Family Practice Read Free Page A

as Callie remembered from high school. “Guess we’re going to have to figure out another nickname for you, Corpsman. Can’t have two Docs in the place, can we?” He paused as if waiting for his barb to strike home.
    Rudy was smiling, but Zach wasn’t. “Stow it, Rudy. She outranks us.”
    “Sure thing.” Rudy raised both hands, signaling surrender, but his grin grew a little wider as he stared pointedly at their joined hands. “Whatever you say.” Belatedly Callie tugged herself free of Zach’s grasp. Why hadn’t she noticed Zach was still holding her hand before Rudy did? Maybe because she had enjoyed the feel of Zach’s long, strong fingers wrapped around her wrist. He had big hands, but his hold on her had been gentle. He would have no trouble setting a bone or reducing a dislocation with those hands and that strength, even in a combat situation. Experience she certainly didn’t have.
    “Zach’s patients may call him whatever they and he are comfortable with,” she said, appalled at how condescending the remark sounded. She hadn’t meant it that way. She avoided speaking to colleagues in that manner, although she’d been talked down to plenty of times herself. Medicine, for the most part, was still a man’s world.
    “Sure thing, Dr. Layman,” Rudy said. He wasn’t smiling anymore.
    “What can I do to help?” she asked, hoping to make some kind of amends. This was not how she’d wanted to start her relationship with Zach Gibson, especially not with a witness as talkative as Rudy.
    “Nothing, ma’am.”
    She wished he wouldn’t call her that, but she could hardly ask him to call her Callie so soon, and insisting on being addressed as Dr. Layman would only add insult to injury at this point. “I want to help,” she said. “It’s my practice now,” she couldn’t stop herself from adding.
    Zach’s face hardened momentarily. “You don’t know where a bloody thing is yet, or where it goes.” His tone softened, probably when he remembered he was talking to his boss. “You’re soaking wet and covered with fiberglass. Go on over to the White Pine and get changed. Besides, Leola and Bonnie are on their way to lend a hand.” The two women, both of whom Callie knew from her childhood, were the clinic’s nurses and receptionist/bookkeepers, both essential to the efficient functioning of the practice. “Everything’s under control here, ma’am.”
    “I wish you wouldn’t call me that,” she snapped before she could censure her words.
    “Yes, ma’am.” A corner of his mouth ticked up in what might have been a grin, but it was so fleeting Callie couldn’t be sure. “Go, Dr. Layman,” he said, the words just shy of being an outright command. “Let your dad and your new stepmother know you’re in town. Get yourself settled in and we’ll have this place ready for business on Monday morning.”
    So this was the way he wanted things to go. Where he continued to call the shots and she had no say in the decisions.
    Zach Gibson didn’t want her here; that was easy enough to figure out. The problem was...he was right. She would be more of a hindrance than a help to these people, who were used to working together as a team. She was the outsider. And the one thing she could never let any of them guess, especially her new PA, was that she was afraid she would never fit in.

CHAPTER TWO
    T HERE WAS NO PARKING space in front of the White Pine Bar and Grill, though Callie would have been surprised to find one on a Saturday evening in midsummer. She drove on by, turned left at the corner onto Perch Street, climbed the low hill, turned left again and angled her Jeep into the narrow gravel alleyway that ran behind the building. Her stepmother’s minivan was parked in the spot next to her dad’s SUV, but there was just enough space alongside the storage shed to park her car, if she didn’t ever need to open the passenger-side door.
    She wiggled out of the Jeep and brushed at the front of her