Dr. Dad (4 page)

“I brought brownies,” she said. “I hope that's all right.”

“Brownies,” Lindsey murmured reverently, hovering near the table and gazing worshipfully at Sue. “I
love
brownies.”

“Well,” Toby said, “since I didn't plan dessert—” hell, he hadn't even planned dinner “—it's a good thing you brought some with you.”

“I'll put them in the dining room,” Lindsey offered,
taking the plate from Sue and disappearing from the kitchen.

Toby smiled. Sue smiled. The water resumed its rolling boil, filling the room with a gurgling sound. “I hope you like spaghetti,” he said cheerfully.

“Spaghetti's great.” Her smile was luminous, altering her cheeks and brow, her eyes, her entire body. Did they teach people how to smile that way in acting school? “It was so nice of you to invite me over. It looks as if you've barely gotten home from work.” She gestured toward the tie still knotted tight at his throat.

He grinned and tugged the knot loose. “It was my daughter's idea to invite you,” he confessed, giving the sauce a stir. “It happens to be a fine idea, though.” It was, he realized. Now that he knew she thought spaghetti was great, he intended to relax and enjoy himself.

She gazed around the kitchen, and he wondered whether he should apologize for its clutter. Besides the detritus scattered across the table, the refrigerator was decorated with shopping lists and school calendars. A broom was propped in a corner, left out from when Lindsey had spilled a box of Cheerios yesterday. The pleated shades at the windows had been raised to different heights that morning, and he'd never bothered to adjust them.

But no, he wasn't going to apologize for the disheveled state of the room. He wasted too much energy worrying about whether he ought to apologize to Lindsey for transgressions real or imagined. He wasn't going to worry about his neighbor, too. One difficult relationship with a female was all he could handle.

“Um…” Sue peered through the doorway into the
dining room, then glanced behind her toward the hall. “Will I be meeting your wife?” she asked delicately.

The question jolted him, although he realized it was a perfectly natural one. She'd met him; she'd met his daughter—why shouldn't there be a wife in the picture?

He set down the spoon he'd been using to stir the sauce. “My wife died five years ago,” he said with a wry smile. “So no, I don't think you'll be meeting her.”

“Oh!” Sue looked chagrined. “I'm so sorry—”

“That's all right.” There was a great deal he hated about Jane's death, but one of the worst things—which had never occurred to him until he'd experienced it—was the constant need to break the news to others. For years after Jane had died, he would run into old acquaintances who hadn't heard, and they'd ask how she was, and he would have to tell them and revisit his grief. And when he met new people, like Sue Dawson, he would have to go through it all over again.

The pain wasn't acute anymore; after five years he'd gotten used to the idea that Jane was no longer with him. But whenever he told new people, they would become upset and he'd feel an obligation to comfort and reassure them. Instead of receiving their sympathy, he'd be knocking himself out trying to make them feel better.

“Am I going to meet your husband?” he asked, in part to direct the conversation away from himself and his loss and in part because he assumed a beautiful supposed celebrity like her had to be married or attached, or at the very least in a hot relationship with the Hollywood heartthrob of the moment.

“No husband,” Sue said laconically, her voice dipping into the subzero range.

Okay. No more questions in that direction.

He found a salad serving utensil in a drawer and placed it in the salad bowl. As he shut the drawer his gaze drifted back to her, standing near the windows, the evening light sloping through the panes and glazing her hair with an amber shimmer. She was single; so was he. Interesting.

But impossible. She was his neighbor, and becoming involved with a neighbor would be a serious mistake. Besides, Lindsey deserved the bulk of his attention right now. He couldn't fritter away his time or emotions on anyone else.

She reentered the kitchen and he thrust the salad bowl into her hands. “Would you take this to the table, please?”

She eyed Sue. “He treats me like a slave,” she muttered, then headed back to the dining room with the salad.

Sue grinned. “How old is she?”

“Almost eleven—physically. Mentally, she's anywhere from three to forty, depending on her mood.” The sauce had begun to bubble. He eased a strand of spaghetti out of the water with a fork and tested it for doneness. “I've got a bottle of wine for dinner, if that's all right with you.”

“Great.”

Lindsey reappeared in the doorway. She glanced at Toby, then turned to Sue, who exchanged a smile with her. He had a sense they were communicating privately in some secret female code. Lindsey was probably saying,
My dad is really a jerk,
and Sue was saying…what?
All dads are jerks,
or
I'll teach you how
to get around him,
or
Your dad just offered me wine, so he can't be that much of a jerk.

Trying to ignore them, he drained the spaghetti and dumped it into a serving bowl. “Yes, Dr. Dad,” Lindsey singsang before he had a chance to ask, taking the bowl from him to bring into the dining room. He poured the shrimp-laden sauce into another serving bowl—entertaining a guest meant using dishes he hadn't used in ages, but given how nicely Lindsey had set the table, he wasn't going to serve dinner in pots and pans. At last, he opened the bottle of wine, then gestured Sue ahead of him into the dining room.

There, he thought, gazing at the food arrayed on the table, the gleam of silver and china, the teardrop-shaped flames crowning the two candles, which Lindsey must have lit. Either the meal would go smoothly or it would be a disaster. He'd done his best under pressure, which seemed to be the way he did everything these days. No one could ask more of him.

 

A
REAL HOME
, Susannah thought. A father, a child, warmth and love. It was almost enough to make her weep.

She was an actress, and she knew how to weep—or remain dry-eyed—on cue. But a sentimental sweetness filled her as she soaked it all in—Lindsey's sardonic jokes and long-suffering sighs, Toby's forbearance, the simple, filling food, the tart wine. She couldn't recall the last time she'd eaten spaghetti. Out in California, it was always
pasta,
and it was never served in anything as basic as tomato sauce with shrimp mixed in.

She wouldn't have come if she'd known this dinner party had been his daughter's idea. The poor man! He was a doctor; he shouldn't be entertaining a guest after
a full day of racing around, pushing gurneys up and down hospital corridors, barking orders, holding patients' hands, demanding tests and equipment and facing a crisis every thirteen minutes, just before the commercial break. That was how it worked on
Mercy Hospital,
anyway.

After such hard work, he deserved better than to have Susannah appear on his doorstep with nothing more to offer than a plate of brownies that she hadn't even baked from scratch. She wanted to beg his forgiveness—except that she was through with accommodating everyone else, making others happy, doing what they wanted her to do. It was her turn to do what
she
wanted—and what she wanted right now was to be eating spaghetti mixed with slightly rubbery shrimp and bland sauce, in this pretty dining room with its old-fashioned furniture and expensive china.

And the candles. Were they on the table for a reason? Surely he hadn't been thinking of a romantic dinner, not with his sassy daughter present. And why was Susannah even thinking about a romantic
anything
with Toby Cole? He was just her new neighbor. An unconscionably good-looking man, but so what? She didn't want a romance with him or anyone else.

He was describing a new therapy he hoped to try on a patient of his, a six-year-old with asthma. Every now and then, he'd glance at Susannah and say, “You don't really want to hear this, do you?” and she would insist she did. She wanted to hear every word of it—not because she was a polite guest or because she longed to increase her knowledge about what doctors did beyond what little she'd learned from the TV show, but because when Toby talked about the promise of a new
asthma drug, his eyes glowed brighter than the candles, fiery with passion.

Would he be as passionate in bed as he was when he talked about helping a six-year-old to breathe more easily?

Stupid question. Stupid thought. He was a neighbor, for crying out loud, a little girl's daddy.

“So,” he asked, “what brings you to Arlington?”

“I was looking for a change of pace,” she said vaguely.

“You're leaving
Mercy Hospital,
aren't you,” Lindsey said.

Susannah turned to the girl. She'd liked Lindsey when they'd met in the front yard that afternoon. She liked anyone MacKenzie approved of, since MacKenzie tended to be quite selective in bestowing his approval. The moment Lindsey had caught Mac and scooped him off the ground, the cat had sighed and snuggled into her arms, melting into a purring ball of fuzz—his signal to Susannah that the kid was okay.

The kid was a little less okay right now. She'd brought up the one subject Susannah really didn't want to talk about: her acting career.

She was going to have to talk about it. Sooner or later, people were going to recognize her. She could introduce herself as Sue Dawson—or Mary Smith or Sally Jones or Hazel Berrybush, for that matter—but anyone who watched TV or read showbiz magazines was going to realize she was Susannah Dawson, the onetime star of the top-rated TV show
Mercy Hospital.

Lindsey was staring at her, her eyes wide and glistening with curiosity, or maybe awe. Susannah had to say something. “I've already left the show,” she murmured, infusing her voice with a note of finality.

“See?” Lindsey swung toward her father. “I told you she was a famous actress! I told you! I can't believe she's living right next door to us! This is so exciting!” She turned back to Susannah, who felt her appetite slipping away. “I
love
that show! It's the best show on TV. I thought you were great in it. I read you were leaving the show, and Dr. Lee Davis was going to be written out during the May sweeps. I don't know why you left, except that now you're here and that's so incredibly cool.”

“Well…” She wished Toby would bail her out, steer his daughter in another direction, talk some more about the appalling increase in pediatric asthma cases over the past decade. But why would he? He was probably just as fascinated by her career as Lindsey was. People always thought working on a television series was more exciting than it actually was, more glamorous, more stimulating. He was probably just as curious as Lindsey to learn why Susannah Dawson had abandoned the show and transported herself all the way across the country in an effort to get as far from that whole scene as she could. She couldn't expect him to stifle his daughter.

“I was looking for a change,” she said again.

“But it's the most popular show on TV,” Lindsey said. “And I bet you made gazillions of dollars, and people all over the world watched you every week. Plus, you got to kiss Lucien Roche—”

And an unfortunate experience that was, Susannah thought bitterly, although she didn't say so. She hadn't fled from
Mercy Hospital
with the intention of badmouthing everyone else connected to the show. The producers still wanted her writing scripts for them, which was generous of them and a wonderful oppor
tunity for her. As for the actors…they were doing their jobs, and she'd made the choice to do that job for many, many years. She took responsibility for her life, the way she'd lived it then and the way she hoped to live it now. She wasn't going to put down anyone else.

“I'd die if I could be a TV star,” Lindsey gushed.

“I bet it's so much fun, having all those people fussing all over you all the time, and making all that money just by pretending to be someone else.”

“Obviously, Ms. Dawson decided she'd rather do something else,” Toby interrupted, gently but firmly. He
had
rescued Susannah from his daughter's inquisitiveness after all.

She sent him a grateful look. His smile was enigmatic but reassuring. She wondered if he used that smile in his medical practice, if by smiling at his patients he was able to ease their symptoms and make their medications work more effectively.

“But—everybody wants to be a star, and Susannah Dawson
is
a star.” Lindsey returned her adoring gaze to Susannah. “There are so many people in the world who would give anything to live that kind of life.”

“Those people don't know any better,” Susannah retorted. “If they did, they'd run screaming in the opposite direction. Stardom is a lot nicer to dream about than to live through.”