The Doctor Next Door. Victoria Pade

she was concerned—could just drop dead.

      Well, after he fixed Charlie’s tooth, anyway.

      Chapter Two

      “Uh, Miss Charlie, the rule in this house is that the animals stay off the bed—that’s why you have a pillow on the floor,” Boone Pratt informed the schnauzer early Monday morning when he awoke to his patient sitting beside him on his king-sized mattress, facing him with an unwavering—and pitiful—stare.

      His own five dogs—all of them at least four times bigger than the schnauzer—were looking on from various spots around his bedroom, probably wondering at the smaller mutt’s audacity.

      But reprimanded or not, Charlie curled up against Boone’s side with a small whine to let him know she still didn’t feel well.

      “I know, nobody likes to be sick,” he commiserated, curving one arm around her to pet her with a minimum of effort.

      His alarm hadn’t yet gone off so he closed his eyes in hopes of catching a little snooze-time. He’d been up most of the night with Charlie. As happened with a lot of animals, the anesthetic had caused vomiting. Plus the particular pain medication he’d administered sometimes had the side-effect of inspiring a vocal response which had left her whimpering on every exhale. He had known she wasn’t hurting and it was nothing to be concerned about, but it always upset pet owners. The possibility of those two things happening were why he’d thought it better to keep Charlie with him rather than send her home after extracting her tooth. Especially home with Faith Perry.

      As if Charlie knew that Faith had just crossed Boone’s mind, the dog nudged against his side in what felt like a criticizing elbow-jab that made him think about Faith and their encounter the day before.

      “Yeah, I know, I should have my ass kicked for the way I acted yesterday,” he admitted to her dog.

      And he didn’t even have a good reason for how he’d treated Charlie’s mom.

      “I’m really not a jerk, you know,” he told Charlie.

      But what he didn’t confide—even to the animal—was what had been behind his behavior. It was something he’d never told anyone. Ever. Something that made him flinch just remembering it.

      The first crush he’d had on a girl had been on Faith Perry.

      And he could hardly stand thinking about it.

      It hadn’t been some macho, I’m-the-man kind of crush. If it had, it wouldn’t have been such a big deal. But he hadn’t been an I’m-the-man kind of kid.

      He’d had bad skin and braces on his teeth. He’d been barely five and a half feet tall, stocky, backward, awkward and immature at seventeen when—from out of nowhere—the late bloomer who had spent more time with animals than people had discovered he couldn’t think about anything but Faith Perry.

      And the crush itself? That had been a doe-eyed, tongue-tied, trip-over-his-own-feet, blushing, can’t-control-his-body’s-reaction crush. The kind of crush that he would have been ridiculed for if anyone had known. The kind that was completely hopeless and had just made him feel all the more inadequate.

      Especially because it had been on someone who was almost unaware that he was alive and had never made a secret of the fact that she couldn’t wait to get out of this one-horse town and away from everything and everyone in it to have a cultured life with classier people. Blue bloods, that’s what she’d aspired to, hobknobbing with blue bloods.

      And every time he’d gotten anywhere near her, every time he’d picked up a book or a pencil she’d dropped, offered her notes from a class she’d missed or any of the other million things he’d done just to be near her, she’d looked at him the way she had when he’d first faced her in front of his office yesterday—as though he were the prime example of the backwater hicks she’d wanted to rise above.

      So he’d slumped his way through those last two years of high school feeling rejected and resentful and inept.

      As much as he’d worshipped her, he’d hated her.

      And yesterday he’d punished her for it.

      Okay, maybe I am a jerk.…

      On the other hand, he also didn’t think much of people who believed they were better than others and, particularly, people who believed they were too good for his hometown and the lifestyle and the values that went with it.

      But that still didn’t excuse his behavior.

      It wasn’t how he’d planned to act in anticipation of making contact with her again.

      He didn’t know why, but just the thought of Faith Perry had made him uncomfortable since his crush had died a natural death years and years ago. He supposed she reminded him of something he’d rather forget: a miserable, agony-filled adolescent phase he wished he’d never gone through. A phase that embarrassed him now even if he had managed to avoid embarrassing himself—on the whole—back then. So, since she’d left, whenever he’d heard through the grapevine that Faith was coming to town to visit family, he’d avoided places where he might run into her.

      The problem recently, though, had become weddings.

      Earlier this year there was the wedding of his brother, Cam, and her sister, Eden. Now it was her cousin Jared, marrying his sister, Mara.

      For Cam’s and Eden’s wedding Faith only came to town for the day. He’d known that totally avoiding her was not going to be possible, but he’d planned to keep his distance. To stay across any room they were in together. To observe nothing but scant courtesies and go his own way.

      Then he’d ended up being called to an emergency surgery that had kept him from attending the entire event. Problem solved.

      For Mara’s wedding he’d figured he’d just activate that former plan—avoidance and distance.

      But then he’d answered his cell phone yesterday and she’d been on the other end of the line and it had set something off in him from that long-ago silent humiliation.

      He’d tried to pull in the reins on it and he’d thought he’d done a pretty good job until he’d stepped out of his truck and watched her majesty recoil at that first look at him.

      That’s right, he’d wanted to say to her, I’m covered in dirt and I’m still a hayseed in the land of hayseeds you didn’t want any part of.

      And she was still Miss Priss, sitting there on his bench all stiff and prim and proper, her hair and her clothes making her look like some stereotype of a spinster librarian.

      Not that she hadn’t looked good. Faith the woman was even better-looking than Faith the girl had been, and he’d thought she was the prettiest girl in town then. Now she was full-out, hands-down beautiful.

      Even trussed-up, her hair had glistened in the sunlight. It was the burnished sienna color of the mole sauce he ate on enchiladas.

      Her face hadn’t aged, it had grown refined and delicate, with skin as smooth and pale and flawless as the cream that rose to the top of fresh milk.

      Her mouth just had to taste sweet—that was what he’d thought before he’d left his truck, when he’d had his first glimpse of her. It curved up at the corners and dipped low in the center to form a sort of languid heart shape that was the shade of pale pink rosebuds.

      And before she’d skewered him with that repulsed glare, he’d thought that even the color of her eyes was more intense—some combination of purple and blue—though still as sparkling as morning dew in the meadow.

      He’d steeled himself before getting out of the truck, worrying that one look from those eyes might make him stumble or fall just the way it would have done when he was seventeen. But then she’d helped him avoid that with the instant revulsion he’d seen on her face and it had been like a bucket of cold water dumped over his head.

      Yeah, sure,