, went to the bathroom to put it on. The flannel was soft as a whisper against her skin. The shirt was that wonderful age when all the sizing had been washed out of the material and it felt like an old friend. It was long. The shirttail extended below her fanny in the back and covered more of her thighs than the towel had. The sleeves were too long and the top button was missing, but it was still a vast improvement over the towel. She rolled up the sleeves and pulled the collar closer together over her chest before venturing out of the bathroom.
This time when she looked into the kitchen area, Caleb was sitting at the table waiting for her. Sidling into the room self-consciously, Julia pulled at the hem of the shirt, her bare feet fidgeting on the tile floor.
His blue gaze dropped, lingering for a split second on her breasts and peaked nipples before zipping back up to her face. Only then did it occur to her that flannel could be clingy. Faster than the speed of light, her hands dropped the shirt hem and whipped up to tuck, arms crossed, around her chest.
"Maybe I have a raincoat somewhere." Caleb walked slowly around her and headed down the short hall again.
He came back a minute later bearing a beautifully tailored trench coat. It was heavy and expensive, and its presence in Caleb's trailer added one more question to Julia's growing list of things about him that didn't make sense.
He dropped the coat over her shoulders. The thing swallowed her and hung to her ankles. Sliding her arms into the sleeves, Julia tugged it close around her body.
"This is fine." She belted the voluminous material snugly at her waist. "Now I can get home without getting arrested."
"True," Caleb murmured. "B
ut the towel did have a certain..
something."
*
Around him rolled a warm mist, damp and suffocating. He couldn
’
t move with his muscles locked and his feet held rooted to the ground. Despite the mist, the sun glared hot on his head as he stood before the small mound of earth. He tried to turn away but a powerful force held him captive, his eyes pulled to the name on the gravestone. Erin Ashley Langham.
The light above him brightened to a blinding haze, blinding before it dimmed again.
“
Well, Dr. Hayden,
”
a voice mocked him.
“
Do you think you can get it right this time?
”
Now Caleb stood beside a hospital bed in a sterile, white room that smelled of antiseptic-and death. A woman lay on the bed, unmoving except for a pleading hand stretched in his direction. A monitor next to the bed beeped her weak heartbeat.
The voice came again.
“
D
iagnose the illness, Dr. Hayden.
Haven
’
t you done your homework? Hurry. She doesn
’
t have much time. Don
’
t you know how to help her?
”
The paralysis held his voice frozen in his throat. He couldn
’
t respond, couldn
’
t scream out for this to stop. The fear filling Caleb exploded into panic. He wanted to run, to tear himself free of this horror; but he couldn
’
t.
“
Dr. Hayden! Diagnose her! Isn
’
t she a woman who loves you?
”
the voice commanded as the monitor beep slowed.
“
Quickly, Dr. Hayden! Are you going to let her die?
”
Suddenly, the monitor screamed. A thin green line ran across the screen where a blip of heartbeat had been before.
Caleb felt his muscles bunch to leap to the bed, administer CPR, call for the crash cart. But the paralysis held. He couldn
’
t move, couldn
’
t help her!
“
You failed again, Dr. Hayden,
”
the voice sneered.
“
When are you going to learn? I guess we’ll just have to keep trying.
“
The dead woman in the bed faded away before Caleb’s eyes. And in a blink another appeared, alive but just as desperately ill. Just as dependent on him to save her
.
And he couldn
’
t.
“No!
”
he screamed in his head.
“
No! No! No!
”
His yell echoed around him as he came to consciousness in the trailer's small sleeping area. Caleb stood beside the tousled bed, drenched in sweat. His whole body trembled.
Minutes later, Caleb rubbed a hand across his face as he stumbled from the trailer. He stood drawing in the night air, forcing himself to see the darkness instead of the glaring lights in his dream. His bare feet settled into the dirt in front of the trailer, it
’
s cool dampness jolting him into welcome reality.
He was here in an empty meadow, not in an antiseptic hospital room that smelled of death. He was here, three years away from the nightmare. Three years spent forgetting a lovely woman's face. He'd begun to think he'd left it behind him. Until Dr. Julia Adams came along and brought it all back.
He knew from experience that clammy coldness of the dream wouldn't leave him for hours. Sometimes he had to drive all night to shake the demons. Still, anything was better than the horror of seeing Erin's pale, dead face again and again. Ducking back into the trailer, he pulled on a shirt and dragged on his jeans. Shudders ripped through him as the small space closed in. He had to get away. He grabbed his boots and dove into the inky thickness of the night. The haven of his pickup loomed ahead.
Why the hell did Julia Adams have to come into his life? And why did she have to be so damned sexy? Caleb swore as he thrust his feet into his boots. He had to get himself under control, had to forget her and the way her hair looked in the sun. So what if the curvaceous body under her doctor's jacket raised his blood pressure.
Damn her. She brought it all back to him. Not just the white-coated godliness and the distinctive air of a hospital. Or the heavy, crushing burden of his own inadequacy.
Julia brought something else alive in him. Hunger. A restless, eager need that assaulted him whenever she was near, despite the fact that she was as contrary as a mule. He hadn't wanted a woman this way in years.
Not even Erin, damn his soul. If he'd loved her, wanted her the way she'd wanted him, maybe she wouldn't have died.
Pulling into the drive at the lot, Julia turned off the engine and leaned forward, her arms resting on the steering wheel. Before her the ground rose slightly, rolling gently to the structure that now sat in front of the bluff. For two weeks the site had been empty. Today, the floor frame had been completed and a lattice of stock two-by-eights topped the concrete piers, ready for subflooring.
After a moment, Julia got out of the car and shut the door. She walked forward slowly and paused under the pecan tree. The actual house plans had started out as a daydream in medical school. Since childhood she'd known what the inside of her house would look like. The feeling in each room, the sense of home. Every time
her father had moved the family--
her mother packing in tears-
-
she'd told herself it was all right because the house they left wasn't her "real" home.
Julia sighed, feeling the sun's warmth as she moved out from under the shade of the tree. With the workload these last few days, complete with an out-of-season flu epidemic and three midnight births, she hadn't had time to do more than snatch a few hours of sleep. She couldn't think about all that though, when a kid had an earache.