Loe raamatut: «The Makeover Prescription»

Chapter One

Captain Julia Calhoun Fitzgerald had no problem commanding a full surgical team in the operating room during an emergency decompressive craniectomy, but she could be naked, standing on her head and yelling from a bullhorn, and nobody in the Cowgirl Up Café would give her a second look.

“May I get some...” Julia’s voice trailed off when she realized she was talking to the back of the busboy’s turquoise T-shirt. He’d unceremoniously dropped the plate of food off on the counter between her seat and the empty one next to her, not bothering to ask if she had everything she needed.

She looked down the counter and saw an unused place setting two seats over. She could either sit here, going unnoticed for another twenty minutes—which was how long it’d taken for the waitress to take her order in the first place—or she could reach over and grab the neighboring paper napkin and utensils. She decided to do the latter.

After centering the newly acquired napkin in her lap, Julia neatly cut her oversize breakfast burrito in half with surgical precision, then clamped her lips shut at what looked to be sausage gravy oozing out of the center. This couldn’t be right. She lifted her head and looked around the restaurant, hoping to catch the attention of the lone waitress who was darting between several crowded tables, fumbling with her order pad before picking up a stack of dirty plates from an empty table.

Was this place always so crowded? Since being stationed at the Shadowview Military Hospital last month, Julia had come into her aunt’s restaurant only twice, and both times were right before closing when most of the small town of Sugar Falls, Idaho, shut down for the night.

And speaking of Aunt Freckles, where was she anyway? Julia could’ve sworn the calendar app on her fancy new smartphone said they were supposed to meet at the café at eight this morning.

She glanced at her gold tank watch—one of the more modest pieces she’d inherited from her mother—and noted that she had only about fifteen minutes before she was supposed to meet the contractor at her new house.

Julia used her fork and knife to probe at the contents of the flour tortilla on her plate, then leaned forward and sniffed at the batter-covered meat inside. This was definitely not what she’d ordered. She carefully set her utensils down on either side of her plate and took a sip of her orange juice while observing the other customers and trying not to eavesdrop on the intense conversation going on in the booth to her right.

“There’s no way the Rockies are going to make it to the play-offs this year, let alone win the pennant.” One of the older-looking cowboys slammed his fist on the table, making the salt and pepper shakers rattle as the equally elderly man beside him nodded in agreement. “And if you try to tell me their bull pen is stronger than the Rangers’, I’ll call you a liar.”

Julia squirmed in her seat, trying not to listen to the heated discussion but unable to tear her gaze away.

“Now settle down, Jonesy,” said the younger man sitting on the opposite side of the booth. He was holding up his hands, the sleeves of his gray flannel shirt rolled up to reveal strong, tan forearms that could only be the result of years of outdoor physical labor. His short auburn hair was messy—probably due to the green hat precariously hanging on his bouncing knee—and his square jaw and smirking lips made Julia’s pulse want to do the opposite of settle down. Luckily, though, his quiet voice, or maybe his overall size, had the proper effect on Jonesy, who took a couple of deep breaths before nodding. Sexy Flannel Shirt continued, “Nobody said anything about their pitchers. All I said was...”

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the server approach, and Julia turned away from the conversation, slightly lifting her hand in an attempt to get Monica’s attention. At least, she thought the name tag read Monica. She couldn’t be sure since the woman kept passing by in a blur, not even glancing in Julia’s direction.

“Excuse me.” Julia tried again when Monica rushed behind her side of the counter, this time balancing three plates of food in one hand and a carafe of coffee and a bottle of syrup in the other. But the young woman still didn’t look her way.

Sighing, Julia decided that she’d settle for eating what she could off the plate. She hated being late, and since the contractor was a good friend of her aunt’s, Julia wanted to make a good impression. She picked up her fork and began eating the home fries, which she had to admit were delicious, if a little greasier than her usual breakfast fare. Just as she swallowed the last bit of potatoes, she heard a choking sound coming from the booth beside her.

Sexy Flannel Shirt had his hand covering his mouth, and Julia sprang into rescue mode. Within four strides, she’d pulled the man out of the booth and wrapped her arms around his torso, locking them in place directly above his upper abdomen. His chin almost collided with her forehead when he whipped his head back quickly to look at her.

“You’ll be okay,” she said in her most authoritative tone. “Try to stay calm.”

“I would be a hell of a lot calmer if I knew why you were latching onto me like that,” the man replied. If he was capable of speaking, he was capable of breathing.

Oh no.

Julia rose awkwardly to her full height, her hands disengaging so slowly, she could feel the softness of his flannel shirt under her fingers. And the tightness of the muscles underneath. Obviously her senses were on high alert because of the quick adrenaline rush she got whenever she was in an emergency situation like this. Even if it was a false alarm.

She quickly clasped her overly sensitive hands behind her back.

“Sorry,” she said to Mr. Flannel, as well as to the two older cowboys sitting with him at the table, their eyes as large and round as their stacks of blueberry pancakes. “I thought you were choking.”

“I thought so, too,” the man admitted. “Then I just realized that I was being poisoned by whatever was inside my chicken-fried steak burrito.”

He pointed to his plate, and Julia suddenly realized where her breakfast order had ended up.

“It looks like you got my egg white and veggie delight wrap.” She picked up the plate and walked back to her seat at the counter, then returned with his meal, the spilled gravy not yet congealing. “I think I got yours by mistake.”

“What happened to my hash browns?” he asked, looking at the empty space alongside his burrito.

A defensive heat rose up from the neckline of Julia’s hospital scrubs, all the way to her hairline. Who put chicken-fried steak in a tortilla, anyway? “I, uh, ate them when I realized that the burrito wasn’t what I ordered.”

“Most people would’ve just sent the order back if it was wrong,” he said, his lips twitching, giving her the impression that he found her mistake hilarious.

Oh really? She wanted to ask. They wouldn’t gasp and choke and pretend to be poisoned? But she didn’t know this man, or the rest of the people in this town. Yet. And Julia didn’t want to start off on the wrong foot with her new neighbors. Although she had a feeling that with all the eyes—including Monica’s, finally—in the suddenly quiet restaurant staring at her, she’d already made quite an impression.

The pressure on her sternum felt as if someone were trying to save her from choking...on her own embarrassment and she had to silence the whispers of one of the other few times she’d been so foolish. She returned to her seat and picked her leather satchel up off the floor, retrieving her wallet out of the front pocket before walking back to his booth.

“Here. This should cover the cost of your breakfast.” Julia’s voice wobbled as she pulled two twenty dollar bills out, setting them on his table. Then, before she walked out the door, she decided someone had better tell him. “And just so you know, there’s a piece of spinach stuck in your teeth.”

Julia dodged the waitress and her tray full of food as she made her way to the front door. Several shouts of laughter reached her ears right as she exited, but she didn’t pause or turn back to see who was making fun of her. Instead, she squared her shoulders and walked down the sidewalk of Snowflake Boulevard, wondering how long it would take for news of the embarrassing scene she’d just caused to make its way down the shops and businesses lined up along this main road through town.

This was why she was more comfortable in the background. Out of the way. Being ignored.

She’d just climbed in her car when her cell phone chirped to life. Seeing her aunt’s name on the display screen, Julia quickly answered it.

“Sug, where are you?” Aunt Freckles asked.

“I just left the café.” No need to tell the woman about how she’d accosted one of the customers by mistakenly performing the Heimlich maneuver. Her aunt would probably find out soon enough, anyway.

“Why would you go there?”

“Because we were supposed to meet there at eight.”

“No, we weren’t. We were supposed to meet at the bakery. Why would I have you come to my restaurant when I’d already taken the morning off?”

Well, that would explain why the café was so understaffed. But how could Julia have gotten the location wrong? She tried to tap on her calendar app to confirm that she hadn’t screwed up twice this morning, but she accidentally ended the call. Ugh. She squeezed the phone in frustration, then took a deep breath and reminded herself that she was smarter than this. She tried to pull up Freckles’s number, but before she could find the right button, a text message from her aunt popped up saying they could just meet at the new house, so Julia put her MINI Cooper in gear.

Turning onto her street, Julia gazed up at the ramshackle old Victorian that stood at the end of the cul-de-sac on Pinecone Court, a proud smile making her cheeks stretch and alleviating her lingering shame over that awkward encounter just a few moments ago. If one didn’t count the Federal-style mansion in Georgetown, the summer cottage on Chincoteague Island in Virginia or the countless commercial properties still held in the Fitzgerald Family Trust, Julia had never owned her own house.

She parked her car in the driveway, biting her lip and staring out the window, trying to envision all the possibilities spread out before her. Unlike Julia, this house was anything but practical and understated. But all thirty-two hundred square feet of it was hers.

There were no interior designers to suggest beige color palettes and overpriced modern art. No maids to rush in and make up her bed the moment she’d robotically woken up at five thirty every morning to practice the cello. No private tutors waiting in the informal library—the formal library in the Georgetown residence being reserved for when Mother invited her university colleagues over—to ensure Julia’s MCAT score was high enough. After all, they needed the med school admission counselors to overlook the fact that she wasn’t old enough to buy liquor, let alone cut open cadavers to research the long-term effects of liver disease. And there was no personal chef here to tell her that her parents had already instructed him on the week’s menu, so she would not be eating processed carbs for dinner, no matter how many of her classmates were cramming for finals over pizza and Red Bull energy drinks.

A horn blasted behind her, and she turned to see her elderly Aunt Freckles behind the wheel of a slightly less elderly rusted-out 4x4 that Julia didn’t recognize. Freckles was actually her great-aunt on her father’s side, and while Julia only had sporadic contact with her relative until her parents’ joint memorial service several years ago, it didn’t take a neurosurgeon to figure out why the flashy waitress and former rodeo queen had been estranged from their conservative and academic family.

“Morning, Sug,” Freckles hollered—there was really no other way to describe the woman’s cheerfully brash voice—as she patted the Bronco emblem near the driver’s-side door. “Ain’t she a beaut? My second husband, Earl Larry, had one just like it back in ’73. We hitched an Airstream to it and cruised all over Mexico.”

She brushed her aunt’s weathered and heavily rouged cheek with a soft kiss as Freckles wrapped her in a bear hug that threatened to crush several ribs. Julia was still accustoming herself to the woman’s hearty displays of affection. “Whatever happened to Earl Larry?” she asked, always interested in hearing about her aunt’s series of past relationships.

“His grandpappy died and left the family business to him. Earl Larry went corporate on me, and after that Forbes report came out with him on the cover, I told him I wasn’t made for that kind of life. I couldn’t stand being married to some stuffy old three-piece suit, no matter how many capital ventures he sank our RVing money into.”

It was hard to imagine anyone named Earl Larry wearing a suit, let alone having a grandpappy who left him a company that would be featured in a well-respected financial magazine. Of course, it was just as difficult to imagine seventy-eight-year-old Eugenia Josephine Brighton Fitzgerald of the Virginia Fitzgeralds wearing orange cowboy boots, zebra-printed spandex pants and an off-the-shoulder turquoise T-shirt emblazoned with the words Cowgirl Up Café—We’ll Butter Your Biscuit.

“Whose car is this?” Julia asked.

“It’s Kane’s,” Freckles said. “I saw him pulled over on Snowflake Boulevard, and he said he’d eaten something that hadn’t agreed with him. I told him he just needed some fresh air, and since I’ve been itching to take this old Bronco of his for a spin, he agreed to let me drive it so he could walk the rest of the way. It’s only a couple of blocks, so he should be here any sec.”

Julia had yet to meet Kane Chatterson, the contractor Aunt Freckles suggested she hire to remodel the house. But if this derelict hunk of junk on wheels was any indication of the man’s rehab skills, her once-stately Victorian abode was in serious trouble.

Of course, if her overzealous impromptu CPR skills back at the restaurant were any indication, Julia’s medical career as a Navy surgeon might be in serious trouble, as well.

“Would you like to see the inside of the house?” Julia asked.

“You bet,” Freckles said in her mountain drawl.

“I have only an hour before my shift at Shadowview, so I might ask you to give Mr. Chatterson the tour if he isn’t here soon. I can email him some of my notes and suggestions later.”

What Julia didn’t say was that it would certainly be a load off her mind if she could just skip all this formal meet and greet business and fire off a quick note to the guy. Especially after the disastrous morning she’d already had. But Aunt Freckles’s quick shake of her dyed and teased peach-colored hairdo was enough to suggest Julia shouldn’t keep her fingers crossed.

“Kane’s a good boy and dependable as sin. He’ll get here in time. Besides, I’m holding his baby ransom.” Freckles dangled the metal keys above her head. “And men have an unnatural attachment to their cars. If you ever took the time to go out on a date with a decent fella, you’d find that out for yourself.”

Julia rolled her eyes, a practice that she never would’ve dared in the presence of her parents when they’d been alive. But, seriously. Her aunt referred to every male under the age of sixty as a boy and never missed an opportunity to suggest Julia’s social life was too date-free—at least by the older woman’s standards. Freckles liked men almost as much as she liked sequins and comfort food.

“I’m in and out of surgery all day, and when I do get the occasional time free, I usually spend it swimming laps or sleeping at the officers’ quarters near the base hospital.”

“You work too hard, Sug,” Freckles said, rubbing her niece’s shoulder. Julia, who normally tried to remain as reserved as possible, had difficulty not leaning in to the comforting motion. “And you gotta eat sometime. In those blue hospital scrubs and that cardigan, you look like you haven’t got a curve to your name. Isn’t there a nice doctor or admiral or someone you could go out to dinner with?”

“I don’t need a man to take me to dinner.”

“Hmph.” Had her aunt just snorted? “I don’t know if I mentioned this yet, but the town of Sugar Falls puts on a big to-do at the end of the year to raise money for the hospital. Since you’re one of the new surgeons and an official resident of Sugar Falls, the committee is going to expect you to be there as a guest of honor. With a plus-one, if you know what I’m saying?”

Guest of honor? A plus-one? Julia’s stomach twisted and her forehead grew damp, despite the fact that the early November sun still hadn’t peeked out of the clouds. She was pretty sure her aunt was suggesting she’d need to find a date, which was much easier said than done. Besides, Julia never wanted to show her face in the town of Sugar Falls again.

“Oh, look,” Freckles continued. “Here comes Kane now. Smile and try not to look so dang serious.”

Julia’s insides felt tighter than a newly strung cello as she turned around to await the contractor who would be doing the remodeling work on her new home—if his estimate was reasonable. Yet before she could formulate her plan to refrain from shoveling out piles of her inheritance to someone in order to avoid the hassle of negotiating, she recognized the familiar gray flannel shirt, and her heart dropped.

Oh no. Please, no. This can’t be happening to me.

The man hadn’t seemed quite as tall when he’d been sitting in that booth back at the Cowgirl Up Café, but his broad shoulders and chest looked just as muscular as they’d felt twenty minutes ago. He moved with long, purposeful strides that ate up the sidewalk, and Julia didn’t know whether she should meet him halfway and beg him not to mention the choking incident to Freckles, or whether she should hide in the overgrown azalea bush.

In the end, she was too mortified to do either. Her aunt motioned the man up the uneven cement path and onto the porch. “Kane Chatterson, meet my favorite grandniece, Dr. and Captain Julia Fitzgerald.”

The pride in her aunt’s voice blossomed inside Julia’s chest, nearly shadowing the lingering shame. Or was that just her elevated heartbeat?

“I’m your only niece,” Julia said, trying to lighten things up with a joke, but she succeeded only in making her nerves feel more weighed down. She cleared her throat and looked at Kane. “We weren’t formally introduced earlier.”

God, she hoped this man didn’t spill the beans to her aunt. His sunglasses shaded his eyes, and he certainly wasn’t smirking now, making it impossible for Julia to figure out if he was annoyed, amused or biding his time until Freckles left and he could tell her that she and her contracting job weren’t worth the trouble.

But Kane Chatterson simply gave her a brief, unsmiling nod before asking, “Do I call you Doctor or Captain?”

“Call me just Julia. Please.” She reached out her hand to shake his, and he gripped her fingers quickly, his warm calluses leaving an imprint on her palms. As a medical professional, she had no rational or scientific explanation for the shiver that vibrated down her spine. As a woman, her only explanation was that this new sensation was most likely the result of her aunt’s fresh lecture on dating. And possibly the fact that she hadn’t been this attracted to a man since...ever.

“Just Julia,” he replied. But still no smile.

She looked at her watch. She’d be out of here in ten minutes. Surely, she could pretend to be a normal, successful woman for another ten minutes.

“What do you mean, you weren’t formally introduced earlier?” Damn. Aunt Freckles didn’t miss a thing.

“We, uh, spoke briefly at the Cowgirl Up Café when our orders got mixed up this morning,” Kane told her aunt. The faint dusting of copper-colored stubble on his square jaw made it too difficult to tell if the man was actually blushing.

“Yeah, I figured the new waitress I hired wasn’t quite ready for me to leave her on her own,” Freckles replied, then turned to Julia and gave her a wink. “Seems like lots of people are getting stuff wrong this morning.”

“Here.” Julia handed the cell phone to her aunt, determined to prove that she hadn’t made a mistake. Or at least two of them. “It says right here on my calendar app that we were supposed to meet at the café.”

Since Freckles was busy tapping on the screen and Mr. Chatterson’s attention was on the yellow paint chipping off the wood siding of the house, Julia stole another look at his dour face. She’d been trying to save his life back at the café. Surely he couldn’t be irritated with her over that—unless the laughter she’d heard as she left the restaurant was directed at him. Maybe the guy’s ego had taken a hit. Or maybe his feet were cold and tired from walking all this way from the restaurant.

Julia glanced down at the scuffed cowboy boots. No, that sturdy, worn leather looked like they’d been walked in quite a lot. So his stiff demeanor most likely wasn’t the result of sore feet. She allowed her gaze to travel up his jeans-clad legs, past his untucked shirt and all the way to his green cap with the words Patterson’s Dairy embroidered in yellow on the front.

That funny tingling made its way down her spine again.

What was wrong with her? She didn’t stare at unsuspecting men or allow her body to get all jumbled full of hormones, no matter how good-looking they were. Julia reached up and tightened the elastic band in her hair, hoping he wouldn’t look over and catch her checking him out.

“Sug,” Aunt Freckles said, holding up the smartphone. “Somehow you managed to program the Cowgirl Up Café as the location for everything in your calendar this month—including five surgeries, two staff meetings, a seminar on neurological disorders and the Boise Philharmonic’s String Quintet.”

“Oh. Well, I haven’t had time to go over the new software update. Yet.” Julia waved her hand dismissively before powering off her screen. That wasn’t a real mistake. She had much more important things to accomplish than mastering some stupid scheduling app—like getting this tour underway if she wanted to report for duty on time. She pulled a key from the pocket of her cardigan sweater, the one Aunt Freckles said did nothing for her coloring or her figure, and asked Mr. Chatterson, “Would you like me to show you around inside?”

“I could probably figure it out on my own,” he said, then used the top step to wipe his boots as she unlocked the door. “But it wouldn’t hurt for you to tell me some of your ideas for the place.”

Well, wasn’t he being generous?

“Shouldn’t you grab a notepad?” Julia gestured toward his run-down truck-vehicle thing.

“Why?”

“So that you can take notes?”

“Don’t need to.”

“What about measurements? Surely you won’t be able to remember every little dimension.”

“No, ma’am. I probably won’t. In fact, there’s probably a lot of stuff I won’t remember. But I’ll get a sense of the house and what it needs, which is something no tape measure can show me.”

“But how will you give me an estimate?”

“If I decide to take the job,” he said, looking up at the large trees, their pine needles creeping toward the roof she was positive needed replacing, “I’ll come back and take measurements and write it all down neat and tidy for you.”

“Sug,” Freckles interrupted in a stage whisper. “Kane here knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t come into the operating room and tell you where to cut or how to dig around in someone’s brain.” Then, as if to lessen the rebuke, Freckles turned to the brooding contractor. “Julia’s a neurosurgeon in the Navy. Smart as a whip, my grandniece. Did I mention that?”

“I believe you did. Should we get started?” he asked, wiping his hand across his mouth. Then, without waiting for a response, he walked through the door as though he couldn’t care less about Julia’s abilities in the operating room or her whip-like intelligence. Not that she wanted the attention or expected him to be in awe of her, but it was one of the few times somebody hadn’t been impressed with her genius IQ.

The guy strode into her front parlor as though he owned the place, and Julia resented his take-charge attitude and her unexplainable physical response to him. However, he was the expert—supposedly—and she was intelligent enough to know that this old house needed much more than her surgical skills.

The trio made their way from room to room, and Julia lost track of the amount of times she had to tell Aunt Freckles that she didn’t love the idea of glitter-infused paint on the walls or a wet bar added to each of the three floors. When they finished the tour in the kitchen, Julia was already in jeopardy of being ten minutes late for her shift. Unfortunately, she didn’t trust her aunt not to suggest something outlandish in her absence.

“I say you get some of those cool retro turquoise appliances and redo all these cabinets with pink and white paint.” Freckles waved her arms like an air traffic controller. “Then you can do black-and-white-checkered tile and give it a real fifties’ vibe. If you knock out this wall, it will open up the kitchen to the family room.”

“Which room is the family room?” Julia rubbed at her temples before tightening her ponytail. Again.

“I believe that’s the room you referred to as the study,” Kane told her. His smirk gave off the impression that he was laughing at her for some reason. Again. “Or was that the informal parlor?”

“Either way,” Julia said. “I don’t want a fifties-themed anything in my house. Besides, remodeling the kitchen is my last concern.”

It was difficult to not startle at Freckle’s loud, indrawn breath. “Sug, no, no, no. The kitchen is the heart of the house. That should be the first thing Kane works on. How’re you gonna cook or eat if you don’t have a decent kitchen?”