Heartwishes

  “No one saw you,” the girl said as she sat up straight in the chair and yawned.

  “Saw me?” Gemma asked.

  “With no clothes on. Uncle Tris made the men leave before he examined you. That’s okay because he’s a doctor.”

  “I’ve heard of him.” She was trying to look at the big bandage over her ribs.

  “My mother says that all the women in three counties know about her brother.”

  Gemma smiled as she managed to sit up. “You wouldn’t know what happened to me, would you?”

  “The whole world saw everything.”

  Gemma looked at the girl in question. What did that mean?

  “When you climbed on Uncle Colin and got that boy down, Deputy Carl filmed it, and he put it on YouTube.”

  “That’s not good,” Gemma said as she swung around to get out of bed, but she was dizzy, so she lay back down.

  “Uncle Tris gave you happy drugs.” She lowered her voice. “He thinks I don’t know what narcotics are, so that’s what he calls them to me. He’s afraid I’m going to grow up to be a drug dealer.”

  “I have to agree that that wouldn’t be a good choice of careers.”

  The girl stood up, her bear held tightly to her. “This is Landy. Would you like to shake his hand?”

  “Sure,” Gemma said and held out her hand to grip the fuzzy paw. The bear wore a patch over its left eye. “Named for Orlando Bloom?” she asked.

  The child’s eyes widened. “Nobody knows that. Uncle Colin said you were smart and you are.”

  “What else did Colin say about me?”

  “Just that he was worried that you were going to die. Uncle Tris said that if Uncle Colin didn’t sit down and shut up he was going to give him some happy drugs.”

  Gemma smiled. “What’s your name?”

  “Nell Sandlin. My daddy is in Iraq.”

  “Oh,” Gemma said and offered up a silent prayer for the man’s safe return.

  “When he comes home, Momma says we’ll move back to Detroit—unless she can get Daddy to stay here in Edilean.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “I want my daddy to come home. We can live in an igloo, I don’t care. Just so my daddy is with us.”

  Gemma would never tell the girl so, but she’d felt the same way when her father was taken away in an ambulance. But he’d never returned.

  They heard voices outside the door.

  “Uh oh,” Nell said. “I promised I’d tell Uncle Tris when you woke up.”

  There was a clock on the table by the chair. It was ten minutes after four, which meant that Gemma had been out for hours. “Maybe you should tell Dr. Tris that I’d like to see him.”

  “Sure.” Nell went to the door but paused with her hand on the knob. “Do you think you’ll fall in love with my uncle?”

  “I’ll do my best not to,” Gemma said, repressing a smile. “Unless you want me to.”

  Nell took a moment to consider this. “Momma says Uncle Tris is in love with an ‘impossible dream’ and that’s why he doesn’t fall for real women. But maybe you are that dream.”

  “I doubt that, but I’ll consider it. I think—” She didn’t finish because the door opened and an extraordinarily handsome man came in. He was wearing a doctor’s white coat, a stethoscope hanging out of a pocket. He had black hair, blue eyes, and a jawline that could have been sculpted out of marble.

  Gemma could see why there was talk of falling for the man, and she waited for her own temperature to rise—but it didn’t.

  Dr. Tris looked around the door at his niece. “I thought you and Landy were going to play nurse and tell me when my patient woke up.” His voice was very pleasant.

  “Landy fell asleep,” Nell said. “And his necklace was blinking so . . .” She shrugged.

  “I want you and Landy to go next door and tell Uncle Colin that Gemma woke up.”

  Nell’s face was serious. “Should I tell him you found a brain tumor?”

  “Out!” Tristan said as she ran past him, giggling. “And if you frighten Colin I’ll sue you for malpractice,” he called after her. Shaking his head as he shut the door, he turned to Gemma. “Sorry about that. My niece is much too knowledgeable for her own good. I blame it on TV. Or the Internet. I haven’t decided which.”

  He paused at the foot of the bed and stared down at her. Gemma wasn’t sure, but she thought he might be trying to ascertain if she was going to . . . well, probably start flirting with him.

  But beautiful as he was, Gemma wasn’t attracted to him. She couldn’t explain it, but there was a faraway look in his eyes that almost made her feel as though he wasn’t really there.

  What the doctor saw seemed to relieve him and he let out his breath. “I’m Tristan Aldredge.” He held out his hand to shake hers.

  “Gemma Ranford.”

  He walked around the side of the bed. “I’ve heard about you from Colin. That was some feat you two pulled off this morning.” He folded back the cover and lifted her gown to look at her bandaged side.

  “What happened to me?”

  “When the branch broke, it hit you and cut you along the rib cage. It wasn’t too deep. The stitches I used will dissolve in a few days. You’ll be sore for a while, so you shouldn’t go dancing—or climbing on Colin—for a week or two.”

  “Did I pass out?”

  “Yes, but I think you mostly had an overload of adrenaline. I hear you got a job you really wanted, then you were subjected to Colin’s driving, then you climbed up and rescued a little boy. It’s been a hectic couple of days. I suggest you rest for a day or two and you’ll be fine.”

  “Has everything really been posted on YouTube?”

  “Every second of it.” Tristan smiled. “Tom has suspended Carl, but the rescue is on the Web. There’s a second where you and the boy are standing in midair and some kid’s already selling posters of it.”

  Gemma frowned. “It doesn’t look bad, does it?

  “Bad?” He was checking her pulse.

  “I mean I wouldn’t want to cause any problems for Colin. Or with any of the Fraziers.”

  Still holding her wrist, Tris looked at her. “Afraid of losing your job?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Fraziers would never fire you just because you—”

  He broke off when the door flew back and Colin burst in—and Gemma’s face dissolved into a smile. As pretty as Dr. Tris was, to her eyes, he looked small and insignificant next to Colin.

  “How do you feel?” Colin asked. “Sore? In pain? Weak?”

  “Hungry,” Gemma said.

  Colin grinned at her. “We can fix that.” He looked at Tris. “When can we leave?”

  “As soon as she’s dressed.”

  When both men kept standing at the foot of the bed and staring at her, Gemma said, “Could I have some privacy please?”

  “Sure,” Tris said. “Mrs. Frazier sent some of your clothes over, and they’re in the closet. Take your time.”

  She watched the two men leave, then slowly got out of bed.

  Outside in the waiting room, Colin looked at Tristan. “You’re sure she’s okay? Nell said something about a brain tumor.”

  Tris cut his niece a look, and she muffled a giggle. “Gemma is fine. That was a scary thing she went through and that combined with the cut made her faint.”

  “Then Uncle Tris gave her narcotics,” Nell said. “So Gemma slept for hours.”

  Colin shook his head at her. “You’re already an Aldredge. What medical school are you going to?”

  “None. I’m going to be a ballerina,” Nell said as she got off the chair. “Could I have five dollars?” she asked her uncle.

  “How about two?” he said, getting out his wallet. “And where are you planning to go?”

  “You know Mr. Lang is picking me up.” She looked at Colin. “He has puppies, and I’m going to get one.”

  They saw out the window that Brewster Lang’s old truck had stopped in front of the office.


  “Go!” Tris ordered. “Or he’ll start blowing his horn.”

  Holding tight to her bear, Nell ran out the door.

  “When did that start?” Colin asked.

  “The last time Sara and Mike were home, Nell spent the afternoon at the farm with them, and she and Lang hit it off.” Tris shrugged. “Yet another thing I don’t understand about that child. I don’t even get that weird bear. Anyway, Mike and Sara got in last night, and they invited Nell over to see the puppies. Lang picked her up.”

  Colin was barely listening. “You’re sure Gemma’s okay?”

  Tris put his hand on Colin’s big shoulder and looked him in the eyes. “She’s fine. Very healthy. It looks like she works out some.”

  “Yeah, she does. And she’s smart and curious and remembers things. She’s a good sport and easy to be with, and—” He broke off.

  Tris was behind the counter in the room where his secretary usually worked. She wasn’t there today, as his office was closed. If the people of Edilean had any medical problems on Tris’s days off, they had to go to Williamsburg—which was why Colin’s sister, Ariel, was planning to work with him when she finished her residency. But Tris had come in at Colin’s call.

  “You seem to like Gemma,” Tris said, his head down.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “So ask her out,” Tris said.

  “Gemma and I just met. And I need to finish some things first.”

  “I guess that means Jean. Too bad. Looks like that leaves me free to ask Gemma out.”

  “You mean on a date?”

  “Yeah. Dinner and a movie. Hey! I know. Mike and Sara invited me to their barbecue. I’ll ask Gemma if she’d like to go with me. I bet she’ll love Merlin’s Farm. She and Sara can talk about architecture until the sun comes up.”

  Colin was staring at him. “Gemma was injured. I don’t know if she’s ready to go—”

  “I’m her doctor. Of course she can go.”

  “Go where?” Gemma asked from the doorway.

  Tristan stepped forward. “I have been invited to a barbecue in a couple of weeks and I wondered if you’d like to go with me.”

  Gemma was pleased with the invitation. She needed to meet more people in Edilean besides the Fraziers. As it was, she’d already spent too much time with Colin.

  “I’d love to go,” she said, smiling at him.

  8

  GEMMA AND COLIN were in his Jeep and driving back to the Frazier house.

  “Gemma,” Colin began, “I’m really sorry that you were hurt. I shouldn’t have involved you in my job.”

  “It was one of the most exciting moments of my life,” she said.

  “Yeah? Are you just being nice?”

  “No, really. I spend most of my life dealing with books and papers, so being able to help rescue a child was great.”

  “What about your athletic students?” She was covered up again, but he remembered the shape of her. “Didn’t they help you do more than just read?”

  Gemma smiled in memory. “They changed my life in a big way.” She glanced at Colin, and he gave a nod to encourage her to continue. “When I started tutoring, the boys kept falling asleep in my sessions and I was really annoyed. I worked hard to make the lessons interesting, but they were ignoring me. One day I touched one of the sleeping football players on the shoulder and he . . .” She shook her head. “He grabbed me about the waist, picked me up, and started running. He said he’d been dreaming and thought I was a football.”

  Colin didn’t laugh. “You could have been hurt.”

  “If we’d been alone I might have been. But in the first month of tutoring one of the guys made a pass at me, so I never again had one boy at a time. On the day the guy grabbed me, there were four other boys there, and the others rescued me before anything bad happened. I’m still glad the kid wasn’t a shot-putter and didn’t try to throw me over a pole.”

  Colin was frowning. “Did you do something to prevent things like that from happening again?” His tone and formality were that of a law enforcement officer.

  “Yes, I did. The truth is, it all scared me.”

  “Rightfully so.”

  “But when I told the guys I’d have to report the incident, they said it looked like I could teach, but I couldn’t learn. I had no idea what they were talking about.”

  “The fatigue that comes from training for a sport,” Colin said softly.

  “You’re right. One of the boys angrily said that if I did what they did, I wouldn’t be able to stay awake to study either.”

  As Colin pulled into the driveway of his parents’ house, he was listening intently to her. “What did you do?”

  “I couldn’t resist a challenge like that one. I wanted to prove them wrong.” She laughed. “And I was sure I’d succeed. I was young, healthy, and I kept in shape by rushing around the campus while carrying a heavy load of books. And I’ve never smoked and I rarely drink.”

  Colin was smiling. “How long did you last?”

  “Three days. They had me doing cardio, weights, stretching, then I had to repeat it all again. And you know what? They were right. I was too tired to think, much less to learn anything. At the end of the week, I sat down with the original boys and had a serious talk with them. I patiently explained that while their job was athletic, mine was cerebral, so I couldn’t continue with their very strenuous program.”

  “And how did that work out?” He was grinning.

  Gemma laughed. “They listened to me without saying a single word, then they left and I didn’t see them for four whole days. They didn’t show up for their sessions. When they did return, they were different. There was no more joking and, worse, no one tried to learn anything. I was close to panic because if they failed, I’d lose my job—and it paid twice as much as any I’d had before. One night it hit me that I’d pretty much told the boys that I was smart while they were dumb. It was okay for them to be too tired to think, but I, Gemma Ranford, the Ph.D. candidate, had to have a clear mind.”

  “It was good that you could see that about yourself.”

  “Actually, the whole thing shook me up. It was a true epiphany. It’s not comfortable to have to look at yourself without foggy glasses. The next morning I was at the gym at six A.M. and . . .” She shrugged. “Since then I’ve never asked my boys to give more than I give in return.”

  “What happened with their grades?”

  Gemma grinned. “They skyrocketed so much that I was put in charge of the entire tutoring program. I started to require that anyone who works for me must work out with the boys. It’s been so successful the university officially said that physical training was to be added to the requirement of being hired as a tutor for the athletes.”

  They were sitting in the car, he’d turned off the engine, and Gemma let out her breath. She’d never told anyone that story before. She’d tried to, but no one would listen. When the professors and her fellow graduate students had congratulated her on her ingenious program of working out with the athletes, Gemma always said it had been the boys’ idea. But no one believed her. When she’d insisted, they’d turned away. Her colleagues and the professors didn’t want to believe that the inhabitants of the athletic department could think. To them, thinking football players were too much like Planet of the Apes come alive.

  Turning, she looked at Colin. His arm muscles were bulging inside his shirt. He was an athlete who listened and understood. Brains and brawn together—her dream man.

  “I think you did a good job,” he said. “And I’m impressed that you could really look at yourself. Not many people can do that.” He nodded his approval and smiled at her in a way that made Gemma’s skin grow warm.

  “What do you want to do now?” he asked. “Besides eat, that is?”

  Gemma looked out the window at the front of the big Frazier house. It was an unusual structure. It seemed to have been built in sections over the years, and none of them quite matched. She looked back at Colin. “Would your family think
it horribly rude of me if I moved into the guesthouse today? I’d really like to get started on the research. Remember what I was reading that first day?”

  “Sure,” he said. “You were sprawled on the floor with lots of colored pens.”

  “You and Kirk! What is it about my pens that so intrigues you men?”

  “I think he was jealous; I was intrigued. You’re an artistic scholar.” Colin opened his car door. “You’ll be happy to know that I anticipated what you were going to say. This afternoon while you were sleeping off Tris’s drugs, I made some calls. Lanny sent you a car. It’s a one-year-old Volvo with very low mileage. That sound okay?”

  “Perfect.”

  “Mom had Shamus move your suitcase to the guesthouse, and Rachel packed your refrigerator.”

  “That sounds heavenly,” Gemma said. She had her hand on the door handle. “Have you ever heard of something called a Hare-whistle?”

  “Not that I remember. Is that what you were reading about? Your ‘love, tragedy, and magic’?”

  “Yes,” she said, impressed that he remembered what she’d said. “That word has stayed in my head. It keeps rattling around in there.”

  “Through everything? Isla and Kirk? Playing cheerleader with me? Through Tristan pouncing on you?”

  “Unfortunately, it wasn’t anything like a pounce,” she said, but Colin was already outside. She watched him walk around the car. The truth was, Gemma wanted to stay in the guesthouse so she’d be farther away from Colin. She had never been so attracted to a man in her life!

  There wasn’t anything about him that she disliked. In fact, if she entered everything she’d ever wanted in a man into a computer, Colin Frazier would be what came out. Maybe it came from years of being around football players, but she really liked big men. She’d also grown to favor men who did things. Her colleagues, who spent their days reading and debating about things that had happened centuries ago, had come to bore her. But her students, more than a hundred of them over the years, only let her lecture so long, then they plunged into something physical—and she joined them. It had been a genuine challenge for her to teach something like iambic pentameter while she was slamming away at a hanging bag while wearing sixteen-ounce boxing gloves.