Page 123 of The Honorable Texan
“If you say ‘wash the dogs,’” she interrupted, “I’ll slug you!”
He chuckled.“I wasn’t going to say that.I’ve got to get back and finish my marketing strategy for the next year before we have our year-end board meeting.”
“I guess that’s pretty complicated.”
“No more than treating diseases and plottingnutrition,” he replied.He studied her quietly.“I’ll miss you.Don’t stay away too long.”
“Why?”she prodded.
“You have to save me from attacks on my virtue from hordes of amorous, sex-crazed women,” he said without cracking a smile.“Who knows when I might weaken and give in to one of them, and then where would we be?”
“I’ve got my heart set on a virgin,” she informed him.
He laughed helplessly.“Sorry, honey, you missed the boat by a decade or so.”
She snapped her fingers.“Damn!”
“On the other hand, I didn’t,” he said in a deep, soft voice, and moved closer.He framed her face in his lean hands and studied it hungrily for several seconds.“You make me ache every time I touch you,” he whispered, bending.“I’ll starve to death before you get back.”
“Starve…?”She wasn’t thinking.She was watching his long, hard mouth come closer.She held her breath until it settled, ever so softly, on her parted lips.And then she didn’t think at all for several long, tempestuous seconds.
Too soon, he caught her by the arms and pushed her away.“You stop that,” he muttered breathlessly.“I refuse to be seduced on the front lawn.”
She was trying to catch her own breath.“No problem.There’s a nice soft carpet just five steps this way,” she indicated the hall.
“I’m not that kind of man,” he said haughtily.
She made a face at him.
He chuckled and kissed her one last time, teasingly, before he pulled back and started toward his car.“I’ll call you.”
“That’s what they all say!”she cried after him.
“Then you call me, honey,” he said in that deep, sexy voice that made her melt.“You’ve got my number, even if you don’t know it yet.”He winked and went on to the car.He didn’t look back, even as he drove away.Meredith’s eyes followed the car until it was out of sight.She didn’t cry until she was inside, behind the closed door.
* * *
She was backat work and going crazy in no time, overrun by people with everything from stomach viruses to the flu.She had a good immune system, and she didn’t catch any of the ailments, but she missed Rey terribly.
Three days before Thanksgiving, her father telephoned her from the ranch, full of excitement about his new job.He seemed like a different person.He told her he was still going to therapy sessions, but in Jacobsville with a psychologist.He was doing much better, and he was going to make everything up to his daughter, he swore it.And wasn’t she coming for Thanksgiving?
It took real nerve to tell him the truth, that she hadn’t been able to get off because of the time she’d already missed.There was simply nobody available to replace her.She’d have Thanksgiving Day, but nothing more.
She’d tried to beg the time off to have a long weekend, but her boss hadn’t been pleased and he refused.He wanted her on call that weekend, and she couldn’t be and go to Jacobsville.The office held a huge clinic for the local immigrant population on Saturdays, as well as Sunday afternoons, and Meredith was competently bilingual in medical terms.It made her indispensable.Not that she minded.These people were desperately in need of even the most basic health care, and Meredith was a whiz at preventive medicine.She counseled them,advised them on nutrition and wellness, and tried not to let her heart break at the sight of little children with rotting teeth and poor vision and a dozen other ailments that money could have corrected easily.The disparity between the rich and the poor was never more evident than in minority communities.
But the fact was, she had one day off for Thanksgiving and no real time for herself.It was a reminder of just how pressured her job really was, and how demanding.She loved what she did, but she hated being made to feel guilty when she asked for time off—something she hadn’t done since her brother’s and mother’s untimely deaths.Actually it had been a battle royal to get time off for bereavement leave, and the funerals, and she’d had to go right back to work the day after the burials.It had been too soon, but she’d thought work would be good medicine.
Perhaps it had been, but she was living on nerves.The weeks at the Hart ranch had given her a taste of a whole other life.It was one she recalled with joy and missed every day.Most of all, she missed Rey.Now she wouldn’t even see him.Her father said that he’d ask someone to loan him a vehicle, and he’d come to have Thanksgiving with her.That cheered her up a little, but it would mean she wouldn’t see Rey.It was a bad blow.She told her father that she’d make dinner, which cheered him up as well.
* * *
Thanksgiving Day came,and Meredith got up before daylight to start cooking.She was determined that she and her father were going to have the best Thanksgiving dinner she could manage.She’d bought a turkey and a small ham, and raw ingredients to make dressing andsweet-potato soufflé, green beans, ambrosia, homemade rolls and cherry and pumpkin pies.
She’d just taken the last pie out of the oven when she heard a car pull up in front of the house.She didn’t stop to take off her apron or run a brush through her disheveled hair.She ran to the front door and opened it, just in time to see her father and Rey come up on the porch.
“Happy Thanksgiving, Merry,” her father said, and hugged her warmly.
Rey grinned.“We thought you might like company to help you eat all that food,” he told her.
