Coltrain's Proposal

Chapter 2

Monday morning brought a variety of new cases, and Louise found herself stuck with the most routine of them, as usual. She and Coltrain were supposed to be partners, but when he wasn’t operating, he got the interesting, challenging illnesses. Louise got fractured ribs and colds.

He’d been stiff with her this morning, probably because he was still fuming over the argument they’d had about his mistaken idea of her weekend activities. Accusing her of lollygagging with the EMTs for excitement; really!

She watched his white-coated back disappear into an examination room down the hall in their small building and sighed half-angrily as she went back to check an X-ray in the files. The very worst thing about unrequited love, she thought miserably, was that it fed on itself. The more her partner in the medical practice ignored and antagonized her, the harder she had to fight her dreams about him. She didn’t want to get married; she didn’t even want to get involved. But he made her hungry.

He’d spent a lot of time with Jane Parker until she married that Burke man, and Lou had long ago given up hope that he would ever notice her in the same way he always noticed Jane. The two of them had grown up together, though, whereas Lou had only been in partnership with him for a year. She was a native of Austin, not Jacobsville. Small towns were like extended families. Everybody knew each other, and some families had been friends for more than one generation. Lou was a true outsider here, even though she was a native Texan. Perhaps that was one of many reasons that Dr. Coltrain found her so forgettable.

She wasn’t bad looking. She had long, thick blond hair and big brown eyes and a creamy, blemish-free complexion. She was tall and willowy, but still shorter than her colleague. She lacked his fiery temper and his authoritarian demeanor. He was tall and whipcord lean, with flaming red hair and blue eyes and a dark tan from working on his small ranch when he wasn’t treating patients. That tan was odd in a redhead, although he did have a smattering of freckles over his nose and the backs of his big hands. She’d often wondered if the freckles went any farther, but she had yet to see him without his professional white coat over his very formal suit. He wasn’t much on casual dressing at work. At home, she was sure that he dressed less formally.

That was something Lou would probably never know. She’d never been invited to his home, despite the fact that most of the medical staff at the local hospital had. Lou was automatically excluded from any social gathering that he coordinated.

Other people had commented on his less than friendly behavior toward her. It puzzled them, and it puzzled her, because she hadn’t become his partner in any under-handed way. He had known from the day of her application that she was female, so it couldn’t be that. Perhaps, she thought wistfully, he was one of those old-line dominating sort of men who thought women had no place in medicine. But he’d been instrumental in getting women into positions of authority at the hospital, so that theory wasn’t applicable, either. The bottom line was that he simply did not like Louise Blakely, medical degree or no medical degree, and she’d never known why.

She really should ask Drew Morris why, she told herself with determination. It had been Drew, a surgeon and friend of her family, who’d sent word about the opening in Coltrain’s practice. He’d wanted to help Lou get a job near him, so that he could give her some moral support in the terrible days following the deaths of her parents. She, in turn, had liked the idea of being in practice in a small town, one where she knew at least one doctor on the staff of the hospital. Despite growing up in Austin, it was still a big city and she was lonely. She was twenty-eight, a loner whose whole life had been medicine. She’d made sure that her infrequent dates never touched her heart, and she was innocent in an age when innocence was automatically looked on with disdain or suspicion.

Her nurse stuck her head in the doorway. “There’s a call for you. Dr. Morris is on line two.”

“Thanks, Brenda.”

She picked up the receiver absently, her finger poised over the designated line. But when she pressed it, before she could say a word, the sentence she’d intercepted accidentally blared in her ear in a familiar deep voice.

“…told you I wouldn’t have hired her in the first place, if I had known who she was related to. I did you a favor, never realizing she was Blakely’s daughter. You can’t imagine that I’ll ever forgive her father for what he did to the girl I loved, do you? She’s been a constant reminder, a constant torment!”

“That’s harsh, Copper,” Drew began.

“It’s how I feel. She’s nothing but a burden here. But to answer your question, hell no, you’re not stepping on my toes if you ask her out on a date! I find Louise Blakely repulsive and repugnant, and an automaton with no attractions whatsoever. Take her with my blessing. I’d give real money if she’d get out of my practice and out of my life, and the sooner the better!” There was a click and the line, obviously open, was waiting for her.

She clicked the receiver to announce her presence and said, as calmly as she could, “Dr. Lou Blakely.”

“Lou! It’s Drew Morris,” came the reply. “I hope I’m not catching you at a bad moment?”

“No.” She cleared her throat and fought to control her scattered emotions. “No, not at all. What can I do for you?”

“There’s a dinner at the Rotary Club Thursday. How about going with me?”

She and Drew occasionally went out together, in a friendly but not romantic way. She would have refused, but what Coltrain had said made her mad. “Yes, I would like to, thanks,” she said.

Drew laughed softly. “Great! I’ll pick you up at six on Thursday, then.”

“See you then.”

She hung up, checked the X-ray again meticulously, and put it away in its file. Brenda ordinarily pulled the X-rays for her, but it was Monday and, as usual, they were overflowing with patients who’d saved their weekend complaints for office hours.

She went back to her patient, her color a little high, but no disturbance visible in her expression.

She finished her quota of patients and then went into her small office. Mechanically she picked up a sheet of letterhead paper, with Dr. Coltrain’s name on one side and hers on the other. Irrelevantly, she thought that the stationery would have to be replaced now.

She typed out a neat resignation letter, put it in an envelope and went to place it on Dr. Coltrain’s desk. It was lunchtime and he’d already left the building. He made sure he always did, probably to insure that he didn’t risk having Lou invite herself to eat with him.

Brenda scowled as her boss started absently toward the back door. “Shouldn’t you take off your coat first?” she asked hesitantly.

Lou did, without a word, replaced it in her office, whipped her leather fanny pack around her waist and left the building.

It would have been nice if she’d had someone to talk to, she thought wistfully, about this latest crisis. She sat alone in the local café, drinking black coffee and picking at a small salad. She didn’t mingle well with people. When she wasn’t working, she was quiet and shy, and she kept to herself. It was difficult for strangers to approach her, but she didn’t realize that. She stared into her coffee and remembered every word Coltrain had said to Drew Morris about her. He hated her. He couldn’t possibly have made it clearer. She was repugnant, he’d said.

Well, perhaps she was. Her father had told her so, often enough, when he was alive. He and her mother were from Jacobsville but hadn’t lived in the area for years. He had never spoken of his past. Not that he spoke to Lou often, anyway, except to berate her grades and tell her that she’d never measure up.

“Excuse me?”

She looked up. The waitress was staring at her. “Yes?” she asked coolly.

“I don’t mean to pry, but are you all right?”

The question surprised Lou, and touched her. She managed a faint smile through her misery. “Yes. It’s been a…long morning. I’m not really hungry.”

“Okay.” The waitress smiled again, reassuringly, and went away.

Just as Lou was finishing her coffee, Coltrain came in the front door. He was wearing the elegant gray suit that looked so good on him, and carrying a silver belly Stetson by the brim. He looked furiously angry as his pale eyes scanned the room and finally spotted Lou, sitting all alone.

He never hesitated, she thought, watching him walk purposefully toward her. There must be an emergency…

He slammed the opened envelope down on the table in front of her. “What the hell do you mean by that?” he demanded in a dangerously quiet tone.

She raised her dark, cold eyes to his. “I’m leaving,” she explained and averted her gaze.

“I know that! I want to know why!”

She looked around. The café was almost empty, but the waitress and a local cowboy at the counter were glancing at them curiously.

Her chin came up. “I’d rather not discuss my private business in public, if you don’t mind,” she said stiffly.

His jaw clenched, and his eyes grew glittery. He stood back to allow her to get up. He waited while she paid for her salad and coffee and then followed her out to where her small gray Ford was parked.

Her heart raced when he caught her by the arm before she could get her key out of her jeans pocket. He jerked her around, not roughly, and walked her over to Jacobsville’s small town square, to a secluded bench in a grove of live oak and willow trees. Because it was barely December, there were no leaves on the trees and it was cool, despite her nervous perspiration. She tried to throw off his hand, to no avail.

He only loosened his grip on her when she sat down on a park bench. He remained standing, propping his boot on the bench beside her, leaning one long arm over his knee to study her. “This is private enough,” he said shortly. “Why are you leaving?”

“I signed a contract to work with you for one year. It’s almost up, anyway,” she said icily. “I want out. I want to go home.”

“You don’t have anyone left in Austin,” he said, surprising her.

“I have friends,” she began.

“You don’t have those, either. You don’t have friends at all, unless you count Drew Morris,” he said flatly.

Her fingers clenched around her car keys. She looked at them, biting into the flesh even though not a speck of emotion showed on her placid features.

His eyes followed hers to her lap and something moved in his face. There was an expression there that puzzled her. He reached down and opened her rigid hand, frowning when he saw the red marks the keys had made in her palm.

She jerked her fingers away from him.

He seemed disconcerted for a few seconds. He stared at her without speaking and she felt her heart beating wildly against her ribs. She hated being helpless.

He moved back, watching her relax. He took another step and saw her release the breath she’d been holding. Every trace of anger left him.

“It takes time for a partnership to work,” he said abruptly. “You’ve only given this one a year.”

“That’s right,” she said tonelessly. “I’ve given it a year.”

The emphasis she placed on the first word caught his attention. His blue eyes narrowed. “You sound as if you don’t think I’ve given it any time at all.”

She nodded. Her eyes met his. “You didn’t want me in the practice. I suspected it from the beginning, but it wasn’t until I heard what you told Drew on the phone this morning that—”

His eyes flashed oddly. “You heard what I said?” he asked huskily. “You heard…all of it!” he exclaimed.

Her lips trembled just faintly. “Yes,” she said.

He was remembering what he’d told Drew Morris in a characteristic outburst of bad temper. He often said things in heat that he regretted later, but this he regretted most of all. He’d never credited his cool, unflappable partner with any emotions at all. She’d backed away from him figuratively and physically since the first day she’d worked at the clinic. Her physical withdrawal had maddened him, although he’d always assumed she was frigid.

But in the past five minutes, he’d learned disturbing things about her without a word being spoken. He’d hurt her. He didn’t realize she’d cared that much about his opinion. Hell, he’d been furious because he’d just had to diagnose leukemia in a sweet little boy of four. It had hurt him to do that, and he’d lashed out at Morris over Lou in frustration at his own helplessness. But he’d had no idea that she’d overheard his vicious remarks. She was going to leave and it was no less than he deserved. He was genuinely sorry. She wasn’t going to believe that, though. He could tell by her mutinous expression, in her clenched hands, in the tight set of her mouth.

“You did Drew a favor and asked me to join you, probably over some other doctor you really wanted,” she said with a forced smile. “Well, no harm done. Perhaps you can get him back when I leave.”

“Wait a minute,” he began shortly.

She held up a hand. “Let’s not argue about it,” she said, sick at knowing his opinion of her, his real opinion. “I’m tired of fighting you to practice medicine here. I haven’t done the first thing right, according to you. I’m a burden. Well, I just want out. I’ll go on working until you can replace me.” She stood up.

His hand tightened on the brim of his hat. He was losing this battle. He didn’t know how to pull his irons out of the fire.

“I had to tell the Dawes that their son has leukemia,” he said, hating the need to explain his bad temper. “I say things I don’t mean sometimes.”

“We both know that you meant what you said about me,” she said flatly. Her eyes met his levelly. “You’ve hated me from almost the first day we worked together. Most of the time, you can’t even be bothered to be civil to me. I didn’t know that you had a grudge against me from the outset…”

She hadn’t thought about that until she said it, but there was a subtle change in his expression, a faint distaste that her mind locked on.

“So you heard that, too.” His jaw clenched on words he didn’t want to say. But maybe it was as well to say them. He’d lived a lie for the past year.

“Yes.” She gripped the wrought-iron frame of the park bench hard. “What happened? Did my father cause someone to die?”

His jaw tautened. He didn’t like saying this. “The girl I wanted to marry got pregnant by him. He performed a secret abortion and she was going to marry me anyway.” He laughed icily. “A fling, he called it. But the medical authority had other ideas, and they invited him to resign.”

Lou’s fingers went white on the cold wrought iron. Had her mother known? What had happened to the girl afterward?

“Only a handful of people knew,” Coltrain said, as if he’d read her thoughts. “I doubt that your mother did. She seemed very nice—hardly a fit match for a man like that.”

“And the girl?” she asked levelly.

“She left town. Eventually she married.” He rammed his hands into his pockets and glared at her. “If you want the whole truth, Drew felt sorry for you when your parents died so tragically. He knew I was looking for a partner, and he recommended you so highly that I asked you. I didn’t connect the name at first,” he added on a mocking note. “Ironic, isn’t it, that I’d choose as a partner the daughter of a man I hated until the day he died.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked irritably. “I would have resigned!”

“You were in no fit state to be told anything,” he replied with reluctant memories of her tragic face when she’d arrived. His hands clenched in his pockets. “Besides, you’d signed a one-year contract. The only way out was if you resigned.”

It all made sense immediately. She was too intelligent not to understand why he’d been so antagonistic. “I see,” she breathed. “But I didn’t resign.”

“You were made of stronger stuff than I imagined,” he agreed. “You wouldn’t back down an inch. No matter how rough it got, you threw my own bad temper back at me.” He rubbed his fingers absently over the car keys in his pocket while he studied her. “It’s been a long time since anyone around here stood up to me like that,” he added reluctantly.

She knew that without being told. He was a holy terror. Even grown men around Jacobsville gave him a wide berth when he lost his legendary temper. But Lou never had. She stood right up to him. She wasn’t fiery by nature, but her father had been viciously cruel to her. She’d learned early not to show fear or back down, because it only made him worse. The same rule seemed to apply to Coltrain. A weaker personality wouldn’t have lasted in his office one week, much less one year, male or female.

She knew now that Drew Morris had been doing what he thought was a good deed. Perhaps he’d thought it wouldn’t matter to Coltrain after such a long time to have a Blakely working for him. But he’d obviously underestimated the man. Lou would have realized at once, on the shortest acquaintance, that Coltrain didn’t forgive people.

He stared at her unblinkingly. “A year. A whole year, being reminded every day I took a breath what your father cost me. There were times when I’d have done anything to make you leave. Just the sight of you was painful.” He smiled wearily. “I think I hated you, at first.”

That was the last straw. She’d loved him, against her will and all her judgment, and he was telling her that all he saw when he looked at her was an ice woman whose father had betrayed him with the woman he loved. He hated her.

It was too much all at once. Lou had always had impeccable control over her emotions. It had been dangerous to let her father know that he was hurting her, because he enjoyed hurting her. And now here was the one man she’d ever loved telling her that he hated her because of her father.

What a surprise it would be for him to learn that her father, at the last, had been little more than a high-class drug addict, stealing narcotics from the hospital where he worked in Austin to support his growing habit. He’d been as high as a kite on narcotics, in fact, when the plane he was piloting went down, killing himself and his wife.

Tears swelled her eyelids. Not a sound passed her lips as they overflowed in two hot streaks down her pale cheeks.

He caught his breath. He’d seen her tired, impassive, worn-out, fighting mad, and even frustrated. But he’d never seen her cry. His lean hand shot out and touched the track of tears down one cheek, as if he had to touch them to make sure they were real.

She jerked back from him, laughing tearfully. “So that was why you were so horrible to me.” She choked out the words. “Drew never said a word…no wonder you suffered me! And I was silly enough to dream…!” The laughter was harsher now as she dashed away the tears, staring at him with eyes full of pain and loss. “What a fool I’ve been,” she whispered poignantly. “What a silly fool!”

She turned and walked away from him, gripping the car keys in her hand. The sight of her back was as eloquently telling as the words that haunted him. She’d dreamed…what?

For the next few days, Lou was polite and remote and as courteous as any stranger toward her partner. But something had altered in their relationship. He was aware of a subtle difference in her attitude toward him, in a distancing of herself that was new. Her eyes had always followed him, and he’d been aware of it at some subconscious level. Perhaps he’d been aware of more than covert glances, too. But Lou no longer watched him or went out of her way to seek him out. If she had questions, she wrote them down and left them for him on his desk. If there were messages to be passed on, she left them with Brenda.

The one time she did seek him out was Thursday afternoon as they closed up.

“Have you worked out an advertisement for someone to replace me?” she asked him politely.

He watched her calm dark eyes curiously. “Are you in such a hurry to leave?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said bluntly. “I’d like to leave after the Christmas holidays.” She turned and would have gone out the door, but his hand caught the sleeve of her white jacket. She slung it off and backed away. “At the first of the year.”

He glared at her, hating the instinctive withdrawal that came whenever he touched her. “You’re a good doctor,” he said flatly. “You’ve earned your place here.”

High praise for a man with his grudges. She looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes wounded. “But you hate me, don’t you? I heard what you said to Drew, that every time you looked at me you remembered what my father had done and hated me all over again.”

He let go of her sleeve, frowning. He couldn’t find an answer.

“Well, don’t sweat it, Doctor,” she told him. “I’ll be gone in a month and you can find someone you like to work with you.”

She laughed curtly and walked out of the office.

She dressed sedately that evening for the Rotary Club dinner, in a neat off-white suit with a pink blouse. But she left her blond hair long around her shoulders for once, and used a light dusting of makeup. She didn’t spend much time looking in the mirror. Her appearance had long ago ceased to matter to her.

Drew was surprised by it, though, and curious. She looked strangely vulnerable. But when he tried to hold her hand, she drew away from him. He’d wanted to ask her for a long time if there were things in her past that she might like to share with someone. But Louise was an unknown quantity, and she could easily shy away. He couldn’t risk losing her altogether.

Drew held her arm as they entered the hall, and Lou was disconcerted to find Dr. Coltrain there. He almost never attended social functions unless Jane Parker was in attendance. But a quick glance around the room ascertained that Jane wasn’t around. She wondered if the doctor had brought a date. It didn’t take long to have that question answered, as a pretty young brunette came up beside him and clung to his arm as if it was the ticket to heaven.

Coltrain wasn’t looking at her, though. His pale, narrow eyes had lanced over Lou and he was watching her closely. He hadn’t seen her hair down in the year they’d worked together. She seemed more approachable tonight than he’d ever noticed, but she was Drew’s date. Probably Drew’s woman, too, he thought bitterly, despite her protests and reserve.

But trying to picture Lou in Drew’s bed was more difficult than he’d thought. It wasn’t at all in character. She was rigid in her views, just as she was in her mode of dress and her hairstyle. Just because she’d loosened that glorious hair tonight didn’t mean that she’d suddenly become uninhibited. Nonetheless, the change disturbed him, because it was unexpected.