She became Dr. Chandler instantly, running into the room, seeing the older woman choking and beginning to turn blue. Blair didn’t waste a second before she began pushing on the woman’s chest and then using her own lungs to force air into the woman.
She hadn’t applied two breaths before she found herself forcibly pulled away.
Leander pushed so hard that she nearly fell as he began clearing the woman’s throat. Within minutes, the patient was breathing evenly again and he turned her over to a nurse.
“You come to my office,” he said to Blair, barely looking at her.
What followed for Blair was twenty minutes of a tongue-lashing such as she’d never had before in her life. Lee seemed to think that she was trying to interfere in his work and that she could have killed his patient.
Nothing Blair said made any difference to his rage. He said she should have called for help rather than worked on a patient that she knew nothing about, that the treatment she’d tried might have been the wrong one and she could have done more harm than good.
&
nbsp; Blair knew he was right and, even as he spoke, she began to cry.
Leander relented, stopped his tirade, and put his arm around her.
Blair drew away, screaming that she hated him and she never wanted to see him again. She ran down the stairs and hid inside a doorway while he ran past looking for her. When the way was clear, she left the hospital and caught a trolley car home—where she was now, crying and never wanting to see that horrible, hideous man again.
At eleven, she managed to pull herself together enough to leave the house to meet Alan. She told her mother she was meeting Lee to play tennis and Opal merely nodded, mistakenly trusting her daughter.
Opal was sitting on the back porch, trying to enjoy the spring afternoon and not worry about her daughters, her embroidery in her hands, when she looked up to see Leander standing in the doorway. “Why, Lee, what a pleasant surprise. I thought you and Blair went to play tennis. Did you forget something?”
“Mind if I sit down and join you for a while?”
“Of course not.” She looked at him. Rarely was Lee’s handsome face marred by a frown, but today he looked as if he were deeply worried about something. “Lee, is there something you’d like to talk about?”
Leander took his time in answering as he withdrew a cigar from his inner coat pocket and motioned to Opal for permission to smoke. “She’s out with a man named Alan Hunter, the man she says she’s going to marry.”
Opal’s hands stopped sewing. “Oh, dear, yet another complication. You’d better tell me all of it.”
“It seems that she accepted this man’s marriage proposal in Pennsylvania and he was to come Monday and meet you and Mr. Gates.”
“But by Monday, Blair’d already…And the announcement of your marriage had been made, so…” She trailed off.
“It was my doing that our engagement was announced. Both Houston and Blair wanted to keep quiet and forget any of it’d ever happened. I’m almost ashamed to admit that I blackmailed Blair into remaining in Chandler and participating in the competition.”
“Competition?”
“I met Hunter at the train station on Monday, and I talked him into competing with me for Blair’s hand. I have until the twentieth to win her, because on the twentieth she’s going to decide whether she wants to marry me or leave town with Hunter.”
He turned to Opal. “But I think I’m losing, and I don’t know how to win her. I’ve never had to court a woman before, so I’m not really sure what has to be done. I’ve tried flowers, candy, and making a fool of myself in front of the entire town—all the things I thought women liked, but nothing seems to be working. On the twentieth, she’s going to leave with Hunter,” he repeated, as if it were the most tragic of thoughts and, with a sigh, he told Opal what had been going on in the last few days, told her about the lake incident and then the time with the horses and ended with this morning at the hospital when he had, admittedly, been a little rough on Blair.
Opal was thoughtful for a moment. “You love her a great deal, don’t you?” she said with surprise in her voice.
Lee sat up straighter in his chair. “I don’t know whether it’s love exactly…” He glanced at Opal, then seemed as if he realized he was fighting a losing battle. “Well, all right, maybe I am in love with her, so in love that I don’t even mind looking like the town idiot—if only I get her.”
He quickly began to defend himself. “But I’m not about to go to her looking moony-eyed and tell her that I did an unmanly thing like fall in love with her on the first night I spent with her. It’s one thing to have your roses thrown back in your face, but I’m not sure I’d like to have the same thing done to my declarations of undying love.”
“I think you may be right. Do you know how this other man is courting her?”
“It’s something I clean forgot to ask.”
“He must be the ‘friend’ who keeps sending her medical books. Blair reads one, and an hour later she leaves the house, saying she’s meeting you.”
“I have a room full of medical books, but I can’t imagine sending one to a woman. I guess I have to agree with Mr. Gates when it comes to medicine. I wish she’d give up this absurd idea and settle down and—.”
“And what? Be more like Houston? You had a perfect homemaker, yet you fell in love with someone else. Did you ever think that if Blair gave up her medicine she’d not be Blair?”