Chapter 20
danielle
I watched as Noah dropped his donation off, and then as soon as he turned to come back my way, he was cornered by three men. One was an older gentleman with wispy white hair and a cane. The other two looked middle-aged. All three were white.
I figured they were colleagues of some sort, so I just sat up tall in my wheelchair, lifted my chin and projected strength and confidence out into the room. It didn’t take long for people to approach me to introduce themselves.
“Do you need any help?” one older man asked when he got within earshot.
“Help with what?” I asked in a playful way. I looked up, taking in his extreme height. I was seated, but he had to be at least six-five or six-six.
“I apologize; you do look rather capable. What table are you at?” He smiled and held out his hand. “I’m Jake Barton. I work at the university in the athletics department.”
“You don’t say.” I smirked, my eyes trailing up and down his athletic figure. “To be honest, my fiancé signed us in but didn’t tell me what table. He’s over there.” I gestured toward where he was standing.
“Oh, which one is he?”
“The handsome one,” I answered, letting him use his imagination.
“I see.” He winked. “Well, if I can get you anything, let me know. He seems to be engaged in quite the conversation.”
Noah’s back was to me now, so I couldn’t really see his face, but the other three men were practically caging him in. I didn’t like that. I was about to roll myself over there and crash their little party when a woman came up to me. She was petite with an elegant updo like mine, only her hair was a stunning shade of auburn. She wore a pale, glittery champagne-colored gown with a slit up the thigh and high heels with pearls and rhinestones on them.
“Are you friends with Jake?” she asked after he moved on to mingle with some other attendees.
“Oh…well, I guess I am now.” I smiled at her, even though she seemed a little put off by my answer. “Why do you ask?”
“I just wondered,” she said. “He’s single. And one of the many eligible bachelors here tonight.” A couple of men started to walk past us, and she straightened her shoulders and visibly sucked in her gut.
“I see,” was all I could think to say to that. Was she really here to land a rich dude?
“Have you seen Chase Walker yet?” She drew her attention back to me when the two men passed by without seeming to notice either of us.
“Um, sorry, I don’t know who that is.” I looked behind the woman to see if Noah was still engaged in conversation with the three men. That conversation had to either be going very well or very poorly, and I still couldn’t see his face, so it was impossible to know for sure.
“You don’t know who Chase Walker is?” She rolled her eyes. “Are you, like, new to town or something? Do you live under a rock?”
“Are you always so condescending to perfect strangers?” I snapped back while still maintaining a pleasant smile on my face.
“I’m sorry. I just—I thought everyone would know the Walker family. They own half of Monroe County. Very old money—goes back to the early nineteen-hundreds when Chase’s great-great-grandfather founded a pharmaceutical company. Chase is in line to inherit it.”
“Ah, okay.”
“He’s supposed to be here tonight, and he’s very, very single.”
I flashed my ring. “Well, I’m engaged, so single men are not really on my radar.”
“Oh my gosh, let me see!” She grabbed my hand, jerked it toward her, and inspected my ring. I felt like a piece of fruit in the grocery store. “It looks like an older style ring. Is it an antique?”
“It was his mother’s engagement ring,” I explained.
“Oh. Well, that’s very nice. I hope you two will be very happy together.”
I hadn’t noticed while this rude lady was jerking my hand to look at my ring that Noah had finally joined us. I heard a throat clear, and my head snapped up. My new “frenemy”—seemed to be the appropriate term—whipped around to see Noah standing there with his mouth gaping wide open.
One word came out of his mouth: “Alexandra?”
Out of all the people attending this charity event—which is crawling with people, by the way—Alexandra Bagby leeches onto my date?!
“Dr. Evans,” she sneered, looking me up and down. “You clean up nicely.”
“I see you’ve met my fiancée.” I flashed her a smug smile, then crouched down in front of Danielle. “Are you ready for that drink I promised? Sorry for getting trapped back there…”
“It’s quite all right, my love,” she said, breaking her eye contact with me to pin her eyes on Alexandra. “I’ve heard so much about you. Nice to meet you in person.”
God bless her, I don’t know how she did it, but there wasn’t a trace of malice in her voice. She sounded one hundred percent sincere. And the Oscar goes to…
Alexandra stood there, speechless, looking very much like a fish out of water. She stepped back, glanced to her left and right, and then dipped her head before running away. Well, what constitutes running in a pair of stilettos.
“Oh my god!” Danielle burst into laughter. “That was the funniest thing ever! You should have seen your face. You should have seen her face!”
“Shhhh…” I warned her. “People are staring at us.”
“Good, that’s what we want. Now, lean down here and kiss me, and then we’ll go get drinks.”
I wasn’t used to being bossed around, but I didn’t second-guess it either. I promptly leaned forward and pressed my lips to hers as if the entire room wasn’t watching us like reality TV. It was meant to be a quick smack, but she lifted an arm and palmed the back of my head, pressing me to her. The act sent a chill down my spine and a zap of arousal right to my cock.
Holy shit. Didn’t have that on my bingo card for the night—and I had prepared myself for a lot of potential discomfort.
“Now, how about that drink you promised me forever ago?” She only pulled away a few inches, so her words fell along with her heated breath across my lips and chin.
“Yes, ma’am.” I rose to my full height, enjoying the smug smirk on her face when she made eye contact with none other than Alexandra Bagby across the room. She was talking to her father. Oh, good. They were both watching me wheel her down the hallway toward the ballroom.
When we entered, the room was humming with conversation, underscored by a string quartet playing classical music on the stage at the front of the room. There must have been a hundred tables, all decked out with crisp white linens, floral centerpieces with fragrant lilies, and flameless candles in ornate silver holders.
“Very classy,” she said as I wheeled her to table twenty-one. I started to move a chair out of the way for her wheelchair, but she shook her head. “I’ll sit in a regular chair. There’s not much room for the wheelchair anyway.”
“I can get them to move us to a table along the wall, where there’s more room?”
“No, this is fine,” she insisted, lifting herself out of the chair and hobbling over to the table. “You can fold it up and put it somewhere else. I won’t need it unless I need to go to the bathroom or something.”
“Okay. Now, what can I get you?”
“Something strong,” was the only clue she gave. It was around that time that a few others began seating themselves at our table, and I wanted to give the impression that we knew each other well, so I smiled and headed off to the bar.
She’d handled Alexandra brilliantly, so I was sure she could make conversation without me. She was a force of nature, truly. To come in here, not knowing anyone, with a broken leg and in a wheelchair—her presence was still so commanding.
I had seen her sitting meekly in my exam room and thought she was shy. I’d seen her tumble to the pavement when Aris struck her with his bicycle, and she bore the pain like someone who was accustomed to it. And I’d seen her heart broken over having to give up her dream role and postpone her master’s graduation, and she took it in stride.
Yet, when I’d had an issue, she was the first to step up and offer to help.
It was easy to see why Aris thought he was falling in love with her.
Maybe he truly was?
All of these thoughts descended upon me, twisting and morphing in my brain along with the conversation I’d had with the three men who detained me at the donation table. One was a colleague, a gastroenterologist who worked in my building. The other two men were members of the hospital board.
I wanted to tell Danielle what they said, but I didn’t want to rile her up any further. She was already angry about Alexandra and her father. If she knew how these three men had threatened me to settle the suit with Alexandra, she would have a difficult time concealing her rage, even if she was a seasoned actress.
I was not a seasoned actor, and I was having a hard enough time.
Bloomington, Indiana, was a relatively small town. I guessed that was why everyone felt the need to get involved in other people’s business. Everyone was jockeying for power, seniority, clout. I didn’t care about such things. Maybe it was my background as a foster kid shuffled from home to home from ages ten to eighteen. Maybe it was the fact that I had to scratch and claw my way through so many years of college and med school. Maybe it was because everything I had achieved had come from my own two hands, two feet, and my big ole brain.
I exchanged our drink tickets for two cocktails and headed back to the table.
I did not expect to see Danielle conversing with David Shepherd and Kurt Banks, the two board members who confronted me earlier. They were apparently assigned to our table. Fantastic. I fixed a smile to my face and greeted them as I set Danielle’s drink in front of her and then took the empty seat beside her.
“David, Kurt, nice to see you again,” I stated, trying not to sound stiff and fake. Danielle was probably less than impressed with my acting skills, but she was maintaining a pleasant smile anyway. “I see you’ve met my fiancée.”
“Yes, Danielle has been telling us all about how you met. I didn’t even know you were dating anyone, Noah,” Kurt said, sounding a bit incredulous.
“I’m a private person,” I said with a shrug, but I kept it light.
“Noah doesn’t like to toot his own horn,” Danielle jumped in. “He gets so busy with work—and I’m so busy with my master’s degree that we don’t get out much. So I leapt at the opportunity to attend this event with him. The leukemia foundation does such amazing work.”
“Danielle was telling us she’s studying musical theater at IU,” David changed the subject. “I hope we get to see you perform sometime. When is your next show?”
Danielle smiled sweetly and pointed to her leg. “I had a bit of a setback and broke my leg, but I hope to be involved in one of the fall productions. They haven’t announced the fall season yet.”
“And what do you hope to do with your degree when you’re finished?” Kurt probed. “We don’t exactly have a huge theater scene around here.”
I saw Danielle’s character slip for just a second when she seemed surprised by the question. But she bought herself some time by taking a sip of her drink, then jumped right in, “Oh, I’m not sure right now. I believe Noah wants to stay in the area, so I’ll find something local. Of course, we want to start a family.”
I nearly choked on my own drink when those words came out of her mouth, and she flashed me a “you better follow my lead” glare. I remembered her speech before we left the house. “Yes, lots of kids. Like five or six, I think.”
She laughed and swatted at my arm playfully. “I think probably more like eight. Isn’t that what you said, Noah?”
Now Kurt nearly choked on his drink, but David took the baton and ran with it. “Why get a master’s degree if you’re just going to pop out eight babies?”
It took every ounce of restraint I could muster not to punch the guy right upside the head, but Danielle didn’t miss a beat. “Education is never a waste, is it?”
“Of course not, but?—”
“Are you a medical doctor?” she asked David.
“I am,” he said. “My specialty was cardiology.”
“And how many years of education do you need for that?”
“A lot,” he fired back, refusing to play along with an exact number.
“Well, that’s a lot of time spent learning how to save people’s lives only to sit on a hospital board and not save any.” Her icy stare sliced right through him.
“Wow, I like this one, Noah. Good job,” Kurt said, laughing and slapping me on the back.
“Oh, look, they’re getting ready to speak.” Danielle pointed to the stage, saving us from the lingering sizzle of the sick burn she just gave Dr. Shepherd. She folded her hands in her lap and trained her gaze on the podium that was being moved to where the string quartet had been playing just moments before.
A tall, wiry white man and a willowy blonde, both in their fifties, approached the podium, and the audience politely applauded. While they were waiting for the applause to die down, someone wheeled a massive black grand piano onto the stage.
“Good evening, and welcome to the Seventeenth Annual Leukemia Warriors Ball! I’m Walter Schloderman, and this is my wife Cecile. We’re so glad you took time from your busy schedules to join us this evening. We have so much in store for you, including a fabulous dinner, more beautiful music courtesy of our talented musicians from the IU School of Music, and even a special guest vocalist who will perform a special number for us after dinner. Now, if you’ll all turn your attention to the screen?—”
A giant screen began lowering from the ceiling, taking up all the space visible behind the podium.
“—we’ll watch a short presentation on some of the beneficiaries of the work we do at Leukemia Warriors. After, your servers will arrive with your first course and will take your order for your main course. Enjoy, and we’ll be back later with our special performance and a speech from one of our VIP Warriors!”
Everyone applauded again as the video began to play. I looked over to watch Danielle as the faces of kids and adults, their bodies ravaged by cancer and their bald heads glowing, appeared on the screen. I saw how it visibly affected her and how her fingers clenched around her napkin in her lap. She didn’t take her eyes off the screen as I reached over and laid my hand on top of hers.
Still focused on the screen, she laced her fingers together with mine and squeezed. A tear glistened in the corner of her eye.
Thankfully, the video was brief, and moments later, we were enjoying our salads and bread, our- main entrees in the works. Most of the table got up after that to mingle and replenish their drinks, leaving Danielle and me alone once again.
“I can’t believe you said that to David Shepherd.” My amusement rumbled in a deep chuckle at the memory.
“Well, he sounded like a misogynist pig with that remark.” She rolled her eyes and drained the rest of her drink. “I am not sure what else I could have said, to be honest.”
“It was perfect,” I assured her. “I’m not mad.”
“Those were two of the men you were talking to earlier when Alexandra descended upon me like a plague.”
I had to hide my laughter at that remark behind my napkin. I had no idea she was so witty. “Yes. You wouldn’t like what they said to me, so I’m not going to tell you.”
“To be honest? I think I have a pretty good idea based on his attitude.” Instead of the quartet returning to the stage after the video, a pianist was playing soft classical music. “I was hoping the string quartet would play some more. So,” she rubbed her hands together, “what should we do to grab some more attention?”
“Honestly, the reporters got our pictures, Alexandra saw us, and her dad sent his goons to threaten me. They’ve all seen you with me. Everyone knows we’re engaged. I think our mission is accomplished.”
“There’s got to be more we could do…” She looked out across the room. “Oh, hey, do you see that woman up there talking to the Schodermans?”
I nodded. They were talking to a short, full-figured Black woman wearing a gold sequined gown. “Who is it?”
“She’s one of my voice instructors—she’s actually the chair of the department. And she’s a famous jazz singer.” She clapped her hands together. “Oh my gosh, I bet she’s the special guest performer. We’re in for a treat!”
“Hmm…well, the Schlodermans are shaking their heads and looking upset. I wonder what’s going on?”
“I hope everything’s okay.” She looked down at her empty drink. “Hey, do you think you could wheel me to the restroom, and maybe we could get another drink on our way back?”
“Sure, I’d be happy to.” I leaned in and put my arm around her shoulder, inhaling her perfume. Tonight was weird. I was on edge, and I was pissed about the things David, Kurt and Bill said, not to mention how obnoxious Alexandra was to Danielle, but I was also enjoying myself. It was a strange conflicting sensation.
“I want to kiss you again,” I admitted, a whisper in her ear.
She giggled softly, the sound like the sweetest song. “Don’t let me stop you.”
I didn’t want to go overboard, but I also wanted to taste her lips again. I made it short, then lingered with my lips next to her ear. “How do you think it’s going so far?”
“So far so good…” she whispered back.