Instant Gratification Read online

  At least Spencer was flying in for a few days. She was counting on her co-worker and closest friend to liven things up around there.

  She set down her casserole and walked through her father’s place. It was familiar to her. It should be, she’d lived here for her first six years, and being here gave her an undeniable sense of nostalgia. Oddly enough, she remembered every nook and cranny of the three tiny bedrooms, two tinier bathrooms and postage stamp size living area and kitchen. She remembered her mom cooking in that kitchen…

  She swallowed the sorrow that never seemed to go all the way down, and right there in the middle of the living room, she let it all wash over her.

  Her mom had been born in New York. A city girl at heart, she’d fallen in love on a college science field trip in the Sierras with the brand new young doctor teaching the course.

  Her father.

  Blinded by nineteen-year-old love, Sandy had given up everything and moved across the country to be with him. They’d lived in wedded bliss until her first Sierra winter.

  It’d hit hard.

  The twenty feet of snow had been a rough shock, but going weeks at a time with no contact with the outside world had slowly done her mom in. When a bear had broken into their kitchen and eaten the Junior’s Cheesecake she’d had shipped from Manhattan, she’d tossed up her hands, said, “Stick a fork in me, I’m done, Eddie”, and had packed herself and Emma up.

  Eddie hadn’t tried to stop her.

  Back in New York, Sandy had rented a one room flat, and though Emma knew now that money had been tight as Sandy worked sixty hour weeks nursing, Sandy had never once let on.

  Emma wandered to the log mantle over the fireplace, and looked at the frames. There was one of herself as a newborn, another of her around five and missing her two front teeth. Then there was a glaring gap in the pictures because the next frame was of Emma at her college graduation, when her father had made an unscheduled appearance.

  But the one that caught her by surprise, the one that grabbed her by the throat, was of her mom. She looked to be in her early twenties, and was smiling with easy whimsy into the camera. Emma reached for the frame, picking it up, running her finger over the glass as if she could touch her mom one more time. “I’m back,” she whispered. “Back in Wishful. Who’d have thought it, huh?”

  Yes, well, make sure you check for spiders before you get into bed, darling. Those wolf spiders are everywhere.

  Her mom’s soft, laughing voice echoed in Emma’s head, clear as a bell, making her laugh in shock. Clearly, she was far more tired than she thought. That, or she needed a mocha latte pretty damn bad.

  She settled on sleep.

  The next day, Stone took a group on a moonlight hike up Sierra Point. It’d been five days since his accident, and he felt much better. Finally. After the hike, his guests, who were up from the Bay Area, requested he drop them off at a local bar, where they could drink the rest of the night away.

  Though there wasn’t much left to it—it was nearly one in the morning—he dropped them off at Moody’s, then walked back out to his truck and faced an annoying dilemma.

  A flat tire.

  He pulled out the tools and changed it himself, somehow managing to kneel on a rusty nail, cutting open his knee in the process. Probably the same rusty nail that had wrecked his tire to begin with, and besides bleeding down his leg, it hurt like a son-of-a-bitch.

  As if he didn’t have enough injuries to deal with.

  With a sigh, he went to the glove box for his first-aid kit, and found…nothing. “Goddammit, TJ.”

  TJ was always too lazy to restock his own kit, far preferring to grab Stone’s. He looked down. He was bleeding like a stuck pig through the new hole in his favorite Levi’s. Shit. Maybe if he just cleaned it out really good, he’d be fine—which seemed to be the theme of his life lately.

  Problem was, he didn’t want to die of tetanus. He could go the twenty minutes home to clean out the cut, or be at Doc’s in two.

  In the old days, he’d have had no problem showing up on Doc’s doorstep in the middle of the night. Hell, Doc had given each of the Wilders a key, and there’d been many, many times when Stone had just let himself into the clinic, grabbed what he needed, gone on his merry way without waking Doc, who’d appreciated not having to get up.

  Hoping the apple didn’t fall too far from the tree, even while knowing it had, Stone put the truck into gear and drove to the clinic. It was locked up tighter than a drum, all lights off. Limping now, dammit, he knocked lightly on the door to be polite, then fished out his key and let himself in. He flipped on the reception room light because if Emma woke up, he didn’t want to scare her. Doc had always kept the staff kitchen stocked up for the few times he had to use it as a third exam room. Stone limped across the room and flipped on that light as well, heading for the supply closet. He pulled out the hydrogen peroxide, some gauzes and—

  “Hands where I can see them, asshole, or I’ll kick your balls into next week.”

  He raised his hands in the air—slowly because he was still aching like crazy—and turned. Emma stood in the doorway in a pair of men’s boxers and a thin camisole, wielding a baseball bat like she knew how to use it. Her hair was loose and a bit wild, but her eyes were ice. She wore no make up, which he loved, and he really loved the bed head, but mostly his brain stuttered and came to a screeching halt on the fact that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

  He really, really loved that part. “Just me,” he said lightly. “And FYI, you can’t threaten a guy’s balls when he’s facing the other way.”

  She didn’t lower her bat, not a single inch. “I can threaten them now.”

  He resisted the urge to cover them. “Okay, let’s all just relax.”

  “Relax? You broke in!”

  She was looking and sounding very New York, and maybe he was sick, but he liked it.

  A lot.

  And maybe, just maybe, he’d meant for this to happen tonight. “I didn’t break in, I have a key. Your father gave it to me. I tend to have a lot of emergencies…” He flashed a smile. “And he liked his sleep.”

  “You want me to believe that my father let you come and go through his medical supplies whenever you wanted?”

  “As the situation required,” he corrected, trying another smile.

  She still didn’t match it. She was scowling, actually, and that sharp gaze ran down his body, stopping on a dime at the hole in his jeans revealing the bloody knee. “You’re hurt.”

  “Just a little. I want to clean it out and—”

  “Let me guess. Get a Band-Aid.” With a sigh, she finally lowered the baseball bat and jabbed it toward a chair. “Sit.”

  Instead he pulled himself up on the counter and eyed the bat as she set it down. “You actually ever use that thing?”

  “Didn’t I just threaten to kick your ass?” She smiled grimly. “Trust me, I could have done it.”

  Maybe. Only because he’d been too busy dropping his jaw to the floor to protect himself. Holy shit, the woman had been hiding a smoking hot bod; full breasts with nipples that were pressing up against the material of her cami, a sweet set of hips and a strip of bared belly, revealed by the boxer shorts she’d rolled over several times to adjust to her frame.

  She moved past him, picked up one of the doctor’s coats hanging on a rack and slipped into it. Damn.

  “Sorry,” she said at his expression. “Only invited midnight callers get to see me in my pj’s.”

  “Can I get an invite?”

  Her laugh told him no way in hell was he getting an invite, but he smiled anyway. “You look pretty when you laugh.”

  She was still smiling when she came close and bent, peering at his knee. “No stitches this time.”

  “Good.”

  She straightened and eyed the cut over his eye. “And that looks to be healing. I thought maybe you’d need some antibiotics, but you don’t. But.”

  Ah, hell.

  “You need a tetanus shot. You k
now that, right?”

  “Yeah.” He felt his vision go a little fuzzy. Jesus, he was fucking pathetic.

  “You going to pass out on me?”

  “Not if you take your coat off again.”

  “Nice try.” She was preparing the tetanus shot, and he was sweating and feeling sick when she glanced over at him. She shook her head and sighed. “Unbelievable.”

  “I know.” He swiped his brow. “I—”

  “Not you. Me. I can’t believe I’m going to do this for you, but…” She let the coat hit the floor. “Consider it a present, from me to you.”

  It was a great present. She had great legs, long and toned. Great arms, too. But his gaze dropped to her breasts as she came to a stop at his hip, shoved up the sleeve of his shirt and swiped his skin with an antiseptic gauze. Her skin was smooth and creamy, and his mouth watered. She smelled amazing, too, like—“Ouch!”

  She slapped a Band-Aid on him. “You might have a sore arm for the next few days.”

  “I have to rock climb tomorrow.”

  “Maybe I should have given it to you in the ass then?”

  He laughed, but when he looked at her face, he realized she wasn’t kidding. “You really are mean.”

  She smiled as she bent for the doctor’s coat, giving him a heart-stopping view. “I know. And honestly? You shouldn’t be rock climbing. Not with your ribs and stitches and other various injuries. You shouldn’t be doing anything tomorrow.”

  That said, she covered up again and was ushering him to the door, pushing him out into the night, the sound of the bolt sliding home his only company.

  Well, that and the memory of her in those little boxers and cami, took him all the way home, followed him into his shower and through a whole night of new and even more erotic dreams.

  The next morning, Emma opened the clinic’s doors for all the patients who hadn’t broken into the place in the middle of the night. It was eight sharp, and she had one patient. Cece Potter, Moody’s waitress. The young twenty-ish woman needed an antibiotics prescription for a throat infection, and alternately called her “Dr. Sinclair”—in a snooty tone, and “that woman that Stone’s seeing”—also in a snooty tone—which was more disconcerting.

  “I’m not—” Emma started.

  But Cece Potter, not interested in explanations, was gone, and Emma had no other patients to distract her.

  That woman Stone was seeing?

  Seriously?

  By noon she was ready to tear out her hair when Missy Thorton showed up with a sprained thumb. Missy was the cashier at Thorton’s Hardware store in town. She’d been in Wishful since the dawn of time, or close to it. She had a sweet face and a grandmotherly shape that lowered Emma’s resistance because she had a soft spot for women who looked like they’d lived and lived well.

  “Is your daddy back at work yet?” Missy asked as Emma x-rayed her thumb.

  “Not yet. Nothing’s broken. I’ll just wrap it and—”

  “Maybe I should go to South Shore for a second opinion.”

  “You could, but this isn’t complicated.”

  “Hmmm…”

  It took some convincing, but finally Emma was wrapping the woman’s sprained thumb. Outside the window, the street was busy with the lunchtime crunch. The shops were doing a good business. Everyone was doing a good business but Emma.

  “Hmmm,” the woman said again.

  Emma looked up into Missy’s face. “Is something wrong?”

  “What if it’s broken?”

  “I showed you the x-ray. There’s no break.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Across the street, a pickup pulled up and parked. Stone’s. He wore loose jeans and a polo shirt. Tall and sure of himself, he pulled out a clipboard and headed toward the corner building, moving with the carefulness of someone who’d been beaten up by three women in a bar only a week ago.

  Or whatever had really happened to him.

  Oblivious to her eyes on him, he headed—limping slightly—down the sidewalk, stopping in front of the old, rundown building on the corner. It had a FOR SALE sign on it.

  Bending his head, he wrote something on the clipboard.

  “I hear you treated him,” Missy said.

  “Who?”

  “The man you’re staring at instead of concentrating on your patient who.”

  Yeah. Point taken. But just looking at Stone invoked memories, his bad boy eyes, filled with wicked intent, his smile, the one that backed up that intent.

  His naked body sprawled on her examination table.

  She gave herself a second to digest that image.

  “He is a fine boy.” Missy was smiling shrewdly. “Very fine.”

  Except Stone Wilder was no boy. In fact, just remembering how little he resembled a boy brought a little secret tingle to certain places she hadn’t thought about in a while.

  “And he’s very good at what he does,” Missy went on.

  Yes, well, how hard could it be to play all day long?

  “My niece’s boy was heading straight for juvie last year,” the older woman said. “And landed himself on one of those treks the Wilders take troubled kids out on. He did really well, but when he wanted to go again, Stone told him that he couldn’t go out if he kept up the stealing. So Trevor gave it up. The trek changed him, calmed him down. That was Stone’s doing, pure and simple.”

  Okay, that didn’t sound like he was all mountain bum.

  “Women love him.” Missy eyed her wrapped thumb this way and that. “So don’t blame yourself for having a crush on him.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Of course you do, dear. You were practically drooling. Don’t worry, there’s far worse things to be than Stone’s woman.”

  Okay, that was two times now she’d been called that. “I’m not his woman.”

  “Maybe we should consult with Doc about the possible break?” Missy asked, still eyeing her thumb.

  Emma tried a deep breath. Didn’t help. “I can assure you, Missy, I know what I’m doing.”

  “Hmmm.”

  How she managed such a wealth of doubt in that single syllable, Emma had no idea but she’d become used to it. Four years of undergrad and four years of medical school at Columbia, residency at NY Presbyterian, two years in the NY Bellevue ER—one of the busiest in the country—and yet the people here still saw her as Doc’s kid, not a “real” doctor. She pulled Missy’s chart close to document today’s visit.

  “Did you know I knew your momma?”

  “I didn’t, no.” Under diagnosis, Emma wrote: sprained thumb. She refrained from adding: pain in the ass.

  “She was a good woman. A hard worker, too.”

  Her mom had been a good person, and a very hard worker, up until the day she’d died six months ago, and the kind words softened Emma’s heart with memories. “Thank you.”

  “I don’t know what happened to change her, none of us ever knew.”

  Emma managed to keep the smile in place by sheer will as she stood. “Keep the thumb elevated, Mrs. Thorton. Aspirin as needed for the pain.”

  “I mean she just up and left your father, one of the best men in Wishful. Crazy, right?”

  Emma didn’t mean to respond but she found she couldn’t help but defend her mom. “She had her reasons.”

  “Yes.” Missy nodded slowly. “I remember quite clearly how she—”

  “I’m sorry.” Emma forced a smile. “But I don’t want to get into this now.” Or ever. “I’m busy and—”

  The bell jangled out front, for once not annoying her. Saved by the ceramic cow bell. “I’ll print you a bill.”

  “Oh.” Missy looked startled. “But your father just sends them to me at home.”

  Where they were ignored. “Things have changed.” She moved out of the treatment room toward the front desk, where she’d hoped to