You Again Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Excerpt

  Dear Reader

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Copyright

  Special Books by Special Writers

  YOU AGAIN

  by Peggy Nicholson

  “You Again is a refreshingly original, thoroughly engrossing story that explores both the power of love and the incredible strength of the human spirit. Suspenseful, frequently humorous and always engaging, You Again is impossible to put down until the final, wonderfully satisfying page is turned. Peggy Nicholson has penned a story you won’t forget!”

  —Kay Hooper (author of Amanda)

  “You Again is delectable, delightfully different…in a word, magnificat!”

  —Anne McAllister (author of the Code of the West trilogy)

  “Tantalizing and seductively unique. Don’t miss You Again. It’s purrrfect!”

  —Dee Holmes (author of His Runaway Son)

  “You Again by Peggy Nicholson is part mystery, part fantasy, and very much a romance. Curl up with it, and not only will you never see cats—or men—in the same light, but you’ll be in for the nail-biting read of your life.”

  —Peter Mandel (author of Red Cat, White Cat and The Official Cat I.Q. Test)

  “A wonderfully original, thoroughly enchanting tale that is sure to please lovers of romance and cats alike.”

  —Antoinette Stockenberg (author of Emily’s Ghost)

  Dear Reader,

  Some books happen where ideas intersect

  For instance, in my single years I had one dating rule: Never date a man who doesn’t like cats. (I sought a strong but sensitive male, subtle, with a great sense of humor, who’d appreciate an independent, adventurous woman. Such a paragon was bound to adore cats, I reasoned.)

  Wrong. Instead I met a man who thinks all cats are…brats. Selfish, slinky, arrogant critters. He explained this politely and at great length to Yaffa, resident computer-cord chewer in these parts, though in the end it didn’t do him much good. (If you want to learn how to seduce—inch by inch, month by month—watch a cat. A paw oh-so-casually rested on a thigh, then withdrawn, a silken flick of the tail.)

  While I was observing unwilling man/relentless cat, I was playing with the idea of myths: how to relate them to the present? A myth that spoke to me was that of the animal wife, the selkie. A man weds a beautiful, mystical stranger. She’s woman, and maybe, late at night when the moon is full or the tide runs high, she’s…other than woman. Will love bridge their differences? Or will her otherness tear them apart?

  Finally, I’ve always wanted to be the fly on the wall, the unseen observer. How would it be to watch the man you love when he thinks he’s alone: to hear him speak from his heart when he thinks there’s no one to listen but a worthless cat?

  Myth, man versus cat, the fly on the wall—I started writing. Hope you enjoy.

  Peggy Nicholson

  Peggy Nicholson

  YOU AGAIN

  To R. duPrey

  and with special thanks to Chris Canham,

  who said,

  "What if you made the shrink a she?”

  If called by a panther, don’t anther.

  —Ogden Nash

  “Well, that ol’ black cat followed us all the way across Texas. Each night, after we’d made camp, there he’d be. He’d come stalkin’ up to the fire with those big shinin’ green eyes of his, and he’d say, ‘I’m hungry, tool Fix me some bacon, tooooo!’”

  —from a bedtime story told

  by my grandmother,

  Lula Grimes

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHEN SHE WAS A CHILD, Jessica Myles’s worst nightmare—or rather, one of her nightmares—had involved an elevator. Being trapped in one. Having to spend hours and hours trying to converse with total strangers while they waited for rescue.

  The image returned to her with wincing vividness as the elevator doors rolled open, and five men regarded her with interest. Jessica didn’t rock back on her heels, but for an instant she pictured herself turning. Striding across the hotel corridor to the elevator set in the opposite wall. Riding up to the rooftop health club in blessed isolation and silence.

  The man nearest the front grinned as he put out an arm to hold the doors open. “Thank you,” Jessica said, unsmiling, and stepped aboard. Shows how little imagination I had as a kid, she told herself, as the doors closed and the car lifted skyward. I could’ve imagined myself trapped in an elevator—with five doctors.

  For though, with typical male arrogance, not one of them was wearing his convention name tag, each of her fellow passengers might as well have been dressed in a white lab coat, with a stethoscope dangling from his neck. They had that faint but unmistakable aura of self-congratulation and assurance, that I’ve made it, but what about you? air that marked the typical physician—at least the male of the species.

  The man across from Jessica bent to study the name tag pinned to her suit lapel. His eyes lingered at breast level a moment too long, then lifted to her face. “Rhode Island General, huh? Do you know Bob Daley?”

  A surgeon, Jessica recalled. She’d heard him paged over the hospital PA system, but in the month since she’d been admitted to practice at RI Gen she’d yet to fit a face to the name. “I’m afraid not.”

  “Slice and Dice Daley, they used to call him,” the man continued to the group at large. “Bob could whomp out an appendix faster than you could cross yourself and say Hail Mary. I remember the time we admitted this kid, he presented like an absolute textbook case of…”

  Tuning him out, Jessica suppressed a sigh and glanced up at the numbers above the door. Some forty floors to go. With any luck, the pool would be empty. She’d chosen the breakfast hour on purpose, hoping that most convention attendees would be below in the banquet hall, sucking down a last cup of coffee before the first seminar of the day.

  “That was some party last night, huh?” said the doctor on Jessica’s right, leaning close to her ear. “The one in the Merck Labs suite? I saw you there, didn’t I? On the far side of that vat of beluga?”

  “No, I didn’t make that one.” Nor any other of the private or promotional parties given last night, though she’d been invited to half a dozen. Jessica had bolted the hotel, desperate for fresh air, natural light and any sound at all but medical babble. She’d ridden the Staten Island ferry back and forth till the sun went down in the smoldering sky over New Jersey, and Manhattan turned into the jeweled city of Oz. Later she’d nibbled on a spinach salad in some nondescript midtown restaurant while she read a New England Journal of Medicine. She touched her briefcase now, thought of pulling one out to bury her nose in, then reluctantly dismissed the impulse. Only twenty floors to go.

  “You wouldn’t have the time, would you?” the man on her right persisted.

  “I would,” Jessica said, and was tempted to leave it at that. She had no doubt that if he lifted his own wrist, a gold Rolex would gleam from beneath his cuff. Her father had awarded her hers, along with six lab coats with “Dr. Jessica Myles” embroidered above the left breast pocket, on the day she received her M.D. She consulted h
er watch gravely. “It’s seven-forty-four.”

  “Not seven-forty-five?” There was a smile in his voice.

  “Not for another twenty seconds.”

  The car’s floor pressed up against the soles of her feet, then the doors slid back. Jessica seized the moment and moved away from her inquisitor, making room for the two men who stepped aboard. “…tempted to cut out of here after the ten-thirty seminar,” one of them was saying, “since Jorgenson’s wimped out on us. The only thing deadlier than the guest speaker at the closing banquet is a last-minute replacement.”

  “Maybe not this time,” said his companion. “I hear they’ve come up with a powerhouse pinch hitter.” He leaned close to his friend and whispered, while everyone else averted his eyes and strained his ears.

  Jessica frowned. Had she caught the magical phrase “Nobel prize,” or had she only imagined it? Imagined or real, the phrase brought a face with it. With a ruthless efficiency born of years of practice, she slam-dunked that laughing image into the back closet of her mind. Slammed the door shut on it. No. Not here. Not now. Not ever.

  The first doctor let out a low whistle. “No kidding? How’d they corner him?”

  Some other him, of course. Who’d won the Nobel in medicine last year? Or was due to win it this?

  “He’s an old buddy of Vincent’s, the conference chair. I hear he was passing through town on his way out to some do in San Francisco, and they yanked him off a jet.”

  “Guess I’ll stick around. He puts on quite a show, they say.”

  The car stopped again, and three doctors exited. The rest of them stepped off at the concierge level. Jessica breathed a silent thanks and moved to the front of the car. With any luck she’d have the pool to herself.

  But as she neared the end of the corridor that led to the health club, a man pushed out through the steamy glass doors. Toby Morrison—hair still wet from his swim, a towel draped around his neck.

  Toby had been a Fellow at Boston Charity, the year she’d been a wild-eyed, frantic intern. Funny that she hadn’t thought of him twice in the past five years, and now they’d be speaking for the second time in less than a month. Though this encounter hardly rated as coincidence. This conference was the biggest event of the year for internists and general practitioners, and she and Toby both had their professional training to upgrade.

  “More gorgeous than ever,” Toby pronounced her with a grin, holding her hand longer than was strictly necessary.

  “We all look better without the bags under our eyes.” A hundred hours a week on call was typical for the first three years of clinical training. Jessica could still fall asleep in ten seconds flat. They’d had to snatch every wink of blessed unconsciousness, learn to sleep on their feet like horses in harness. She remembered falling asleep once, her forehead pillowed against an old man’s chest, while she was checking his heartbeat. Remembered another intern who’d fallen facedown in his plate of mashed potatoes and gravy at the free late-night meal the hospital cafeteria provided for house staff.

  “About that phone call last month…” Toby reminded her, as she’d feared he would.

  She shouldn’t have called him. Wasn’t sure yet why she’d called him, why she. hadn’t simply minded her own business. “Oh, that…” She shrugged, making light of it now. “About Grenada?”

  Toby was one of those few-and-far-between American doctors who’d attended med school offshore, then had managed to gain accreditation in the U.S. system. In his case he’d attended St. George’s University, on the island of Grenada. He’d graduated there the year of the revolution, which had ended with Reagan’s sending in the U.S. troops.

  Late nights on the ward, when admissions were slow, Toby had had some fine tales to tell of street fighting and burning buildings, of students sharing a bottle of cane rum in the bunkered basement of their dorm while American shells whistled overhead, of working long, bloody hours in a bare-bones island clinic under fire and threat of being taken hostage. If even half his tales were true, he’d seen more excitement in that one week than the rest of the house staff had seen in the whole of their short, privileged lifetimes. They’d all been green as their operating scrubs with envy listening to him, though one second-year resident privately swore that Toby had actually skipped the revolution altogether and had spent that week golfing on Barbados.

  “Anne Talbot,” Toby prodded. “Why’d you want to know about her?”

  Two weeks ago Jessica had called Toby in Baltimore, after tracking him down through the friend of a friend. Though she’d tried to disguise it, she’d had a purpose beyond the what’ve-you-been-up-to-the-last-five-years chatter. She’d casually asked if he’d known a Raye Talbot on Grenada—an American med student graduating from the school and the revolution the same year he had. A student who’d gone on, like Toby, to pass the brutal Foreign Medical Grad exam, winning the coveted right to take her clinical residency in the U.S., in psychiatry.

  Jessica had made that call in the hope of gaining some insight into what kind of person Raye had been back in her student years on Grenada. Because Jessica was still trying to comprehend just who or what the woman was now. Any clue Toby might give her to the puzzle that was Dr. Raye Talbot—consulting psychiatrist to the patients and staff of RI General, would-be friend to Jessica, charmer, raconteur and attempted cat killer—any clue at all would be more than welcome.

  But Toby hadn’t provided another piece to Jessica’s puzzle—he’d swept the whole jumbled pattern right off the table. Because Toby hadn’t known a Raye Talbot at med school—he’d known Anne Talbot. “Yeah, Anne—a mousy little lab rat,” he’d recalled when she asked. “From some place way down South—accent thicker than kudzu.”

  That hadn’t sounded like the Talbot Jessica knew at all.

  “I just assumed you’d known my Dr. Talbot and would love to hear where she ended up, but apparently I got my facts muddled,” Jessica said now. It was best to drop the matter, leave Toby out of this.

  “Maybe your Talbot went to some other offshore school. Guatemala? Or Guadalajara? Sounds a lot like Grenada, after a drink or two.”

  “It does.” But Raye had said Grenada, after four drinks. Still, Jessica shouldn’t have drawn Toby into this. All the same, she couldn’t resist adding, “You said your Talbot was a blonde? But are you sure she was a natural blonde?” Raye’s hair was black and shiny as a crow’s wing, her eyes so dark there was almost no line between iris and pupil.

  “Dead sure.” Toby’s grin was too smug by half.

  Poor little lab rat. Jessica remembered why she’d never liked Toby very much.

  “But to heck with ancient history,” Toby was saying. “Have supper with me tonight? And maybe a show? Last night to take a bite of the Big Apple.” And of each other, his eyes suggested.

  Jessica smiled gently. “Thanks, Toby. But I’m afraid I have somebody waiting for me back in Providence, and I promised I’d be home before dark.” Cattoo was waiting. No doubt she’d finished her three-day supply of dry food by now and had started in on the spider plants.

  “So—“ if he was disappointed, it didn’t show “—the Ice Maiden took someone at last? Good for you. Well…” He shifted his weight, signaling an end to the encounter.

  “Ice Maiden?”

  “What we called you back on the wards. You didn’t know? We had a pool going—who’d get you by the end of the year. Nobody ever collected, so we used it to buy you that monster bouquet, remember?”

  Face scarlet, she remembered the armful of white roses. “And I was touched. You creeps!”

  “Temper, temper.” He patted her shoulder and drifted on down the hall. “It was meant as homage,” he called back, walking sideways. “To something rare and wonderful—the last virgin at Bos Char.” He blew her a kiss. “Be well, Jessica.”

  Virgin—huh! Jessica glared after him. By the time she and Toby met at Boston Charity, she’d been a divorcee for four years.

  She turned and pushed through the doors, her eyes fixed
on something far beyond the misted glass. Ice Maiden. Still, repugnant as it was, she had to admit Toby and his sexfiend pals had gotten that much right, anyway.

  Because Dr. Jessica Myles had stuck her heart in the deep freeze the year she’d turned twenty-one.

  BUT THE PAST WAS OVER…done with…gone. She swam thirty laps stroking those words out through turquoise water, leaving them frothing, then sinking in her wake… Swam another twenty laps willing her mind to believe those words—gone was gone, gone, totally and forever gone… Swam another ten laps wiping the very words from her mind, seeking first blankness, then serenity in the sterile water sliding past her skin…Swam a final ten laps wondering if she could swim just ten more…nine more…eight more laps without drowning.

  When she emerged from the pool at last she was shaking with cold and fatigue, but the fit was past. She felt clean and hollow as a shell washed up a beach. Cold. Shuddering, Jessica glanced at the door to the sauna room beyond the deep end of the pool. But when she’d tried the sauna yesterday, its steam-making device hadn’t worked well. The little redwood room had hardly warmed up at all. A long hot shower, then…

  Half an hour later, dressed again, with hair blown to smooth and shining perfection, makeup subtly applied, briefcase swinging briskly and only minutes left before the first seminar of the day, Jessica hurried back to the pool. She’d left a medical journal lying by a chaise longue before she dived in. Her eyes swept the room—no one here at all—then fixed on her magazine, halfway down the length of the pool. Heels tapping, she picked her way between puddles, leaned to collect it and—