Exit Light Read online

  He leaned in her doorway, the screen making him a blur. “I’m sorry if I startled you.”

  Max woofed and nudged the door open, knocking past Martin hard enough to cause the man to take a step inside. Martin grabbed the doorframe, then held out a hand but was too slow to keep the door from swinging back and hitting him in the face.

  “It swings both ways,” Tovah explained unnecessarily, since he could see that well enough. “So the dog can get in and out. Are you all right?”

  He nodded, holding his nose. He tipped his head back. “I don’t think it’s bleeding, is it?”

  “Oh, for—come in.” She put down the bowl and spatula and pulled out a kitchen chair. “Martin, sit down.”

  He did, so tall his head came up to her shoulder even sitting. She looked at his nose, which bore the red hashmarks of the screen but wasn’t bleeding. She gave him a dampened paper towel, anyway.

  “I think you’re fine.”

  He nodded, looking at her quickly before looking at the table. “Thanks.”

  Tovah looked at herself. The cardigan she’d thrown on hung open, revealing the nightshirt she wore beneath. Made of thin cotton, it outlined every curve and bump and hit her in the middle of her thighs. She pulled her sweater tight over her breasts but could do nothing about the way the gown shifted high on her thighs.

  She turned back to the griddle.

  “I was awake and saw the dog,” Martin said after a minute. “And your lights were on. I was going to go out for a jog, and…I’m sorry, I should go.”

  “I haven’t seen much of you lately,” Tovah said.

  From behind her, the purr of the chair legs on her linoleum stopped. Martin didn’t stand. “My hours at the hospital changed.”

  She dropped another circle of batter on the griddle. “How’s the house?”

  “The house? It’s…great.”

  Silence between them. She turned, expecting to see him staring, but Martin was looking at his hands, clasped in his lap. The paper towel had been folded neatly into a perfect square on the table.

  “Would you like to stay for breakfast?”

  He looked up. His smile knitted tension in her belly as she waited for an answer. “Sure.”

  “I don’t mind telling you,” she said in a few minutes as she slid the plate of steaming golden pancakes onto the table, “I’m a pretty fine pancake maker.”

  “Nobody’s made me pancakes in years.” Martin waited for her to sit and serve herself before he used a fork to pry one of the pancakes from the pile. He settled it on the plate and took the bottle of maple syrup from her. He poured a small puddle to one side of his plate, then cut his cake into several even pieces as she watched, a bit amused. He caught her looking. “These look great.”

  She looked at her own plate, which bore a stack of hacked pancakes smeared liberally with syrup. “Did you want to be a surgeon?”

  Martin paused, his fork halfway to his mouth. “Pardon?”

  She used her knife to point at his plate. “You’re so precise.”

  He looked at the food, then finished his bite, chewing slowly and swallowing before answering. “I don’t have the patience to be a surgeon.”

  “You have the hands for it.” She meant the statement lightly, but Martin put down his fork and lifted his hands to stare at them, front and back.

  “You think so? I never did. I have big hands.” He curled them into fists, slowing, working each finger.

  “Does size matter?”

  As soon as the words came out, she realized how they sounded, and laughed. Martin looked up, mouth slightly parted, like he didn’t get it at first. And then he did.

  “That’s not the sort of question you should ask a man, Tovah.”

  “I’m sorry.” She giggled. “Blame it on lack of sleep.”

  He smiled and opened and closed his fingers again, then picked up the fork. “Why were you up so early? Surely not just because you had a craving for pancakes.”

  “No. I had a bad dream. I couldn’t go back to sleep. I could ask the same question of you.” The scent of coffee she’d forgotten to pour teased her nostrils. “Oh, I forgot, coffee!”

  She got up to pour them both cups. When she came back to the table, Martin’s gaze followed her path. She’d been under such intense scrutiny before, and as usual heat rose in her cheeks because of it, but she tried not to show it. She gave him the sugar and cream she already knew he took.

  “Thanks.” He added the sugar and cream and stirred, but didn’t sip. “I never wanted to be a surgeon because I wanted to fix what was inside people’s minds without having to cut them open to do it.”

  “That’s a good reason.”

  After a moment he dug back into his pancakes, severing each piece into halves and chewing them carefully. He interspersed each bite with a swig of coffee, finishing his first cup before she’d even taken more than a few sips of hers. He got up to help himself to another as matter-of-factly as if he’d always made himself at home in her kitchen.

  She liked that, she realized, as he brought the pot to freshen her cup. Having a man puttering around. “Thanks.”

  He smiled. “Thank you. This is the best breakfast I’ve had in a long time.”

  “Me too, actually,” she admitted. “Usually it’s a toaster pastry and a diet cola as I work at the computer.”

  Martin laughed, the sound easier than it had been before. Tovah was having a hard time getting a handle on this man, who moved among his patients with such confidence but spoke to her as though he expected her to bite his head off.

  He looked up and saw her staring. “What?”

  It was just the sort of thing she’d have said, herself. She recognized that awkward sensation of wondering whether she had something on her face. “I’m glad you stopped by, Martin.”

  “Are you?” He sounded surprised, and finished his second cup of coffee.

  Tovah nodded. She tasted syrup on her mouth as she licked her lower lip. His eyes followed the motion of her tongue before he looked away. He was blushing again, and she found it as charming this time as she had the first. “Yes. I really am.”

  “Well,” he said, sounding a bit gruffly pleased. “You make excellent coffee. And pancakes. I’m glad I came, too.”

  A step forward and another back, like a child’s game of I Dare You. Watching him, unable to read his signals, Tovah didn’t dare. “Thanks. Be careful, Max will beg you for the rest of it.”

  Martin looked at Max, who’d raised his shaggy head at the mention of his name. “Will he?”

  She remembered what he’d said about being bitten as a child. Though Martin didn’t seem frightened of Max, he did seem…wary. And Max, for his part, hadn’t snuffled or slobbered on Martin the way he did on nearly everyone else.

  “He might.”

  Martin ate another bite. “I guess I’d better finish, then, before he has the chance.”

  He watched her again when she got up to put her plate in the dishwasher, and Tovah was mindful of the way her nightshirt hit her at mid-thigh. How she must look, disheveled from sleep and without makeup. No wonder Martin wasn’t flirting, she thought wryly. She probably looked like a mess, and even though he knew about her leg, the sight of it was still probably unfamiliar enough to make him feel a little awkward.

  Or, he just didn’t like her in that way.

  He was up to put his plate in the dishwasher, too, close behind her when she straightened and turned. She came face to chest with him, and it was impossible not to notice how tall he was. How broad. It was the first time she’d seen him in something other than a button-down shirt and dress trousers, and his T-shirt stretched across muscles she wouldn’t have guessed were there.

  “Sorry.” Martin leaned around her to tuck his plate into the open slots of the dishwasher.

  Tovah had always had a fairly large personal boundary area; Martin had seriously encroached upon it. Yet she didn’t move, and not because she felt so comfortable with him it didn’t matter that he�€