AFTERGLOW (7 page)

David looked alarmed, and Elliot said sharply, "She won't starve, David. Remember the forty dollars."

When Elliot dutifully related the conversation to his wife that evening over dinner she burst into laughter. "You, Elliot Mallory, are a born intriguer! Now all I've got to do is work on Chelsea. I've got a week, you say?"

"Yeah, if David doesn't break down and have groceries delivered to her house."

"That was really a nice touch," she said, marveling at his abilities. "Now you just leave the rest to me." She paused a moment, and he knew she was listening. "That, if my radar isn't off today, is the sound of your son demanding his dinner."

Elliot rose, hugged her against him and said, "Let's go marvel over the little devil together, okay?"

Mrs. Cambrey, their live-in nurse, appeared at that moment. She smiled. "You heard him, I guess?"

"Oh, yes, Anna. Why don't you go relax? Papa and I are going to do the honors."

"You two do too many of the honors now," Anna said. "I'm getting lazy and fat."

"It'll be my turn tomorrow," George said. "I'm going to pig out at a Mexican restaurant with a very dear, starving friend of mine."

George eyed Chelsea speculatively as she sipped her spritzer. It was a beautiful clear day, and they were lunching at Chelsea's favorite Mexican restaurant in Mill Valley.

George had waxed eloquent about her perfect son for a good fifteen minutes, giving Chelsea time to down one glass of white wine.

"I understand you're working under a deadline," George said, finally changing the subject as she crunched on a tortilla chip. "Hmm, yummy hot sauce."

Chelsea blinked. "You know I'm not. Where did you ever get that idea? I'm in the middle of the third book of the San Francisco trilogy."

"Oh, dear," George said, looking guilty, "I forgot. Forgive me, Chels. Have you decided what to order yet?"

"George," Chelsea said, bending her patented stare on her friend, "come clean."

"I think I'll try the macho burrito, with beef, not chicken. Come clean? It's just a silly misunderstanding, I'm sure. It's just that David told Elliot he wanted so much to apologize to you, and you told him you didn't have the time for him."

"So I lied," Chelsea said, shrugging elaborately. "I told you how obnoxious he was, George. Apologize, beans! That eastern uptight idiot probably doesn't know the meaning of the word."

"What do you think, Chels? Do refried beans come with the lunches?"

"George," Chelsea said in her most menacing voice. She had to put her flame on simmer because the waitress came up with a big smile and her pencil poised over her order pad.

"Another white wine for my friend, please," George called after her a moment later, as she left with their orders.

"Now," George said, "let me tell you something maybe you don't know about David." Unlike her husband, George was a firm believer in Machiavellian means. After all, she'd taken good care of her brother, Tod. Well, maybe not completely, but
…

"I don't want to hear anything about that jerk!"

"It seems that what he said, the way he reacted to your joking around, was all the result of his first wife. It seems that once, when he had just finished a thirty-six-hour shift as an intern, he wasn't able
to …
well, perform. His wife laughed at him."
Dear heavens, I should be an author! Brilliant!

If Chelsea were wearing socks, she would have been startled out of them, George thought. Indeed, she seemed so upset that it didn't occur to her to think it unlikely that any man would admit to nonperformance, much less to a woman laughing at him about it.

"But … but I wasn't laughing at him! How could he have thought that? We were joking around, talking about necking and Mark I and Mark II heroes, and we ended up on the sofa. All I did was nibble on his neck—maybe not all that funny, but I was kind of nervous. I just did a tiny bit of my Dracula routine. George, for heaven's sake, I'm not used to lying around with a man on top of me."

I wasn't, either, until Elliot.
She said in her most consoling voice—at least she hoped it was consoling—"Poor David, he's so lonely, you know. You must realize that he misses his kids something awful, and he works so hard. Sometimes eighteen hours a day, Elliot told me."

Chelsea sat back in her chair, her white wine in one hand, her chin propped up on the other. "You know, he did very well with my crazy friends that night. And he was amusing, and funny. I just never thought that
…
well
…"

"Exactly," said George. "Ah, here's my macho burrito!"

Chelsea stared down at her nacho plate, but for one of the few times in her twenty-eight years she didn't have any appetite for her beloved Mexican food. "I've been a jerk," she said. "His wife
laughed
at him?"

"So sad," George said, shaking her head as she cut enthusiastically into her burrito.

Chelsea said in a glum voice, "I'll just bet he doesn't call me again."

"Well," George said brightly, "perhaps it's just as well. Maybe it's true that opposites don't attract, or shouldn't, in any case. Hand me the hot sauce, please, Chels."

Chelsea frowned at her, wondering how she could be so utterly insensitive. They weren't really opposites, after all.

"Hello. Chelsea?"

She gripped the phone tightly. "Yes. David?"

"Yes. I was wondering if maybe you were finished with your deadline."

"As a matter of fact I sent the manuscript off just this morning," she said with great untruth. "How are you, David?"

David blinked at the phone. He heard a man shouting at an intern in the emergency room and quickly kicked the door to the small lunchroom shut with his foot. She sounded happy to hear from him. "I, uh, would you like to have dinner with me? Now that you're not under any more pressure from your publisher."

"When?"

"Uh, well, how about tomorrow night? Do you have a favorite place?"

Elsa opened the door at that moment. "Dr. Winter, we've got a motorcycle accident."

"I'll be right there." To Chelsea, he said quickly, "Emergency, I'm sorry. I'll pick you up at seven o'clock, all right?"

"That would be grand," Chelsea said, and smiled, a sweet, tender, understanding smile, as she gently replaced the receiver. Poor man, she thought, looking with a bemused smile at the now silent phone. She'd been insensitive to him with all her joking around. But she had been nervous. She sighed. To be honest with herself, for once, her thinking continued on a rueful smile, she hadn't had that much experience with men, and the little experience she'd had, had left her lukewarm, if not cold. Only heroines in her novels enjoyed sex. Only heroes, spun from her optimistic imagination, were perfect lovers. And how was she to deal with a man whose wife had laughed at him when he couldn't "perform," as George had put it? She shuddered. Even her heroines—although never faced with such a circumstance—certainly wouldn't laugh! No, her heroines would be loving and caring and full of tender concern.

Oh, hell! Reality simply wasn't like what went on in her novels. David was right about that. But for that matter, reality wasn't what was portrayed in his damned Westerns. Stupid, pigheaded man!

Chelsea rose and walked out the front door, yelling back to Sarah, who was making a salad, that she was going for a walk. She crossed Bridgeway and walked down the road that led to the sailboat docks on Richardson Bay. San Francisco and Marin were the most beautiful spots in the United States, she decided. The day was perfectly clear, and when she walked out on the farthest dock she could see Alcatraz and San Francisco in all their glory. She wondered where David's sailboat was berthed.

After a few moments of indulging in the scenery Chelsea began to plot, something as natural to her as breathing. Why not, she thought, consider writing a follow-up trilogy using the children of her current heroes and heroines? She wasn't usually big on sequels because of all their pitfalls—such as heroines now in their forties or fifties still with eighteen-inch waists—but it was something to think about. She remembered how the trilogy had gotten started, all from the fan mail she'd received for one novel, touting the hero's brother. And he, bless his heart, was now the hero in the first of the trilogy.

Chelsea continued wandering, thinking about the young heroine in her current novel. Her name was Juliana—Jules, for short—and she was in for a tough time. Now what should I do once I have her married to the hero? How will he act toward her? Paternal? Benevolent? Yes, of course, that's obvious, but next she
…

The blast of a car horn brought her out of her plotting fog.

"Watch where you're going, lady!"

She hadn't realized that she'd stepped off the curb into the oncoming traffic. She shouted out a "Sorry!" and scurried across the street. I know. She'll want her husband to love her, but doesn't know how to go about it. Then Byrony and Brent will get into the act, along with Chauncey and Delaney. Then there's the obsession Wilkes has with her. Ah, endless opportunities—

She stretched out on a blanket in her front yard and plotted away the afternoon.

"You look gorgeous," David said smiling down at Chelsea the following evening precisely at seven o'clock. "You haven't lost any weight, have you?"

She cocked her head. "That's always the least of my problems," she said. "How are you, David? Are you dreadfully tired?"

"No, not really. Today wasn't particularly slow, but it wasn't a madhouse, either."

She patted his arm. "I'm glad. You don't want to wear yourself out. You look very fine. I don't think we should waste your finery on the place I was thinking of. Have you ever been to the Alta Mira?"

He hadn't, and was duly impressed by the panoramic view from the hotel dining room windows.

David ordered a very expensive Chablis, looking briefly toward Chelsea to see if she approved. She did, and beamed at him.

Lord, he thought, forcing his eyes down to the ornate menu, she looked lovely tonight. He liked the clingy dress, but wondered how she managed to get around without stumbling and killing herself on the three-inch high heels she was wearing. Maybe, he thought, she wanted to come up to his chin. Her black hair was fluffy and soft-looking and framed her pixie face adorably.

"And the seafood salads are delicious," Chelsea said after a while. He'd had enough time to study the menu through three times!

David set down the menu and smiled at her. "Why don't you order for me? I'm a sucker for seafood, particularly shrimp or crab. Ah, and here's the wine. Why don't you taste it? You're the one with the expert taste buds."

Chelsea tasted, approved and ordered for both of them. She sat back in her chair, feeling suddenly shy. She swallowed, then began her tour guide rundown on the sights they could see from their table.

"You keep your fingernails short. I like that," he said when she'd finally ground to a halt with Strawberry Point, just across Richardson Bay from them.

"Oh," Chelsea said, curling her fingers under. She hadn't filed her nails in an age. "Well, it's hard to type with long nails."

"It would be pretty hard on my patients if I didn't keep mine short, too," he said.

"I don't know," she said thoughtfully, a dimple appearing on her left cheek. "If the patient were particularly obnoxious, you could slip just a bit."

He thought of just such a particularly obnoxious man who'd come into the emergency room yesterday with bruised knuckles from a fight and complained because he'd had to wait for thirty minutes. He took another sip of wine, then said cautiously, "I understand that in your profession, your money doesn't come to you regularly."

"That's right," Chelsea agreed. "I call it a bolus of bucks when it does arrive."

"Bolus? Do you know what a bolus is?"

"Sure, it's a big shot of something you give to a patient who needs the something very quickly."

"You got that from Elliot, right?"

"Yep. I'll have to tell George that Elliot has indeed been good for something."

He didn't know what to make of that, but he was tenacious and wasn't to be sidetracked. "Are you expecting a bolus of bucks soon?"

"Why?" She cocked her head questioningly. "Do you need a loan?"