The M.D. Courts His Nurse Read Free

to Hazel was like a cold hand wrapping her heart.
    â€œActually,” Hazel confessed, “I’m curious as the dickens to know how your love life is getting on. Did that good-looking sales rep fellow ever ask you out? The blond who drives the Town Car?”
    â€œNo, and he’d better not. His flirting was all a smoke screen.”
    â€œNo fire behind the smoke, you mean?”
    â€œNo, a wife behind the smoke, I mean. Last time he was here he forgot to take his wedding band off the way he usually does. Horny creep.”
    Hazel sighed at her end. “It’s true, isn’t it? The real hunks are either married, gay or cowboys.”
    Or snobs suffering from a bad case of “It’s all about me!” Rebecca added inwardly, her glance sliding toward John Saville’s closed door. Still pouting in his office, she told herself. At least she knew this conversation was safe from his sonar ears—her private line was separate from his.
    â€œSo how do you like your new boss?” Hazel probed as if plucking Rebecca’s thoughts from her mind.
    â€œI don’t. For such a young man, he’s sure an old sobersides. At least with his co-workers. Or should I say, with his servant staff. It’s funny. I mean, he replaced Dr. Winthrop, but he seems even older. And, heavens, cranky? He’s always got his nose out of joint about something.”
    â€œWell, I met him briefly at the reception Dottie Bryce hosted for him. I didn’t get that impression at all—his nose was perfectly in place, and so was the rest of him. He’s certainly good-looking. He’s well knit, as Grandma Mystery used to say of men with nice builds.”
    â€œLittle appeal beyond the eighteenth hole,” Rebecca insisted dismissively.
    â€œHmm,” was all Hazel said to that—a speculative tone that Rebecca knew well by now. “Anyway,” the rancherwent on briskly, “I guess I would like to schedule an appointment after all.”
    â€œI thought you were fit as a fiddle?”
    â€œHon, even a fiddle needs its strings tuned now and then.”
    Hazel’s ironic tone turned the words strings tuned into a bawdy innuendo. Rebecca couldn’t help feeling it was also a little nudge from Hazel, the only person in town besides Lois who knew she was still a virgin with “untuned strings.”
    Hazel added quickly, “I just want to ask Dr. Saville some questions about my diet since the gall bladder surgery.”
    â€œUh-huh,” she replied skeptically as she checked Lois’s appointment calendar. “Seems like a lot of female patients in the Mystery area suddenly want to discuss something with their new doctor.”
    â€œSo what? We gals of a certain age aren’t as finicky as you proud and stubborn little twenty-three-year-olds. That’s because you don’t feel Time nipping at your taut little fannies yet. We can feel it, in the form of gravity.”
    Rebecca laughed as she scheduled her friend. But Hazel was wrong about one thing—she did feel Time nipping. And the question wasn’t lack of desire or fear about her first time. The one man she had felt like “giving it up to” had coldly rejected her as his social inferior. And once burned, twice shy.
    â€œTen o’clock next Tuesday sound all right?” she asked Hazel.
    â€œThat’s hunky-dory, hon. See you then.”
    Even as she put the handset back in its cradle, however, Rebecca was already wondering what the sly Matriarch of Mystery was really up to.

Two
    â€œM iss O’Reilly, when you’re free, may I see you in my office?”
    Only my third week under Dr. Dry-As-Dust, Rebecca thought, and I’ve got all his imperious tones filed like everything else in this office.
    She glanced at him. The tone he used now included the hardening of his mouth, and it sure wouldn’t have been so irritating if his mouth wasn’t so blamed