He’d been tagged on Facebook. In fact, on the Lucky Harbor page there was an entire note on him, listing sightings and news. They called him Mysterious Cute Guy.
It was enough to give a guy nightmares.
Except he was already having nightmares…
He waited until hunger stopped him and drove into town. Lucky Harbor was nestled in a rocky cove, its architecture a quirky, eclectic mix of the old and new. The main drag was lined with Victorian buildings painted in bright colors, housing the requisite grocery store, post office, gas station, and hardware store. Then there was a turnoff to the beach itself, where a long pier jutted out into the water, lined with more shops, the arcade and Ferris wheel, and the diner.
Eat Me was like something from an out-of-time Mayberry, except in Mayberry he’d probably not have gotten laid at Vets’ Hall, in a storage attic above the entire town.
Noticing the brand new front door, he entered the diner and took a seat at the counter. Amy silently poured him a mug of coffee. This was routine; they’d been doing the same dance for months, rarely speaking. He really appreciated that in a waitress, and he liked her infinitely more than the eternally grumpy diner owner. Jan scared him, just a little bit.
Then Amy dropped the local paper in front of him and cocked a hip tableside.
Ty slowly pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head and gave her a level look. Her return look had bad attitude all over it. She wore a black tee with some Chinese symbol on the front and the requisite frilly pink apron that looked incongruous with her short denim skirt, boots, and general kick-ass attitude. She gestured with a short jerk of her chin to the paper, and he took a look.
The headline read: COUNTY HOSPITAL’S AUCTION—A HUGE SUCCESS.
So far so good, he thought, then read the first paragraph, which credited the success of the auction to the nurses, specifically Mallory Quinn, who along with her new boyfriend had gotten the entire Vets’ Hall on its feet by starting off the bidding with a bang.
Ty reread the article. New boyfriend? Mysterious Cute Guy? He graced Amy with his no-nonsense, don’t-fuck-with-me look. It had cowed many.
But Amy didn’t appear impressed or even particularly intimidated.
He set down the paper and pushed it away.
She pushed it back with a single finger.
“Do you have a point?” he asked.
“Several, actually. First, Mallory’s my friend. And I recently encouraged her to make a change in her life. You were that change. Don’t make me sorry.”
Ty wasn’t much used to threats, however sweetly uttered. Never had been. He’d been raised by two military parents who’d taken turns parenting him when one or the other had been on tour overseas. He’d been loved, but weaknesses had not been tolerated. Even his current job added up to a life lived by rules, discipline, sheer wits, and honor.
The honor part was troubling him now.
Somehow in spite of himself and his reclusiveness, he’d managed to find celebrity status in this crazy-ass, one-horse town, and even worse, there was Mallory, wanting him to take her for a walk on the wild side.
Bad idea.
The baddest.
He’d done it anyway, fallen captive to those melted chocolate eyes, even knowing he planned on being out of Lucky Harbor any minute now. “She’s a big girl,” he finally said.
Amy stared at him for a long moment, then shook her head and walked away, muttering something beneath her breath about the entire male race being genetically flawed.
Ty was inclined to agree with her. He paid for his coffee and received another long, careful look from Amy.
Message received.
As to whether he was going to heed the warning, the jury was still out. He went straight back to his big, empty house. Cranking the music to ear-splitting levels, he worked on the Shelby. He’d seen the car in the newspaper on his first day in Lucky Harbor had hadn’t been able to resist her.
He’d never been able to resist a sweetheart of a car.
Or, apparently, a sweetheart of a woman…
Mallory sat in a hospital board meeting surrounded by a bunch of administrators that included her boss and her mother, in what should have been the meeting of her life. Instead, her mind was a million miles away. Or more accurately, in a certain storage room.
Memories of that storage room, and what Ty had done to her in it, were making her warm. Very warm.
She still couldn’t believe how fast she’d gotten na**d with him.
Well, not quite na**d, she reminded herself. She’d been in such a hurry that she hadn’t even lost her panties, not completely.
Ty had simply slipped them aside with his fingers.
Just remembering made her damp all over again. God. She’d never gone up in flames so hard and fast in her entire life.
Heaven.
He’d taken her to heaven in seven minutes. A record for her. And she’d do it again, in a heartbeat.
That is, if the man who’d taken her to heaven hadn’t vanished from the auction without a word. That should teach her to have completely inappropriate sex with a man whose name she’d learned only twenty minutes earlier.
But all it’d really taught her was that she’d been missing out. Man, had she been missing out. Worse, she knew the magnitude of her attraction for him now, and she was afraid that the next time she saw him, she was going to shove him into the nearest closet for round two.
And round three.
Mallory took a moment to fantasize about that, about what she’d be wearing the next time. Maybe her little black dress again; he’d seemed to really like it. And maybe next time she’d leave the panties at home—“Mallory?”
She blinked away the vision of Ty and her panties and came face to face with a not amused Jane.
“The amount?” Jane asked in a tone that said she’d repeated herself several times already.
“Eighteen thousand.” Mallory looked down at the check in her hands, a check she was incredibly proud of—the total of the proceeds from the auction. “You said the board would donate twenty-five percent of it to the Health Services Clinic.”
“There isn’t an HSC,” Jane said. “Not yet.”
Mallory bit back her retort, knowing better than to show weakness. “There will be. We’ve proven need.”
“Have we?” Jane asked.
“Yes.” Mallory forced herself to look the other board members in the eyes as she spoke, no matter how resistant they were. Dr. Scott was there, rumpled and gorgeous as usual. His eyes warmed when he met her gaze. No one else made eye contact. She took a big gulp of air. “The need is obvious. There’s nowhere else in the entire county providing drug programs, teen pregnancy counseling, women’s services, or an abuse hotline. We all know that. The ER is losing money because we’re taking on patients who’d be better served by a Health Clinic.”
“You mean people who can’t, or won’t, pay.” This from Bill Lawson, head of the board of directors. He was tall, lean, and fit, looking forty instead of his fifty-five. He had sharp eyes, a sharper mind, and was all about the bottom line. Always. He was listening though, and Mallory appreciated that. This was important to her, had been since Karen had died because she’d had no place to go and get the services she’d so desperately needed.
People rarely talked about Karen and what had happened to her. But Mallory hadn’t forgotten a thing, and she intended to make sure that no other scared eighteen-year-old girl ever felt the helplessness and terror that Karen had.
“We’ve run the numbers,” she said, talking directly to Bill now. The hospital, just outside of Lucky Harbor, serviced the entire county but was private, run by a board of directors who all tended to bow to Bill’s wishes. She needed his support. “A Health Services Clinic is eligible for programs and funding that the ER isn’t. I’ve written the grant requests. If you go with my proposed plan and allow use of the old west wing, then one hundred percent of the HSC revenue will go right back into the hospital’s pockets.”
“It would also mean that the full financial responsibility for the Health Services Clinic would be the hospital’s,” Bill pointed out.
He already knew this. He just didn’t like it. “Yes,” she agreed. “But with the grants and donations, HSC will run in the black, and in the long run, it’ll save your ER losses. We’ve got most of the first year’s funds already.”
“You’re short ten big ones.”
“True, but I won’t stop until we have the rest,” she promised. “This makes sense for our community, Bill, and it’s the right thing to do.” She paused, then admitted the rest. “I’m going to be a pain in your ass over this.”
“Going to be?” Bill shook his head wryly. “Listen, Mallory, I believe in what you’re trying to do, and I want to be on your side. But let’s face the truth here—your proposed programs will bring a certain…demographic to Lucky Harbor, a demographic we typically try to divert away to other parts of the county. The town isn’t really behind this.”
“The town can be persuaded. People are in need, and HSC can meet that need.”
Bill was quiet a moment, and Mallory did her best not to fidget. She was only moderately successful.
“I’ll make you a deal,” Bill finally said. “At this week’s town meeting, I’ll give everyone a formal spiel, then ask for thoughts.”
People went to town meetings like they went to the grocery store or got gas. It was simply what everyone did. If Bill asked for opinions, he’d get them, in droves.
“If we get a positive response, I’ll consider a one-month trial run for HSC. One month, Mallory,” he said when she smiled. “Then we’ll reevaluate on the condition of the actual costs and the bottom line at that time. If you’ve got the budget for the rest of the year after that month, and if there’ve been no problems, you’re on. If not, you drop this.” He gave her a long look. “Is that acceptable to you?”
There was only one answer here. “Yes, sir,” she said with carefully tempered excitement.
“Oh, and that budget of yours better not include paying you to go to the pharmacy and pick up meds for our patients and then delivering them.”
He was referring to how she’d picked up Mrs. Burland’s meds for her just that morning and brought them to the woman’s home. How he’d found out wasn’t too much of a mystery. Lucky Harbor had one pharmacy. It was located in the grocery store, and everyone in town was in and out of that store often. Anyone from the pharmacist, to the clerk, to any of the customers could have seen her, and she hadn’t made a secret of what she was doing.
Nor had Mrs. Burland made a mystery out of how she’d felt about Mallory delivering her meds.
“Do you expect a tip?” she’d asked. “Because here it is. Put on some makeup and do something with your hair or you’ll never catch a man.”
At the memory, Mallory felt an eye twitch coming on but she didn’t let it dampen her relief. She was closer to opening the HSC than she’d ever been. “I did that on my own time.”
Bill nodded. “And if by some miracle, the town meeting goes well, how long would you need to get up and running?”
She’d had volunteer professionals from all over the county on standby all year. “I would open immediately with limited services, adding more as quickly as I can get supplies and staff scheduled.”
“See that ‘immediately’ is actually immediately,” Bill said. “And I’ll expect to see numbers weekly.”
“Yes, sir.”
An hour later, Mallory was on the ER floor, still doing the happy dance. Finally she had something other than sexy Ty to think about, because hoping for town approval and actually getting it were two very different things.
Not that she had time to think about that either, thanks to a crazy shift. She had a stroke victim, a diabetic in the midst of losing his toes, a gangbanger who’d been shot up in Seattle and made it all the way to Lucky Harbor before deciding he was dying, two drunks, a stomach-ache, and a partridge in a pear tree.
In between patients, she worked the phones like mad, preparing for a very tentative Health Clinic opening the following week.
The west wing in the hospital had once been the emergency department before the new wing had been built three years ago. It was perfectly set up for the clinic, easily accessible with its own parking lot. It needed to be cleaned and stocked. And she needed staff on standby. The list of what she needed and what she had to do went on and on.
When she yawned for the tenth time, Mallory went in search of coffee. As she stood there mainlining it, waiting for it to kick in—her mind danced off to revisit a certain storage room…big, warm hands, both rough and gentle at the same time, stroking her—
“Mallory, my goodness. Where are you at in that pretty little head, Disneyland?”
Mallory blinked and the daydream faded, replaced by the sight of her mother, who stood in front of her smiling with bafflement. “I called your name three times. And the same thing happened in the board meeting. Honey, what in the world are you thinking about today?”
She’d been thinking about the sound Ty had made when he’d come, a low, inherently male sound that gave her a tingle even now. “Dessert,” she said faintly. “I’m thinking about dessert.”
“Hmmm.” Ella looked doubtful but didn’t call her on it. “You’ve seen the paper.”
“You mean the local gossip rag masquerading as legit news?” They’d labeled Ty her boyfriend. Who’d run the fact check for that tidbit? “Yeah, I saw it.” Every person she’d come across had made sure of it.