Heartwishes (Edilean 5)

“You mean on a date?”

“Yeah. Dinner and a movie. Hey! I know. Mike and Sara invited me to their barbecue. I’ll ask Gemma if she’d like to go with me. I bet she’ll love Merlin’s Farm. She and Sara can talk about architecture until the sun comes up.”

Colin was staring at him. “Gemma was injured. I don’t know if she’s ready to go—”

“I’m her doctor. Of course she can go.”

“Go where?” Gemma asked from the doorway.

Tristan stepped forward. “I have been invited to a barbecue in a couple of weeks and I wondered if you’d like to go with me.”

Gemma was pleased with the invitation. She needed to meet more people in Edilean besides the Fraziers. As it was, she’d already spent too much time with Colin.

“I’d love to go,” she said, smiling at him.

8

GEMMA AND COLIN were in his Jeep and driving back to the Frazier house.

“Gemma,” Colin began, “I’m really sorry that you were hurt. I shouldn’t have involved you in my job.”

“It was one of the most exciting moments of my life,” she said.

“Yeah? Are you just being nice?”

“No, really. I spend most of my life dealing with books and papers, so being able to help rescue a child was great.”

“What about your athletic students?” She was covered up again, but he remembered the shape of her. “Didn’t they help you do more than just read?”

Gemma smiled in memory. “They changed my life in a big way.” She glanced at Colin, and he gave a nod to encourage her to continue. “When I started tutoring, the boys kept falling asleep in my sessions and I was really annoyed. I worked hard to make the lessons interesting, but they were ignoring me. One day I touched one of the sleeping football players on the shoulder and he . . .” She shook her head. “He grabbed me about the waist, picked me up, and started running. He said he’d been dreaming and thought I was a football.”

Colin didn’t laugh. “You could have been hurt.”

“If we’d been alone I might have been. But in the first month of tutoring one of the guys made a pass at me, so I never again had one boy at a time. On the day the guy grabbed me, there were four other boys there, and the others rescued me before anything bad happened. I’m still glad the kid wasn’t a shot-putter and didn’t try to throw me over a pole.”

Colin was frowning. “Did you do something to prevent things like that from happening again?” His tone and formality were that of a law enforcement officer.

“Yes, I did. The truth is, it all scared me.”

“Rightfully so.”

“But when I told the guys I’d have to report the incident, they said it looked like I could teach, but I couldn’t learn. I had no idea what they were talking about.”

“The fatigue that comes from training for a sport,” Colin said softly.

“You’re right. One of the boys angrily said that if I did what they did, I wouldn’t be able to stay awake to study either.”

As Colin pulled into the driveway of his parents’ house, he was listening intently to her. “What did you do?”

“I couldn’t resist a challenge like that one. I wanted to prove them wrong.” She laughed. “And I was sure I’d succeed. I was young, healthy, and I kept in shape by rushing around the campus while carrying a heavy load of books. And I’ve never smoked and I rarely drink.”

Colin was smiling. “How long did you last?”

“Three days. They had me doing cardio, weights, stretching, then I had to repeat it all again. And you know what? They were right. I was too tired to think, much less to learn anything. At the end of the week, I sat down with the original boys and had a serious talk with them. I patiently explained that while their job was athletic, mine was cerebral, so I couldn’t continue with their very strenuous program.”

“And how did that work out?” He was grinning.

Gemma laughed. “They listened to me without saying a single word, then they left and I didn’t see them for four whole days. They didn’t show up for their sessions. When they did return, they were different. There was no more joking and, worse, no one tried to learn anything. I was close to panic because if they failed, I’d lose my job—and it paid twice as much as any I’d had before. One night it hit me that I’d pretty much told the boys that I was smart while they were dumb. It was okay for them to be too tired to think, but I, Gemma Ranford, the Ph.D. candidate, had to have a clear mind.”