Chapter Seventeen
As Whitney saw it, she was a woman of limited options. Her birthday dinner wasn’t until that weekend, a grand bash that was to consist of her parents, as many friends as she could convince to make the drive up, and at least fifty bottles of wine—and she somehow had to get through the week, spiraling-depression-free, until that happened. The most appealing of her options, to call Matt and have him drag her out of the sulks with his dimples and bad taste in menswear, was one she refused to consider for the time being.
He was probably off gallivanting with Natalie and Laura, the twinset terrors, anyway.
That left groveling at Jared’s feet, begging him to solve all her problems or...what? Oh, yeah. Fixing the damn problems herself.
Which was why she ended up at the local golf dome, sneaking in through the emergency exit while she struggled to conceal a five-iron in her pants.
This fight wasn’t over. She could still play nice with the locals, show her softer side. Not every crisis in the world needed Dr. Fine to come dashing to the rescue.
The golf dome sat like a pustule on the outskirts of town. Big, white and bulbous, the dome had to be one of the worst beautification petition transgressors in the world. Yet, if the state of the parking lot was anything to go by, beloved by the community.
Once inside, Whitney sidled up to the tee on the farthest end of the dome. She swiped a few of the balls from the bucket belonging to the guy next to her and lined up. With a little ass wiggle and her arms primed to hit a homerun, she swung.
Miss.
She screwed up her nose and tried again. Slowing things down this time, she was able to actually make contact with the ball, though it skittered off at the wrong angle and almost took out an advertisement on the nearest wall.
Doctors golfed all the time, but she’d be damned if she could figure out why. This stupid sport had none of the precision, none of the finesse of a well-done periareolar incision. She was pretty much hacking away here.
“Well, this is a sight I never thought I’d see,” drawled the last man Whitney wanted as a witness to her failure. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’re wearing golf shoes.”
“That’s because I am wearing golf shoes.” Whitney spoke with a composure she was far from feeling. She was also wearing sedate, flamingo-free clothes. Khaki slacks she’d pilfered from her mother and one of her less colorful shirts completed what had to be the most boring outfit she’d ever worn, but her goal, for once, was not to antagonize.
She turned to face Jared, also dressed in casual golf wear and looking as uncomfortable as she felt. His powerful build was made for military-style fatigues and field scrubs, which, of course, had always magnified her own ass about twelve times.
“What a strange world we live in these days.” His smile said he was laughing, but no real sound came out. “Back when we were dating, you couldn’t tell the difference between a putter and a driver.”
“The women of Pleasant Park golf. Therefore, so do I. It’s no different than you putting on a suit and showing your suitcase full of slides to a committee. It’s called networking.”
“Oh?” Leaning against the separator wall between tees, he pointed toward a group of women clad in similar attire as Whitney. “You going to join those ladies over there? Talk manicures and slip gin in your afternoon tea? ’cause that woman in blue is giving you a major case of the stink eye.”
Whitney ignored him. It wasn’t Natalie—just one of her cronies. If the Ice Queen herself had been here, she’d have already been escorted far, far away. “What are you doing here anyway? Are you stalking me or something?”
“Yes.”
Disarming her with the truth. That was new. “I don’t know why you think you can show up after all this time and pretend like we’re best friends on our way to the jungle to save the world. Maybe Kendra and John think you’re the answer to our problems, but I don’t.”
“I know I messed up, Whitney. Believe me, I know.” His words were so soft she almost had to lean in to hear them. But she didn’t lean—at least not in. When his voice dropped like that, so low it was almost a rumble, it meant danger loomed on the horizon. She knew and her body—the stupid, thoughtless thing—knew it too. She straightened and gripped her club tighter, wielding it like a weapon.
“What is it you want from me, Jared? Do you need me to fill your bucket with warm fuzzies? Because you’re knocking at the wrong lady’s door for that. My warm and fuzzy for you ran out a long time ago.”
“Ah, Whitney. You are, as always, a class act.” A mocking smile lifted one corner of his mouth. “Why don’t you let me start making it up to you? Fifty bucks says I can walk over there and book your first nose job.”
“Oh, please. Even your arrogance has its limits. You couldn’t possibly.” She scanned the group of women carefully just in case. There was one woman, a petite blonde with a recessive chin, who could probably benefit from a hump rhinoplasty to even out her features. Her friend, drinking from a water bottle, was in desperate need of a cervicoplasty to get rid of her double chin. It wasn’t that they were unattractive—it was simply that there was always some sort of recommendation to make, some flaw every person saw in the mirror. The smallest mole had a way of making an otherwise gorgeous woman feel like a hag.
“Is that silence the sound of you picking up the gauntlet?” Jared teased, his hand cupped around one of his ears as he tilted his head close. “Or are you afraid?”
“I’m not afraid,” Whitney muttered, returning her attention to the tee. “I just don’t want you ruining our business even more than it already is. In fact, it would be better for all of us if you’d hop back on a plane and resume your charitable actions.”
Aware that Jared was watching, she took care placing her feet. By the time the club came down, chipping just at the edge of the ball so it veered off in yet another left angle, she was sure he must have taken the hint and sauntered off again.
But his laughter rose to greet her ears, followed almost immediately by the tinkling of three female voices appreciating his sense of humor.
She ignored them and returned to her golf clubs. It probably wasn’t the best way to go about making friends, but she wasn’t about to head over there and ride on Jared’s coattails.
She’d made that mistake once. Never again.
Surprisingly, the balls flew much straighter and much harder as her sense of irritation grew. Maybe these golf people were on to something. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to—
Her club stopped in midair. Her first reaction was completely immersed in an Oh shit moment, thinking that someone had stepped in the way. But then her club dropped and she saw that Jared had stilled it with his hand.
“Are you insane?” She turned. “I may not have been playing the sport for very long, but even I know you don’t come up behind someone midswing.”
“Dr. Vidra, I’d like for you to meet Lila Tucket.”
At the invocation of her title, Whitney immediately dropped into professional mode. It was an involuntary response, the result of years of jumping whenever the attending doctor made so much as a peep.
“Oh, how lovely to meet you,” she said, stretching her lips into a smile and extending a hand. “If you walk away from this conversation with anything, please let it be my solemn vow that my medical skills far surpass my golfing ones.”
Jared coughed heavily.
Lila offered her a tight smile, looking as though the only thing less pleasant than their meeting would be a coffee enema.
“I believe you’re a friend of Natalie’s, right?” Whitney persisted. “Maybe you can tell me why my ball keeps shooting off to the left. Is it a stance thing?”
Lila ignored her. “We weren’t aware that your practice participates in charity.”
“Oh.” Whitney’s club clomped to the green plastic grass. “Well...you know.” What was it Kendra had said? All the businesses here were charity-minded? “I hate when businesses go on and on about their nonprofit contributions, as if that somehow replaces solid customer service. When we perform a service, we do it for us.”
There. That should do the trick.
“Dr. Fine here—” Lila said his name as though it were a sigh, “—was just telling us about his work with the orphans in Borneo. The Ladies Golf Club has been putting on an annual luncheon for Borneo for the past five years—we had no idea you had such an incredible team of doctors at your back.”
That was close, but it wasn’t a nose job. Jared promised her a nose job.
Whitney smiled. “It’s always been our goal to match the quality of organizations and people here in Pleasant Park,” she said, parroting Kendra’s mission statement. “But thank you for noticing. We hope to become a positive influence in the community.”
Ugh. The schmooze tasted like hydrogen peroxide on her tongue.
Lila nodded, eating it up. “Maybe I could set up a tour of your facilities later this week. Strictly between us, of course.”
Her heart took a strange tumble in a war of excitement and irritation. Jared had just booked her first surgery. In a matter of five minutes. At the golf club.
Jared grabbed the club from Whitney’s hand and gave it a tentative swing. “Work can wait, don’t you think, ladies? Next bucket of balls, warm and fuzzy, is on me.”
Lila actually cracked a smile and squeezed Whitney’s arm before taking her place at one of the tees. The other two women followed suit, all of them perfect in the way they positioned their bodies. A quick slice went straight and true, sailing through the air in a perfect arc somewhere near the 200-yard mark.
Whitney sighed and lined up with them. This was a game she wasn’t sure she’d ever like playing.
And she wasn’t talking about the golf.