The M.D. Meets His Match

  “What did you do that for?” April demanded.

  The lady packed a hell of a punch, Jimmy thought. He couldn’t remember the last time a slight kiss had turned into a full three-course affair. He found himself fighting the urge to do it all over again. “Have you ever felt like you just had to find out something?”

  April struggled for her deepest-sounding voice, afraid that anything less would crack. “I generally go to the encyclopedia.”

  His grin was ever so slightly lopsided. He toyed with a strand of her hair.

  “They don’t have anything like this in the encyclopedia.”

  No doubt about it, she thought. Educators and scholars probably hadn’t come up with a word to fit what had just happened here….

  The M.D. Meets His Match

  MARIE FERRARELLA

  To Aileen and Adrian Galang,

  Happy wedding!

  Happy life!

  Love,

  The Third Photographer

  Books by Marie Ferrarella in Miniseries

  ChildFinders, Inc.

  A Hero for All Seasons IM #932

  A Forever Kind of Hero IM #943

  Hero in the Nick of Time IM #956

  Hero for Hire IM #1042

  An Uncommon Hero Silhouette Books, 2001

  A Hero in Her Eyes IM #1059

  Heart of a Hero IM #1105

  Baby’s Choice

  Caution: Baby Ahead SR #1007

  Mother on the Wing SR #1026

  Baby Times Two SR #1037

  Baby of the Month Club

  Baby’s First Christmas SE #997

  Happy New Year Baby! IM #686

  The 7lb., 2oz. Valentine Yours Truly, 1996

  Husband: Optional SD #988

  Do You Take This Child? SR #1145

  Detective Dad World’s Most Eligible Bachelors, 1998

  The Once and Future Father IM #1017

  In the Family Way Silhouette Books, 1998

  Baby Talk Silhouette Books, 1999

  Like Mother, Like Daughter

  One Plus One Makes Marriage SR #1328

  Never Too Late for Love SR #1351

  *The Pendletons

  Baby in the Middle SE #892

  Husband, Some Assembly Required SE #931

  Those Sinclairs

  Holding Out for a Hero IM #496

  Heroes Great and Small IM #501

  Christmas Every Day IM #538

  Caitlin’s Guardian Angel IM #661

  Two Halves of a Whole

  The Baby Came C.O.D. SR #1264

  Desperately Seeking Twin Yours Truly, 1997

  The Cutlers of the Shady Lady Ranch

  (Yours Truly titles 1998-1999)

  Fiona and the Sexy Stranger

  Cowboys Are for Loving

  Will and the Headstrong Female

  The Law and Ginny Marlow

  A Match for Morgan

  *The Reeds

  Callaghan’s Way IM #601

  Serena McKee’s Back in Town IM #808

  *McClellans & Marinos

  Man Trouble SR #815

  The Taming of the Teen SR #839

  Babies on His Mind SR #920

  The Baby Beneath the Mistletoe SR #1408

  *The Alaskans

  Wife in the Mail SE #1217

  Stand-In Mom SE #1294

  Found: His Perfect Wife SE #1310

  The M.D. Meets His Match SE #1401

  MARIE FERRARELLA

  earned a master’s degree in Shakespearean comedy and, perhaps as a result, her writing is distinguished by humor and natural dialogue. This RITA Award-winning author has one goal: to entertain, to make people laugh and feel good. She has written over 100 books for Silhouette, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide and have been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, Japanese and Korean.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Chapter One

  With a sigh, April Yearling moved the desk fan closer to her. It was stuffy in the archaic post office, but she couldn’t turn the fan on high because it would send the tonnage of envelopes, leaflets and whatnot around her flying off in an unauthorized, frantic dance.

  One week back in Hades and she remembered why she’d left.

  She mopped her damp forehead with the back of her wrist and instantly regretted it. The area hidden beneath the haphazardly wrapped bandage on her wrist stung, reminding her that there was a consequence for moving too fast, even in a place like Hades.

  Biting her lower lip, April continued to sort the mail. She glanced at her watch, swearing that time was altered here in the backstretch of Alaska, moving at a snail’s pace that was completely unacceptable to normal human beings.

  At least, it was unacceptable to her.

  Gran had proudly pointed out that there were people who had moved here from the lower forty-nine. Why a place like Hades, numbering about five hundred on its town roster, would attract anyone to come and settle here was completely beyond April.

  Glancing at the scribbled name, she tossed the envelope into its proper pigeonhole.

  She moved the fan a tad closer and longed for air-conditioned rooms. It was unseasonably warm for the middle of spring. April couldn’t remember a spring ever being so hot and muggy. But this old building wasn’t wired for air-conditioning. She supposed she should be happy that it was even wired for electricity, otherwise she’d be relying on candles and the now dormant fireplace in the corner.

  A fragment of a memory flashed through her mind. She and her brother and sister gathered around a fireplace, listening to the wind howl outside and the fire crackle as Gran read a ghost story. She remembered waiting to be frightened, but she never was.

  Maybe that was her problem, April mused, flipping the last envelope into its cubbyhole. She was too fearless. Nothing frightened her. Except maybe the specter of falling in love.

  Small chance of that ever happening, she told herself confidently. She was too smart.

  Bending to retrieve more mail out of the sagging pouch Jeb Kellogg had just flown in and dropped off, April smiled. She was a city kid through and through. It had taken her exactly five minutes in Seattle, her first port of call after graduating high school, to discover that about herself, although she’d secretly thought it for years before her great escape.

  There had been this exhilaration that had telegraphed itself through her the moment she’d stepped off the plane and looked around Seattle. She knew then that her soul belonged in a city—the bigger, the better.

  April glanced at the next envelope and deposited it where it belonged. Her soul certainly belonged to something bigger than a town comprised of two rows of buildings that faced each other like participants in an old-fashioned square dance.

  When she’d left, she’d been positive that nothing would ever bring her back here, here amid the snow and the scenery that went on forever without so much as a soul to disturb it, the loneliness so thick you couldn’t cut through it. But of course, her family was here—Gran and Max and June—so there’d been short visits throughout the years. And then she’d received the letter from June saying that Gran, their tiny but invincible tower of strength who had never been ill a day in her life, was sick. Angina, the
doctor, Shayne Kerrigan, had said. So she had come back.

  It was as simple as that. She owed Gran everything. She and Max and June, they all did. Everything. If Gran hadn’t taken them in when their mother had left them in every way but physically, becoming a vacant, broken shell of a woman, April wasn’t sure what she would have done. As the oldest by eleven months, she would have had to do something and she had tried. Tried to care for her brother and sister and her mother. But eleven had been a very young age to suddenly become an adult and she hadn’t been quite able to manage it.

  Until then, she had believed herself up to the challenge. She’d felt she’d grown up rather quickly even before her father had walked out on them and their mother had gone to pieces. Living in a rural town in Alaska was no picnic, no matter what the travel brochures said to the contrary about the frozen state. Alaska, she thought, tossing a fashion magazine onto Edith Plunkett’s stack of mail, was an uncompromising mistress who demanded a great deal from everyone who inhabited her terrain.

  And right now, she was stuck here. April thrust a postcard into Jean-Luc LeBlanc’s pigeonhole. As much as she longed to leave, she felt too worried and too guilty to return to the life she’d placed on hold.

  Postmistress. April shook her head. Never in a million years would she have ever seen herself in this position. Gran had even made her take the oath, hand on the Bible and everything. Gran had said it wasn’t official otherwise, which meant she couldn’t handle the mail when it came through. Gran had taken her position here, both with the government and with the community, very seriously. So April had taken the oath to placate Gran rather than just whisk her away the way she’d wanted to.

  April sighed, picking up another envelope. She fervently wished that Max or June had had the time to take over for Gran. But career-wise, neither of them had her flexibility. Max was Hades’s sheriff and June was the town’s resident mechanic who had more than her share of work to keep up with. That meant she had been elected.

  So far, election meant frustration.

  It was beyond her why Gran had been so adamant that one of them take over for her here at the post office. It was either that, or have her continue. Gran absolutely refused to turn the job over to an outsider. The position had belonged to someone from Gran’s family ever since the first piece of mail had come into Hades some hundred and ten years ago.

  As far as April saw it, this was just another rut to leave behind, not something to aspire to.

  Certainly not something to take pride in. But Gran took pride in it and Gran was the one who counted, she thought, resigning herself for the umpteenth time and trying desperately to be patient. Patience was not her strong suit. It never had been. She’d always had the sense that there was something else, something better, waiting for her just around the next corner. So she kept turning corners. And anticipating.

  April paused to flex her shoulders and straighten her back. “Wanderlust,” Gran had called it. She supposed in a way that gave her something in common with her father. The only thing in common. She would never hurt anyone, the way her father had, to get what she wanted. Wayne Yearling had had itchy feet. He’d tried to resist temptation for a while, or so he’d said, but then he’d finally given in and left. Her mother had thought for days that he would return, but April hadn’t. Even at eleven, April had known better. She’d known that her father was gone for good.

  She’d gotten one postcard from him a few months after he’d left Hades. The only communication she’d ever had from him. One postcard in over thirteen years. The picture had been of Manhattan with its steel-girder skyscrapers making love to the sky as they reached up to forever. She’d fallen in love with the city the second she’d seen the postcard. The inscription on the back had been the typical “Wish you were here” and she wished she was there. Wished it with all her heart.

  Gran had slipped the postcard to her, telling her in a hushed voice to not let her mother see it because in her anger and grief, Rose Yearling would have immediately ripped it up. So April kept it like a secret treasure, not even letting Max or June know about it. She’d slipped the postcard beneath her pillow and dreamed dreams of New York City and other places that had never seen a dogsled.

  It had taken April seven years to make her dream come true. Her mother was gone by then and there seemed little reason to remain in Alaska. Gran could take care of June, and Max was almost grown. So she had left Hades to make something of herself, to forge a career that suited her and the wanderlust she’d inherited.

  She found her answer and her calling in freelance photography and proceeded to make a minor name for herself. That she never remained long in any one particular place was just a pleasant by-product of her career. She went where the stories were and considered herself a citizen of the world rather than as someone belonging to a tiny blip on the map.

  Sighing, she ran a hand through the tangle of blond hair that refused to fall into neat waves the way June’s always did. Her hair, Gran used to say, was every bit as rebellious as her soul. She supposed that it was. April had always rather liked the description. It made her view her hair as a badge of some kind rather than just a sea of golden corkscrew curls that repeatedly defied styling.

  According to one of her acquaintances, she was in style now. Eventually, she mused with an absent smile, everything was.

  Digging out another stack of envelopes from inside the mail pouch, the frown that returned to her lips deepened. It was too quiet for her.

  Returning to Hades, she’d forgotten how quiet it could be here at times. How quiet and how dark. It was spring now so the endless winter darkness that assaulted the town was six months away, but even so, once the lights went out, there would be nothing but inkiness in the world right outside her window. Nothing like in the city where there were always streetlights and illumination coming in from all sides.

  Here, dark was dark, like the bottom of the mine shafts that half the male population of Hades regarded as their prime source of livelihood.

  Dark like a soul without love.

  She stopped. Where had that come from? In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love, she recalled Tennyson’s line. Maybe a young man’s, but not hers. Love would turn her into someone who was needy. Someone who could be hurt. Like her mother. She’d vowed that was never going to happen to her.

  But there were times when she felt as if something was missing. Something…

  She was just hot, April told herself. Hot, bored and a victim of cabin fever.

  Setting down the stack of mail, she moved toward the open stairs in the rear of the post office. The living quarters were upstairs. She, Max and June had grown up there, living with Gran. Now only Gran still called it home, even though April had tried time and again, if not to lure her away, to at least buy her a small house of her own. Gran wouldn’t hear of it.

  “Don’t want to get used to anything new at my age, except maybe a man,” Gran had said with a wink. “You keep your money and buy a house for yourself.”

  And that was that. Telling Gran she didn’t want a house of her own was out of the question. Gran wouldn’t have believed her. She had her own preconceived notions of what people did or didn’t want and there was no talking her out of them.

  “Gran,” April called up the stairs, “is there anything I can get you?”

  “No, I’m fine, dear,” her grandmother’s voice assured her. “Just watching my story. I’ll be down to help you as soon as it’s over.”

  April shook her head as she hurried up the stairs to head off her grandmother. The woman had a patent on stubbornness. They’d waltzed around this argument every day since she’d arrived. The first day had been the most difficult, but April hadn’t fooled herself into believing that she had won the war, just tiny skirmishes here and there.

  “No, you won’t,” April informed her, entering a tiny living room filled to overflowing with knickknacks that had taken more than six decades to accumulate. April seriously doubted th
at Gran threw out anything, convinced that the moment she would, a need for the item, no matter how obscure, would arise. “If you remember, the reason I’m here, playing solitaire with all those envelopes, is so that you can rest—and sensibly see your way clear to going to the hospital in Anchorage for—”

  Lying on the sofa, Ursula Hatcher waved a small hand in the air to push away the words she knew were coming. “Stuff and nonsense,” she proclaimed. “Bunch of children playing doctor, poking at me for no good reason.” She raised her chin, tossing her gray-streaked faded red hair over her shoulder. “My heart’s fine. It’s just a little tired, but it has a right to be. It’s been working nonstop for sixty-nine years without a vacation. You’d be tired, too, if you’d worked that hard,” she insisted staunchly.

  April reached over to adjust the black-and-yellow crocheted throw draped over her grandmother’s legs. “That’s just the point, Gran—” April began.

  Ursula finished adjusting the throw herself, then cocked her head, listening. “Is that the doorbell downstairs?”

  April pinned her with a look. Her grandmother was a great one for diversions when she didn’t like the subject under discussion. “Whoever it is down there will keep, Gran. They can’t be in any sort of a hurry if they’re living in Hades.”

  “Think you know everything, don’t you, child?” Ursula began digging her knuckles in on either side of the sofa, giving a masterful performance of a person struggling to get up. “It’s a postmistress’s duty to be there when someone walks into the post office. But that’s all right, dear, you’re busy. I’ll go—”

  April struggled to keep from laughing. Her grandmother was ruining her attempt at being stern with her. Very gently, she pushed the older woman back against the mound of pillows she’d personally fluffed up this morning.

  “God, but you are good at dispensing guilt,” she informed her grandmother. The older woman smiled in response. “Stay put, you hear me? I’ll go down and see who it is.”