The Medic's Homecoming

More thoughts rushed his mind as he walked the track. Back in high school, Lucas hadn’t yet learned the fine art of total focus, except for when it came to cars. Being the coach’s kid meant having to prove yourself, and it seemed that in his father’s eyes, Lucas never really did. Second place was only a quick flash on Kieran Grady’s track radar; third place didn’t register at all. At least that’s how it’d felt.

Lucas shook the bitter memories from his head.

What the hell was he doing here? Jogging on this track was like reliving his slacker days all over again. It felt idiotic. Old insecurities laced through him, quickly followed by anger. He wanted to punch something or kick over a hurdle and storm off, just like he used to.

Here he was, honorably discharged from the army, a medic, twenty-eight years old, no plans, no job, subbing for his dad for some stinking high school fund-raiser. He squinted into the sun. In some ways he still felt an L was tattooed on his forehead.

Ambushed by frustration, he burst into a sprint, slowed down a few paces, then sprinted again. Maybe he could run off the negativity.

“Lucas!” Jocelyn came trotting across the grass wearing running gear and holding her workout bag in one hand, long strides accentuating the tone and muscle of a female athlete. He could get used to looking at those legs, all right.

“Hey,” he said when she got ten feet away, chiding himself for being so glad to see her.

“Sorry I’m late.”

“Where’re the kids?”

She checked her watch. “They should start straggling in any time now.”

“That lack of discipline flies with my dad?”

“Nope,” she said, plunking her overstuffed gym bag on the nearest bleacher seat. “They’re taking advantage of me. They think I’m a softy because I don’t blow my whistle and yell like he does.”

“Dad would turn over in his wheelchair if he found out.”

She laughed, way overdone for his lame comment. Her laugh sparked a déjà vu zing back to when he used to tease her. Good old Joss used to let him bug and nearly torture her, and she’d think it was funny. The sound of her laugh had grown huskier over time, but the sweet nature of it hadn’t changed at all. A smile just sort of popped up on his face. She smiled back, and something about being here with her made his shoulders relax.

“Well, I guess I’ll have to crack the old whip on my dad’s behalf, then,” he said.

She put her hands on her hips and raised her brows above her sunglasses. “You do remember being exactly the same as these kids, don’t you?”

“I’ve made it a point to erase my entire four years at Whispering Oaks.”

“That’s a pity because we had some good times. At least I thought so.” She’d leaned over to stretch out her hamstrings, so he figured he should do something, too, besides ogle. He grabbed his foot, drawing it flush to the back of his thigh, and enjoyed the long pull on his right quadriceps.

“It wasn’t that bad, was it?” she asked, head between the V of her legs. Did she have a clue about the power of that pose?

His answer stuck in his throat, which was a good thing because his tongue had momentarily quit working.

A gaggle of teens rushed across the lawn, a few stragglers running behind, as if they’d all arrived on a bus together. Lucas was sorry Jocelyn had quit stretching in order to greet the students. He glanced at his watch—eight-fifteen. Dad would hit the ceiling, and because he’d filled him in on Jocelyn’s insecurity about losing her athletic scholarship and feeling as if she had little right to authority, Lucas decided to step in and give her some back up.

Channeling his father, and avoiding Jocelyn’s questions, he clapped his hands hard enough to make an echo. “Let’s put a move on it. Come on. Practice started fifteen minutes ago.”

Fifteen minutes later, four more teens swaggered in to practice. “That was sick,” the most muscular one said.

“So epic,” the lankiest replied.

“You’re late, guys,” Jocelyn said. “Start your stretching.”

Her comments didn’t register on their too-cool-for-track-practice attitudes. Lucas walked up close to them, and having borrowed his dad’s favorite device, blew the whistle.

“Drop your bags and take laps.” Lucas glanced at his watch. “You’re almost a half hour late, so you four will stay an extra half hour.” If he were still in the military, he would have started the sentence with “ladies.”

The boys stood dumbfounded, kind of like adolescent dinosaurs, waiting for the message to travel from their brains all the way to their legs.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Lucas said, clapping his hands again. Jock number one nodded to the others. Begrudgingly, they dropped their gym bags and halfheartedly jogged around the track, bickering under their breaths.

After the forty or so teens finished their warm-ups, they gathered at the bleachers and Jocelyn made formal introductions. Lucas scanned the group and easily identified the four major food groups in high school: cheerleading-squad material, battling-the-diet group, Jocks R Us, and, last but not least, “I still haven’t figured out how to work my body” bunch. He had to hand it to his dad—every year he was faced with the same material, yet he’d always managed to pull the team together, find the star athletes, sometimes in the most unlikely kids, turn the rest of the students on to team spirit and good sportsmanship and in the process reel in his fair share of track medals. No easy feat.

When Jocelyn introduced Lucas as Coach Grady’s son, he heard one quiet comment in the vicinity of the jocks. “Figures.”

He suppressed the threatening smile. Dear Old Dad ran a tight ship.

As Jocelyn timed her distance runners, she couldn’t prevent her gaze from drifting toward Lucas. One of the hurdlers had stumbled and twisted her ankle. Without being asked, Lucas had come prepared and had already elevated the runner’s leg and put an ice pack on it. That look of earnest concern blew her away.

She checked her stopwatch. What lap was that? Oh, gosh, she’d gotten distracted and lost track.

She glanced at the stopwatch then back toward Lucas, who was now laughing with a tall, scraggly, redheaded kid. The warmth in her heart doubled when she saw him encourage the boy to give hurdling a try, and to her amazement, the kid wasn’t half-bad.

Lucas glanced in her direction, and their gazes met and held. He nodded. She’d have to settle for the subtle lip twitch he offered instead of a smile, but that was enough to send a marching brigade of chills over her shoulders. She wasn’t sure what it was, but Lucas Grady had It with a capital “I”—and she’d known that since she was six years old.

This was the Lucas she’d always seen. The bighearted guy he’d fought to conceal. She’d never let him get away with putting himself down. Not on her watch.

Before Lucas knew it, the two-hour practice came to an end. He finished wrapping an elastic bandage around the little runner who’d twisted her ankle and sent her home with RICE instructions—rest, ice, compression and elevation. Somewhere along the line, he’d abandoned his everyday thoughts and had become completely engrossed in being outdoors, enjoying the sunshine and coaching track. It felt good.

But as he thought of heading home with no particular plans other than helping out his parents, a huge dreary cavity opened up deep inside. He’d tried meeting one of his high school buddies for a beer one night, but they couldn’t relate to each other anymore. Lucas’s world had expanded to include faraway deserts, death and mayhem and his buddy had finished college and spent most of his time at the bar complaining about not yet finding his dream job. Not once did the guy ask what it had been like to go to war, and Lucas sure as hell wouldn’t bring up the topic. He went home feeling even more alienated—and then he had another crazy dream. Maybe tonight he’d have better luck sleeping.

“You were such a big help today, Lucas,” Jocelyn said, jogging his way. “I can’t thank you enough. I think you really got the runners to buckle down.”

Little Miss Sunshine, acting like he was the greatest gift on earth. Didn’t she get it? He was messed up. Always had been, but even more so now. He didn’t belong here. He didn’t belong anywhere, and he really didn’t want to be forced to be around Jocelyn, the perennial cheerleader.

“No problem.” His jaws locked, and the old and familiar tension in his shoulders returned. “I’ll put the hurdles away, then I’ve got to get back home,” he muttered, feeling as though the leftover ashes from the big fire hovered around him—like that character from Charlie Brown, Pig-Pen, but instead of a cloud of dirt and dust, his was gloom.

“You know, I’m barely holding it together,” she said. “Your dad always works wonders.”

He stopped, turned and gave her his full attention.

“I guess what I’m saying is, I can’t wait for the big guy to get back, but in the meantime, I’m really glad you’re around to help.”

He wanted to ignore her, wanted to disappear. But he knew she was insecure about taking on the job, and from the unruly lot of athletes she’d inherited, she sure as hell could use some back up.

“Why wait for my dad? Why not work your own wonders?”

She pulled in her chin as if the idea were preposterous. After a moment or two of obvious consideration, switching weight from one hip to the other, opening her mouth once or twice as if to speak but nothing coming out, she shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“There you go.” He winked, turned and, back on task, jogged toward the storage bin where the lanky kid with possibilities waited with the practice hurdles to help put them away.

“I’ll see you Monday at four?” she called out.

“Yup,” he said, over his shoulder.

“Ah, the magnificent smell of formaldehyde,” Jocelyn said to herself, opening up her classroom lab at Whispering Oaks High on Sunday afternoon as the stale, toxic wave hit her nostrils. “Think I’ll leave the door open.”

The empty room stood forlorn, in need of filling up. Rows of student desks seemed eerily vacant. She’d come in to set up for the big anatomy test on Monday. She hadn’t been at all sure she wanted to be the anatomy instructor a year ago when she’d transferred over from her substitute teaching job at Marshfield High. When she’d blown her free-ride athletic scholarship, she transferred to the state college and got her teaching degree in science. Then Whispering Oaks needed an anatomy teacher, so here she was teaching elementary science and college prep anatomy/physiology.

No longer a fill-in for a teacher on maternity leave, but a full-time science teacher, she was track coach, too.

She went about setting up for the test in quiet serenity, random thoughts popping in and out as she did. Yesterday, Lucas had been a natural at coaching. He was young, buff and gorgeous enough to keep the attention of all the girls, yet jock enough to challenge and command respect from the guys. He’d also accidentally discovered the natural talent of redheaded Brian Flaherty. Who knew the kid was a hurdler waiting to be outed?

Jocelyn shook her head. She’d spent far too much time thinking about Lucas since he’d gotten home a week ago, and it hadn’t been that long since she’d broken off her engagement. What a disaster that had turned out to be … She stuck a red-tipped pin into the gastrocnemius muscle of the lab specimen, near the Achilles tendon. The poor stiff cat bore the expression of the famous Edvard Munch painting, The Scream. They all did—all ten of them—in various stages of dissection. Sometimes she preferred biology labs to anatomy. Dissecting frogs wasn’t nearly as grotesque as the cats.

Before Jocelyn realized it, two hours had passed as she painstakingly pinned numbered paper markers inside the formaldehyde-fixed innards of the cats for the midterm anatomy test. The smell had given her a headache, and she still had one cat left to label. Tomorrow morning she’d come in early and place the numbered note cards with the test questions by each pan.

She needed to get things set up for the non-honors basic anatomy class, too. Every year she’d have the students outline themselves on butcher paper, and as they studied each organ, they’d place it inside the body outline where it belonged. The life-size study aid could be rolled up and taken home, too.

Her eyes burned and got teary beneath the mask. If she wasn’t wearing surgical gloves, she’d blow her nose. Being an anatomy teacher might be an unglamorous profession, but it was her job and she gave it her best effort. She’d learned her limits at the university when she couldn’t give one hundred percent to her athletic scholarship and still manage to keep up with the academics. Although it was the hardest decision of her life, she knew that a sports career would be short-lived, whereas her education would last a lifetime. That had to come first.

How many other people at age twenty-seven could say they were content with their jobs and mean it?

But was she really happy, or was she just settling for content?

Why not work your own wonders?

Lucas’s challenge jarred her. She’d been settling for stand-in status with track while subbing for Coach Grady, merely holding things down and waiting for him to get back. Was it because of her painful failure in college? She’d matured now, could focus more. Maybe it was time to own the position, put her name on it.

Work your own wonders.

Yeah, that’s exactly what she’d do … that is, if it was okay with Mr. Grady. Uh, Kieran.

After a few more finishing touches, and meticulous hand washing, she was ready to leave for home. Her parents’ house held a lot more appeal since Lucas had come back last week. If she were lucky, she’d get to see him again today.

Hmm, maybe Beverly needed her hair done…

An hour and a half later, after she’d washed and blow-dried Beverly’s hair while hatching her plan, she knocked on Lucas’s bedroom door with determination.

She needed his help. Honestly.

Minutes later, Lucas glanced down at Jocelyn sprawled out on top of a long sheet of butcher paper on the hardwood floor of the Howards’ family room. She handed him a pencil.

“I need you to trace my body.”

Three seconds ago he’d watched her on all fours with her backside up in the air, while she unrolled and smoothed out the thick brown paper. Now, her long legs lay beneath him in form-fitting jogging shorts. His gaze trailed upward, grateful she’d put on a T-shirt over the black sports bra, which was outlined through the thin white material. One slender arm reached out, extending a black wax pencil to him.

“Outline?”

She smiled up at him, oblivious to the battle she’d ignited between his head and body. Good old Jocelyn, the little girl next door versus the come-hither sex kitten stretched out on butcher paper reaching for him.

“I do this every semester,” she said, sounding like usual but looking anything but. “I used to have Rick help me, but …”

He took the pencil. “Every semester.” A crazy pinch of jealousy over Rick outlining her took him by surprise.

“Yeah. I have every student do the same thing in class. Then, as we learn about each system, we add organs to our ‘bodies.’” She used air quotes. “By the end of the year, they have a great study aid for the final exam.” She bent one knee and casually crossed the other over it, folding her arms across her chest. Maybe she did have a clue because he’d forgotten his manners and had stared at her chest for the past few seconds.

He cleared his throat, forcing his eyes upward to her face. “So where should I start?” His voice sounded foreign as she resumed the position and he dropped to his knees.

“You can start at my head.” She beamed an encouraging smile. She couldn’t possibly know how awkward this felt, not to mention the sexy visions flashing through his mind.

The room became deadly quiet except for the crinkling of butcher paper and his breathing. Their eyes caught for an instant. His fingertips tingled, and he quickly looked away. She finished repositioning herself into the dead man’s pose with legs outstretched and arms at her sides.

Lucas kneeled over her and began to trace, focusing on the work and not the person. Her hair was fine, rich brown and lustrous, with emphasis on the lust. Geez, he’d been watching too many TV commercials since he’d gotten home. Lustrous? Her neck was long, like that of a ballet dancer. The only reason he knew about ballet dancers’ necks was because Mom had talked him into watching Black Swan with them last week. Her shoulders were broader than most women’s, but not manly-broad, definitely not. Hell, she was an athlete, so what did he expect?

Her arms only gave the impression of being thin. Fine muscles overlapped and cut a subtle, sturdy shape that made him want to touch them. Show me what you got. He was careful not to make contact with her skin, only allowing the thick-tipped pencil to do that.

Do not look at her face or into her eyes.

He concentrated on the task at hand.

“I want them to be together,” she said. Her husky voice broke the stretching silence.

“What?” He looked at her face—damn—and into her eyes—crap.

“Anne and Jack. Have you noticed the chemistry between them?” She stared at the ceiling, and he was grateful she didn’t see how closely he examined her mouth as each word rolled out.

He cleared his throat. “I haven’t been around them much.” Realizing he was hovering over her in a lover’s position, he sat back on his haunches. “But I noticed how preoccupied Anne has been. She’s been real touchy whenever anyone brings up Jack’s name.” He went back to outlining her torso, hip and bare-fleshed thigh, wishing for a longer pencil. Anything to avoid touching her skin. “She missed her plane yesterday, but Jack took her to the airport today.”

“Great. Maybe they can trade weekends for a while until they …”

Three quarters of the way down her thigh, his thumb made contact. The surge of electricity shot up his fingers and into his arm. “Sorry.” He quickly traced the safe region of her bony knee. Dimples? Her kneecap had dimples. Had he ever seen cute kneecaps before?

A safe distance from her eyes and steady gaze, he traced down to her ankle and her bare feet. A soft pink pedicure made him smile. What would she do if he ran his fingers over her toes?

“You think they’ll ever get together?”

His little fantasy dissolved. “No way of telling. Anne’s pretty stubborn.” The pencil began its journey up the inside of her leg. Satiny-smooth flesh waited to be traced. He swallowed hard. Three-quarters of the way up her inner thigh, the pencil made a sharp left turn, as if it had a mind of its own, making a saggy square-bottom effect. She didn’t really expect him to go all the way, did she?

He began the descent back to her other knee and foot, taking a second look at the pretty pink nail polish, around and up the outside of her leg, as attractive as the other. She must have realized what she’d asked him to do was torture. Since when had little Jocelyn Howard become a tease?

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