Yours to Keep: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance Page 8

  He could see the evidence of the time Theo had spent in his office—a copy of The Hunger Games, Theo’s Windbreaker slung over the back of a chair. The “punishment” was infinitely more successful than Ethan could have hoped. Theo sat in the office, reading his book or doing his homework. When Ethan came in from seeing a patient, Theo looked at him expectantly. “Perfectly healthy,” Ethan said, most of the time. Or “stomach bug.” Or “unexplained sore throat. Probably a bad cold.”

  And Theo would nod sagely. Once he asked, “Do you like being a doctor?”

  Ethan had sat down then, across from Theo and the big unkempt desk, and given him the long answer, even though it made him ten minutes behind schedule. For once he didn’t have to choose other people’s children over his own. “I love being a doctor,” he’d said, and Theo hadn’t squirmed or writhed with discomfort or boredom but had let Ethan tell him about what it was like to ease children away from their fears, soothe anxious parents, solve mysteries.

  At the end, Theo had said, “Maybe I could do that.”

  And Ethan had been able to restrain himself from saying, “You have to keep your grades up” or “If you study hard.”

  In the car on the ride home that night, they had sat in companionable silence, a feeling so different from the experience of the preceding weeks that Ethan wanted to pray to a God he hadn’t believed in since childhood to keep things just like this. Requiring Theo to spend time in his office, it turned out, was not a punishment but a blessing.

  Now he gathered the charts in his arms, slung Theo’s jacket over his elbow, and stacked The Hunger Games on top of it all. He ran up the stairs to the parking lot and drove too fast on the way home, surging into the garage and almost taking out Theo’s bike. He took the stairs from the basement two at a time. His watch said 6:05.

  The kitchen was empty, and he wanted to slam his fist into the table.

  He heard a sound from the front hall.

  She was standing there, looking out the narrow glass panes beside the door, her hair a silky black fall. The sun had disappeared behind the trees and the hall was in shadow. She turned and smiled at him.

  His breath caught. He was absurdly happy to see her. “Hey.”

  “Hey yourself.”

  “I thought I’d missed you.”

  “My shuttle’s late. They called to say they were running fifteen minutes behind. I sent Theo upstairs to start his homework.”

  Fifteen minutes. He had some ideas about those fifteen minutes. He took a step toward her, watching her face. Her smile trembled a little and her eyes warned him off, but she didn’t back away as he took another step.

  “I’m glad I didn’t miss you.”

  “Me, too,” she whispered.

  He reached out his hand, wanting to close the distance between them, but she pulled back, almost imperceptibly, and he stopped. The temptation to take another step closer was a physical sensation, like a palm on his back. Dammit, he needed to understand. “Am I way off base here? Out of line?”

  They both turned at a sound from upstairs, Theo’s door opening. His footsteps thudded across the carpet, tapped into the upstairs bathroom. The door closed.

  When he turned back, she was looking at him, her eyes sad and a little puzzled.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You don’t owe me anything, especially an explanation. Forget I said anything.”

  “No. You’re right.”

  There was an unrestrained warmth in her gaze that he hadn’t seen before. His heart thudded.

  “You’re not off base, and you’re not out of line. But there are good reasons for us not to …” She trailed off. Bit her lip. “The apartment.” She sighed. “It’s nine hundred square feet. Me and my sister and my niece in one bedroom, my brother and my nephews in the other. The kitchen hasn’t been redone since the 1960s. I think someone might have replaced the toilet sometime in the eighties, but not anything else in the bathroom.”

  He wasn’t sure what she was saying. “Your apartment is small,” he said stupidly.

  “I told you, we have five jobs among us. But it’s only been in the last year or so that we’ve managed to pay the rent and save a little bit. Only since I’ve been doing a lot more tutoring.”

  She was trying to tell him that she couldn’t go out with him because she was poor.

  “I don’t care if you don’t have money.”

  “I didn’t go to college.”

  “I don’t care about that, either. You’re quick and smart and funny—” He closed the distance between them now, put his hand to her cheek, which was smooth and hot. He brushed his thumb over her skin, touching her hair. The shift of the strands over his fingers set off a domino tumble of nerves up his arm, down his torso, into his gut, his cock.

  “My life,” Ana began. Her voice shook.

  Whatever it was she’d been about to tell him was drowned in the noise of Theo pounding down the stairs, and he leaped away from her.

  Theo swung himself over the end of the banister, landed at his father’s feet, and leaned in and whispered into his ear, “Toilet’s clogged.”

  Ethan closed his eyes.

  When he opened them, Ana was still there, but she’d turned away and was looking out the front window.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, but he knew he’d lost that moment.

  He’d gotten the toilet snake unfurled, its long coils down in the depths, when he heard a pounding at the front door. For a moment, he couldn’t figure it; then he remembered that they were expecting his brother, James, for dinner. “Fuck,” he said aloud.

  By the time he got the snake rewound and the toilet back to health, James had made himself comfortable in the living room and Ana was gone.

  Ethan glanced around. “Where’d Theo go?”

  James leaned back on the couch, infinitely easy with himself. He was shorter and stockier than Ethan, and he carried himself with a cockiness Ethan couldn’t have imitated if he’d wanted to, but apart from that they could have been twins—same reddish-brown hair, same green eyes. “He said he was going upstairs to finish his homework.”

  “Good thing.” Ethan plopped onto the couch beside him.

  “Can I just say? The Spanish tutor is smoking hot.”

  Startled, Ethan turned to look at James, who wiggled his eyebrows.

  Ethan elbowed James hard under the ribs.

  James grunted in pain. “She is.” He sounded distinctly unrepentant. He was two years younger than Ethan and taught high school in Wayland. He was a dedicated bachelor, rarely without a girlfriend and rarely with any one girlfriend for more than a few months. “I’d do her for a dollar.”

  Ethan’s pulse rose rapidly, a condition that often plagued him around James.

  “In fact, I think I’m going to ask her out, if you don’t mind. You have her phone number?”

  Ethan struggled to keep his voice level, reasonable. “What makes you think she’d be interested in you?”

  James sat up and narrowed his eyes to scrutinize Ethan. “Oho! So that’s how it is in your family.”

  “What do you mean?” Ethan asked coolly.

  “You’re interested in her. Are you going to do anything about it? Or just admire her from afar? Like the beautiful mommies?”

  Ethan crossed his arms. “It’s not like the mommies. The mommies are a professional issue.”

  James laughed. “Yeah, but that’s not why you don’t sleep with them.”

  “Of course that’s why I don’t sleep with them. It’s against my professional ethics, for fuck’s sake.”

  James leaned back, rested one foot on the coffee table, and draped an arm across the back of the couch. “So what’s your reason for not screwing the tutor?”

  “Don’t be such a dick.” If Ethan had been at James’s house, he would probably have walked out by now, but there was nowhere to go, and kicking James out would take more energy than Ethan had.

  “Sorry,” James said sweetly. “What’s your reason for not making
love to the tutor? Does her professional-ethics handbook forbid it?”

  Ethan tried not to envision suffocating his brother with a cushion. It would be so satisfying. He drew a few deep breaths, settled himself back into the sofa, and wondered whether he should tell James about Ana’s close encounter with Ed Branch. But he knew exactly what James would have to say to that. What the hell does that have to do with you? And he’d be right. The whole she-works-for-me thing had only been an excuse for him not to take a risk.

  James didn’t give up easily. “Seriously, bro. She’s beautiful, she’s smart—at least, I assume she is if you’re paying her to tutor Theo. She doesn’t have a boyfriend—”

  Ethan turned on his brother. “How do you know she doesn’t have a boyfriend?”

  “Ah,” James said. “We have our ways.” He sat up and restored his feet to the floor with some emphasis.

  “Did you ask her?”

  “I sure did.”

  Ethan sank back into the couch again, defeated. “You actually asked her if she had a boyfriend.”

  “And she actually said no,” James said.

  “Did you … did she …?” He thought he might be capable of murder.

  James grinned. “Did I? Did she? Did we what?”

  “Did you ask her out?”

  James regarded Ethan with his self-satisfied smile, dragging the moment out so long that Ethan wanted to punch him. Then he shook his head. “No, I didn’t. And I’m not interested in her if you’re interested in her. You’ve got dibs.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Dad!” Theo ambled in. “Dibs on what?”

  “On the Spanish tutor,” James said, before Ethan could shut him up.

  “Ignore him,” Ethan said. “He’s a degenerate crazy man.” He glared at his brother, who shrugged.

  “You like her?” Theo asked, his eyes wide.

  “He likes her,” James confirmed.

  Ethan scowled. “Do you ever shut up?”

  “I tell it like it is.” James sprawled back on the couch again.

  Theo appeared to be considering what he’d learned. “That’s pretty cool.”

  Ethan was surprised at how good that felt, even though a fifteen-year-old boy’s opinion of his romantic life shouldn’t matter any more than a thirty-six-year-old veteran bachelor’s. “Did you finish your homework?” He wanted to end the conversation before James got going again.

  Theo’s face shuttered abruptly. “No.”

  When he’d gone back upstairs, James said, “I think he’s a bigger boy than you think he is, Eth.”

  “You think a lot of stuff. Keep your thoughts off my life.”

  James laughed. “As soon as you get a life, I sure will.”

  Ethan sighed. At the bottom of all the teasing there was a granule of pure truth. For so long, he hadn’t had a life to speak of. For so long, it hadn’t mattered, but things had changed, and now it did.

  There was no use denying it, not to James, who, despite all the bullshit, saw through him better than anyone. Like right now. James was staring at him, waiting for him to respond to the jab. One eyebrow lowered.

  Ethan said the most honest thing he could think of.

  “I’m trying.”

  Chapter 9

  The panic in Nicole Freyer’s voice surged over the phone line.

  “Take a deep breath,” Ethan told her and did the same himself. Despite years of practice at this, he still sometimes found the mothers’ fear contagious. And he knew that his own calm could work its way through the phone back to Nicole.

  “They don’t have anything till May,” she wailed.

  “And nothing’s changed with Mary?” He fiddled with the jar of pens on his desk.

  “If anything, she’s worse.”

  “I’ll call them,” he said. “I’ll get you an appointment, I promise.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  He put the phone down and called the developmental specialist’s office. He identified himself and explained the situation. The woman at the other end of the phone asked whether it was an emergency. He hesitated.

  “Yes,” he said, finally.

  He got Mary an appointment for the following Thursday then called Nicole back to let her know.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  “We’re going to get to the bottom of this,” he said.

  “I knew you’d fix it. You’re the best. You’re the Superman of pediatricians.”

  Something, some subtle switch, some breathy new note in her voice alerted him. He shied back from the receiver as if it were the woman herself.

  Oh, bloody hell. It was unmistakable, the sexual undertone.

  But the fact that Nicole was flirting didn’t mean Mary wasn’t sick. The trouble was you couldn’t tell. Maternal neediness could turn bad behavior into a yearlong, expensive, test-ridden carnival of doctor’s visits, but mothers were also by far the most reliable early indicator of serious trouble.

  “Let’s see what Dr. Hastings has to say. We’ll go from there. In the meantime, try to do something nice for yourself. A spa day or something. Get a little time away from Mary.” He hesitated. Sexual desperation often reared its head when things were amiss on the domestic front. He could try to get a line on that, see if he could diagnose the mommy’s condition, if not the child’s. “Get a babysitter. Go out to a nice restaurant with your husband.”

  A short, harsh laugh affirmed his suspicions.

  “You’d be surprised how much it helps. Try it.”

  “He—”

  The last thing he wanted was to give her the impression he could be her confidant. “Do something self-indulgent. Take care of yourself.”

  At the other end of the phone, she took a breath.

  “You’re going to be fine,” he said.

  “Okay.” Her voice quavered, the edge of that familiar desperation made plain. “Thank you. Goodbye.”

  He placed the phone back in the receiver as gently as he could. His hands were shaking, a narrow escape. In a year, he knew, she’d be grateful that he’d spared her the humiliation of the confession she’d been about to make.

  Now he had to figure out whether Mary’s ailment was manufactured or real.

  “¿Quién es Ethan?”

  Her brother was demanding to know who Ethan was.

  “Your new yanqui boyfriend?”

  When Ricky was angry, his language devolved into a stew of Spanglish and curses. He wasn’t angry yet, though, just suspicious. Edgy.

  “No es mi novio.”—“He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “¿No? Quién es?”

  “I work for him. I tutor his son.”

  “He called. He wants you a half hour later.” Emphasis on “wants.”

  “Don’t be gross, Ricky. It’s a job.”

  “I’m sure it’s not the only job he wants you to do around there.”

  “Ricky.”

  They were in the kitchen, the dingy, fifty-year-old kitchen, with its avocado and gold appliances, the electric range-top that worked intermittently, one burner on Thursday, another one on Friday, a bonus two functional burners one Saturday for no discernible reason.

  “I don’t like the idea of you working for him,” Ricky said.

  He’d like it even less if he knew how she felt about Ethan, but she wasn’t about to say that. “You don’t like the idea of me working in Beacon at all.”

  “I’m dealing with the idea of you working in Beacon. It doesn’t bother me so much anymore. But working for a man? Where’s his wife? He good-looking?”

  She sighed. “What’s that got to do with anything? I’m not seeing him.” It was the truth, but it felt like a lie. What the hell? What was she doing? “His wife is dead. He’s a single dad.”

  Something softened in his face.

  What a bundle of contradictions he was, her Ricky.

  She went to him and put her arms around him. He resisted for a moment, then hugged her back. He touched her hair. “Herma
nita, I worry. I worry all the time about you.”

  “I know.”

  “You’re keeping your mouth shut, right?”

  She nodded, thinking of what she’d already told Ethan about herself, far more than she’d ever told an employer.

  “You can’t trust anyone.”

  She remembered how Ricky had coached her as a little girl. “If anyone asks you where you’re from, you say, ‘Here.’ If anyone asks you if you’re an American, you say, ‘Yes.’ If anyone asks you about your parents, you say, ‘My brother is my guardian.’ But the most important rule of all is that you shouldn’t hang around long enough to let people ask you those kinds of questions.”

  He’d taken care of her like a father, better than a father, since her actual father had abandoned them. She wouldn’t have graduated from high school if Ricky hadn’t worked three jobs to support the rest of them while she was a student.

  But she wasn’t a little girl anymore. She was done with high school, had two jobs of her own, was bringing in more than half the household’s income now. And she wasn’t Ricky, either. Like Cara, Ricky was more Dominican than American. He would probably have gone back to D.R. by now if it weren’t for the kids. He was fifteen when they arrived here, beyond the reach of schoolteachers, stubborn about choosing Dominican friends, unwilling to learn English. And he’d only gotten angrier and more entrenched when their father failed to join them in the United States. When their mother died. When he discovered the deceptions and screwups and began to understand the consequences.

  She was different. She’d always been an American. She’d been at the top of her class in school. Her best friend had been a little blond-haired white girl, whose house she spent more time in than her own, playing Barbies and eating American meals and glomming onto the sophisticated English patterns of her friend’s highly educated parents. She couldn’t choose to live in Ricky’s world any more than he could choose to live in hers.

  “He’s a good guy, Ricky.”

  All the softness went out of him, and he let her go with enough emphasis that it was almost a shove.

  “You cried for a month after that other yanqui asshole.”