Ozark Nurse (16 page)

She got up, took a cold drink of water, glared at the phone, then threw herself over the bed and spent a good ten minutes sobbing her heart out. Oh, if only Paul would phone!

At exactly twenty minutes to ten the phone rang.

Sitting up, she grabbed it, for all the world like a drowning person grabbing at a lifeline.

"Oh, it's you," she said, when she heard Paul's voice. "Well, how is everything?" She mustn't let him know she'd been lying there crying her heart out over him.

Everything was fine, Paul said, if she was referring to the hospital. Little Bobby was in great shape. The second emergency operation he had performed was okay, too. In another accident at the lake, a boy had had his back slashed by a water skier. "But I fixed him up, and everything is under control, Nora. When Bobby swallowed the little rubber frog, I seem to have swallowed all my fears, or whatever ailed me."

She was, she told him, truly happy for him. "This means you'll be back at the hospital. Right?"

"Maybe," he said.

"It all depends on you, Nora."

Then, after a moment's hesitation: "Look, you and I have got to get a lot of things straightened out." He had to know, he said, what the chances were of his getting his girl back and taking up about where they had left off, just before fun-packing Ben Sackett had come on the scene. What about that rich widower who had been squiring her around town?

In short, Paul had a lot of ground to cover, past, present, and future. So how about picking her up in his car in about ten minutes?

"Be waiting for me at the curb," he said. And then he said: "My sweetheart. You are still mine, aren't you? Tell me."

"I'll tell you when you arrive," she promised.

She was breathless as she rushed back into her clothes. Those were stars she saw in her eyes in the mirror as she fairly danced across the room to run a comb through her hair. A little while before she had looked positively awful, her color gray, her lips pinched and bluish. Now she glowed with radiance and life, with sheer happiness, as a girl does whose doubts and worries have been banished by the right words murmured at the right time by the right man.

As she ran down the stairs and out of the house, she was laughing softly, amused by her own thoughts. How silly she had been to believe for even a moment that she would like to go around the world with Andy Fine.
That
was a temptation?

She stood by the curb, and when she saw the lights of Paul's car approaching, the radiance in her eyes was the reflection of the happiness in her heart.

There came her
real
temptation: Paul. She smiled at the knowledge that when he came he would take her into his arms and back into his life to stay.