The One in My Heart by Sherry Thomas Page B

prepare myself if things are going to be awkward.”
    “Oh, you don’t ever need to worry about the Somersets being awkward in public,” Mrs. Devonport hastened to reassure me. “Besides, Frances called me this afternoon and said she was still under the weather—the flu—and she didn’t want to give it to anybody else.”
    “Phew,” I said. “Crisis averted. Thanks for letting me know.”
    When I returned with my newly gathered intelligence, someone had taken my seat, a wavy-haired blonde in a cranberry spaghetti-strap dress.
    Bennett rose and kissed me beneath my ear. “Sweetheart, I thought you were never coming back. I missed you.”
    “I was gone for five minutes, Doctor. You need to be a little less clingy.”
    He laughed. “Evangeline, this is Damaris. Damaris, Evangeline. Damaris and I took ballroom lessons together when we were kids.”
    “Bennett came with me to talent night at my school, and we brought down the house with our tango routine,” bragged Damaris.
    “Tango? Did you guys bring sexy back?”
    “I thought so at the time. But then Bennett and I went dancing last June at a tango club and my God”—she trailed a finger up Bennett’s lapel—”what a difference, dancing the tango with him all grown-up. How come we haven’t gone back there since?”
    “I told you,” Bennett said coolly, “my work is too busy.”
    “Why? You can buy the hospital. Forget work.”
    “That’s not going to happen,” said Bennett. “But it’s good to see you again, Damaris. Now, would you mind giving my date her chair back?”
    Damaris stood up reluctantly. “We should tango here tonight and show everybody a thing or two.”
    “I don’t think so. See you later.”
    Damaris made a sound through her nose. “I wouldn’t feel so secure about your place if I were you,” she said to me. “He went out with my friend a few times last summer and then dumped her like a bag of cement.”
    “Thanks for the heads-up,” I answered with a smile. “I’ll be sure to dump him first.”
    “You really are the best,” Bennett whispered to me as we sat down in the wake of Damaris’s hair-tossing departure.
    “Next time, if you must reject a woman, try some subtle.”
    “I already tried subtle. The patient is forty-five percent inebriated and not responding to subtle.”
    Damaris looked back just then. Bennett wasted no time in pulling me toward him and kissing me on my cheek. “Now, why don’t you get wasted and come on to me?”
    I ignored that question. “Your mom has the flu. She called Mrs. Davenport earlier to say she wouldn’t be coming.”
    This sobered him. “At least I don’t have to wonder about that anymore.”
    We sat silently for a while; then I felt him touch the shell of my ear. The sensation of it all but skewered me. “What happened to waiting for me to get wasted first?”
    “That’s only one scenario.”
    “What’s this scenario, then?”
    “I’m just turned on by you.”
    His words were almost a greater peril than his touches. I nudged a pumpkin gnocchi around on my plate. “You’re planning to use me to distract yourself from your disappointment. I don’t do consolation sex.”
    I also didn’t want to experience any more of his vulnerability. That sigh on my shoulder just about killed me.
    “It’s not consolation sex, just the straightforward, nasty sort,” he whispered in my ear, sending sizzles of electricity along my nerve endings.
    He was clearly angling for sex and sex alone, viewing me as a stressed-out society matron might eye her bottle of Xanax. Why, then, did I so desperately want to say yes?
    I put on my sternest voice. “If you want to get laid, hook up with somebody on Tinder, or order an escort off craigslist.”
    “I’m morally opposed to paying for sex, and I don’t want to deal with any more strangers tonight.” He reached for a tomato tarte Tatin. “Guess I’ll eat myself into a stupor then. Where’s a gallon of cookie-dough ice cream when a man