Coltrain's Proposal. Diana Palmer

so, but you’d need a grenade launcher,” she retorted without thinking.

      He lifted an eyebrow and gave her a look that held mingled contempt and distaste. “You’d be lucky.”

      The remark was painful, but she didn’t let him see that. Her own eyebrows lifted. “Really?” She laughed and walked off to her car, happy to have seen him stiffen. She walked past his Mercedes without even a glance. Take that, she thought furiously. She didn’t care what he thought about her, she told herself. She spent most of her free time telling herself that. But she did care about him, far too much. That was the whole problem.

      He thought she was cold, but she wasn’t. It was quite the reverse where he was concerned. She always jerked away when he came too close, when he touched her infrequently. It wasn’t because she found him repulsive but because his touch excited her so much. She trembled when he was too close, her breathing changed. She couldn’t control her shaky legs or her shaky voice. The only solution had been to distance herself physically from him, and that was what she’d done.

      There were other reasons, too, why she avoided physical involvement. They were none of his business, or anyone else’s. She did her job and avoided trouble as much as possible. But just lately, her job was becoming an ordeal.

      She drove home to the small dilapidated white house on the outskirts of town. It was in a quiet neighborhood that was just beginning to go downhill. The rent was cheap. She’d spent weekends painting the walls and adding bits and pieces to the house’s drab interior. She had it all but furnished now, and it reflected her own quiet personality. But there were other dimensions to the room, like the crazy cat sculpture on the mantel and the colorful serapes on the chairs, and the Indian pottery and exotic musical instruments on the bookshelf. The paintings were her own, disturbingly violent ones with reds and blacks and whites in dramatic chaos. A visitor would have found the combinations of flowers amid those paintings confusing. But, then, she’d never had a visitor. She kept to herself.

      Coltrain did, too, as a rule. He had visitors to his ranch from time to time, but his invitations even when they included the medical staff invariably excluded Louise. The omission had caused gossip, which no one had been brave enough to question to his face. Louise didn’t care if he never invited her to his home. After all, she never invited him to hers.

      Secretly she suspected that he was grieving for Jane Parker, his old flame who’d just recently married Todd Burke. Jane was blond and blue-eyed and beautiful, a former rodeo star with a warm heart and a gentle personality.

      Lou often wondered why he’d ever agreed to work with someone he disliked so much, and on such short acquaintance. He and Dr. Drew Morris were friends, and she’d tried to question Drew about her sudden acceptance, but Drew was a clam. He always changed the subject.

      Drew had known her parents in Jacobsville and he had been a student of her father’s at the Austin teaching hospital where he’d interned. He’d become an ally of her mother during some really tough times, but he didn’t like Lou’s father. He knew too much about his home life, and how Lou and her mother were treated.

      There had been one whisper of gossip at the Jacobsville hospital when she’d first gone there on cases. She’d heard one of the senior nurses remark that it must disturb “him” to have Dr. Blakely’s daughter practicing at this hospital and thank God she didn’t do surgery. Lou had wanted to question the nurse, but she’d made herself scarce after that and eventually had retired.

      Louise had never found out who “he” was or what was disturbing about having another Blakely practice at the Jacobsville hospital. But she did begin to realize that her father had a past here.

      “What did my father do at this hospital, Drew?” she’d asked him one day suddenly, while they were doing rounds at the hospital.

      He’d seemed taken aback. “He was a surgeon on staff, just as I am,” he said after a hesitation.

      “He left here under a cloud, didn’t he?” she persisted.

      He shook his head. “There was no scandal, no cloud on his reputation. He was a good surgeon and well respected, right until the end. You know that. Even if he was less than admirable as a husband and father, he was an exceptional surgeon.”

      “Then why the whispers about him when I first came here?”

      “It was nothing to do with his skill as a surgeon,” he replied quietly. “It’s nothing that really even concerns you, except in a roundabout way.”

      “But what…?”

      They’d been interrupted and he’d looked relieved. She hadn’t asked again. But she wondered more and more. Perhaps it had affected Dr. Coltrain in some way and that was why he disliked Lou. But wouldn’t he have mentioned it in a whole year?

      She didn’t ever expect to understand the so-controlled Dr. Coltrain or his venomous attitude toward her. He’d been much more cordial when she first became his partner. But about the time she realized that she was in love with him, he became icy cold and antagonistic. He’d been that way ever since, raising eyebrows everywhere.

      The remark he’d made this morning about her coldness was an old one. She’d jerked back from him at a Christmas party, soon after she’d come to work in his office in Jacobsville, to avoid a kiss under the mistletoe. She could hardly have admitted that even then the thought of his hard, thin mouth on hers made her knees threaten to buckle. Her attraction to him had been explosive and immediate, a frightening experience to a woman whose whole life had been wrapped around academic excellence and night upon night of exhaustive studying. She had no social life at all—even in high school. It had been the one thing that kept her father’s vicious sarcasm and brutality at bay, as long as she made good grades and stayed on the dean’s list.

      Outside achievements had been the magic key that kept the balance in her dysfunctional family. She studied and won awards and scholarships and praise, and her father basked in it. She thought that he’d never felt much for her, except pride in her ability to excel. He was a cruel man and grew crueler as his addiction climbed year after year to new heights. Drugs had caused the plane crash. Her mother had died with him. God knew, that was fitting, because she’d loved him to the point of blindness, overlooking his brutality, his addiction, his cruelty in the name of fidelity.

      Lou wrapped her arms around herself, feeling the chill of fear. She’d never marry. Any woman could wake up in a relationship that damaging. All she had to do was fall in love, lose control, give in to a man’s dominance. Even the best man could become a predator if he sensed vulnerability in a woman. So she would never be vulnerable, she assured herself. She would never be at a man’s mercy as her mother had been.

      But Copper Coltrain made her vulnerable, and that was why she avoided any physical contact with him. She couldn’t give in to the feelings he roused in her, for fear of becoming a victim. Loneliness might be a disease, but it was certainly a more manageable one than love.

      The ringing of the telephone caught her attention.

      “Dr. Blakely?” Brenda, her office nurse, queried. “Sorry to bother you at home, but Dr. Coltrain said there’s been a wreck on the north end of town and they’ll be bringing the victims to the emergency room. Since he’s on call, you’ll have to cover the two-hour Saturday clinic at the office.”

      “I’ll be right over,” she promised, wasting no more time in conversation.

      The clinic was almost deserted. There was a football game at the local high school that night, and it was sunny and unseasonably warm outside for early December. It didn’t really surprise Lou that she only needed to see a handful of patients.

      “Poor Dr. Coltrain,” Brenda said with a sigh as they finished the last case and closed up the office. “I’ll bet he won’t be in until midnight.”

      “It’s a good thing he isn’t married,” Lou remarked. “He’d have no home life at all, as hard as he works.”

      Brenda glanced at her, but with a kind smile. “That is true. But