Family Practice Read Free

face interesting in photographs—at least in the rare ones where she’d been smiling—and now, in person, he found her even more appealing.
    “Thank you,” she said. Her tone was dubious, and frankly he couldn’t blame her, considering the condition of her future workplace. “How do you plan to clean up this mess?”
    “My buddy’s got a construction business. He’s here hunting down the source of the leak and hopefully shutting it down.”
    “Only the two of you? You need to get more people in here.”
    Zach didn’t let the judgmental remark goad him into a retort. “I called your father. He’s rounding up some volunteers.” She had grown up in this town. Surely she realized people would pitch in to help once word went out? Or had she been living in the rarified world of a Big Ten medical school so long she’d forgotten her roots?
    She might have blushed but he couldn’t be sure with the lousy lighting. “Of course they’ll come.”
    Though she didn’t offer to pitch in and grab a mop herself. Great, was she going to be one of those kinds of doctors, the ones with the God complexes and the egos to go with it?
    “We weren’t expecting you until tomorrow,” he said as the ominous sound of dripping water filled the silence between them.
    “I left Ann Arbor a day early.” She peered around at the boxes of rescued lab supplies and disintegrating cartons of exam gloves, the empty, wide-open refrigerator with the remains of a collapsed ceiling tile still piled on top, balanced precariously on the carcass of the shorted-out police scanner. A frown drew her arched brows together. “Do you have an assessment of the damages?” She didn’t bother to make eye contact this time, just clipped out the question. “Will we be able to see patients on schedule Monday morning?”
    Great, she was going to be one of those ramrod-and-ruin kinds. It was going to be a long summer. But two could play at her game. “We lost the computer system and the police scanner, ma’am. That’s the worst so far. I don’t believe there’s any structural damage to the building.”
    “But the mess.” She made a little sweeping gesture with her right hand. “There’s water everywhere—”
    “Incoming,” Rudy yelled from the doorway. Zach reached out and wrapped his fingers around Callie’s wrist, hauling her forward and almost into his arms as three overhead tiles crashed to the floor, splattering Zach and Callie with water and soggy, cardboardlike shrapnel.
    He was wearing old cargo shorts and an even older T-shirt, and he was already wet through, but his new boss hadn’t been expecting a dousing. She let out a shocked gasp as the cold water cascaded down her back and soaked her to the skin.
    * * *
    “S ORRY ABOUT THAT , Doc.”
    Callie shifted her attention to the man in the doorway, a short, ruddy-faced, stocky guy with a buzz cut not doing anything to hide his receding hairline, and laughing blue eyes. He was wearing a faded red T-shirt emblazoned with U*S*M*C in equally faded gold letters, and shorts that exposed the prosthesis that replaced his left leg below the knee. His leather tool belt hung low on his hips, as if he were an old-time gunslinger. Rudy Koslowski. She remembered him from high school, even though he’d been a couple of years ahead of her. He’d joined the Marines immediately after graduation and lost his leg in a suicide-bomb attack in Afghanistan.
    “Hi, Rudy,” she said, swallowing a sharp comment about the inadequacy of his warning. Rudy had always been a gossip even as a kid. She doubted he’d changed much over the years, and the last thing she wanted was to be reported to all and sundry as a bitch her first day on the job. “Quite a welcome home you arranged for me.”
    “We aim to please. You still got the moves, Doc,” he said next.
    “I beg your pardon?” But Rudy wasn’t looking at her; he was grinning at the man beside her.
    “Oops.” Rudy chuckled, his expression as mischievous