Not Quite Forever (Not Quite #4)(16)
Author: Catherine Bybee

“Fine. I’ll meet you at Joe’s for a drink on Tuesday.”

This felt too good . . . too right. “Do you pay your bills in advance?”

For a moment, there was silence on the line.

“What?”

“Your bills? Electric, water . . . that stuff. Do you—”

“I understand what bills are. Yes, I do. I hate to think of them stacking up and me forgetting them. Do you?”

He offered a nervous laugh, turned to his computer, and noticed a red “overdue” notice on his water bill. “Of course . . .” He punched in the amount due and hit Send.

“Doctor?”

“Yeah?” He clicked through the bills he normally paid, noticed his cell phone was a couple of days away from being shut off. “Damn,” he mumbled.

“You can’t lie worth shit. I hope you know that.”

He placed the amount due in the empty box, hit Send. “What?”

The rest of his bills were good. Rent was on a monthly payment, cable too—not that he really needed it. He was never home. Automatic credit card, and car payment . . . insurance.

There was silence on the line. “Dakota?”

“I’m still here. Are you done paying your bills?”

“Yeah.” Wait . . . did he tell her he was paying bills? “I’m busted, aren’t I?”

“You’re not perfect? That might be a deal breaker, Doc.”

He pushed away from his desk, drank his black coffee. “Tuesday?”

“Tuesday at Joe’s by the hospital.”

He liked that. “Be safe.”

“You too, Doc.”

Chapter Six

Desi Calloway had been her own boss since she was twenty-seven. The literary agency she’d started after her short stint working with one of the big publishers changed her mind about editing for a living. She wanted to represent authors, lots of authors. She’d set out to be a powerhouse in her field and accomplished an impressive list of authors by her midthirties. Closing in on her fiftieth birthday, she was on her second marriage and had one daughter in college. Calloway Literary Agency now employed a half-dozen agents and an equal amount of ancillary staff.

Whenever Dakota visited the New York office, she was treated with a warmth usually reserved for family. The staff knew her by sight from day one. They answered her e-mails within twenty-four hours and never said no.

“You can’t blame them for pushing, Dakota. You’ve been under one contract or another with them for three years. They want the Dakota Laurens machine to keep dealing out new books.”

“I’m not sure I want to write another series right now. I have a single title swimming around in my head.”

“Single title, series . . . they don’t care. Give me two sentences to pitch to them and we’ll get the ball rolling.”

Dakota laughed. “I’ve come a long way from the six-page synopsis.” Or as she more frequently called it, suck-nopsis. An emotionless outline of a proposed book that often veered off course during the writing process. Every writer she knew dreaded writing the things.

“Shoot me an e-mail when you have something. We should have your numbers for the last pay period in the next couple of weeks, which might give us more leverage during contract negotiations.”

“I’ll let you deal with that. I’ll play temperamental artist and make stuff up to sell.”

Desi laughed and wrapped up the call.

For the next hour, Dakota sat with an open notepad and a pen. Some of the personalities she’d met at the Miami conference floated in her head and started to take shape. For Dakota, writing always started with her characters. Who were they, what were their experiences that brought them to the point in life that the book began? She hadn’t been completely kidding when she told Walt that she was writing a character profile on him. Well, not him, but a doctor . . . or maybe a nurse. Perhaps a male nurse and a female doctor . . . she jotted down that idea, asked herself how that would impact the story.

When her ideas crashed to a halt, she’d step into the kitchen and pick a cupboard to clean. Halfway through the kitchen junk drawer her thoughts moved to Monica Fairchild. Without any hesitation, she picked up her cell phone, found the number Monica had given her, and placed the call.

“Hello?” Monica’s cheerful voice was accompanied by a bark. “Gilligan, down!”

“Monica? It’s Dakota.”

“Oh, hey. Can you hold on a second?”

“Sure.”

She heard Monica call her pets outside and had to smile.

“Sorry about that. Seems they just love it when I’m on the phone.”

“Sounds like kids.”

“Bite your tongue. I’m not ready for that.” They laughed about kids and phones for a couple of minutes, discussed how unready they both were for parenthood.

“Walt told me that flying down to the Keys was a bust.”

“Not a complete waste of time, but yeah, not what we thought it might be.”

Dakota started drawing circles on a blank page in her notebook. “Part of the reason I called was to pick your brain a little bit. I’m working on a new book . . . or I think I will be soon. After Miami I thought it would be great to have a doctor or nurse in my next story.”

“Really?” Monica’s giddy laugh was contagious. “I’m not sure how I can help, but I’d love to.”

“That would be great. I can look up facts online, but there are things that happen in every profession that never make it into a book.”

“I completely agree. I’m sure Walt can answer . . . wait, did you say you saw Walt since you’ve been back to LA?”

“Yeah.”

Monica hesitated over the line. “As in a date?”

“Is that strange?”

“For Walt it is. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure he has a personal life, but I’ve never heard about anyone he’d actually say he was dating. Wow.”

Suddenly the need to know more about Walt’s lack of dating became the driving theme of the conversation and her character profile drifted away.

“So the good doctor doesn’t date. I wonder why.”

“I always thought he was just too busy to bother. Between Borderless Doctors and the ER there’s no time.”

Dakota kept drawing circles, filled some in. “He said as much. Still, I can’t imagine single nurses looking the other way.”

“Take it from me,” Monica said. “Hospital romances are overrated. It’s more common that the nurses hook up with the paramedics that come in. At least when those relationships fail you don’t have to see your ex on a daily basis . . . or if you do it’s only briefly.”