Knocking at Her Heart (Conover Circle #1) (3 page)

“We haven’t discussed it. He’s
working
late again tonight. I’m going to leave him a note.”

Wonderful. Peter Sinclair would
come home after a long day of brain surgery expecting an extra-dry martini and
he’d get a note instead. “I think the two of you need to talk about this.”

“I can’t do that right now. I’ve
booked a short stay at Pierre’s. If he can buy her flowers and underwear, then
he can certainly pay for a few massages and a good facial.”

Maddie let out the breath she was
holding. This was the mother she knew and mostly loved.

“After that,” her mother
continued, “your father will know where to find me.”

How furious would he be? Even if
he was in the wrong, he wouldn’t take well to being left. What if he decided to
teach Frances Sinclair a lesson? What if he said Good Riddance?

What if her mother ended up
staying?

There wasn’t enough chardonnay in
the world to make that better. 

Twenty-four hours later, Maddie
lifted her wine glass. “Happy fifty-fifth, Carol.”

Carol Muldoon shrugged. “Beats the
alternative,” she said. “Man, I love this place.”

Maddie also liked Terratoni’s.
Family owned for generations, they served upscale Italian food and had desserts
that could make a grown woman beg. The place was always busy, especially on a
Saturday night. Maddie was grateful that she’d made reservations. She’d invited
Carol’s husband to join them but Travis Muldoon had left just this morning to
visit his ailing mother who lived in Tennessee. 

They’d been past soup and on to
salad before Carol had given up fretting over Maddie’s hand. The reaction had
been expected. Carol had been working alongside Maddie for four years, since
the very beginning of Kids Are It. She was fiercely over-protective and
unfailingly supportive. 

“Hey, there’s Tom
Holt,” Carol said.

Maddie looked up.
She and Dr. Holt had volunteered for the same library fundraiser a year ago.
He’d been a wild man with the hose, getting the volunteers almost as wet as the
cars they were supposed to wash. Sometime during the day she’d discovered that
Tom and Carol had grown up next door to one another, and that their families
were still friends.

Unfortunately, Tom wasn’t alone.
Dr. Jordonson, who had looked good in a white lab coat and totally hot in blue
jeans and jacket, was two steps behind, looking very professional in his gray
silk trousers and French-blue shirt. 

Tom, balancing a pink drink, a
menu, and a plate of shrimp cocktail, stopped at their table. “Evening,
Ladies.” He extended the shrimp in their direction. Maddie shook her head but Carol
reached for one.

“Thanks, Tom,” Carol said. She
looked past him. “Hi, Sam. Carol Muldoon. We met at Tom’s summer picnic.”

Sam
. His name was Sam. In the middle
of the night, hours after she’d shooed him off her front porch, she’d awakened
thinking about him. She’d blamed her achy hand because there had to be a reason
for the lapse. It had been in the absolute darkness of her bedroom that she’d
spent a half hour staring at her alarm clock, imagining what his first name
might be. She’d thought he looked a little like a Michael but Sam would do.

She wasn’t surprised that Carol
knew him. She knew just about everybody in town.

Sam was smiling at Carol. “Of
course. Nice to see you again.” He shifted his eyes. His smile faded. “And you,
too, Maddie.”

Tom set his shrimp down on the
table. “You two know each other?” he asked.

Maddie held up the hand that
she’d managed to keep in her lap for most of the evening. She tried to keep
focused on Tom Holt, but her eyes, like they had a mind of their own, strayed
back to Sam Jordonson. She stared at his long fingers as they wrapped around
his glass, remembering the steadiness, the gentleness. “He's been doing some
repair work for me.”   

“Best mechanic in town,” Tom
said. 

Sam reached around Tom and picked
up the shrimp plate. “Excuse us, ladies.” He started walking.

Tom shook his head, gave the
women a vague smile, and followed. They were barely six feet away when Carol
said, “Well, that was a little abrupt.”

“He asked me out for coffee last
night,” Maddie confessed. “After he put my stiches in.” 

“That explains it. You said no,
didn’t you?”  Carol looked disappointed but not surprised. 

Maddie shrugged. “I was too
injured to socialize.”

Carol took a big drink of her
wine. She put the glass down. “I don’t think they’re all like your father,” she
said, her tone challenging.

There were times that Maddie
regretted having confided in Carol. She knew more than most people. But because
she meant well, Maddie simply stuck her fork in her cheesecake.

Carol glanced in the direction
that the two men had walked. “I would not have failed to mention that Dr.
Jordonson patched me up,” she added. 

“I didn’t think it was any big
deal,” Maddie lied.

“That man is a very big deal.” Carol
fanned her face with her napkin. “Good grief, Maddie. It doesn’t take much
imagination to figure out that he’s probably got some great bedside manners.”

Maddie rolled her eyes. 

Carol had the grace to laugh.
“Anyway, I heard he’s the reason enrollment in the nursing program is up at the
junior college. They call him Dr. Gorgeous. Dr. G. for short. He moved here
from San Diego last year.”

Maddie put her fork down, then
put both hands in the air, palms up, as if balancing a scale. “Conover,
Wisconsin. San Diego, California.”

“Conover has its pluses,” Carol
said.

Stuck in the less-populated
northern part of the state, Conover was surrounded by rolling hills, dairy
farms, and lakes and rivers that drew weekend boaters like sugar did ants. It
was a peaceful place where neighbors still greeted each other when they walked
outside to get their mail or to water their flowers. There was a quaint
business district and a winding river that separated an equal number of
churches and bars. The houses were big and yards were kept mowed and junk
didn’t accumulate on any curb. Maddie loved it.

But she recognized its
shortcomings. “I hope he knows that he moved somewhere where the ability to
stick one’s nose into one’s neighbor’s business is considered an essential skill,”
Maddie said.

Carol shrugged. “Maybe the good
doctor got tired of 365 days of warm weather. You know County General has one
of the best reputations of any hospital in Wisconsin.”

True. Conover itself boasted less
than two thousand residents, but the hospital served a sprawling tri-county
area. It was the largest employer in a hundred miles. Everybody knew somebody
who either worked or had worked at the hospital.

“Anyway, I heard he’s got a couple
of sisters around here. I’m just surprised he was staffing the Emergency Room,”
Carol added. “He’s an orthopedist. Tom’s group was happy to get him because he
takes trauma call, too. Tom’s other partner, Donald, doesn’t want to do that
anymore.”

Trauma call.
She knew that life. Feeling ill,
she pushed her cheesecake plate to the center of the table.

           
“I’ve heard he’s a good doc. Very dedicated to his career,” Carol added.

Of course. Weren’t they all? She
had to change the subject. “By the way, you’re going to want to be
prepared.  My mother’s coming to visit.”

That shut Carol up. She’d met
both Frances and Peter Sinclair when they’d previously visited. “That’s nice,”
she said finally.

“We’ll see.” She resisted the
urge to tell Carol the reason behind the visit. She had awakened this morning
and steeled herself for the possibility of a call from her father.
Send your
foolish mother home.
Or something along that line.

But he hadn’t called. She
couldn’t actually recall the last time she’d talked to her father on the
telephone. Maybe it had been at Christmas. She’d spent the holiday in Conover
and had dinner with Faith and Dante and several of their other friends. She’d
called home early in the morning and her father had answered. It had been a few
minutes of awkward conversation. They’d covered the weather in Wisconsin and in
D.C.  She’d asked about his work, he’d said it was fine. He had not
reciprocated and asked about Kids Are It.

Then, thankfully, her mother had
taken the phone.

“You’d make her day if she knew
that Sam Jordonson was sniffing around you,” Carol said. She’d heard the
stories about the various physicians that Maddie’s parents had tried to match
her up with over the years.

“Well, we don’t need to worry
about that. There’s no reason for the two of them to ever
meet.”       

*

“What’s your hurry?” Tom said,
giving Sam a push on the shoulder from behind. 

Sam pulled out his chair and sat
down. “I’m hungry.”

 Tom circled around the
table, sat down, and rubbed his chin. “I don’t think so.” He took a bite a
shrimp and chewed. He picked up his cloth napkin, only to throw it down on the
table.

“You asked her out,” he said.
“And she shut you down. I’m right, damn it, aren’t I?”

“I asked her out,” Sam admitted.
Tom could be a bit of an ass, but he had a great deal of respect for the man.
When he’d made the decision to move to Conover to be closer to his sisters and
his niece, he’d been thrilled when Tom Holt and Donald Wainsworth, who was old
enough to be his father, had invited him to join their group.
   

“She was busy,” Sam added. “It
wasn’t a big deal. I only asked her for coffee. It wasn’t a real date.”

“Well, here’s your big chance for
the
real
thing. She’s getting her coat.”

“I’m eating dinner.”

Tom made soft clucking sounds like
a chicken and started scratching his fingernail across the menu, like he was
pecking for food. “Not yet you aren’t. Not afraid, are you?”

No way. 

Tom clucked again.

Sam pushed his chair back from
the table, making the wrought iron scrape across the stone floor. He quickly
walked to the back of the restaurant and when Maddie rounded the corner after
getting her coat, she ran right into him. Literally. He reached out to steady
her and she jumped back, but not before electricity ran up his arm, jolting his
heart. 

“Sorry,” Sam said, dropping his
hands to his side. Had she felt it too? Were her arms still tingling?

“No problem,” Maddie said. She
tried to move around him.

Years of dodging street bullies
kicked in and he got in front of her again. “Look, I was wondering,” he said,
“would you like to go to a movie on Friday?”

Her pretty blue eyes opened wide
and her pink lips formed the shape of a circle. She didn’t say anything for
several seconds.

It made him nervous as hell. All
he could do was stare at her. She did natural very well. Make-up was minimal
and she wore her long blonde hair tucked behind her ears. Her simple black
dress hinted at curves that had been hidden the other night under the ratty
blue robe she’d clenched tight around her and the baggy T-shirt that she’d worn
to the emergency room.

“Maybe we could catch an early
dinner,” he added.

“No.”

“No to dinner or no to
everything?”

“To everything. I have plans.”
Her cheeks had gotten as pink as her lips.

“How about Saturday, a week from
today?” he asked. “If that’s not good, I’m flexible.”  Christ. Any minute
and he’d be bragging about his stamina. “I mean, I have some flexibility in my
schedule.”  

“Sorry. Busy.” 

He might be rusty, but he wasn’t
stupid. “I suppose you’re busy the following weekend, too?”

She shrugged her shoulders,
looking a bit like she wanted to apologize. “I’m sure I will be,” she said.
Then she pushed her arms into her coat sleeves and moved past him.

Tom was laughing, practically
holding his side, when Sam returned to the table. For being a pillar of the
community, he acted like a thirteen-year-old sometimes. 

“Smooth, Sam. Real smooth,” he
said. “The woman ran out the front door.”

Sam shook his head, not bothering
to defend himself.

“Don’t feel so bad,” Tom said,
wiping a tear from his eye. “She shut Mike Smithers down so fast he barely
survived it.”

Sam knew Smithers was an
Oncologist at the hospital. “I don’t understand.”

“She doesn’t date doctors. Carol
told me that.”

 “That’s ridiculous.”

“All I know is that every single
doc and probably some of the married ones, too, have asked her out. Nobody gets
anywhere with her.”

Sam’s pride suddenly felt a
little less bruised. “She’s a busy woman. This weekend wasn’t good for her.”

“Sure.” Tom tipped his glass up and
took a big drink. “And your golf game is just in a temporary slump.”

He sucked at golf.

He hadn’t felt this foolish in a
long time. He hadn’t asked a woman out since Gwen had died. Hadn’t felt the inclination.
But his brief interaction with Maddie Sinclair has jolted him out of
indifference.

Still, maybe because his heart
was still a little bruised, maybe because it always would be, it had taken him
twenty minutes of dawdling on the sidewalk in front of her house to work up the
courage to ring her doorbell. It had taken her two to slam the
door.   

He’d checked her chart. He knew
the facts. She was twenty-eight years old, stood five feet six inches tall, and
weighed a hundred and twenty-eight pounds. Her blood pressure ran on the low
side and she didn’t have any known allergies.

He’d thought of her today. In the
middle of a knee replacement, he’d remembered her comparing Helen to a prison
guard and had struggled to keep from laughing. During a consultation with a
pharmaceutical salesman, he’d remembered her hair. Blonde, with streaks of
almost-white, she had curls she couldn’t quite control.