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“You say that as if it’s a good thing,” she accused from the passenger seat.
Seeing the heightened color in her cheeks, hearing the pitch-change to her voice, watching the way he
r eyes sparked to life, he smiled. “Yes, I guess I do. You need to be flustered, and flustered good.”
“Why am I blushing?”
“Because you have a dirty mind?” he suggested, shooting her a teasing look. “And you liked that I kissed you today in your office and Friday night on your porch.”
“Let’s change the subject. Let’s talk about Edith and her bowel movements.”
He burst out laughing. “You have a way with words, McKenzie.”
“Let’s hope they include no, no and no again.”
“Then I just have to be sure to ask the right questions, such as, do you want me to stop kissing you, McKenzie?”
She just rolled her eyes and didn’t bother giving a verbal answer.
There really wasn’t any need.
They both already knew that she liked him kissing her.
CHAPTER SIX
EDITH DIDN’T LOOK much the worse for wear when McKenzie entered her hospital room. The elderly woman lay in her bed in the standard drab hospital gown beneath a white blanket and sheet that were pulled up to beneath her armpits. Her skin was still a pasty pale color that blended too well with her bed covering and had poor turgor, despite the intravenous fluids. Oxygen was being delivered via a nasal cannula. Edith’s short salt-and-pepper hair was sticking up every which way about her head as if she’d been restless. Or maybe she’d just run her fingers through her hair a lot.
“Hello, Edith, how are you feeling since I last saw you at the office earlier today?”
Pushing her glasses back on her nose, the woman shrugged her frail shoulders. “About the same.”
Which was a better answer than feeling worse.
“Any more blood?”
Edith shifted, rearranging pillows. “Not that I’ve seen.”
“Are you spitting up anything?”
She shook her head in a slow motion, as if to continue to answer required too much effort. “I was coughing up some yellowish stuff, but haven’t since I got to the hospital.”
“Hmm, I’m going to take a look and listen to you again, and then one of my colleagues whom you’ve met before will also be checking you. Dr. Spencer.”
“I know him. Handsome fellow. Great smile. Happy eyes.”
Lance did have happy eyes. He had a great smile, too. But she didn’t want thoughts of that happy-eyed handsome man with his great smile interfering with her work, so she just gave Edith a tight smile. “That would be him.”
“He your fellow?”
McKenzie’s heart just about stopped.
Grateful she’d just put her stethoscope diaphragm to the woman’s chest, McKenzie hesitated in answering. Was Lance her fellow? Was that what she’d agreed to earlier?
Essentially she had agreed to date him, but calling him her fellow seemed a far stretch from their earlier conversation.
She made note of the slight arrhythmia present in the woman’s cardiac sounds, nothing new, just a chronic issue that sometimes flared up. Edith had a cardiologist she saw regularly. Perhaps McKenzie would consult him also. First, she’d get an EKG and cardiac enzymes, just to be on the safe side.
“Take a deep breath for me,” she encouraged. Edith’s lung sounds were not very strong, but really weren’t any different from her usual shallow and crackly breaths. “I’m going to have to see why your chest X-ray isn’t available. They did do it?”
