to sand the rust off before you paint. I’ll help.” He paused. “Unless that’s a violation of the self-sufficiency thing.” Another pause. “Which, for the record, I completely respect.”
God, this guy was too much. Everybody here was too much. “Why is everyone in this town being so nice to me? Pearl wouldn’t let me pay for my pie just now. CJ offered to do a house call when I need my roots touched up. And that’s just today. There must be a catch.”
“It’s that two-year thing, probably. I think everyone just wants you to stick, you know? This town really needs a doctor.”
“Oh, so I’m just a warm body with a medical degree?” she joked.
“No. I think Dr. Baker was the warm body with the medical degree, and now that you’re here, everyone is realizing exactly how much that was true.” He paused. “That sounds uncharitable. He was a nice enough guy. He was just…not getting right in there on the town green when a tourist was going into labor, you know?”
“The scientist in me needs to point out that my clinic isn’t even open yet, so all these favorable conclusions are premature.”
“Nah. You can just tell.”
Well. She liked that assessment. “Speaking of tourists in labor on the town green, Sawyer told me that Colleen called the police station looking for both my name and your name—she said she’d forgotten them.”
“Huh. I wonder why?”
“Maybe so she can send us thank-you notes? Name her kid after us?”
“Jake Nora?”
“Nora Jake!” she teasingly corrected. “It is a girl, after all.”
“Nora Jacobina?”
She wasn’t sure why she found that so funny, but she had to pause in her painting because she was cracking up. “Nora Jacobina sounds like a pilgrim.”
He chuckled, and they settled into a companionable silence as they worked. They’d each started on one end of the desk and had gradually been making their way toward the center—toward each other.
“See?” he said as his left arm brushed her right. Goose bumps rose on her flesh despite the fact that it was a warm evening. “Piece of cake.”
“Wow. That was anticlimactic. I guess it’s time for dinner. I was prepared to work a lot harder than that.”
He stood back and examined their work. “Let’s take the food and paint to your place and do that chair.”
She started to object. It was a reflex. But as she’d wondered the other day with respect to the deck, why? Someone offered to help her, and something inside her automatically rose up and said no? Wasn’t she supposed to be not doing that anymore?
“Okay. We can eat on my glorious new deck and listen to the lake.”
An hour later, her good-as-new chair was drying in the warm twilight, and they were sitting on the edge of her deck, eating pizza.
“This is so good,” she said. “Even cold.”
“Yeah, Law has been wanting to start serving food for a while. I think he’s onto something.”
“My favorite is the Hawaiian—he uses this ridiculous pancetta that melts in your mouth and grills the pineapple with this balsamic glaze. But I didn’t know if I should inflict that on you. So many people object so vehemently to pineapple on—”
“Nora?”
Oh hell no. She shot to her feet and looked wildly around the yard. She had to have imagined that.
“Nora? Hello?”
Crap. She was too content, wasn’t she, with her pizza and her chair and her deck? Apparently so, because the Ghost of Nora’s Past was here to take her down a few pegs.
Yap, yap, yap! Despite her dismay, her heart did a happy little leap at that familiar sound.
It was coming from the front yard. She leaped to her feet. But as she made her way to the gate that divided the backyard from the front, she slowed, suddenly feeling clumsy, unsure of her footing.
“Everything okay?” Jake’s voice came at her as if through a fog.
She must have looked as unsteady as she felt because suddenly he was at her side—which was a good thing. When Rufus appeared from around the front of the house, Jake had to physically hold her up. But just for a second. She ordered herself to get her act together and took a step away from him and toward Rufus. Generally speaking, toward Rufus was not her preferred direction these days, but she needed to assert her dominance. This was her territory. Her crappy house. Her new life.
Which did not include Rufus.
So she walked the last few steps to the gate, put her hands on her hips, and summoned her