Only Yours (Fool's Gold #5)(56)

Oh, that. “Yes, Peru. I know. Not the most romantic postcoital declaration I’ve ever heard.”

“Montana, I’m not playing a game. You need to understand….”

“That you’ll leave.” She rolled onto her back. “It would be good for you to stay.”

“I can’t.”

“You won’t.”

“I won’t.”

She turned her head to look at him. “Because there are people who need you?”

“Yes.”

“They could come to you here.”

“Not all of them.”

“You can’t heal all of them.”

“I can try.”

“That’s a lot of pressure.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t matter. You don’t know what it’s like. There are places where people die because they don’t have access to clean water. I do what I can. It’s my job.”

It was more than his job, but he already knew that. Telling him that saving the world wouldn’t save him was dramatic, and true, but also wouldn’t help. He used his job as a way to heal, not just others, but himself as well.

“It’s not a gift if you have to keep paying for it,” she whispered.

“I know.”

He kissed her then, probably because he wanted to shut her up. She didn’t complain. Whatever the outcome, being in Simon’s arms right now was the best place in the world.

SIMON MADE HIS WAY BACK to the hotel late Saturday morning. He needed to go into the hospital to check on a few patients and clear his head. Then he would return to Montana’s house.

He reluctantly went to shower. The scent of her lingered on his skin. As the hot water hit his muscles, he told himself he would see her later. He would lose himself in her again and for those few hours he could forget about everything.

After he’d dried off, he dressed and was about to leave when someone knocked on his door. He opened it and found Montana’s mother standing in the hotel hallway.

“Bobby down at the front desk said you’d come up a little while ago,” she said with a smile.

“Ah, yes. I was out this morning.”

He rarely felt guilty about the women in his life, but staring at Denise Hendrix, he felt as small as a sixteen-year-old caught making out in the backseat of the family car.

Remembering his manners, he stepped back. “Please, come in.”

She stepped inside the hotel room and raised the cloth bag she carried. “Montana mentioned your suite came with a refrigerator and a microwave. I thought you might be getting tired of eating out all the time, so I made you a couple of casseroles. It’s sort of a Fool’s Gold thing.”

He’d slept with her daughter and she’d brought him food? He would guess she didn’t know about last night, but still. He could feel himself flushing.

“Thank you,” he said, taking the bag from her. “That was very nice of you.”

“One is a Mexican dish. It’s a little spicy. The other is Italian—plenty of meat and pasta. It was my late husband’s favorite.”

Simon told himself that the fact that he was slime was something he would deal with later. Right now he only had to get through the next five or ten minutes.

She gave him the heating instructions, then waited until he’d loaded the dishes into his small refrigerator and took back her cloth bag.

“Are you enjoying yourself while you’re here?” she asked.

He nearly choked. “Yes. The people around here are friendly. My patients are always a pleasure. Even the difficult ones.”

“What you do is amazing.”

“Sometimes. Not often enough.” He thought of Kalinda and the years of surgery ahead of her. He wanted to make her journey easier, but didn’t know another way.

He waited to see if Denise would ask him about Montana or perhaps warn him away. Instead she talked about the festival, the weather and suggested a few places for him to visit. Then she excused herself and left.

Simon stood in the center of the room, confused by her visit. The food was the obvious reason, but why had she done that? And then he remembered. There were people who were simply nice. The majority of children grew up in stable homes, feeling loved and cared for. What he knew, what he and the Freddies of the world had experienced, was the exception.

“IT’S OPEN,” Montana called when he knocked on her door, later that afternoon.

He walked in to find her carrying a tray with a bottle of wine and cut up sandwiches.

“If I’m going to have my way with you again later, you’ll need to keep your strength up.”

She was smiling as she spoke. Her face was bare of makeup, her hair long and loose. She’d dressed in jeans and a blue T-shirt and her feet were bare.

He stopped where he was just to look at her, to take in her radiance, to feel the life pulsing through her. Then he crossed the room, took the tray from her, put it on the coffee table and pulled her into his arms.

When they surfaced from the kiss, she continued to hang on to him. “You do have a way with greeting people. Not that I would encourage you to do that with the other women in the hospital. They would be throwing themselves at you constantly and that would make it hard to work.”

“Yes, it would.”

She laughed.