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“That’s the only reason?”
“Not the only one.” Her sultry eyes flashed with sweet meaning that was quickly masked, and he had to physically force himself not to take her hand in his. She didn’t want him to see her attraction to him. Couldn’t she feel the chemistry sparking between them?
Silence stretched, but he couldn’t touch her comment, couldn’t touch her.
“The Gulf,” she added, taking a sip of water, clearing her throat when she drank too quickly. “Since that spring I first visited the Gulf, I’ve dreamed of living here.”
“The hurricanes don’t scare you?”
“Not enough to convince me to live somewhere else.” A slight tremble in her fingers, she set down her water glass. “What about you? The hurricanes bother you?”
“It’s the winds no one knows are there until they drop down on you and rip everything in their path to shreds that bother me most.”
“Did you have a lot of tornadoes in North Carolina?”
“Not many.” He arched a brow that she knew where he’d grown up and tried to recall just how much he’d told her that week when, as a teenager, she’d utterly fascinated him. To the point he’d forgotten she was his best friend’s kid sister and that he had already committed to another.
When Chelsea’s innocent lips had kissed him, he’d burst into flames, had forgotten she’d only been seventeen, a babe in many ways. Because in his arms she’d felt all woman and he’d wanted her more than any other woman, ever. Still did.
But that want had been wrong, had led him to another wrong, and in the end Laura had paid the ultimate price and he’d vowed to never make that mistake again.
Guilt hit him that he was sitting at a table with Chelsea, that he couldn’t even look at her without wanting her, that even in a restaurant filled with a million smells, her sugar-cookie scent called to him.
Chelsea took a deep breath and even before she spoke warnings sounded in his head. “Have I done something to upset you?”
How the hell was he supposed to answer that?
“Because ten years is a long time to carry a grudge,” she continued. “If you’re worried I’m going to embarrass either of us by throwing myself at you again, don’t be.”
“This isn’t necessary.”
“Yes, it is. We work together, and it’s clear you have issues with me working at the clinic. For everyone’s sake, we need to at least be able to coexist.”
She was right, of course. He’d known for months that his days of being able to avoid Chelsea had been coming to an end. That end was now here, and he was being forced to find a new way to deal with the guilt that seeing her gave him.
“We were once friends. I’d like us to be friends again, but perhaps only time will prove whether or not that’s possible.”
She wanted to be his friend? He couldn’t do it. How could he ever justify that to Laura’s memory?
“But if nothing else, we’re going to have to at least develop a business relationship.”
“Fine,” he answered flippantly. “We’ll have a business relationship, but make no mistake, Chelsea. There will never be anything more between us.”
“I don’t recall asking you for anything more,” she reminded him in a soft but steady voice. “At least, not in this decade.
”
Wincing at his own stupid arrogance, Jared watched Chelsea abandon him to be the sole occupant of their table.
If he’d been Chelsea, he’d have walked away from his sorry butt, too.
The worst of it was, he didn’t want her to walk away. Anything but.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE following morning Jared was dreading going into his next patient’s exam room. Inside sat Connie Black, anxiously awaiting news on why her hip hurt so much. No doubt she expected him to tell her she had osteoarthritis or degenerative joint disease. Maybe even that she was going to need a hip replacement.
She wasn’t expecting to learn that her cancer, the cancer she’d thought she’d beat, had metastasized to her left hip and destroyed the joint and surrounding bone tissue.
