A Soldier's Return. RaeAnne Thayne
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each other, even if they wanted to. She didn’t necessarily want to avoid him, but considering she was now bedraggled and covered with sand, she was pretty sure he wouldn’t be in a hurry to see her again.
“Thanks again for your help. I’ll see you later.”
“Remember your RICE.”
Right. Rest, Ice, Compression, Elevation. The first-aid prescription for injuries like hers. “I’ll do my best. Thanks. See you later.”
This time as she headed for the house, Fiona trotted along beside her, docile and well behaved.
Melissa’s wrist, on the other hand, complained vociferously all the way back to the house. She did her best to ignore it, focusing instead on the unsettling encounter with Dr. Sanderson’s only son.
* * *
Eli told himself he was only keeping an eye on Melissa as she made her slow way along the beach toward Brambleberry House because he was concerned about her condition, especially whether she had other injuries from her fall she had chosen not to reveal to him.
He was only being a concerned physician, watching over someone who had been hurt while he was nearby.
The explanation rang hollow. He knew it was more than that.
Melissa Blake Fielding had always been a beautiful girl and had fascinated him more than he had wanted to admit to himself or anyone else when he was eighteen and she was only fifteen.
She had been a pretty cheerleader, popular and well-liked—mostly because she always had a smile for everyone, even geeky science students who weren’t the greatest at talking to popular, pretty, well-liked cheerleaders.
He had danced with her once at a school dance toward the end of his senior year. She had been there with her date—and future husband—Cody Fielding, who had been ignoring her, as usual.
While his own date had been dancing with her dad, the high school gym teacher and chaperone, Eli had gathered his nerve to ask Melissa to dance, hating that the nicest girl in school had been stuck sitting alone while her jerk of a boyfriend ignored her.
He remembered she had been everything sweet to him during that memorable dance, asking about his plans after graduation.
Did she know her boyfriend and future husband hadn’t taken kindly to Eli’s nerve in asking Cody’s date to dance and had tried to make him pay? He still had a scar above his eyebrow from their subsequent little altercation.
It had been a long time ago. He was a completely different man than he’d been back then, with wholly different priorities.
He hadn’t thought about her in years, at least until his father had mentioned a few months earlier that Melissa was back in town and working for him.
At the time, he had been grieving, lost, more than a little raw. He remembered now that the memory of Melissa had made him smile for the first time in weeks.
Now he had to wonder if that was one of the reasons he had worked hard to arrange things so that he could come home and help his father out during Wendell’s recovery from double knee-replacement surgery. On some subconscious level, had he remembered Melissa worked at the clinic and been driven to see her again?
He didn’t want to think so. He would be one sorry idiot if that were the case, especially since he didn’t have room in his life right now for that kind of complication.
If he had given it any thought at all, on any level, he probably would have assumed it wouldn’t matter. He was older, she was older. It had been a long time since he’d felt like that awkward, socially inept nerd he’d been in the days when he lived here in Cannon Beach.
He had been deployed most of the last five years and had been through bombings, genocides, refugee disasters. He had seen things he never expected to, had survived things others hadn’t.
He could handle this unexpected reunion with a woman he might have had a crush on. He only had to remember that he was no longer that geeky, awkward kid but a well-respected physician now.
In comparison to everything he had been through in the last few years—and especially the horror of six months ago that he was still trying to process—he expected these few weeks of substituting for his father in Cannon Beach to be a walk in the park.
“You’re late.” Carmen Marquez, the clinic’s receptionist and office manager, gave an arch look over the top of her readers, and Melissa winced but held up her braced wrist.
“I know. It’s been a crazy day. I’m sorry. Blame it on this.”
“What did you do? Punch somebody?” Tiffany Lowell, one of their certified nursing assistants, gave her a wide-eyed look—though the college student and part-time band front woman wore so much makeup, she had the same expression most of the time.
“I tripped over a big, goofy Irish setter and sprained my wrist. I’m sorry I’m late, but I was on strict orders to rest and put ice on it.”
“That’s exactly what you should be doing. In fact, it’s what Dr. Sanderson would be telling you to do if he were here,” Carmen said.
Dr. Sanderson Jr. had been the one to give her the instructions, but she wasn’t ready to share that interesting bit of gossip with the other women.
“You look like you’re either going to puke or pass out,” Tiffany observed.
“We don’t have any patients scheduled for another half hour,” Carmen said with a great deal more sympathy in her voice. “You should at least sit down.”
“I’m fine. I need to get ready for the new doctor. He should be coming in today.”
Carmen angled her head in a strange way, her mouth pursed and her eyes twinkling. “He’s already here. Oh, honey. Have we got a surprise for you.”
The butterflies that had been dancing in her stomach since earlier on the beach seemed to pick up their pace. “The substitute doctor is Dr. Sanderson’s son, Eli.”
“Whoa! Did your fall make you psychic or something?” Tiffany asked with much more respect than she usually awarded Melissa.
“In a way, I guess you could say that. Sort of. I bumped into him on the beach this morning. He was a firsthand witness when I made my graceful face-plant into the sand, and he ended up kindly helping me up.”
The memory of the concern in his blue eyes and of his strong fingers holding her hand, his skin warm against hers, made her nerve endings tingle.
She firmly clamped down on the memory. She would have to work closely with him for at least the next few weeks while Wendell recovered. It would be a disaster if she couldn’t manage to keep a lid on her unexpected attraction to the man.
“I keep forgetting you grew up in town,” Carmen said. “You must know Eli, then.”
While Cannon Beach could swarm with tourists during the summer months, it was really a small town at heart. Most permanent residents knew one another.
“We went to school together. He was older. I was a freshman the year he was a senior. I didn’t know he was going to be filling in until I bumped into him this morning. Last I heard, we were getting a temp from the Portland agency.”
“That’s what I heard, too,” Carmen said. “I guess we have to roll with what we get.”
“I’m pretty sure plenty of women in Cannon Beach will want to roll with Doc Sanderson’s son when they see him.” Tiffany smirked.
Melissa turned her shocked laugh into a cough. “He told me he wasn’t sure until the last minute whether he’d be able to make it back to fill in.”
“You know where he’s been,