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have been a laugh, but he wouldn’t let himself get his hopes up.
    She took another sip. “Since you can’t seem to get through a half hour of work without taking a break, explain to me how a wimp like you ever survived the eighteen-hour shifts of a resident.”
    “Black coffee and plenty of No-Doze. But then, I didn’t have a harsh taskmaster of an Army Lieutenant riding my butt at the University of Utah.”
    She shifted her leg, and he didn’t miss her wince, even though she quickly took another sip of soda to hide it. “I forgot that’s where you went to medical school,” she said after she’d swallowed.
    “Yeah. The Running Utes.”
    “Good medical school. So why didn’t they throw you out for sheer laziness?”
    He thought of the summa cum laude hanging in his office and how he’d worked his tail off to earn it. “Must have been a fluke. I guess I can fake it when necessary. You know how it works, look busy when the attending is around.”
    Her shoulders had relaxed, he saw, and she had lost some of those pain lines around her mouth. Good. He wondered what chance he had of keeping her right here insulting him for the next couple of hours. He supposed he’d have to be happy with a few minutes.
    “So, why does a moderately intelligent medical student with a talent for fakery choose general medicine as a specialty instead of something more lucrative like plastic surgery or urology?”
    “I guess because I like treating the whole patient, not just bits and pieces.”
    “Okay, so you still could have broadened yourhorizons a little and opened a general medicine practice somewhere more interesting than Pine Gulch, Idaho. So why come home?”
    He had many answers to that particular question, some easier to verbalize than others, but he did his best to put his reasons into words.
    “Old Doc Whitaker gave me my first taste of medicine, literally and figuratively. He probably did the same for you, right?”
    She nodded with a small smile for the robust man who had treated everyone in the county for nearly fifty years.
    “He brought all three of us boys into the world, treated us when we had the chicken pox, helped Seth through the worst years of his asthma,” Jake went on. “In high school, I worked at the clinic on Saturdays and a few afternoons a week. I grew to admire that old coot for his dedication, for the connection he had to his patients. He knew them all. Their kids, their parents, their sisters and brothers.”
    He was quiet for a moment, remembering the man who had been such a steady influence in his life. “When I was finishing my residency, I tried to picture myself working in some impersonal HMO somewhere treating thirty patients a day. I just couldn’t do it. Around that time, Doc called me, said he wanted to retire and was I interested in buying his practice. Coming home seemed right.”
    “Any regrets?” she asked. “Does fame and fortune ever come calling your name?”
    “Not that I’ve heard. But maybe I had my cell phone turned off and missed it.”
    A smile almost broke free but she sternly forced hermouth back into a straight line before it could escape. “I forget. You’re one of the Daltons of Cold Creek. With your share of the ranch, you probably don’t have to worry about money at all, do you? I guess that makes you just another dilettante.”
    He swallowed a sigh. What would he have to do to get past her anger at his family?
    “ Dilettante . Now there’s a big word for an Idaho cowgirl.”
    “Must have read it on a cereal box somewhere.”
    “If I were one of those dili-thingies just out for a good time, I’m pretty sure the amusement quotient would have disappeared once I actually started treating patients. We GPs see some pretty nasty stuff. Anything from impacted colons to uncontrolled vomiting to gangrenous sores.”
    “Try being a nurse, wussy-boy. You doctors get to waltz in, make your godlike proclamations and waltz out again, leaving us hardworking nurses to