The Last First Kiss (Harlequin Special Edition) (14 page)

Something in her voice caught his attention and he gave up the idea of getting out of bed and cooking, at least for the moment. Still, he kept up the pretense—wasn’t that what this was all ultimately about? Pretending?

Or maybe, he amended, in light of things that seemed to be happening, about pretending to pretend?

His eyes delved into hers. “What are you in the mood for?” he asked.

Kara had to suppress a groan. Oh God, he’d fed her such a straight line. It took everything she had not to give voice to the answer that had instantly sprung to her lips:
You.

Instead, with effort, she told him, “Surprise me.”

“Tall order,” he commented, his eyes slowly caressing her face.

Even first thing in the morning, Kara was still beautiful. Maybe, Dave amended, even
more
beautiful than she’d been last night.

Just his luck, he thought with an inward sigh. He was falling for her. All the intelligent, poised, even-tempered, clear-thinking women in the world and
he
had to fall for the one emotional, volatile, outspoken harpy in the lot.

“Oh, you’re up to it,” she replied with confidence, her voice so low it felt as if it were rumbling along his naked skin.

This was where he got up and marched off to the kitchen, dressed in confidence if nothing else, he told himself, because what was unfolding between them was way too hot to indulge in.

This was where he got up from the bed and put some distance between them.

Quickly.

This was where he—

Oh damn, he knew exactly where “this” was all leading him: to hell in a handbasket.

In one swift movement, he went from being next to her to looming directly over her. Bracketing her face with his hands, he paused for a moment, looking at her as if he’d never seen her before. And maybe he hadn’t, at least, not
this
version of Kara, the one who seemed to so effortlessly fire up his soul.

He finally gave voice to what he was thinking. “You just might single-handedly set the course of cosmetics back half a century.”

She wasn’t altogether sure she understood where he was going with this.

“And why is that?” she wanted to know, waiting for a punch line she could rip apart. Secretly
hoping
for a put-down so that this feeling inside of her, this caramel center, melting feeling would finally go away instead of undoing her.

“Because you’re beautiful without it.
More
beautiful without it,” he corrected himself.

Still ready and waiting to read him the riot act, Kara came to a skidding halt before she was able to utter a single word. As his words sank in, she looked at him, utterly stunned and speechless. And confused.

What the hell was he up to? Was this some kind of bait and switch?

Mentally, she threw up her hands as his began to roam over her body, discovering her pressure points all over again.

“You don’t play fair,” she accused, the words scraping out of her dry mouth. The rest of her, however, was all but salivating with anticipation.

“Maybe,” he told her slowly, his warm breath creating havoc everywhere it touched, “that’s because I’m not playing at all.”

Okay, now he really had her confused. “What are you saying?” she asked with effort, unable to draw in a complete sustaining breath.

“You’re a bright woman,” he told her, his lips beginning to unravel her again as they proceeded to tease all the different parts of her body. “You can figure it out.”

Maybe she could. But that was for later.

Much later, she told herself, slipping her arms around Dave’s neck. She planned to be far too busy right now to think at all.

Chapter Fourteen

T
his was crazy, Dave thought.

It was nearly a month later, and rather than winding down, the way both he—and, he was certain, Kara—had expected, things were only becoming more intense, more complex and, consequently, more confusing.

He knew he sure as hell was confused by this unexpected turn his life had taken. A month ago, he would have never seen this coming. And yet, here it was, confounding him even as it mocked him.

Damn it all, anyway.

It didn’t make any sense to him. The only woman he’d ever actually felt as if he’d made a connection with was the one woman he never thought he’d
want
to make a connection with.

Somewhere in the universe, something was either seriously off-kilter, or God had the kind of twisted sense of humor none of the nuns ever publicized in the parochial school he’d attended.

And the really weird thing about all of this was that the further away their “breakup” was pushed back—as it had been twice already—the more he secretly found himself
wanting
to have it pushed back.

Something else he would have never expected.

It was as if he was in on the planning of his own self-destruction.

And he was
smiling
about it, Dave thought darkly, catching a glimpse of himself in the shiny surface of a stainless-steel cabinet door in the tiny room where he kept all the free clinic’s medications locked up.

He thought back to the beginning, which now seemed like eons ago. Back then, this charade of falling for one another was to last only a week. Ten days, tops. Kara was supposed to have picked a fight with him at her mother’s house the first Saturday they had been invited over for diner.

That had fallen through by mutual consent when Paulette Calhoun surprised them by inviting a few other people to dinner, as well. People, as it turned out, who came equipped with deep pockets and even deeper hearts. Over dinner Kara’s mother had talked up the free clinic where he volunteered, praising all the good it was doing for the destitute people in that neighborhood.

Conversationally, she let it drop that the clinic was facing a funding shortage and she lamented the possibility that it might have to close its doors. She added that it would be morally criminal if that did happen, because all the children in that neighborhood would have nowhere to go if they became ill. Her guests, parents all, could readily identify with the angst of parents who had to stand by and watch their children suffer.

There was no question about it. The woman was good. He began to see where Kara got her craftiness and her stubbornness.

He vividly remembered how surprised—and, damn it, how relieved—he was that evening when Kara had drawn him aside and said in a hushed voice, “We can’t get into a fight in front of these people now. They might think you’re unstable and change their minds about those checks they’ve promised to send you for the clinic.”

He’d wanted to point out that since she was the one who was to start the argument, most likely her mother’s guests would think
she
was the unstable one. But he bit his tongue and merely nodded.

And just like that, there was a stay of execution. A stay that per force wound up extending his time in purgatory—or hell, depending on the point of view. Except that, even though he told himself that was what pretending to be romantically involved with Kara was supposed to feel like, being forced to spend time with her, presumably where her mother or his would be able to cross their paths, didn’t feel like either hell or purgatory to him.

What he
did
feel like was, well,
alive.
Whether it was his anger that she periodically managed to arouse, or something else, there was no denying that the bottom line was that she did arouse him.

Very much so.

And even when he wasn’t around her, she was haunting his thoughts as well as his dreams. There seemed to be no getting away from Kara. His head was utterly filled with visions of her that popped into his brain unprovoked, unannounced and utterly unbidden.

The woman had definitely cast some kind of spell over him, and while he didn’t actually believe in things like voodoo,
something
had to be at play here that wasn’t readily explainable.

Why else would he be thinking of her so much? Why else would he be looking forward to getting together with her, even if it was just to argue, the way they seemed to do about half the time that they were together? There was no denying that she was an infuriating, utterly perverse person.

The other half of the time, he’d already noted more than once, somehow managed to find them winding up in bed, whether it was after coming home from dinner at her mother’s, or after a quick visit to his mother’s place, or just after a long, hard day’s work.

The charade—and their lovemaking—had fallen into almost a pattern. Chaotic, but nonetheless still a pattern.

When he felt dead tired after a day in the E.R., she would turn up in the parking lot, waiting for him, the scent of a hot pizza emanating from inside her car. And the times that his shift actually ended on a quiet note and
she
had put in copious amounts of overtime on some kind of save-the-world video game that was overdue for production, he’d invite her to his place, where he proceeded to whip up something seductively appetizing to romance her mouth. And then he’d proceed, after dinner, to do the same to the rest of her. It all seemed to follow so naturally.

In short, he thought as he made some quick notations to the file of the patient he’d just seen, he was enjoying himself. For the first time in his life, there was something beyond his work that he found himself looking forward to.

Even arguing with the woman was enjoyable, because somewhere amid the words that threatened to grow more and more heated, he’d either find himself filled with a passion that could be sated only by her, or she would seal away the words about to come pouring out of his mouth with her lips.

And then nothing else mattered but her.

God help him but he was in a bad way. Especially since he caught himself hoping more and more frequently that this pretense he found himself involved with would continue indefinitely—or at least until such time as he could figure out what was going on with him.

Closing the file, Dave looked at his watch. Damn it, it was getting late.

Ordinarily, the doors to the clinic would be closed by now and the number of people in the waiting area would be at least beginning to dwindle. But there was a new strain of flu making the rounds in Southern California. Children under ten seemed to be particularly susceptible to it, and it looked as if half the felled population were in the clinic’s waiting room, most of them crying and growing more irritable.

Tonight was the night he’d told Kara he would take her out to that Chinese restaurant she liked in order to celebrate the donations her mother had rounded up. At first the invitation had been extended to her mother as well, but Paulette had demurred, saying three was a crowd.

“I will, however, let you bring back some of their absolutely fabulous shrimp lo mein for me,” Paulette had told him.

“She wants proof we went” was Kara’s cynical way of interpreting her mother’s request.

He would have pointed out that it was a simple matter for him just to swing by the restaurant and get takeout without having to take her anywhere, but he knew when to keep things to himself. These days he picked his arguments, usually with an eye out for making up with her.

Now, from the looks of it, he was either going to have to give Kara a rain check on that dinner or wind up turning away at least half a dozen small, suffering patients and their equally suffering—although for an entirely different reason—mothers.

He made his choice. He was staying. But his nurse didn’t have to, he thought. Approaching her, he said, “You can go home, Clarice.”

The ebony-eyed, heavyset woman gave him one of her sterner looks and shook her head. “Don’t go telling me what to do, Doctor Boy.” She’d awarded him that affectionate nickname the first week he came and had been inundated with patients. She’d been forced to marvel at his staying power and had told him that he looked younger than her grandson, hence the nickname. “I can stick it out if you can.”

He should have known better than to try to get her to leave. “Thanks, Clarice. Tell the patient’s mother in room two I’ll be right there. I have to make a call first.”

Clarice raised an eyebrow. “Canceling a date?” she asked.

He didn’t ask her how she knew.

“Just canceling an obligation,” he told her, deliberately avoiding a direct answer.

Clarice looked at him as if she saw right through his evasive maneuver. “It’s a date. Tell that pushy woman I said hi.”

Someday, he thought as he pressed numbers on the keypad, there was going to have to be a whole branch of science devoted to the study of the female mind so men like him had a prayer of understanding it.

He counted the number of rings. On the fourth one, he heard Kara pick up. “Hello?”

She sounded confused, he thought. Had she forgotten about tonight? “Kara, this is Dave.”

“I figured it would be—that’s what it says on my caller ID. What’s up?”

He heard noise in the background. Where was she? “I’m running late. Actually, I’m not sure if I can make it tonight. The waiting room’s packed and I can’t turn them away. There’s no place else in the area they can go where they can be treated for free,” he explained.

Rather than comment on his possible no-show for their date, she said, “Sounds like you’re having a revolt in your waiting room.”

He supposed that was probably what it had to sound like to her. “It’s full of kids.” It was a given that young patients didn’t do well confined to one room for hours at a time.

“You really should have something to keep them occupied while they’re waiting. It would be a lot easier on their parents, and it would also go a long way toward reducing the level of your noise pollution.”

She had a point, he thought. He was here only one day a week and tended not to occupy his mind with what was or wasn’t out in the waiting room. His only concern was the patient. “Maybe I’ll use a small portion of those donations your mother managed to raise for the clinic to buy some toys.”

He heard her laugh. Three weeks ago, he would have bristled at the sound, offended that she was laughing at him. Now, although it still might be what was happening, he no longer took offense so easily.

“Toys?” she echoed. He could envision her wide smile. Even seeing it in his mind’s eye had an effect on his gut. It hit him dead center, creating its own little tidal wave. “You really are old-fashioned, aren’t you?”

“What’s so funny?” he wanted to know, and then, before she could answer, he stopped to listen more closely to the sound he was picking up. “What’s all that noise I hear in the background?” Dave asked. If he didn’t know any better, he would have said she was somewhere surrounded by kids. But she worked with adults, or at least overgrown kids in adult clothing. “Where are you?”

“Someplace where I can implement a solution for your problem.”

He didn’t have time for riddles. He had to get back to his patients—and then it hit him.

On a hunch, still holding the cell phone in his hand, Dave came out of the closet-size office he shared with the other doctors who volunteered their services the other days of the week. Walking into the waiting room, he discovered that Kara was there—had they arranged to meet at the clinic? He didn’t think so. He was almost certain they’d agreed that he would pick her up at her apartment. But if that was the case…

Dave looked at Clarice, but the nurse just shrugged her very wide shoulders, silently conveying that she hadn’t a clue what was happening out here.

Kara was surrounded by an army of short people, all eagerly watching her every move. That included dropping to her knees beside an orange plastic chair that appeared to be bolted onto the floor.

“What are you doing here?” he wanted to know. And why was she now snaking her way under that chair?

“In a minute,” he heard her mumble in response.

Then he heard her grunt as she struggled to push a plug into the electrical outlet directly in front of the bolted chair. When she snaked her way back out again, Kara brushed off a layer of dust bunnies from the front of her tank top before she stood up.

Only then did he notice the gaming system on the magazine table—now completely devoid of any magazines—standing beside the orange chair. Above the system was a twenty-inch monitor. That was new. He looked from it to Kara, momentarily too stunned to adequately form his question.

“Okay,” Kara announced. He was about to ask her, “Okay, what?” when he realized she wasn’t talking to him. She was talking to the squadron of pint-size patients who were still in the waiting room. “This is up and running,” she told the children. Pointing to the four control pads, each in a different color, she said, “Four of you can play the game at the same time.” She raised her eyes to Dave. “That should take care of your noise problem,” she told him cheerfully.

That was when he saw that there was a different system hooked up across the room from the first one. The four hand controllers attached to that system were quickly claimed and four patients began their mighty adventure, all struggling to keep their colorful vehicles on the track while they raced toward a virtual finish line. The children not fast enough to grab a controller gathered around them, watching and waiting for their turn at the game.