For the Sake of Warwick Mountain (Harlequin Heartwarming) Read Free Page B

the car out front, and I brought him a chocolate pound cake.”
    “Dwight can’t come,” Rebecca announced. “He broke his wrist. This is Dr. Tyler, his partner. He’s taking Dr. Peyseur’s place.”
    The gray-haired woman faced Matt, and her eyes lit with recognition. Her mouth fell open and the cake bobbled in her hands. She saved it from crashing to the floor with a maneuver that would have made an NFL wide receiver proud. Shifting the captured plate to one hand, she grabbed Rebecca’s elbow with the other and dragged the young woman with her toward the kitchen. Before Matt could say anything, the door slammed behind them.
    “That’s Aunt Delilah,” Emily announced matter-of-factly, as if her relative always descended on the house with the speed and fury of a whirlwind.
    Matt sank back into his chair, curious over Delilah’s obvious negative reaction to him. Maybe she was one of the bevy of older women who found Dwight so attractive and was disappointed that he’d been replaced.
    “You’ve got to get that man out of here!” In spite of the closed door, Delilah’s hysterical tone carried clearly into the living room.
    “Shh, he’ll hear you,” Matt heard Rebecca’s hushed and slightly frantic reply.
    “He can’t stay in this house.” Her niece’s warning had failed to lower Delilah’s volume. “Don’t you know who he is?”
    “He’s Matthew Tyler, Dwight’s partner,” Rebecca answered in a reasonable tone.
    “Oh, no, he’s much worse than that!”
    Emily, also tuned in to the conversation in the kitchen, studied Matt with renewed interest.
    “What are you talking about?” Rebecca asked.
    “He’s Dr. Wonderful,” Delilah said in a tone that seemed to equate the nickname with evil incarnate. “You’ve got to get him out of this house. Now.”

CHAPTER TWO
    B ECCA RESCUED THE cake plate from Aunt Delilah’s hands when it wobbled precariously a second time and placed it safely on the counter.
    “Dr. Wonderful?” She cast a worried look at the door between her and the room where Matt Tyler sat with Emily. “What are you talking about?”
    Before her great-aunt could answer, Becca edged her toward the far end of the kitchen in hopes her guest wouldn’t overhear their conversation.
    Aunt Delilah settled onto the bench in the bay window of the breakfast nook, fanned her heated face with one hand and clasped her heart with the other. “I can’t believe you’ve never heard of him.”
    Becca slid onto the bench across from her. Although Granny’s younger sister looked enough like her grandmother to be her twin—small, wiry frame, luxuriant gray hair that refused to remain in a sedate bun and wily gray eyes that sparked with wisdom—their personalities were as different as night from day. Where Granny had been calm and unflappable, Delilah’s moods were as mercurial as the mountain weather, sunny and bright one moment, gloomy and stormy the next. The sisters held in common, however, their deep abiding love of family and the land from which generations of Warwicks had sprung. What affected one touched all, and Aunt Delilah always rose to a perceived threat to protect her clan like a mama bear with cubs.
    She leaned across the table, her gray eyes snapping like thunderclouds laced with heat lightning. “That man was on the cover of People magazine just last month.”
    That’s where she’d seen him, Becca recalled. On the magazine cover in the beauty shop that Cousin Bessie ran out of the front room of her house. Becca pictured the gleaming smile, the handsome face—then forced the image from her mind to concentrate on what her aunt was saying.
    “That man has more money than God. The article said he’s the doctor to the stars. Showed pictures of him with bunches of young celebrities, most of them with bosoms out to here—” Delilah held her hands a foot from her own flat chest “—and some in bikinis that should have had them arrested for indecent exposure. He’s dated most of