chapter Four
Ivy made it to work with four minutes to spare. She had punched her number into his i-Phone, and then placed herself on speed dial using an image of ivy, with clear heart-shaped leaves, as her icon.
“In case you forget my name,” she told him.
“Not a chance.” His mouth softened and when he accepted his phone back from her, his fingers trailed smoothly over the sensitive skin of her wrist. It was a deliberate touch and when her lips parted in reaction, his smile became decidedly roguish.
He leaned into her space. “We’re going to wait on the physical, but when we do come together,” he warned softly, “it’s going to be explosive.”
His breath fanned her lips and Ivy thought about closing that space between them. The tension was like a ribbon running down the center of her and he was pulling on the raveling end. She felt her nipples bead and wondered if he could see them pushing against the thin fabric of her tank top.
He swore and it was a single, husky word of need. She opened her eyes to find his fastened on her breasts.
“This is crazy,” she whispered. She’d never felt even half this aroused with Trace. Of course, she had been a school girl then. And later, all feeling for him was gone.
“Never this fast. This hot. This need,” he agreed.
“I think I waited too long,” she blurted. “That has to be it.”
He took her confession with his lips, grazing over hers softly. He took her breath as his own as her mouth opened on a shuddering sigh.
“How long, Ivy?” he asked.
But she was beyond words. She was all about the scent of him, warm and close. The taste of him, moist and hot. Her fingers drifted over his shoulders, tracing their strength, and settled on his chest. She could feel the beat of his heart, accelerated but steady, an elemental rhythm that called to her.
“How long?” he asked again.
“Years,” she admitted.
His tongue plunged into her mouth then, sliding against hers, tangling in an erotic dance that melted Ivy from the inside out.
And then it was over. A bucket of ice water couldn’t have left her any colder than his sudden withdrawal.
She heard herself gasp. Felt her body pull into itself.
“Sorry,” he muttered. And she could tell from the anger in his voice that he was, truly. So
she spared him a glance.
His face was flushed. His lips wet from her mouth. His chest lifted in an agitated rhythm.
“Our first date,” he announced, “will be hands off.”
“What?”
“There’s more to us than sex. There has to be. But we’ll never discover it if we touch each other.”
“Because touch won’t be enough.”
“Not ever,” he agreed.
“Maybe it is just sex. A really strong attraction,” she pointed out. “Maybe we could work each other out of our systems.”
He shook his head and reached over her to open her door. “I don’t want to work you out of my system, Ivy.”
She gathered her purse and slipped out of the truck. Standing inside the open door, she held Jake’s gaze. His eyes reminded her of the ocean, a tropical green mixing with the blue and made more intense from his emotions. She nodded, pushed the strap of her purse over her shoulder, and cleared her throat.
“Thanks,” she said. “Really.” She gestured toward the truck and her car hooked up in back.
“You’re welcome. Really.”
“Mind parking it and leaving the key at reception?”
“Of course,” he promised.
Ivy shifted on her feet. She was probably down to two minutes now and would have to race through the lobby, but she had trouble shifting from fully aroused to work mode. “Well, OK. I’ll see you Tuesday.”
“Definitely.”
Ivy turned and dashed around the fountain with the children frolicking in the water and slid through the front doors of Rady Children’s Hospital. She loved this place. There were cheerful murals of children at play and many of the floor tiles had been painted with tic-tac-toe boards and row boats stuffed with giraffes and bears.
By the time she got off the elevator on the third floor, it was the stroke of seven. She should be dressed already and on the floor. She stopped at the nurses’ station. They were in the middle of shift change, too, but she caught the eye of the night supervisor, Genny.
“Car trouble,” Ivy explained. “I’m suiting up. Give me five.”
“Take your time, doll,” Genny called after her. “It’s not like you’ve run late before.”
True. Ivy was always early. She knew a good thing when she had it in hand.
Was Jake a good thing? He felt like it. But she was no judge of male character. And he had warned her that he was no Boy Scout. He’d gone so far as to tell her not to forget it.
But he was a man of honor. He’d proven that. He had follow through. He’d driven Ivy more than a hundred miles out of his way and while he was looking for a diversion, that was a
high level sense of duty.
Ivy ducked into the staff locker room and found her cubby which she’d stocked with clean scrubs, lotions, tooth paste and mouth wash. She even dug a bottle of water and an energy bar out of a plastic shopping bag hanging from a back hook. She dressed quickly, went through a brief hygiene check, and peeled back the wrapper on her dinner as she hustled back to the floor.
How was Jake able to figure her out so quickly? He was observant and practiced at making quick applications of what he saw. Skills that probably kept him alive when he was in the Middle East, or wherever he did his tours of duty.
But Ivy was also pretty much what you see is what you get. She put it all out there, even if it meant having to rein it in later—or have someone else do it for her.
Her body reacted to the memory. Maybe the heat she was feeling should stem from embarrassment, but that wasn’t it. Not even close. Jake made her burn. Yeah, their game had gotten out of hand, kind of like a dry bush bursting into spontaneous flame. It had been a long time since her imagination was pushed into play. Eye candy was about as exciting as it got for her and usually she was jogging and unable to take more than a passing appreciation of the view.
Jake made her forget to breathe. And that was before he’d kissed her.
That thought was quickly followed by a curling through her body that was anything but warm and exciting. It was a realization that was weighted with dread.
Her reaction to Jake was high school. It was hormonal. It was purely sexual.
Wasn’t it?
She’d done that already and didn’t care for a repeat. She’d paid dearly for what she’d thought was love.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. Ivy lived by this nugget of wisdom. How she wished she had been strong enough at sixteen to follow it.
But she had sharpened her instincts since then. She had learned a thing or two about self-preservation. She had built up her confidence and knew she was a woman of great value. None of this had come easy. It had taken years. It had been a process—a good counselor, going back to school, a job where she gave good and gave daily, and reconnecting with her sister. So why weren’t there warning bells going off inside her head? Why wasn’t her body on full fight or flight alert?
Ivy joined the shift change at the white board just inside pod c—the intensive care unit for children emerging from surgery. It was seven-ten. The briefing was already a quarter of the way down the list of patient names and needs. Ivy put Jake to the back of her mind. As she worked through the hours, monitoring ventilators, adjusting filters and pausing over each of her patients to stroke a chubby cheek or coach them through the ‘cough up’—extubation—Ivy was aware of her body, still on slow-simmer from her time with Jake.
Occasionally, an errant thought passed through her mind. Jake’s sense of humor—she’d seen a spark here and there, when the tone of their conversation became suggestive—or his quiet disapproval. He was definitely not impressed with her casual acceptance of her circumstances, and yet he had appreciated her plan of action. And there was a lot more to Jake. She had seen the shadow play in his eyes when he was stirred by a memory. Something or someone had caught up with him, only for a moment, but he had changed. Grown somber.
Jake ran deep. And in that, there was no comparison to Trace. Her ex-husband had been all about baseball and when that was lost, so was he.
Jake was made of stronger stuff than that. Whatever haunted him, was not consuming him.
The thought was calming for Ivy. She knew more about Jake than she’d thought. And maybe she could fall back on another of her go-to mantras—proceed with caution. Although the idea of slow with Jake didn’t appeal to her at all.
Ivy was checking over the last of her patient charts and sipping a cup of fresh-brewed coffee when Genny found her.
“You’re not going to get anywhere without these.” The nurse held out the set of Ivy’s car keys. “That was some kind of car trouble you had last night.”
A second nurse came up beside them. “I would love to look half as troublesome,” he agreed.
“Too serious to be sunshine,” the nurse continued. “But I’m calling him Apollo anyway.”
“My wife calls me Thor, the god of thunder. But that’s only when I’ve been very good.”
They laughed and Ivy pocketed her keys.
Genny watched her, shaking her head. “You’re not going to tell us his name? You’ve been with us, what—three years now?—and this is the first sign of life on the outside we see and you’re not sharing?”
“When he becomes a household name, I’ll let you know it,” Ivy returned.
“You just pick him up on the side of the road?” Genny persisted.
Ivy shook her head.”He picked me up, and drove me all the way to work.”
“How far was that?”
“East of Riverside.”
That announcement dropped their jaws.
“No kidding,” Genny whispered. “Look at that, Stan, Ivy’s got the real thing.”
“I don’t have anything. Not yet. Well, except my car. Did he say where he parked it?”
“Blue three. North side.”
Ivy thought about her options. She had Triple A, so it was either have it towed home or to the shop. At home, it would sit until Ivy had the funds to replace the tire and she would have to rely on public transportation to get to work. Not a very practical solution as sometimes she had only thirty minutes to get from her shift at Children’s to her part time at the rehabilitation center. So she was going to have to dip into the precious little that was in her savings account now.
“You guys know of a good deal on tires?”
“No need,” Genny replied. “His message was, ‘You’re good to roll.’”
Ivy felt her eyes flare. There was no fixing that tire, but maybe Jake had managed to find a spare. He’d gone out of his way to do it, too. Again. And it made her a little uncomfortable. It must have shown on her face.
“In the world of man-woman relationships,” Genny said, “this kind of thing is done all the time.”
“But we don’t have a relationship,” Ivy protested.
“Yet. This is the best part,” Genny warned, “when he’s working to win you over. He’ll do the unthinkable—leap tall buildings and all of that. Make a record of it, so you’ll have something to fall back on later. It dries up, all this romance.”
“Now that’s not true,” Stan said. “I still buy my wife flowers for no obvious reason and tell her everyday how lovely she is.”
“That’s why you’ve been married twenty-something years,” Genny pointed out. “You’re a rare breed, Stan.”
“He fixed my car,” Ivy was still stuck on it.
“You’ve got to do better than that, honey,” Genny advised. “Expect the sweet, the nothings and the somethings.”
“This is a something.” It was pretty big to Ivy.
“This is definitely a something. The man knows how to take care of his woman.”
But I’m not his woman. Not yet.
Ivy said good-bye to her friends, grabbed her purse and walked off the floor. She boarded the elevator still feeling that Jake’s gesture was one of trespass. But that was ridiculous. His act of kindness seemed too close, too personal, she argued with herself, because no one, other than Holly, had ever extended themselves so much for her. And maybe she was putting too much weight into Jake’s actions. Fixing her tire was an extension of the man himself—that honor and follow-through she’d already noticed about him—and probably had very little to do with her. Maybe.
By the time she got to the parking garage she was feeling better about the situation.
Jake was a soldier. He helped. He rescued. He restored. It was who he was.
Ivy had never been rescued before. She didn’t realize that it was all-inclusive. That the job wasn’t considered done until the problem was solved. She accepted that. Just as she accepted that people raised in loving homes were conditioned to expect it and that she and Holly, and a whole lot of other people, had to get used to it. And it’s not that Ivy didn’t extend herself in similar ways. Loaning her spare is what got her in this predicament to begin with.
But all that reasoning evaporated when she arrived at her car.
Her Patriot was sporting new tires. Two of them. Not a single, donut-sized spare, but replacement. New tread, shiny black. And her car had been washed, too. The film of dust coating the black paint was gone; the bird spatter, the streaks of desert across her windshield cleaned.
For a moment Ivy lost her equilibrium. She actually felt the world around her tilt a little.
She was overwhelmed. And she didn’t like it.
She felt threatened, but why?
Was it her independence that she’d fought long and hard to achieve and came to covet that she felt was under attack? Or was there more to it than that?
She felt her feet slipping. She leaned backwards to compensate for the sudden change in gravitational pull.
More. There was more going on. Genny’s words fluttered across her mind. Expectations. She was supposed to have them. From the sweet to the grand. Most women not only had them, but made them clear. Ivy knew this. Every time she picked up a fashion magazine there was at least one article addressing ‘what a woman wants’ or ‘how to set and expect…’ Was that part of the problem? Ivy had no expectations?
She definitely had no prior experience with this kind of care. Maybe Jake’s gesture was one more thing to chalk up to ‘the norm,’ as she and Holly called it. If they’d lived a normal childhood, Ivy’s world would not be so rocked now by this extension of kindness.
Yes, she decided. She often found herself tracing emotions back to her childhood. Since leaving Trace and rebuilding her life, she’d gotten much better at identifying them and assigning them the right amount of weight. Baggage—she had to remember when she felt that dread rearing its head, to check her baggage. Like with anything else, she would get better at it with practice.
Ivy took a deep breath and her lungs felt looser. She opened her hand and looked at the key resting in her palm. And after checking her baggage, she decided, she was going to find a way to enjoy her new destination. That would take some practice, too, but she was worth it.
And the thought struck a chord with her. She felt its soft vibration from within, rolling out to her fingertips and down to her toes. Worth. Value. That was the more. Jake treated her like she possessed both. It was also the same old struggle. She’d thought she’d beat that into submission. She could tell herself ten times a day that she had value, that she was a good person with lots to give, but believing it required consistent reminders.
New situations came with new tests. But she was a quick study. It’d only taken her a few hours to get Jake straight in her heart: she was wildly attracted to the man and maybe that was a good thing. He was certainly worth exploring. And that thought thinned the air supply and made her slightly dizzy.
Ivy pressed the button on the key pad that released the door locks. Her headlights flashed and she opened the driver’s door, slid behind the wheel, and sank into the soft upholstery. A car that worked well, that got her from A to B no problem, was a gift. So she took a moment to appreciate it. The Patriot was her first vehicle. When she was a kid, they rarely owned a car, which was probably just as well as her mother was too drunk to drive or to know better. Trace had been stingy with the keys to his pick-up, but he had taught her to drive. When she was still in high school, and had completed the teen driver course, he’d taken her on the back roads until she was ready for her test. Driving was a gift of freedom, of autonomy. And Jake had restored that. That was the complete opposite of threatening her independence. Another way of looking at the situation. A positive spin. Why couldn’t she have gone there first?
Practice, she reminded herself.
She took another breath, opened her eyes, and moved her purse from her lap to the passenger seat. That’s when she noticed the invoice. It was folded neatly in half and propped against the console, where Ivy couldn’t fail to see it. She plucked it from behind the gear shift and scanned the type and numbers.
He’d left her the bill—of course he had. And that made her smile, which was like pulling
a ball of string—the remaining tension in her muscles eased. Jake understood there were boundaries. He’d proven that to her already on the drive to San Diego. When people show you who they are, believe them the first time. When was she going to take her own advice? Ivy dropped her eyes to the bottom line and was relieved to see that the total wasn’t bad at all, after a deep military discount.