Secret Santa (7 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

N
EIL
RAISED
HIS
FIST
to knock on Charli’s door and hesitated. She’d just come in. Maybe she’d been held up at work, and if that were the case, she probably wouldn’t want company.

He’d looked for her at the cantata rehearsal and hadn’t seen her. Maybe he owed her an apology for siccing Flora on her—even if it had been in the best of intentions.

If we’re honest here, Bailey, you just want to see her again.

He banished thoughts of silky blond hair and china-blue eyes that shone with fierce determination.
To make sure she’s okay,
he amended, and swore he would believe the lie he told himself.

That bit of housekeeping attended to, he knocked on the door.

It took Charli a moment to answer. When she did, she opened it a scant two inches, enough to see who it was.

“Oh! Neil!” The door opened wider, then she closed it back a little. Still, that was definitely a smile—a small one, but still a smile.

Wow. Not the reaction I was expecting—I figured she’d be all “Beat it, Bailey.”

But she wasn’t. At least part of her seemed pleased to see him. However, he could detect some hesitation in her face.

“Is this a good time?” Neil asked. “Because I can always, you know, come back another time.”

“Oh, no, no, come in. Just...give me a minute. I have to...”

She shut the door before she told him what it was she had to do. Had he caught her in her jammies? It was only eight, but doctors had weird hours, after all.

He heard a series of bumps and chair squeaks. Didn’t sound as though she was yanking on anything over Hello Kitty pj’s—or whatever she wore to bed.

Stop that. Right now. She’s your doctor. She sees your naked butt, you don’t see hers.

Neil’s chiding had rendered his face awash with heat at precisely the moment she flung open the door to let him in.

“Sorry! I had patient files out.”

He saw no sign of the files or even a laptop, but he did see a pile of notebooks on a pine dresser beside the kitchen’s eat-in dining table. Otherwise, the kitchen looked Spartan—no personal knickknacks, cabinets bare and empty. He was used to seeing it with his old buddy Owen as an inhabitant.
Well, she’s a big improvement over Owen on the slob scale.

He realized she was waiting for an answer. “Oh, wow. You take patients’ privacy very seriously, don’t you?”

“Got to.” Charli had clasped her hands behind her back, and her face glowed with an innocence that would make his niece’s efforts after eating the last cookie pale in comparison. The good doctor was definitely up to something, and if he had a reporter’s bone in his body, he’d bet it didn’t have a thing to do with patient files.

Was it just curiosity, then, that made him want to stay?

And don’t forget the other possibility, Bailey,
his conscience nagged at him.
The one where you hang around just because you’re starting to really like her?

“Are you hungry?” Charli asked him. “I just ordered a pizza, but they said it would take a good thirty minutes.” She leaped to the fridge and flung open the door. The light shone down on a bare refrigerator, save for a few stacks of Tupperware, some tubs of yogurt and a carton of half-and-half. “Oh, wow. I’ve really got to go grocery shopping. How about some Greek yogurt? It’s got blueberries. And lots of protein.” She peered back around the door of the fridge, looking slightly bemused. “Oh, right. You don’t look like a yogurt kind of guy.”

Neil couldn’t help but chuckle. “And what exactly does a yogurt kind of guy look like?” he asked.

She blushed and smoothed a hand over her hair. Shutting the door with a shrug, Charli said, “Not somebody like you—you look like you’re a straight-up meat-and-potatoes kind of guy.”

“I think I’ll wait for the pizza, if you’re offering,” he said. “Because, truth be told, I’ve never been much of a fan of yogurt.”

“See? My instincts were right.” She tried to push her hands into pockets that weren’t there, then swept one toward the kitchen table. “How about a seat? Are you a seat kind of guy?”

“I am.” He crossed to the kitchen table and pulled out a captain’s chair. “I—not to press my luck here, but I didn’t see you at the rehearsal. Was my singing that bad?”

Charli sat down across from him. “No. You’re very good. I didn’t go by for a couple of reasons—one, I called Flora earlier today and told her definitely no.”

Neil couldn’t help feeling disappointed. He’d hoped from the expression on her face the night before that she’d change her mind. Maybe he was wrong, but what had helped him when he was a kid was the way his dad and his aunt had coaxed him into joining in with activities that involved a lot of people.

Still, everyone was different, and people worked through their grief in different ways. He’d found himself talking to his dad earlier in the day about Charli, and his dad had advised him not to rush her—to give her space.

“No chance you’ll change your mind?” It was the wrong thing to ask her. He could tell that from the way her face closed down a little, lost that openness it had.

“No. I’m really busy, Neil.” Charli said this gently but firmly. “Like tonight—I just got home. I had to admit a patient to the hospital. And before that, I wound up helping out the community clinic.”

He smiled, reassured by what she’d told him. “Wow, that’s great! How’d that happen?”

“Louredes was in a jam—they didn’t have a doctor. Hey, have you heard anything about the clinic...?” Charli seemed to change her mind midsentence.

Neil could bet he knew what she was talking about. “About it closing, you mean?”

“You know? Louredes asked me to keep it under my hat, and here I go, blabbing about it, and to a reporter, no less.” Charli sprang up from her chair and walked over to the sink. “You thirsty? I can offer you tap water...or tap water.”

Neil laughed. “Hmm...I think I’ll take the tap water.”

Charli reached for a couple of glasses and asked in a way-too-casual voice, “So what happened to the clinic? Did they have a grant fall through or something?”

Again, Neil tried to ignore the red flags that Charli’s tone sent through him. “Or something. They’d been funded with a federal grant, but then budget cuts really hacked into their bottom line, and I don’t think they were funded again—at least at the same level. Louredes had told me some time ago—maybe a couple of months ago—someone had volunteered to donate a sizable sum on the condition of anonymity. But...she came in a week or so ago and asked me what I thought of trying to do a ‘save the clinic’ fund drive leading up to Christmas. Apparently, their Mr. Moneybags had a change of heart or a change of circumstance, and the money wasn’t coming, after all.”

Charli added ice to two glasses and filled them with water, then set one down in front of Neil. “So it was a man, then? The donor?”

Neil paused, the glass halfway to his lips. “Huh? Oh, I don’t know.”

“But you said ‘Mr. Moneybags.’ Like he was a guy.”

Neil took a sip and considered her comment. “Sorry. I guess it could have been Mrs. Moneybags. To tell you the truth, Louredes was pretty closemouthed about the whole thing.”

Across from him, Charli ran the tip of her finger around the rim of her glass. Her eyes were unfocused, as though she were concentrating on some memory or imagining being somewhere else. “I hate to see the clinic close,” she said.

“Me, too. It does a lot of good here. Your dad really worked hard on it. You know, for a while, I thought maybe Mr. Moneybags
was
your dad, because he was such a strong supporter of the clinic, but Louredes told me no when I tried to guess his identity.”

“Really?” Charli chewed on her bottom lip. “And you asked her? Straight out?”

“Yep. She was pretty adamant about it. Why? Are you or your mom in a position to help out the clinic?”

“Me?” Her eyebrows shot up and she shook her head. “I’m buried in student loans. One reason I came back here—besides the fact that I wanted to practice with my dad—was that it’s a medically underserved area. They’ll forgive part of my loans if I work here for three years. As long as Lige and the hospital staff don’t mind filling out a gajillion papers.”

She finally took a drink of her water. Putting the glass down, she added, “And my mom... Well, there’s no huge lump sum there. My dad’s life insurance went to pay off their house and buy her a small annuity—he wanted to be sure she had an income stream she could count on.”

“Funny. People always think doctors are rolling in the dough,” Neil commented.

A sad smile played across Charli’s lips. “Not small-town docs. And not my father. Keeping his practice going was always an exercise in creativity. He never wanted to increase his fees, and he tried to keep a lid on expenses—you know, just hiring one nurse and Marvela to run his office and do his billing.”

“So no slush fund, huh?”

Charli jumped—or at least Neil thought she did. She looked positively guilty. Then a loud knock came on the door and she did jump. She was so keyed up that she covered the distance to the kitchen door in two bounds.

It was the pizza guy. Neil got up, dug for his wallet, crossed the kitchen. Reaching over Charli’s shoulder, he handed the delivery guy the cash. “Least I can do,” he told her as she tried to protest. “I did invite myself to supper.”

The delivery guy gone and pizza slices on their plates, Charli asked, “There’s nothing that can be done about the clinic, then? All those people... I can’t imagine what they’ll do for care. And some of them are pretty sick. What about Louredes’s idea about a fund drive?”

“Oh, I’ve been putting that in the paper along with my Empty Stocking Fund Drive. But if Louredes told you they were still slated to close, I suppose no white knight’s come to save the clinic. I guess it’s just...gone.”

Charli slowly chewed on a bite of pizza, then pushed away her plate, the slice almost untouched. “There’s got to be
something.
”

“I have to warn you, the clinic’s not a very popular cause around here. A lot of people don’t care very much for immigrants.”

Charli jutted out her chin. “It wasn’t just Hispanics that I treated there today. But even if it had been, they deserve care, too.”

“I know, I know.” Neil lifted his hand to ward off her anger. “You’re preaching to the choir. The clinic serves as a lightning rod, that’s all.” He was impressed with the fierce indignation he saw lining her face. “I have to say, you remind me a lot of your dad—he was just as passionate about that clinic. I don’t think he would have let it close—at least not without a fight.”

He heard Charli’s quick intake of breath and saw her jerk her head, but not before he detected a tear streak down her cheek.

Stupid jerk!
he swore inwardly. “Oh, jeez, I’m sorry....”

His apology seemed to have the opposite of its desired effect, for now she completely lost it, burying her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking with deep wrenching sobs.

Neil pushed back his chair and stood by her, not sure what to do. Gingerly he touched her shoulder, feeling some comfort in how she didn’t immediately slap his hand away. He hadn’t meant to make things worse.

Neil’s touch seemed to rally her. She straightened up, scrubbed her face with her hands and tamped down her tears with one final, single shuddering sob. “Sorry,” she whispered. “I don’t know where that came from.”

“Me being an unfeeling clod,” Neil told her.

She shook her head, but he noticed it lacked conviction. “People tell me it gets better. Easier.”

“They say a lot of things,” he agreed. He would have stepped back, given her space, but she gripped his hand.

“You—you said you were six...when your mom died. And you got through it. How?” The naked pain in her eyes made Neil’s heart ache with the grief he knew she was feeling. Instantly he was six years old again, wrestling with the fact that his mother was never, ever coming home.

He squatted beside her, wanting to be honest with her. “Don’t make me out to be a hero,” he told her. “What happened to you is no different than me. One minute you have a parent, the next you don’t. Doesn’t matter how old you are, it’s tough. And the only ones who can understand are people who have lost their parents.”

For a moment, Neil thought maybe he’d forged a connection with her—something beyond an acquaintance or a neighbor. He’d seen a flicker of trust—real trust that he knew what he was talking about—in her eyes.“What you need is a cup of cocoa. Or tea. Or coffee. Want me to fix you some?” He twisted around to check the counter.

“Cocoa?”

Her tone was flat with disbelief. He didn’t need her to say the rest of what she was thinking—that a cup of cocoa could fill the hole left by her dad’s death.

“Yeah. A nice warm cup of cocoa,” he said. “I can run over to—”

“Thank you. But I’m fine.”

Her eyes didn’t agree. They were cool, and that warmth of trust was gone now. He was trying to be helpful, but still, he’d said the wrong thing.

Whatever chance he had at making a recovery was blown to smithereens by the sound of a long blast of a car horn and joyous shrieks of children penetrating the walls of Charli’s kitchen. She shoved back her chair.

“Let me box up the pizza for you,” she said. “Your adoring fans apparently await their Santa Claus.”

He could tell she’d meant it as an attempt at humor, but her voice had cracked on Santa Claus.

“I can stay—” he offered.

“No. Really. I’m fine.” Charli pushed the box into his good hand. “Perfectly fine.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

C
HARLI
STRETCHED
OUT
on her father’s lumpy couch in his office, feeling the hills and valleys created from years of catnaps.
I’ll wait ten minutes more, and if Neil doesn’t show, I’m going home.

She’d not slept well again last night—she could blame it on Neil and his Christmas lights, but the truth lay closer to the money still lurking in that safe deposit box. And a day’s busy schedule with patients had left her exhausted.

Marvela had told her that she’d squeezed Neil into the schedule after Charli’s last patient, saying he needed to have his arm checked on.

Charli had to admit mixed feelings about Neil. On the one hand, his blithe recipe for curing grief with hot chocolate and Christmas had just about got on her last nerve.

But on the other hand, she was disappointed that he hadn’t shown up for his appointment. The prospect of seeing Neil again had kept her energy up through the back-to-back patients—and her thoughts away from that money. Maybe what she needed to do was convince Marvela to extend their office hours and keep her too busy to think.

But Marvela had other ideas. “Honey, I mean, Dr. Prescott, you got to take care of yourself. You got to pace yourself. Your daddy just died. People will understand if you ease into things around here,” Marvela had offered.

Charli wasn’t so sure. Everyone she’d seen today and yesterday and all the days since she’d been home had complained that she didn’t examine them like her father had.

Down the hall, she heard Marvela thumping and bumping around the front office, closing out the day and getting prepped for tomorrow. In truth, she was glad Marvela was running interference for her, watching over her. Marvela had been proud of Charli―“my little chic-a-dee,” she’d said, wrapping her into a voluminous hug her first morning on the job. “All grown up and a doctor!”

So it was easier to bear since Marvela’s helpfulness had been that way from the beginning, not since she’d lost her father.

She drew in a lungful of air still tinged with a trace of her father’s cologne. The couch smelled like him. It felt like him. It was the closest thing she could get to a hug from him after a long and tiring day.

Why did you do it, Dad? Why did you put that money in that safe deposit box? Why didn’t you report the outbreak?

She had thought of little else in the scant moments she’d had between patients, that and Floyd’s advice to spend the money. Charli had a dozen good uses for that money—student loans to pay off, for one.

But the idea of spending money earned in any sort of cover-up—if that was what had happened—stuck in her craw.

Apparently, it had for her father, too. Unless he’d been intending to spend it on that clinic.

The front door opened. That squeak—she’d told Marvela to get someone to see about it, but Marvela said it was cheaper than a door sensor, with no batteries to change. Straightening up to a sitting position, Charli loosened her hair from its ponytail and began the business of tying it back.

“Don’t do that on my behalf,” Neil Bailey said from the doorway. The unexpected quietness of his arrival made her jerk in surprise.

“Marvela said she was busy, and that I was late, so I could just show myself back here and throw myself at the mercy of the doctor.”

“She didn’t.”

Neil’s dimples jumped again. “She didn’t. She wasn’t up front, so I just came back here. I’m really sorry for being late.”

“Well, let’s have a look at that arm, shall we?” Charli stood up and brushed off the couch fuzz. Her slacks still had deep creases from sitting all day, and the minicatnap had not been kind to them.

You’re not out to impress him.

Was she?

“It’s not really hurting anymore. Not badly, anyway. Do you have to look at it now?” he asked.

“I thought that was why you were here. Why you got the appointment.” Charli yawned before she could cover it with her hand.

“Okaaay.” Neil said, sounding as if he were going along with whatever she said simply because she’d said it.

Trying to inject a measure of professionalism—he had caught her more than once in a less than stellar condition—she walked briskly to the first exam room and opened the door, grabbing his chart out of the holder. “Here you go, and here’s your chart.”

“What? No nurse to take my blood pressure and tell me to wait a bit for the doctor to see me?” Neil hesitated at the door.

“Since you were late, I told our nurse to head on home. You’re our last patient.”

“Oh. I really am sorry I kept you waiting when I’m sure you’d rather have gone home. I got tangled up with a phone call about an out-of-town subscription complaint. Lady is paying for her paper but only getting it every other week. Not a happy customer. I should have called.”

“It’s okay. It’s not like I’ve got anything to run home to. I can’t sleep, not with your lights next door. On second thought, maybe I should take a few minutes and run to the nearest Wal-Mart for a room-darkening shade.”

“The lights really bug you that much? Yikes. I’ll spring for the shade. How about it?”

“First, let’s have you on the scales. Remember, I have nothing in my house to eat save blueberry yogurt, so I’ve got to do something about that, too.”

“Blueberry yogurt is not food.” Neil nodded his head a couple of times. “Yes. By all means. Let’s go do something about this right now.”

Charli laughed in spite of herself. “I’m beginning to think you have a phobia about doctors.”

“I wouldn’t say phobia. Phobia is too strong a word. I don’t go to doctors unless I really, really need them. Kind of like lawyers.”

“Oooh, you didn’t go there. Come on. I promise. I won’t hurt you.”

Maybe her dad was right when he’d bemoaned the fact that insurance companies and Medicare reimbursement fees mandated doctors have such a high volume of patients they couldn’t do this simple start to an exam. It did seem very personal, to stand beside Neil as she adjusted the scale to his weight—a nice one hundred and seventy pounds that was distributed well over his six-foot-two-inch frame. Even more personal? Wrapping the blood pressure cuff around his muscled biceps. She hoped he didn’t notice how her fingers fumbled. Who knew newspaper editors could be so buff?

But his systolic and diastolic pressures surprised her when the machine beeped its answer. “Wow. It’s a little higher than I expected, given your weight and overall fitness, and so is your pulse rate,” she said. “Does high blood pressure run in your family?”

“Er, no. I just get, ah, white-coat effect.” Neil shifted his shoulders and wriggled on the exam table, making the paper covering rustle.

Charli bit back a smile. “Oh. Well, keep a check on it at home.”

“It only does this when I’m with you.” He gave her a sheepish grin and said, “I mean, with a doctor.”

A little thrill stole through her—maybe it was her specifically who had bumped up his pulse rate. And not doctors in general.

He’s your patient. And he’s the number-one newspaperman in this town. You don’t need...

What? What didn’t she need? Why was Neil Bailey all the wrong things for her at this moment in time? When he was near her this way, she forgot all about those very good reasons.

Charli retreated from her mental confusion into the sanctuary of her medical training. She asked him to take off his sling, examined his fingers and the way the cast was holding up. It didn’t go all the way up to his elbow, so she could check his range of motion in the joint. It seemed more limited than it had in the emergency room days earlier.

“You probably need to ditch the sling and start using that elbow more. You don’t want the joint to freeze up,” she advised him.

“Huh, the ortho guy, the one who put the cast on, told me to keep it in the sling.”

Charli couldn’t forestall a roll of the eyes. “Wait. Who’s following up on this arm? Is it me? Or the ortho guy?”

“I kinda didn’t like him.” Now Neil ducked his head and massaged the back of his neck.

“No?”

“No. I didn’t. He was bossy. Told me that while I would probably be okay without surgery, he couldn’t see me anymore if I didn’t elect to follow his advice and have an operation.”

“Ouch. He’d get a D in bedside manner and patient care.” She considered Neil for a moment, noted the jut of his chin and the firm set to his jaw. “Looks like I’ll need to find another orthopedics doctor to refer my patients to, one who will listen better to patient preferences,” she muttered as she gave his fingers one more tweak. She froze, realizing what she’d said and to whom she’d said it. “Oh. That was unprofessional of me. I don’t know why you bring out my candid side, but I find myself blurting out just about anything to you.”

“That’s good.” The faint lines around Neil’s eyes crinkled in amusement. “That’s very good. Right?”

“No. It’s not.” She turned back to the desk and jotted down some notes. “Any pain? Swelling?”

“Some pain, but nothing Tylenol can’t handle. And the only thing really irritating me is the itch.”

“Be glad that it’s not the summer. Take a hair dryer and blow down into the cast on the cool setting. And no coat hangers! You could scratch the skin and create an opening for infection.”

“All done?” The rustle of the exam table paper almost rendered his question inaudible.

She looked up from his chart to see him yanking on the sling and already at the door. Neil had grasped the doorknob in his good hand and swung it open. “You going to bolt out of here?” she asked.

“No. I’m going to take you out to eat.”

Yes!
Her insides quivered in immediate reply. Common sense prevailed. “No...no. You’re my patient. I can’t.”

Neil didn’t seem at all convinced. “Come on. You know you want some supper. Company would be nice, too, right?”

Charli straightened up and closed his chart with all the primness she could muster. “Really, I don’t—” A rumble from her stomach completely spoiled the effect.

To his credit, Neil didn’t laugh. She could see the corners of his mouth quiver, but he managed to keep it to that.

She got up and ripped the table paper off. Crumpling it up, she tossed it in the large trash bin. Sometimes if you didn’t look temptation straight in the eye, it would leave you alone and in peace. And Neil? Well, he definitely tempted her right now.

From behind her as she went about the business of tidying up the exam room—everything her staff would have done for her the next morning—Neil said, “I still need that information about chickens. I’m interviewing you. Off the record. And you need to eat. We can get this done all at the same time.”

Charli’s stomach rumbled again, louder, like this time it meant business. “I don’t know,” she heard herself saying, and hated the way her voice lacked conviction.

She should go check on her mother—who didn’t really need her as she still had her entourage clucking over her. No, Charli should go home and toss and turn until she figured out what to do with her father’s slush fund.

She dispensed with the busywork and turned to face him full-on. He wasn’t taking no for an answer. Neither, for that matter, was her appetite. “This is a conspiracy between you and my stomach. You’re out to weaken my every resolve,” she said, only half joking.

“Come on. You need fun. And I happen to have two tickets to the county fair, which I, as a very bad member of the fair committee, still have not sold. I need you to go with me and use them.”

“I thought you said supper.” He had her confused now. To her horror, Charli realized she’d been picturing a more romantic dinner—complete with white tablecloths, a black-jacketed waiter and candlelight.
Oh, boy, Neil Bailey, you have got me in a twist. I shouldn’t spend five more minutes with you.

“I did. There will be corn dogs and hamburgers and cotton candy and funnel cakes—”

“Fair foods?” This was his definition of supper? “But I can’t keep eating junk food and pizza. Oh, sorry, the pizza that you very kindly paid for was delicious, thank you, but it’s not the most nutritionally dense food out there. I should never have ordered it. And anyway, a doctor shouldn’t be seen—”

“Okay.” Neil nodded, unfazed. “You could be a very good influence on me. I always figured pizza had the four food groups on it when you got the supreme version, but I can see your point. We’ll grab a Subway sandwich on the way. You can’t argue with that. I’ll even make you drink water. But I tell you, you’re gonna love the funnel cakes!”

“I...” Every last vestige of her willpower seemed to be deserting her. Had she used it up pulling too many all-nighters in med school and residency?

Neil tried again. “I’m going to tire you out so much, and distract you so much, my Christmas lights won’t even register tonight.”

She sighed and began pulling off her lab coat. “I need to grab my purse. I’m going to regret this, aren’t I?”

“Not one second of it.” And when he grinned, and those dimples jumped, Charli was toast.