He glanced at the book she shoved in his hands.

She heard his phone buzz in his pocket. To his credit, he didn’t acknowledge it. Just stared at her. The heat in his eyes registered and made some of the confidence inside her sizzle and lean toward him.

His phone buzzed again. “They’re meeting me . . .” He pointed toward the sky.

“On the roof?”

“Right.”

“Then you should probably go.”

Only, he didn’t move. People walked around them in their rush to get to a class, to move to their next event.

“Walter.” She used his full name and he blinked. “Read the book. Call me.”

He tapped the paperback in his palm and finally broke away. “Right. OK.” He stepped back.

The ball, as they say, was in his court. If he wanted to get in touch with her when he returned to LA, he now had her number. There wasn’t anything else she could say outside of good-bye and that didn’t feel right.

Dakota hiked her bag higher on her shoulder and took a step back.

“Safe flight home, Dakota.”

“You, too, Doc.”

“Walt,” he corrected with a laugh.

She backed away a couple of steps. “Walter . . . is that Walt the Second or the Third?”

He moved away, both of them speaking through the bodies swarming around them.

“The Third. How did you know?”

She laughed. “A hunch. Was Grandpa a doctor?”

When Walt opened his mouth to answer, she lifted a hand and stopped him. “Tell me later,” she told him. “Enjoy the Keys, Dr. Eddy. I hear they’re beautiful this time of year.”

With that, she turned and left him standing there.

Dragging, with his eyes straining to stay open, Walt finished his last verbal dictation for the night. Outside light was pouring in from the ambulance bay. Already the morning was heating up. The California sun’s only redeeming quality was the fact that it was dry. Still, anything in the triple digits meant more accidents, more assaults, more chaos. After three long graveyard shifts following his trip to Florida, Walt was ready for a night off. A night of uninterrupted sleep sounded like heaven.

Walt finished his dictation, hung up the phone, and signed off his charts.

“Walt?” the day shift clerk, Nancy, called out as he started toward the doctor’s room where he left his keys.

“Yeah?”

“You have a call on 2748.”

He lifted a hand in acknowledgment and moved to the private room where he could at least hold his tired head in his hands while he finished any last-minute conversations for the day.

He sat on the unused bed in the private room and clicked into the call. “Dr. Eddy.”

“You sound just like your father when you answer the phone.”

He loved his mother, but her timing couldn’t be worse. “Hi, Mom.”

“Oh, you have that I’m tired and you’ve called at the wrong time voice.” JoAnne Eddy was a doctor’s wife. She knew all about late shifts and the need to sleep.

“I did just finish three nights in a row, Mom. What’s up?”

“I knew you’d turn off your phone so I called you at work.”

Walt closed his eyes. “You could leave a message and I’ll call you back.”

His mother sighed. He envisioned her oversprayed hair and perfect makeup. “You know how much I hate playing phone tag. The mother is the last to get a call back. I thought I was a good mother . . . one that deserved more attention from her only son.”

Walt was too tired to listen to the guilt trip. “Mom. I’m tired. It was a busy night. You wouldn’t want me to fall asleep on my drive home . . .” He’d learned how to place guilt trips from the best.

“Oh, that’s just mean. But I’ll get to the point. Your father’s birthday celebration is in two weeks. You’re still coming, right? There hasn’t been some silly outbreak of pig flu somewhere that is dragging you away, is there?”

Pig flu? This disgust for how he spent his free time was always a breath away when speaking to his parents. Giving his services away for free somehow mocked them and every dime it took to put him through medical school.

“I’m still coming.”

His mom waited a beat. “Are you bringing someone?”

What he wouldn’t do to stop the flow of questions he knew were coming. The image of Dakota, and a passage in her book that he’d read from beginning to end, popped into his head. He really needed to call her. Let her know he was back in town. Maybe she’d have some choice words to stop his parents from their constant questions.

The woman did have a way with words.

“No.”

“You hesitated.”

“I didn’t hesitate. I’m coming alone.”

“Who is she?”

He yawned. “There’s no one.”

“You hesitated again.”

“I yawned. I’ll see you in two weeks.” He glanced at his watch. After eight already? The traffic was going to suck.

“You promise?”

“Unless the big one hits and airplanes don’t fly.”

“Don’t say that,” she chastised. “You know how much I hate you living in that godforsaken place as it is. Colorado has its faults, but we don’t have big earthquakes.”

Yes, but you’re both there, he wanted to say but didn’t.

“Good-bye, Mom.”