The Rebound Girl (Getting Physical) (10 page)

She was defending his honor.

And he kind of liked it.

“Whitney, it’s fine,” he said, his voice low.

She whirled to face him. “It is
not
fine. How dare this woman stand there and defend a cheater? Okay, so maybe we weren’t behaving like saints back there, but at least we’re not lying about who we are and how we feel.”

“Whitney.” He waited until some of the anger ebbed away, until her eyes softened just enough that he knew she understood. This one was his call. His ex-wife. His pain. She nodded once.

“Natalie, thank you for your assessment of my condition, but my friend here is right. This has nothing to do with Laura.” Except that wasn’t entirely true. As long as Whitney remained nothing more than his rebound girl, every one of their interactions was a direct retaliation against the life he’d once had.

Natalie scowled and pushed Whitney’s credit card across the counter, making sure their fingers didn’t touch. “She’s still not welcome in here again.”

Matt grabbed Whitney’s elbow and steered her in the direction of the door. Fortunately, they moved fast enough that only a handful of hangers-on by the door caught the stream of lilting, almost sweet obscenities she uttered every step of the way.

Well, and him. He heard each one—and agreed with at least half.

Chapter Eight

“So...that happened,” Whitney explained, wincing as she took a huge gulp of red wine. One thing about Pleasant Park—there were wineries and vineyards in abundance, and most of what they produced was really good. Cheap too. Who knew they were hiding all the best wine out in the country?

“You’re banned from the golf store?”

“The whole chain of them, actually. I’ve been blacklisted so hard I might as well put a scarlet letter on my chest and call it done with.”

Kendra sighed and buried her emotions in an equally oversized glass of cabernet. “This isn’t going to be good for business. You need damage control.”

“What did Dimples say?” John asked. “I can’t imagine that sober smile takes kindly to tarnishing its schoolteacher reputation.”

Whitney frowned into her wineglass. There was no easy way to answer that question.

Naturally, Matt admitted a shared culpability. “
I
was
kind
of
an
active
participant
in
there
,
if
you
didn’t
notice
,” he’d said wryly as he walked her to her car. “
No
need
to
apologize
to
me
.”

And he hadn’t said a word about her outburst against that horrible, uptight Natalie woman. Which seemed about right, actually. One of the things she was coming to appreciate about Matt was that he didn’t try to tell other people what to do. He had his own moral code and adhered to it with an almost frustrating level of diligence, but he didn’t force it on anyone else.

But she still couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d somehow let him down. Herself down. Kendra and John and New Leaf down. Slashing and burning bridges—that had always been her style. Why waste energy placating people she cared about less than fingernail clippings? She could always build new bridges. She could always find an alternate route.

Pleasant Park, though...it was different. There were only so many paths to take here, and encountering the same people day in and day out meant she had to take a good, hard look at the consequences of her admittedly impetuous actions. And to be honest, she didn’t always like what she saw.

What had she gotten herself into, moving here? What had she gotten herself into, taking up with a guy like Matt?

“Dimples is too much of a gentleman to say anything,” she finally replied, purposefully haughty to stave off any further discussion. “He kind of thinks I’m amazing.”

“Well, we’re all happy that you’re settling in with your new boyfriend, but I think you should find something more productive to do tomorrow. You’re bored, that’s the problem.” Kendra looked at her pointedly.

“He’s not my boyfriend.” Whitney ignored the rest of her friend’s statement. “I’m helping him move on with his sexual journey. That’s all. You know, like Beatrice and Dante. Except you replace the seven levels of hell with sexytimes.”

John snorted and held up his glass in a toast. “Here’s to replacing hell with sexytimes.”

“You’re both older than twelve, so please act like it,” Kendra snapped. “I mean it, Whitney. Find something to do other than Matt. You could, you know, volunteer at the hospital or something.”

Whitney’s jaw clenched. Next to the word
boyfriend
, she hated
volunteer
the most, recoiling against it with the force of a thousand black holes. And Kendra knew how she felt about both.

“I’ve already worked out the operating room situation with them. I just have to coordinate with their physician liaison whenever I want to schedule a complex procedure or overnight recovery there, but otherwise we’re all clear—there’s no need to go all Mother Theresa on them in order to grease the works.”

“No one would ever accuse you of
going
Mother
Theresa
,” John said.

Whitney flipped him off. “I’m good at what I do, Kendra. Incredible, actually. I don’t need to prove myself by kissing babies and making nice with the community. So we can drop it now, okay?” She grabbed her glass and stomped to the kitchen, not stopping until she reached the sink. She poured the rest of her wine out, watching the dark red liquid swirl down the drain.

She knew she was overreacting, but she couldn’t help it. Besides her parents, Kendra and John knew better than anyone just how much she didn’t want to start up all the charity work again. As far as she was concerned, she’d done her time—and then some.

For the past twelve years, she’d busted her ass, getting the grades, landing the residency, passing the boards. All she wanted right now was to spend a little time looking out for Number One. And since Number One wanted to kick her heels for a few months, dallying with a nice, cute guy and making no commitments further than a cup of coffee tomorrow, who was she to stop her?

“Stop sulking!” John called, snapping his fingers. “We’re not saying you have to change, Whitney. We’re saying you should probably work a little bit harder on your Plays Well With Others badge. That’s all.”

Whitney slapped on a smile, determined not to let gloomy self-reflections derail her. In the battle of introspection versus Whitney Vidra, she would always put her money on the latter.

“You’re right,” she agreed. “And I’m going to start by letting you pick which Lifetime movie we’re going to watch.”

She took a seat next to John on the overstuffed leather couch. Kendra sat at their feet, her gaze locked on some complex problem neither Whitney nor John could see.

Whitney snuggled closer to John, instantly feeling better. He was big and warm and comfortable, and it didn’t take long before she even felt conciliatory toward Kendra. These were her friends. She had hot sex, great professional success and people who loved her.

What more could a girl possibly want?

* * *

Matt rarely got sick.

He laid most of the credit for it on Hilly’s capable shoulders. At almost a full decade older than her brothers, she’d been primarily responsible for raising them when their mother had passed away in a car accident at the unfairly young age of forty-two. Matt remembered his mother as a soft, gentle woman who always smelled of sunshine and used cookies to bribe them away from dangerous activities like climbing to the roof and daring each other to jump off.

He and Lincoln took after her in a lot of ways, both smaller of stature than they cared to admit and with a distaste of arguments and disorderly scenes. Lincoln, Matt knew, tried to hide it behind his overloud bachelor lifestyle and the gun his job required him to carry. But other than a few rebellious years in which he dyed his hair black and—only once, he swore—wore eyeliner, Matt was content to simply be himself.

Hilly, on the other hand, took after their father, an unapologetically brazen bear of a man who never spoke but barked. Commands, questions, queries about the weather—she didn’t distinguish. In her mind, all communication required complete attention and decibel levels that would endanger anyone subjected to them for longer than a few minutes at a time.

And since Hilly didn’t believe in getting sick, he and Lincoln didn’t get sick. She yelled the germs away.

But not today. Today, his head felt as though it was seconds away from ripping into two, his entire body aching in sympathy with it. He knew, in a vague, swimming-through-water type of way, that he needed to call in sick to work. As this feat sucked away the last of his will to live, he dropped to the couch, which still carried the thrift store smell of unwashed hair and unidentifiable meat products, and reconciled himself to inevitable death.

The pounding on the door came later. Hours, minutes, days...Matt had no real idea of anything except that the apartment was dark and his face pressed so hard down into the threads of his couch he probably had a permanent tic-tac-toe grain on his cheek.

“Mahamanama,” he called, his mouth unable to form any distinguishable syllables. He swung his legs over the side of the couch and promptly tucked his head between his knees, the world dangerously close to tipping on its side.

In the blur of semi-consciousness that took over, Matt recalled a moment, when he and Laura had first been married, that he’d gotten food poisoning from a questionable lamb curry. Even though Laura was squeamish about bodily fluid, she’d been by his side with some sort of vitamin-infused remedy and her cool, efficient hands.

He couldn’t help but feel that if she were here right now, Laura would have gotten rid of the person at the door. She would have force fed him chicken soup until he felt better.

This wasn’t the first time he missed Laura. But it was the first time he realized just how alone he was since he left.

Before he could wallow any more than he already was, the pounding at the door picked up. A glass of stale, tepid water on his coffee table helped alleviate the worst of the nausea, and he’d even gotten so far as to put both feet on the floor and stand when his phone started ringing.

The phone was easily cast aside, but the pounding monster clearly wasn’t going away any time soon. He shuffled to the front door, which was, thankfully, very close—one-bedroom apartments did have their advantages from time to time. He unlatched the lock but didn’t have to pull. The door moved all by itself.

Okay. Not by itself. There was a force on the other side much stronger than wood or air or him.

“I cannot believe you stood me up, you asshole.”

“Come on in,” Matt croaked, gesturing for Whitney to cross over the threshold. She looked chipper and bright, her hair pulled into a ponytail and a wool coat covering a tiny dress the color of a Smurf.

Tennis dress. That was a tennis dress, and she carried a racket under one arm. In his stupor, he’d somehow forgotten he promised to take her to the country club he had a lingering membership to, courtesy of Laura’s family. After the golf store fiasco, Whitney had made him swear to teach her how to play tennis and how to host a tea party—two activities she somehow equated with both him and the ladies-who-lunch crowd in Pleasant Park. He’d been so excited at the prospect of seeing her again, on what was almost a real date, the insulting portion of that comparison hadn’t sunk in until later.

“Oh, shit. You look awful.”

He nodded and kept moving, force propelling him to the couch and allowing him to collapse onto it.

“Are you dying or something?” Whitney followed him inside and stood over the couch, her arms crossed.

“It’s possible,” Matt mumbled. “You’re the doctor.”

“I only ask because that is the sole acceptable excuse for not picking up a phone and calling. Or even texting, for crying out loud. Your fingers look fine.” As if to reinforce her point, she picked up his hand—and then immediately dropped it, moving to place her palm on his cheek instead. “Well, you’re hot, I’ll give you that.”

“Thanks. I work out a little.”

She laughed. “I see your sense of humor survived. Seriously, though. That wasn’t very nice of you. I thought that of all the things wrong with you, not being polite wasn’t one of them.”

“The only thing wrong with me is the flu,” he groaned, sinking farther into the couch. Whitney plopped down near his feet, lifting the appendages and tossing them to the floor to make room for herself. “And it wasn’t my fault I missed the tennis, er, non-date,” he added. “I only just now woke up.”

“Yeah, well.” Whitney reached for his remote control. “You’re lucky I’m not an insecure person—in fact, I have a strong suspicion you’re totally into me. I brought a note. You can check yes or no.”

“You’re funny,” he muttered. The room was beginning to grow a little fuzzy. “So when I stood you up, you decided to stop by my house to aggravate me? That’s the whole plan? By the way...while you’re here, do you think you could get me a fresh glass of water?”

“What am I, your servant?” Whitney clicked on the television, scanning through until she found a Lifetime movie. “Oh, I love this one. The hero travels through time to save his wife’s parents from dying in a horrible car accident, but he makes a mistake and ends up killing his wife before they have a chance to meet. Makes me cry every time.”

Matt blinked and tried to sit up some more but the room spun. “I’m surprised you can cry.”

“Only when the movie is really over the top. I’m a sucker for melodrama.” She looked over and smiled. There was something warm and comforting in that smile. “Relax, Galahad. I’ll grab you a juice and some acetaminophen during the commercial break. You’re not near death yet.”

“How do you know?” he asked miserably.

“Because you’re cracking jokes and kicking me with those freakishly large feet of yours.” She paused, listening for a moment. “And your breathing sounds good.”

“That’s your professional diagnosis?” He settled a little more comfortably on the couch. This wasn’t the kind of sick-time pampering he was used to, but he couldn’t deny that there was no fault to find with the company. And there was something about the brusque, no-nonsense way Whitney treated him that seemed right.

Like
her
.
It
feels
like
her
.

“Shh. This is a good part. He messes up the time-travel machine knobs and ends up in the middle of the French Revolution.”

Matt closed his eyes. “I’m sorry I couldn’t play tennis with you. I was looking forward to it.”

Whitney picked up his feet, which he was having a hard time keeping still, and dumped them in her lap. The warmth of her seeped into his bones, stilling some of the restlessness and making him feel at home for the first time in his god-awful apartment.

“You can make it up to me when you feel better,” she assured him, running her hands firmly over the soles of his feet, her thumbs strong and dexterous where they landed. He should have known she’d be an excellent foot rubber based on the way just a few capable strokes of those hands could reduce him to nothing but about eight inches of nerve endings. “Don’t worry, Matt. I’m not going anywhere. You still have a lot of recovery to do.”