The M.D.'s Surprise Family (11 page)

“What?”

“Video games,” Blue repeated patiently, looking up at him serenely. Peter saw the huge TV monitor with a game in progress, presently frozen. He suddenly felt very ignorant.

Raven indicated the screen. It featured the very latest in the video craze. “Don't you hear about video games in doctorville?” she asked, amusement shining in her eyes.

“I don't have time for games in ‘doctorville,'” he informed her coolly.

“Everyone has time for games,” Blue insisted. “It helps you relax. You could be any color you wanted,” Blue offered.

“Thanks, but I'll pass.” He needed to leave, before he gave in to the impulse to remain, Peter thought. Gave in to the need to be part of something that had been ripped away from him. This wasn't his family. Blue wasn't his child and this wasn't his wife. “I was in the neighborhood and decided to see how you were doing.”

He saw amused disbelief in Raven's eyes, and he decided to ignore her.

“Great,” Blue volunteered. “I'm doing great.”

Raven held up one of the control panels that was attached to the console. “He might do better if you stuck around and played a game or two.”

He'd never held one of those in his hands, didn't even know the first thing that was necessary to make it work. “I don't think so.”

If Blue was disappointed, he hid it well. “Where do you want me?” he asked Peter.

“For what?”

Obviously thinking that he was being teased, Blue laughed. “For the exam, silly.”

“Right here will be fine.”

It was a quick exam, conducted by a doctor who only wanted to make a getaway before he made a complete idiot of himself. If it wasn't too late already. In short order Peter was packing up his instruments, placing them into the black bag Dr. Welles had presented to him when he'd graduated from medical school. “He's doing very well.”

“Yes, I know.” She was pleased beyond words that each day found Blue a little less pain encumbered than the last. “Maybe even better than you.” She saw him look at her sharply and she offered him a smile in response. “Now can you play?”

Like a man struggling against being taken down by the undertow, he took a step back from her. His bag was in his hand.

“No, I've got to get going. Goodbye, Blue, Raven.” He nodded at her.

She matched him retreating step for retreating step. She had her mother's affinity for recognizing souls in pain and Peter Sullivan was definitely a soul in pain. “Have you had dinner yet? I could whip up something in the kitchen—”

Fighting the temptation to give in, he cut her short. “No, thanks, I need to leave.”

“If you say so.” Need to escape is more like it, she thought.

Still barefoot, she followed him outside. The weather had dropped another few degrees. She wrapped her arms around herself as she stood looking at him.

“You don't have to go, you know.”

“Yes, I do.”

He had to leave,
now,
because he was having something very close to a panic attack, born of the desire to remain. To stay here and play some absurd
video game and pretend that he was part of something, part of a unit, instead of the loner he was.

But it would be a lie.

He wasn't part of this family, wasn't part of anything at all really and he'd already made his peace with that before Raven had come on the scene and stirred things up inside of him. With a muttered good-night, he moved away quickly before the temptation to kiss her broke through his not-quite-steely reserve.

Peter got into his car and slammed the door shut. Putting his key into the ignition, he turned it and heard a whining noise before all sound suddenly died. He turned the key again and this time, there wasn't even the whining sound.

Nothing.

A third attempt brought the same results.

Raven walked up to the open window on the driver's side and looked in. “Problem?”

Even with a door between them, it felt as if she was too close. The breeze brought her scent right to him, filling the car. Filling his head.

“My car won't start.”

He saw the grin spread slowly, taking in every single feature. “That would explain the pitiful noise.”

He sighed. His hand on the door, he indicated that he wanted to get out. She took a step back, allowing him to exit. Taking out his cell phone,
Peter began to hit a series of buttons, only to be rewarded with an annoying beep.

“I think your battery's low,” she volunteered, pressing her lips together to hold back another smile.

He looked at the message written across his screen. It confirmed what she'd just told him. And then the message and the last of the light faded from the screen, leaving it blank.

Peter bit back a choice word. He'd forgotten to charge his phone last night.

When it rained, it poured.

Disgusted, he shoved the useless phone back into his pocket. Just what he needed, a dead car and a dead phone. Banking down his anger, he looked at her. “Can I use your phone?”

“You want to call a cab?” she guessed.

He shook his head. “No, I need someone to take a look at this. I've got roadside service,” he added in case she wondered who he was planning on calling at this time of the evening.

“Don't bother calling them yet,” she told him. “Let me go back into the house and get a flashlight and some tools.”

He saw no point in doing that. Automobiles fell under the realm of mystery as far as he was concerned. “I'm not handy with cars,” he called after her.

She looked over her shoulder just before she disappeared into the house. “But I am.”

“W
ell, technically, the problem shouldn't be your battery,” Raven told him several minutes later.

She'd returned carrying a toolbox that was a lot larger than he would have expected someone like her to have. Setting it down, she'd instructed him to pop the hood of his car. Then, as he'd watched, she'd turned on a flashlight to help her conduct a quick exam of the engine and its surrounding parts.

She glanced at him to see if he was listening. “That's less than a year old.”

Peter stared at her. “How would you know something like that?”

Shining her flashlight along the battery cables,
Raven leaned in as she continued to check out the various connections. He tried not to notice how snug her jeans fit.

“Well, my mother was three-quarter Navajo and one of her grandfathers was a tribal medicine man who was said to have great psychic powers.” She looked at him over her shoulder and grinned broadly. “That, and the month and year are scratched onto the top of the battery.” Straightening, she brushed off one hand against her back pocket. It took effort on his part not to allow his mind to travel there. “They do that so you know when to replace it.”

“Oh.”

Peter stopped looking in under the hood. He had no idea what he was looking at anyway and he felt like an idiot. He was a man and he should have at least known about the date on the battery. It didn't exactly take any technical know-how.

Raven saw the look of self-disgust on his face. “Hey, we all have our specialties.” Moving to the other side, she shone the flashlight on the distributor cap. There were no telltale marks on it, indicating a possible burn. She ruled it out as the source of the problem. “Yours is performing miracles in the operating room.”

He crossed his arms in front of him as he studied her. “And what's yours?”

“I'm not sure yet,” she answered cheerfully.
“I'm kind of a Jill of all trades, I guess. A little bit of everything, a whole lot of nothing.” She shrugged her shoulders. Her hair brushed along the one closest to him. “Something like that.”

There was no way that the last part of the description applied to her. She was as far from “a whole lot of nothing” as he was from being gregarious, and he had a feeling that she knew it.

Peter nodded toward his uncooperative vehicle. “Where did you learn to fix cars?”

“Tinker with cars,” she corrected. She was a long way from being a mechanic, the way her father had been. The man had been a positive magician when it came to their temperamental mode of transportation. “My dad. Anastasia was always breaking down or having some kind of problem or other and he'd always find a way to eke yet another thousand miles out of her.”

“Anastasia?” he echoed. She jumped around too much. Keeping up with her was a challenge.

“That's what we called the old ‘bus.' Daisy for short.” Her eyes teased his as she stopped to look at him. “Don't you name your car?”

“No.”

“Maybe that's part of the problem. You should.” The way she said it left no room for debate. “I think Daisy had close to four hundred thousand miles on her when she finally gave up the ghost. Dad didn't
want to junk her after all the faithful service she'd give us, so he built Mom's first ‘workshop' in it.”

Raven sounded as if she was talking about a beloved relative instead of a vehicle, he thought. She lived in a whole different world than he did. He had trouble finding human qualities in people, she found them in inanimate objects.

Peter focused on something he could understand. Or try to. “Four hundred thousand miles? Just how much traveling did you do in that thing?”

She laughed. “Not as much as you think. Dad got Daisy used. It was all he could afford.” The smile he saw on her face was slightly distant, as if her thoughts were taking her years into the past. “My parents were very happy in that old bus.”

And then, as if the memory had suddenly become too painful to deal with, she stopped and looked beneath the hood.

He moved in closer, again looking at he didn't know what. “Figure out what's wrong?”

She nodded as a thoughtful expression slipped over her features. “You know, someone once told me that if you hear hoofbeats, think horse, not zebra.”

He wasn't following. “You talking about the car's horsepower, or is this your way of telling me to get a horse?”

“Neither.” She laughed. The man was way too literal. He needed to lighten up. Her mother would
have said he was just the kind of man who needed saving. And she was pretty confident that she was up to the job. “I'm talking about things are usually simpler than we think they are.” She looked at him for a long moment before finally squatting to rummage through the toolbox she had left open at her feet.

Peter had the distinct feeling that this half Navajo princess, half wild Gypsy wasn't actually talking about the car trouble he was having. But she was wrong. Things weren't usually simpler, what they were was complicated. And, as he watched her, he felt they were growing more complicated by the moment.

“Voilá.”
Popping up to her feet, she held what looked like a toothbrush with metal teeth in one hand and a box of baking soda in the other.

What little imagination he'd been granted at birth extended only to surgical procedures performed within antiseptic operating rooms. “Okay, I'm stumped, what are you going to do?”

“Not brush my teeth,” she quipped, as if guessing what his one thought might be.

Taking the small bottle of water she'd brought out along with the toolbox, she poured some into an old plastic dish she'd dug out of the box. She added some of the baking soda and mixed the two together to form a liquid paste. Satisfied with the consistency, she undid the connectors that were
over the battery terminals and cleaned first one, then the other with the paste she'd just made.

The whole process seemed strange to him, like a home remedy applied to sophisticated machinery. “What's that supposed to do?”

“Sometimes there's too much acid built up over the wires, making it hard to get a good connection. If you don't have a good connection, the battery won't start your engine. The baking soda gets rid of the gunk.”

“Scientific word.”

She flashed a smile that was dazzling even in the limited light.

“I rather like it.” Finished, she reconnected the wires to the terminals, tightening each with a small wrench. She set aside the remainder of the mixture. “Okay, try it now.”

Getting in behind the wheel, Peter skeptically inserted his key into the ignition and turned it. The engine came to life as if it had only been sleeping. He turned it off and tried it again with the same results. He was more than a little surprised. “You did it.”

She flipped the toolbox closed with her bare foot. “Sure, black magic and white baking soda, works every time.”

As the car idled, he looked at her. “What do I owe you?”

“Nothing.”

“I don't like being in debt.”

“Okay.” Her eyes met his. “Time.”

“Excuse me?”

“Time,” Raven repeated. She flipped her hair over her shoulder, completely innocent of how seductive she was to him. “Pay me in time.” She could see he still wasn't following her. “Come back into the house. Spend a little time with Blue and me. He'd love it.” It went without saying that she welcomed it, as well.

He was an adult, Blue was seven. What could they have in common? “Why?”

“Because, if you haven't noticed by now, my little brother's taken a shine to you.” Her smile grew broader. “I know he'd love to teach you how to play a video game. Might help you to unwind.”

“I don't need to unwind.” As if in direct contradiction, he stiffened somewhat.

“Only old-fashioned clocks don't need to unwind. Tension is good, it keeps us sharp and alert.” Squatting, she flipped the dual locks on the toolbox, then picked it up. “But too much tension and we're liable to go off like a Roman candle.” Abandoning the water bottle, she took hold of his arm with her free hand, silently letting him know that the debate was over.

It wasn't as if he had anything planned for the remainder of the evening. And he did hate being in anyone's debt. It was like having something hang
ing over him. With a sigh that was not completely resigned, he took the toolbox from her. “I suppose a little while can't hurt.”

“Not a bit,” she promised him.

As he walked back inside, he couldn't shake the feeling that she was wrong.

 

“I think you wore him out,” she told Peter in a whisper that found its way straight into his gut, tightening it until he could hardly breathe.

Blue sat between them on the sofa, or rather, lay slumped between them on the sofa. Protesting that he wasn't the least bit tired, the boy had fallen asleep almost midword. The control pad was still clutched tightly in his hand.

Peter looked at the dizzying track exhibited on the television screen. Still in possession of his own control pad, he straightened out his vehicle, making it to the finish line.

He glanced toward Raven. “Does that mean I finally won a race?”

“By default,” she pointed out with a laugh he found incredibly sexy.

He tossed the control pad on the coffee table. “Hey, a win's a win.”

She switched off the game. The noise level crashed. Suddenly all that was heard was the sound of Blue's even breathing.

“I like you this way.”

He wished she wouldn't look at him like that. “What way?”

“Relaxed.” But even now, she thought, he was reverting back to his other persona. Guarded. Wary. As if he expected something to come crashing down all around him.

Peter felt as if she was seeing right through him and wanted to change the subject. “What do you want to do with him?”

“Well, I've tried auctioning him off,” she laughed, “but no one's ever offered enough money for me to recoup what I've already invested in him, so I guess I'll just have to put him to bed and keep him.”

For a second, when Raven started, he thought she was serious. And then he laughed, too, shaking his head. Careful not to disturb the boy, he rose to his feet, then picked Blue up. Her toolbox had felt heavier.

He looked at Raven in surprise. “He hardly weighs anything.”

“Takes after my mother's side of the family. They were small people.” Stepping away from the coffee table, she led the way out of the family room. She glanced over her shoulder. Something inside her constricted. He looked so right, holding Blue like that. “I'm hoping for a growth spurt for him, though. I had one when I was twelve.”

“To become the giant you are now?” She was
willowy, but far from tall. He doubted that, in her bare feet, she was more than five-four. Maybe less.

“I was a peanut compared to this,” she informed him. She smiled fondly at her sleeping brother. “Every inch counts when you're short.”

In the foyer, Peter looked around. There was a whole lot of house no matter which way they went. When he'd asked her earlier, she'd told him casually that there were fifteen bedrooms in the house.

“Which way?”

She pointed him toward the staircase. “It's the first door to the left at the top of the stairs.” Letting him go first, she followed Peter up.

What did someone do with fifteen bedrooms? he caught himself wondering. She could have housed three separate families here without blinking an eye. Was all this space just for her and her brother?

“I haven't seen anyone here all night beside the two of you.”

“Connie took the day off to see some friends and we don't really have much household help. The cleaning crew comes once a week. The gardeners show up every two.” Coming to the landing, she shrugged. “That's about it, really.”

She knew what Peter was probably thinking, that this was too much house for two people, three if you counted Connie. But this was home, the first one she'd ever had that hadn't had wheels attached to it since she'd been a little girl on the farm. Her
father had picked out this house for her mother and because of that, it was a special place to her. And also because of that, it would also always be home.

He waited for her to open the right door, then walked into the room. Done in beige and light blue, it looked like a child's idea of heaven. Blue had his own television set, four of the latest video systems not to mention countless games. It was a wonder the boy in his arms wasn't hopelessly spoiled, but everything about him indicated that he was a well-adjusted, mature-for-his-age boy. Peter figured that was a credit to the way his sister had raised him.

“No chauffeur?”

“I like the feel of the wheel in my hands.”

The truth of it was, though she liked to think of herself as a free spirit, she also liked to be in control of things. Destiny had taken away two of the people she'd loved most in this world. She couldn't harness destiny, but she wanted to keep as much as she could reined in and within her control.

She nodded toward the king-size bed. “Just put him right there.” When he did, she crossed to the bed. There was no need to take off his shoes since Blue was barefoot like she was. Taking the edge of the comforter, she folded it over and covered him with it.

Peter looked on, puzzled. When he was a child, there had been an entire ritual to follow before going to bed. His father had made sure of it. If he
skipped brushing his teeth or laying out his clothes for the next day, there were repercussions to face. Going to bed in his clothes—the way all little boys fantasized about at one time or another—had earned him a slap across the face.

“Aren't you going to undress him?”

She shook her head. “It might wake him.” Raven paused to switch the lamp to its lowest setting. “He's slept in his clothes before.”