When You Wish (Contemporary Romance) (15 page)

“What happened?” Thankfully her voice came out brisk, with no hint of the panic that coursed through her veins. If she didn’t keep a cool head, the Jewels would lose what little control they possessed. She’d seen that happen before, and it was not pretty.

“Em said her chest hurt, then she slid down on the floor.” Ruby’s voice shook.

Grace put the back of her hand to Em’s forehead. Damp but not clammy. Still, she didn’t care for those shallow, panting breaths.

“What should we do, Doctor?”

Ruby’s question brought Grace’s head up in surprise. She always handled health-related crises in this house. Though this looked to be the worst crisis yet.

Grace glanced ove
r her shoulder to find Dan filling the entryway, looking trapped, despite the lack of a door to keep him contained.

“Uh, I’m not . . .” He looked at Grace helplessly.

“He’s not that kind of doctor,” Grace filled in.

“Pshaw! A doctor’s a doctor. He went to school, didn’t he?”

True enough, Grace thought. He had the training, even if he didn’t choose to use it. She was scared enough by Em’s color to say, “You could just look, couldn’t you?”

“I think the first thing to do is call 911.”

“There is no 911.”

“What?” Panic lit Dan’s voice. He really wasn’t that kind of doctor—one who thrived on emergency, anyway. He looked nearly as pale as Em.

“There isn’t a hospital for forty miles. This isn’t New York City.”

“What do you do in an emergency?”

“Drive very fast. Or if you can’t drive, you call the hospital, and then you wait.”

“People can die that way.”

“All the time.” Her voice broke.

A cool yet surprisingly strong hand clamped onto Grace’s wrist. She looked into Em’s pain-filled eyes. “No hospital, Grace. Just Dan.”

Grace looked up at Dan and let him see everything she feared. “Please?” she whispered.

He closed his eyes, as if fighting both her plea and himself. For a moment she feared he would flee, and while she knew she could deal with the crisis if she had to, for some reason she wanted him with her.

When he opened his eyes the uncertainty had receded, and he strode into the room, then knelt next to Grace and Em. He pried Em’s hand from Grace’s wrist and checked the pulse, shrugged. “A bit fast, but not so bad. Where does it hurt?”

Em patted between her breasts.
Clunk, clunk
. Grace reached out and thumped her knuckle against Em’s breastbone. Something hard lay beneath the gold and silver dress.

Dan looked like the snake on Em’s headdress had leapt off and bit him. “What’s that?”

“Corset, dear,” Em whispered. “Couldn’t get into the dress without one. I’m not the girl I used to be.”

“Corset? A real corset—laces, whalebone, the whole nine yards?”

“What other kind is there?”

Dan cursed. “No wonder she passed out. We have to get her out of that thing. Corsets killed women in the old days all the time. I’m sure they still work just as well.”

Grace started to hyperventilate. She couldn’t lose Em. She wouldn’t. She’d had the Jewels with her, in one combination or another, all her life. Now that her mother had lost her path and her father had traveled farther on his, Grace didn’t know if she could bear losing Em, too.

With Grace on one side and Dan on the other, they helped Em sit up. Dan reached for the back of the dress, fumbled a bit, then stopped with his hands hovering, uncertain, above Em’s neck “It’s locked.”

Grace searched for a button, a zipper, a key. Nothing. “You’re right. Em, how did you get into this thing?”

Em just gasped and got whiter.

“Hooks and eyes,” Ruby put in from the corner of the kitchen, where she and Garnet huddled, hand in hand. “All the way down.”

Dan fumbled some more, but his too-big hands were unable to release the small fastenings.

“I feel light-headed again,” Em murmured, and then she slumped into a faint. Ruby and Garnet cried out and hugged each other.

Grace shoved Da
n’s fingers aside and tried herself. She got one fastening open, but her hands shook so badly she couldn’t even find the next one. So panicked was she at Em’s plight, Grace barely noticed when Dan got up and went to the counter.

He returned, put his hands over hers, and stilled them. “She’s going to have a fit, but this isn’t funny anymore,” he said.

Grace had no idea what he meant until he grasped the sides of the dress and yanked it in half with a single outward motion of his powerful hands. Tiny hooks and eyes popped all over the place, pinging against Grace like needles of rain and scattering across the floor with a sound reminiscent of the same rain on a hot tin roof.

Dan picked up the
filet knife, stuck the point beneath the corset strings, and with a single upward flick of his wrist, cut them loose Immediately Em took a full, deep breath.

So did everyone else.

Chapter Ten

Dan’s chest felt tight. He’d been really scared there for a minute. Em could have died if he’d been wrong. But she hadn’t. Only Grace’s trust and faith in him had kept Dan from panicking. This was why he was a doctor without patients. Pain and emotion made him want to help people so badly he forgot everything he knew. Sad, but true.

Gently he laid Em back on the floor. She opened her eyes and looked at him with adoration. “That feels so much better, Doctor, thank you.”

Kneeling next to her, Dan felt like the tallest guy in town. When Grace put her hand over his where it rested upon his knee, her touch reached all the way to his wildly bea
ting heart. “My hero,” she whispered.

Dan felt like one. Maybe this doctor-patient thing wasn’t so bad. Maybe he’d never given it a good look-see. He’d stuttered and shuffled and felt like a fool, then decided research was his forte—and it was. He was very, very good at going into the zone and coming out with the truth. But sometimes the zone got lonely. He’d never noticed how lonely until Grace came along.

“My chest still hurts,” Em said.

Dan’s heart did a swan dive into his belly. Maybe he wasn’t such a doctor after all. “Where?”

She pointed to her diaphragm. “It burns, like after I eat too much pickled herring and jalapeños.”

“Ahh!” Ruby and Garnet agreed and rubbed their bellies in exactly the same spot as Em.

Dan blinked. “You eat that?”

“Doesn’t everyone?”

Dan shook his head. “Did you eat that today?”

“No. Only carrots, cauliflower, broccoli.”

“Raw?” She nodded. “All you ate today were raw vegetables?”

“The bran muffins and oatmeal were cooked.”

Dan moaned. “No wonder you’re in pain. You ate too much roughage. Your stomach is working like a cement mixer trying to digest that. I think you’d better take it easy on the raw veggies. Maybe cook a few once in awhile?”

“That’s all?” Grace asked, relief evident in her voice. “Indigestion?”

“I’d like her to go to a hospital, or at least her family doctor. Couldn’t hurt.”

“I don’t have a family doctor, just you,” Em said.

“I’m not—”

“That kind of doctor. I know. But you examined me, you gave your diagnosis, and I like it.”

“I could be wrong. What if there’s something serious I missed?”

“What if?” Em struggled to her feet.

“You could die.”

“I could get hit by a truck, too, but I’m not plan
ning on it.”

Dan was starting to feel as if he were arguing wi
th Olaf. Speaking of whom . . . He glanced uneasily at the door, expecting the big man to come busting in, take one look at Em’s tattered dress and slug him.

When Olaf didn’t appear at the most inopportune time for a change, Dan relaxed a tiny bit, then helped Em to her room, settling her on the bed.

“Thank you, Doctor, you saved my life.”

“Not really,” he said, though he couldn’t help but smile.

“I choose to think so.”

“And what you choose is true?”

“Life works out so much better that way.”

“I just bet it does.”

“You should try my way sometime. Choose to believe, and what you choose will be true.”

“And if it isn’t?”

Em frowned. “That’s never happened.”

“Never mind.” Grace nudged Dan aside. “Lie down, Aunt Em, and I’ll take care of everything.” Grace sat on the end of the bed and untied, then removed, the Egyptian crisscross sandals. Grace lifted Em’s feet into her lap and began to massage them.

“What are you doing?” Dan asked, feeling as if he were intruding on an intimate ritual.

“Reflexology. To make her pain go away.”

“Never heard of it.”

“I can’t imagine you would have. There are points on the feet that correspond to points on the body. Right here . . .” She pushed on the pad of the left foot. “Is for the heart. And here . . .” She shifted her thumb to the arch and smoothed across the width of the foot, then swept upward. Em’s lips com
pressed at the pressure. “Corresponds to the stomach.”

“You believe that?”

“It works.”

Dan’s happy little bubble of joy burst. Everything was going just fine, then, out of the blue, Grace starts up some hip-hop New Age foot stuff. He’d never understand her.

“That works because Em believes it does. Like a placebo. A sugar pill.”

Grace let out an exasperated sigh and turned to Dan. “So? If it works, it works. Go away.”

Dismissed, just like that. So much for being her hero.

Dan went away.

Grace took out her annoyance on Em’s feet. Reflexology required continuous pressure at specific points. Right foot for problems on the right side of the body, left foot for the left. Sometimes the treatment hurt a bit, especially when you hit the part of the foot related to the injury you wanted to heal. But if you could bear the treatment, the relief was worth the trouble.

The first time Grace had reflexology performed on her, she’d been bent nearly double with a pulled stomach muscle from her first aerobic dance class, which had been her last aerobic dance class. She’d been in pain for a week—slowly stooping over, inch by agonizing inch, to ease the pain. Nothing worked—cold compresses, hot packs, pain relief medicine, rest—nothing. She was at the end of her rope, then Olaf h
ad done her feet. The next morning she was fine.

Placebo? Sugar pill? Faith? Whatever. If it worked, do it; that was her motto. Dr. Dan could just blow his opinion out his ear. She’d like to see what shade his face would turn if she tried Reike—the ancient art of healing with the hands.

“Are you better now?” Grace whispered, not wanting to wake her aunt if the woman had fallen asleep.

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Pain gone?”

“Yes, dear. Bless you.”

Grace smiled as the tender feeling she loved so much stole over her. When she made someone’s pain go away the warm, fuzzy glow that filled her chest reminded her why she did what she did every day. And when she soothed the pain of a child, the feeling exploded like a firecracker at midnight.

“‘Night.” Grace opened the door.

“Sleep tight,” Em murmured. “Love you.”

“Love you more.”

Grace went to her office and sat at her cluttered desk. Why was she so annoyed with Dan?

Because tonight he’d seemed to fit right into her happy home as no other man ever had? Then he’d acted like a stiff again, right when her guard was down. When she thought she could trust him, he’d taken her beliefs, her career, and disparaged them with one sentence and a flicker in his eyes. How could he do that so easily? Because he was who he was, and she’d best not forget that.

How could the man be both adorable and abominable at the same time?

“Aren’t they all?” she asked no one in particular, then gave a wry laugh. At least the ones you liked the most always turned out to be more on the abominable side than not.

She turned her chair and stared out at the night, though she did not see or enjoy the moon and the stars. No wishes tonight; her mind was occupied with less fanciful things. Grace had long ago put the painful part of her past behind her, and most times she refused to remember all that had happened. But now she took the memory out and probed that past like a sore tooth.

Once upon a time
she’d felt the same riot of emotions she felt now for Dan Chadwick. Not quite as fast as she’d felt them for Dan, nor quite as strong. Then she’d called the feelings love. Now she knew a whole lot better.

Men like Dan d
id not take women like Grace seriously. Chambermaids remained chambermaids, though princes usually turned out to be frogs.

And forever after? Ha, ha, ha.

Em got disgusted with her attitude, because to Em, God had given her the world as a great big playground, and men were the best toys in it. But Grace was not Em, and she never would be.