Phyllis Halldorson - A Wife For Dr. Sam

But why was he attracted to this woman he didn’t even know?

Because he’d made the mistake of catching her when she stumbled, that was why. She’d snuggled into his arms, so soft, so warm and inviting, and she’d smelled faintly of lilacs, his favorite floral scent. He’d held her close and had a hard time letting her go when she pulled away from him.

Then another thought caught him off balance. Could that fall have been deliberate? Had she been using her femininity to distract him and make him feel protective?

Sure she could have. Not only could have, but probably did. She’d no doubt been bewitching males all her life, to get what she wanted.

Well, he’d learned his lesson early on, and he wasn’t going to be caught in that particular hell again. He had good reason to distrust women.

A few minutes later he turned off the two-lane country road onto the Buckleys’ driveway. There was the usual assortment of automobiles, trucks and farm machinery scattered around the barnyard, and he paid little attention as he stopped near the front of the house.

Before he got to the top of the steps the screen door was flung open and Coralie walked out grinning happily. “Well, if it isn’t the late Dr. Sam,” she said gaily. “What was it this time? Mandy Hoover’s overdue baby, or old Mr. Proctor’s rheumatism?”

“Neither one, smarty,” he said as he gave her a friendly hug. “It was the Tuckers’ youngest son. He fell while running with a knife, and I had to put sutures in his arm. How long before we eat? I’m starved.”

Coralie laughed and disengaged herself as she turned toward the door. “I’m not going to feed you until I’ve introduced you to my best friend in all the world,” she said as she walked into the house with Sam right behind her.

The sun was still bright, and it took him a few seconds to adjust his eyes to the darker living room. As he blinked, Coralie indicated a woman who had just risen from the couch and was standing a couple of feet away.

“Sam, I want you to meet my friend, Kirsten Reinhold,” she said, and there was excitement in her tone. “Kirsten, this is Sam Lawford, the doctor I’ve told you so much about.”

One final blink cleared Sam’s vision, and he saw himself gazing into those same doelike brown eyes that had been haunting him since this morning.

Kirsten Reinhold was the airhead who had trashed his brand-new car!

“No!”

“No!”

Their denials were spoken in unison, even in perfect harmony, as though a conductor had lowered his baton to signal the first fortissimo notes of a fiery duet.

But this was no duet. It was an anguished protest to a fate that seemed intent on bedeviling two nice, unsuspecting people caught in a web of circumstances through no fault of their own.

“You are Kirsten Reinhold? The angel of mercy and paragon of virtue whose praise Coralie has been singing to me for months?” Sam sputtered.

“And you… You are Sam Lawford? The world’s most eligible bachelor, who only needs the right woman to turn him into the world’s most perfect husband?” Kirsten stammered sarcastically. “Why didn’t you tell me who you were this morning?”

“Why didn’t I? I did. I gave you my business card. Why didn’t you tell me who you were?”

She couldn’t believe he could be so obtuse. “I did. I wrote it all out on a piece of paper and handed it to you. It’s not my fault you didn’t look at it.”

Her sense of fair play finally caught up with her, and she sighed. “Although, I…I have to admit I didn’t read your card, either.”

A second male voice boomed through the room. “What’s going on here?”

It was Jim Buckley. In the few hours she’d been at the farm, Kirsten found him to be every bit as handsome and loving toward his family as Coralie had said. And he was just plain nice. Now he was standing next to Coralie, and they both looked surprised and perplexed.

Kirsten was the first to offer an explanation. “This…this is the man who was involved in the accident with me on the road this morning.” Her tone still rang with resentment.

“She caved in the whole side of my car,” Sam inter-jected, angrily.

“I did no such thing.” Her denial was heated. “It was only a slight dent in the front fender. The way you carry on you’d think I’d run over one of your children.”

“I don’t have any children, but I’ve only had that car for a week. Six days to be exact,” he said, fuming. “I had to go all the way to Boise to find a BMW dealership, and it hardly had a fingerprint on it until you came roaring down the road and rammed into it.”

Kirsten’s mouth dropped open. “Roaring down the road!” she raged. “I was barely moving. Twenty miles an hour at the most when you came out of nowhere and drove right in front of me—”

“Whoa there, take it easy!” Jim interrupted as he stepped between the two combatants. “Let’s cool down a little and find out what really happened.” He nodded to Kirsten. “Okay, you first.”

Belatedly Kirsten realized that both she and Sam were being rude, to say nothing of tacky, by waging their quarrel in the home of their host and hostess. She was regretful and embarrassed, but they’d gone too far now not to try to settle it.

She recounted how she’d taken her eyes off the road for just a second to turn off the radio. “I don’t know where he came from. There wasn’t a car in sight when I looked,” she concluded.

“You claim you didn’t see the stop sign, either,” Sam pointed out, “so you couldn’t have even looked to the sides of the road.”

Kirsten knew what he said was undoubtedly true, and she would have admitted it if he’d been reasonable. But he wasn’t reasonable, so she wasn’t going to be either. She’d already apologized, and she wasn’t about to do it again.

“I did, too—” she started to insist, but again Jim interrupted.

“Now hold on a minute, both of you.” Jim’s tone was stern. “Kirsten, you’ve told your side of the story, now let Sam tell his.” He looked at the other man. “Okay, pal, go ahead.”

Sam wished he’d used more restraint when he first realized that Coralie’s friend and houseguest was the woman who’d bashed in his car. Unfortunately he’d shot off his mouth, and now all he could do was take a deep breath and try to control his aggravation. “I had a full schedule of patients at my office this morning when I had to drop everything and hurry out to Chester Atkinson’s farm to help one of his cows deliver a calf that was turned wrong and couldn’t be expelled…”

“A calf?” Kirsten broke in, too astonished to be polite. “I thought you were an M.D.!”

He looked at her and nodded brusquely. “I am, but there’s only one veterinarian in this whole area, and he had to fly back East a couple of days ago to attend the funeral of a family member, so I was the next best thing. Delivering baby animals isn’t that much different from delivering baby humans, and without medical intervention both the cow and the calf would have died.”

Kirsten was stunned by an unexpected rush of admiration for this pugnacious man. She’d worked with a lot of physicians, but she doubted that any of them would have interrupted office hours to make a house call way out in the country to deliver a calf!

“Are they all right?” she asked softly.

He nodded and smiled. “Yeah. All the little guy needed was to be repositioned and he popped right out.”

He looked altogether different when he smiled. His cold brown eyes warmed and softened, and his whole expression lightened. For the first time she saw the slight indentations of dimples on either side of his mouth.