The Heart of the Matter (2 page)

But in view of how she felt about him and his column, his presumption annoyed her. He stood as she walked into the room, and she could see despite the stiffly courteous smile that he wanted to be here even less than she did. Well, that was fine, too. She had an early class this evening, so it would suit her to have this over quickly.

She put her box down on the table in front of the chair closest to him and extended her hand.

“Laura Price,” she said. “I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Warfield.”

And it was then, as his large, warm hand closed around hers and her eyes made contact with his, that she lost the casual neutrality with which she’d approached this appointment. For an instant, a sudden electric awareness charged all her sensory receptors and she felt a kind of enlargement of sound and picture—almost as though she were a video monitor and someone had fine-tuned her.

Jason Warfield’s face filled her viewing screen. It was strong and angular, the line of his brow, his cheekbones and his chin sharply defined and perfectly aligned. His eyes under thick dark brows were also dark and reflected both a bristling energy and a confident calm. She wondered idly how those two qualities could live in harmony.

His nose was straight and strong, and his mouth. She lost her ability to analyze its construction when he smiled suddenly, and she felt charm and a forceful kind of warmth rush at her. His teeth were square and very white.

“You’re fibbing, Ms. Price,” he accused with a soft laugh. “Barry tells me you don’t like me at all.”

Laura opened her mouth in instinctive denial, then decided
truth was always the better policy—and that Barry was ripe for retribution.

“Okay, I don’t like your column,” she admitted candidly, “but we’ve never met before so I can’t very well dislike
you,
can I? Please sit down.”

She pulled her open lab coat around herself in a gesture even she recognized as significant body language and took her chair.

He followed, leaning easily toward her on arms folded on the table. “My column is me,” he said. “You dislike one, you probably dislike the other.”

His full attention and the inclination of his body toward hers were simply behaviors of a confident male—she knew that. But they tended to exaggerate the sense of awareness that had already unsettled her. So she tried to turn the tables on him.

She leaned toward him and asked with concern, “Is it important to you that everyone like you, Mr. Warfield?”

“Yes.” He returned her grave expression, though she saw lively humor behind it. “Not because I’m a case of narcissistic arrested development, but because every person who likes me means another reader. I have three boys to put through college.”

All right. So making him uncomfortable would take too much time and effort. She decided to get to the matter at hand.

She opened a folder that contained the results of his test, glanced over it quickly, then gave him another grave look. “Then you should consider those three boys, Mr. Warfield, and listen to me when I tell you that you have to change your habits if you want to remain healthy and see them through school.”

Laura tried not to betray satisfaction when she saw the
charming swagger in his manner surrender to sudden, serious attention.

Laura Price had appeared to be everything Jason disliked in women—until that moment when she mentioned his children.

She was average in height, slender, though nicely bosomy, but she put distance between herself and him. He appreciated that there were people who needed space, but this was more than that. This was a chilly ice wall she’d raised between them the moment she’d walked into the room.

He didn’t trust people—men
or
women—who held themselves apart from others. Life was all about connecting and holding on. No one was above the fray.

With that wild, curly red hair, Laura Price should be a fighter—a veritable warrior. And maybe she was, but the impression she gave was that of an Olympian goddess who’d simply decided to watch everyone else battle and see how it all turned out.

Until she’d mentioned his children. Then he’d caught a glimpse of something in her gray-green eyes that said feeling was there. It just didn’t seem to be able to find its way out.

He wondered why that was.

But she was telling him that his health was an issue at this point in time, and if he was going to continue to deal with the stress of raising three boys and meeting deadlines three times a week, he’d better pay attention.

So he did.

She explained about good and bad cholesterol, and the report had shown how he had too much of the bad and not enough of the good. She maintained that diet and exercise could help him reverse the numbers.

She handed him a thin book titled
Meal Plan,
and he felt himself immediately tense.

She frowned at him. “Don’t think of it as a diet,” she said firmly, “and you won’t resent it. Its purpose isn’t to deprive you of foods you like, but to find the ones you like that are healthy for you and to encourage you to eat more of those, so that occasionally you can treat yourself to treats that aren’t as nutritionally sound.”

She explained the principle of food exchanges. “And sometimes,” she said, “we’ve given certain foods a designation that’s technically right, but when you consider their nutritional content, it isn’t really accurate. Peas, for example.”

She stood and delved into the box she’d placed on the table. She dropped a dozen or so pieces of colorful rubber onto the table top. Jason studied them in perplexity. Then she pushed the box aside and sat down again, turning all the pieces right side up. He finally recognized them as replicas of foods.

And as often happened to him when he least expected it, his sense of humor was tweaked into operation. He leaned his elbow on the table and rested his forefinger across his lips to prevent the ready laughter from spilling forth.

“Peas are classified as a vegetable,” Laura Price said as her fingers nimbly moved rubber food around the table. He saw a T-bone steak, a pork chop, a hamburger patty, a baked potato, a dish of rice, piles of sliced carrots, broccoli, cauliflower and a particularly lifelike mound of peas that she now held toward him on the palm of her hand. He noticed that one little pea on the top teetered, as though in danger of falling. Except that it couldn’t, of course, because it was molded all in one piece.

He wondered at the inanity of artfully created piles of rubber peas.

The laugh was now lodged in his throat and cutting off his air. He pressed his finger to his lips with desperation.

“But they’re actually a starch, so when you plan a menu that already contains a starch, like potatoes or rice—” she moved those rubber items in front of him “—remember that you might want to have another kind of vegetable.” She moved the carrots and cauliflower around like chess pieces.

She looked up to offer him a tentative smile. “Understand?”

Her expression changed instantly, and he knew she’d read the laughter in his eyes. He regretted that because he’d watched her at work, and though he’d been almost paralyzed by his own effort to withhold laughter, he’d noticed that she was enthused and animated about her subject.

He’d been in the business long enough to know there was a clear difference between laughing about something and laughing at someone. He swallowed the paroxysm threatening to erupt and pulled the pork chop, the mound of peas and the pile of carrots toward him.

“Right. I’ve got it,” he said, lining them up between Laura Price and himself. “If you have peas, they count as a starch and you need another vegetable. They’re like potatoes or rice.” He pushed that menu plan away and pulled the baked potato and the T-bone toward him and retrieved the carrots.

He looked up for her approval.

She stiffly withheld it, hurt feelings clear in her eyes.

Guilt assaulted him. Preparing to admit it meant letting his guard down, and that, unfortunately, also allowed the laughter to escape.

She stood and tossed the rubber food into her box. “I’m glad you understand, but I’m sorry you find it funny, Mr. Warfield. A healthy diet could mean that you’ll get to see your grandchildren through college. But if you ignore my advice.” Her quick glance at him suggested dire consequences. “Well, if you don’t believe me, maybe you should talk to Barry about it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, retrieving the rubber mound of peas when she dropped it on the floor. He withheld it when she reached for it. “I didn’t mean to insult you or your advice…It’s just that the rubber food—” He choked a little over the admission, desperately withholding a full guffaw. “I’m sorry, but it strikes me as really funny. I can’t help it. Sometimes that’s the way things hit me. What seems perfectly ordinary to someone else, conjures up weird images to me and I…laugh.”

She didn’t seem to understand. And suddenly it wasn’t funny anymore. Even to him.

“Come on, Ms. Price,” he cajoled. “You’ve got to admit that rubber food is funny. Particularly to a man who’s been thinking that rubber food—literally—is probably what he’ll be eating for the rest of his life if he follows this.” He pointed to the book she’d given him.

She sighed as though to maintain her patience, and with one hand atop the box and the other at her hip, she looked him in the eye. The ice wall had melted. Her hot anger was aimed directly at him.

“I understand, Mr. Warfield,” she said, “that you find many things funny that just aren’t amusing to me, and that’s fine. I don’t understand it, but apparently you have a large readership that does. What concerns me is that one day three young boys could be fatherless because you laugh at all the discoveries recently made in nutrition. The simple truth is that clogged pipes can’t run water, and the
same is true in your body. Clogged arteries can’t deliver blood. There’s a picture in the book I gave you of arteries lined with cholesterol. Study it. Maybe it’ll change your attitude.”

She snatched the box off the table and started for the door.

He stopped her with a hand on her arm. “Ms. Price…” She turned, as though prepared to snarl at him, but she drew a breath instead, and with that seemed to renew her professional attitude. “Yes?” she asked stiffly.

“What if I have…questions?” He didn’t know why he was stalling her departure. Guilt, he guessed. She’d been so enthused, then so deflated over his amusement.

“My office hours are in the back of the book,” she replied. “I’ll be happy to answer your questions—if they’re serious.”

He folded his arms and frowned at her. “Why does everything have to be serious?” he asked. “You know, life has its plumbing, too. And the simple truth is,” he said, paraphrasing her, “that happiness can’t run through hearts clogged with seriousness.”

She looked first startled, then concerned, then she put up the ice wall again. “We were talking about you, Mr. Warfield.”

“We were,” he agreed. “But with all due respect, now I’m talking about you, Ms. Price. I do have to develop better eating habits. But I think you need to develop a sense of humor. Don’t I recall a study that made the front page recently about laughter lengthening life?”

She smiled blandly at him. “Well, with all the things you find amusing, Mr. Warfield, if you change your eating habits, you should live to be one hundred and ninety-two. Goodbye.”

Then she and her rubber food were gone.

Aaagh! I cannot describe the pain caused by stomach crunches on the body of a once-a-week warrior approaching middle age. Or the humiliation of lying near death on an exercise mat while women half your size or half again your age are still going strong.

—“Warfield’s Battles”

“
W
hat do you mean, you can’t go?” Jason demanded of Barry as he cradled the cordless phone on his shoulder while stuffing a towel into his gym bag. “You’ve been going to this aerobics class faithfully, three nights a week, for the last two years. The one night I decide to go with you, you’re not going?” An ad for the class had been tucked into the back of his
Meal Plan
book, and it had seemed doable when he’d thought Barry would accompany him.

“Look,” Barry said, “I apologize all to hell, but we’ve got a broken hip on the way from the convalescent center. I don’t grump at you when the muse has fled and you miss basketball to stay home and work.”

“That’s because I never do that.”

“Yeah, well if you ever did, I wouldn’t chew you out. Go without me. You’ll like it, I promise you.”

“It’ll be all women, won’t it?”

“No…” The hesitation and all it meant was audible.

“Barry.”

“All right, yes. It probably will. But are you going to wimp out and let that stop you? Women are great. What are you, the Citadel? Do we have to call in the Supreme Court to help you learn to accept them in your life?”

Jason zipped his bag closed with a decisive yank. “Fine. Shut up and go do your thing.”

“Look, Jase,” Barry said reasonably, “you’ve made a decision to change your bad habits and develop good ones. Go to the class. It’s a little hard at first, but you’ll get the hang of it, then you’ll really like it. And the ladies are great. They tend to pamper guys who come. And except for our basketball games, or running, there’s no other exercise program in town.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Jason had already decided he was going. He’d made the commitment to change, and he was a man of his word. Well, at least until it started to hurt. “I’m going just to prove to you when you do get back to it that I’ll have all the ladies’ attention and they won’t even notice you.”

Barry made a scornful sound. “Yeah, right. You forget that I’m a doctor. They all want me for my six-figure income.”

“I have a six-figure income.”

“But I can get them free health insurance.”

“I bow to your superior appeal.”

Barry laughed. “I’ll come over for breakfast tomorrow and you can tell me how it went.”

“Great. You bring the doughnuts.”

“Ah…Jase?”

“Oh, right.” Jason expelled a breath as he remembered that doughnuts and double mochas for breakfast had now
been replaced by egg substitute, whole wheat toast and fruit. “Mrs. Fregoza will be here. I’ll ask her to cook. See you.”

The boys were shooting hoops in the driveway when Jason let himself out the door. They grouped around him in concern.

“You sure this is a good idea?” Eric asked. He had the basketball in the crook of his arm. “What if you faint again?”

“He didn’t
faint,”
Adam corrected him, taking exception to the word. “Girls faint. He…what did you do, Dad?”

“I think I tripped and hit my head. Your uncle Barry maintains that I collapsed. But I’m fine, and according to Ms. Price, more regular exercise is going to be good for me. So, you remember the rules?” He looked from face to face.

“Adam’s in charge,” Matt replied. “We don’t leave the house, and you’ll be back in an hour and a half. And if we need you, the church hall where the class is is right downtown, across from the post office. The number’s on the ‘fridgerator.”

“Good.” Jason ruffled Matt’s hair and high-fived Adam and Eric. “And stay out of my sugar-free Popsicles. It’s the only pleasure I have left”

“Got your towel?” Eric asked.

“Yep.”

Adam studied him doubtfully. “And your water bottle?”

“Yep.” He grinned and waved as he headed down the walk, thinking he’d liked it better when the boys had considered him invincible. It made him feel that he’d somehow failed them when he saw worry for him in their eyes.

“Aren’t you taking the car?” Adam called after Jason when he started on foot down the street.

“I’m walking to warm up,” he called back.

Jason arrived at the hall of the Community Fellowship Church in a very light sweat and feeling good. Loud music blared from the open doors, and as he drew closer, he heard the high-pitched sound of female conversation.

From the doorway he saw about a dozen women in all shapes and sizes. There were young women, middle-aged women and a gray-haired woman in a pink leotard and tights who had a figure that could still grace the centerfold of
Playboy.
She wore a pink headband, soft wrist weights, and as he watched, she stretched one leg back behind her and leaned forward on the other bent knee. He winced just watching her.

There were women in sweats, in tights and T-shirts, and in coordinated outfits like the white-haired woman wore.

Then one woman noticed him standing in the doorway and pointed in his direction, and conversation stopped as the women turned in a body to stare at him. As loud music his sons would probably recognize thrummed from the tape player on the stage, he began to wonder why he’d thought this was a good idea.

Because it meant his health, he remembered, and renewed confidence in him from his boys.

He took a step into the room, smiled at the ladies and was about to head for the other side of the room when a figure in black tights and a black-and-yellow leotard emerged from the curtains onstage. She dropped a stack of tapes and a towel near the tape player, then leapt off the stage and ran at an easy lope toward the back of the hall.

Jason recognized Laura Price, looking like some very sophisticated and erotic little bumblebee. The body that
had been concealed under a lab coat three days ago at the clinic was now as clearly revealed as though she were naked.

Full breasts moved under the short-sleeved leotard, the jut of ribs was defined above a very narrow waist. A flat stomach between hipbones led his eye to long, slender thighs, lightly muscled calves and ankle socks in big-soled shoes. Her wild hair was tied back in a high ponytail. When she turned, the yellow stripes rounded over a tight derriere.

He felt another spell of light-headedness coming on.

She stopped halfway toward the doors when she spotted him and changed direction. “Mr. Warfield,” she said in obvious surprise. “Are you…joining us?”

He looked up at the knot of ladies watching him with smiling interest. Then he saw the white-haired lady standing on one foot and bending her other leg behind her until her foot touched the back of her head, and he winced again.

“If you don’t think I’ll slow you down too much,” he said.

She followed the line of his gaze and laughed. “Don’t mind Martie. She was a dancer in her youth and comes to classes to stay limber. None of us tries to keep up with her.” She looked around. “Didn’t Barry come with you?”

He shook his head. “His call night’s been changed and he had a broken hip coming in.”

“Well, I’m glad you decided to come on your own. I know it’s probably a little uncomfortable for you with no other men in the class, but please don’t feel selfconscious. No one is here to impress anyone, just to get healthy. Start slowly, do what you can, and I always demonstrate the lighter side of our moves, so go with what
works for you.” She caught his arm and pulled him toward a table set up near the doors. “Come on. Dixie will register you while I get us ready to start.”

Jason was turned over to a bubbly young woman in gray tights and a black-and-white T-shirt that read Dixie’s Day Care on it. While he filled out a form and checked off whether he had or didn’t have a long list of illnesses, she told him she exercised to relieve stress. “Dealing with ten to fifteen kids every day can turn your mind to broth and your body to sausage,” she said.

The food references made him salivate.

When he’d finished the forms and paid the small fee, Dixie introduced him to Philly. She was a plump middle-aged woman in baggy sweat bottoms and a T-shirt. She announced that her claim to fame was that she always occupied the back row.

“Everyone else moves too fast for me,” she said, indicating the three rows of women ahead of them, “so I stay in the back and do my own thing. The back’s a good place to start. I’ll keep you from getting hurt.”

Jason nodded a thank-you as a slow, brassy tune began and Laura Price started to warm up her class.

They did neck rotations, slow, easy stretches of arms and legs, easy bends and twists, then, as the music changed every seven or eight minutes to something just a little faster and a little more intense than the tune before, the warm-up gradually turned into the beginning stages of aerobic exercise.

Jason was surprised to find himself enjoying it. Philly warned him of what was coming next, helped him when the steps became tricky and saved him from being trampled when a forward march he was just getting into made an abrupt turn and he was suddenly confronted with a
dozen women just gaining their stride running toward him.

With Philly pulling on him, he backpedaled dramatically, causing an outburst of smiles and laughter before the cheerful army made another turn and headed back toward the stage.

When that number was finished, Laura, still running in place, ponytail bobbing, called for everyone to take their pulse.

Jason put a thumb to his wrist.

Laura leapt off the stage and came toward him while the other ladies toweled off, drank water or stood with their fingertips to their necks, watching the big clock over the stage.

“Never take your pulse with your thumb.” Laura surprised and momentarily befuddled him by putting her fingertips to the side of his neck just under his chin. Her green eyes looked past him to the clock, her complete attention riveted on it.

He stayed absolutely still, sure his pulse must sound like someone on amphetamines. He could feel every small pad of every fingertip touching the sensitive skin at his throat. He couldn’t take his eyes off her eyes.

Then she dropped her hand abruptly and swung a diagnostic gaze to him. He felt it like a touch, as though it soothed all the hardworking processes in his body. “Your thumb has its own pulse, so it confuses your reading. You’re a little fast but not too bad. How do you feel?”

“Great,” he said.

“Good. Test yourself once in a while as we go through the heavy-duty stuff. Your heart rate shouldn’t exceed about one hundred and twenty beats per minute. So every once in a while, check the clock for fifteen seconds and
make sure you’re not over thirty beats. Get it? A quarter of a minute, a quarter of your rate.”

He nodded.

“If you get higher than that, slow to a walk, or you can even stop if you get uncomfortable.” She turned to Philly. “You keeping an eye on him, Philly?”

Philly grinned. “Already saved his life once. I think I might even take him home with me. Bob’s out fishing.” She turned a wicked grin on Jason. “Would you like that, Mr. Warfield?”

“Jason,” he said. “Do you make brownies?”

She patted the roundness under her baggy sweats. “How do you think I got this figure?”

“Then, I’m yours.”

Laura ran back to the stage, levered herself up with agile ease, then popped in another tape.

Jason lost control of the situation at that point. For the next twenty minutes he felt as though he were on one of those iron-man weekends for executives who want to learn the limits of their endurance.

He learned that he’d met his somewhere at the end of the warm-up. He even slowed down to a march step, walking his way through the moves with Philly while everyone else continued to jump, bounce, leap and run like some well-oiled set of pistons, beautifully synchronized, moving flawlessly in their appointed up-and-down rush to the unrelenting music.

He was drained and renewing unwelcome memories of the first weeks of boot camp when the music stopped.

He turned to Philly. “Is it…over?” he gasped hopefully.

She patted his arm consolingly. “Now we’re going to the mat.”

He raised an eyebrow in perplexity. He was sure it was
the only part of him he’d be able to raise for the next few weeks. “But I was beaten to the mat twenty minutes ago.”

She laughed and drew him toward the side of the room where all the other women had gone to retrieve exercise mats from a tall green stack.

“Now we do floor exercises and cool-down,” Philly said. “You’ll like this part.”

“You didn’t bring any of those brownies with you, did you?”

She took a mat for herself and handed him one with a sunny smile. “You’re so funny. No wonder you get paid for it. Come on. You’ll want to drink a little water before we get going again.”

Ten minutes later, in the middle of thirty crunches, he thought that no amount of water—or even brownies—would have seen him through the torture Laura inflicted upon her class now.

Only, he seemed to be the only one in pain. There was lots of good-natured groaning, but when Laura called for thirty leg lifts, they gave them to her. And when she told them to turn over for thirty on the other side, they groaned again, but did it.

And through it all, she lay on a mat on the stage, leading the routines with perfect form and seemingly limitless endurance. Her cheeks were pink with the glow of exertion, and she mopped her face occasionally with a hand towel on her mat, but her moves were tireless.

While she executed perfect push-ups, he followed, determined to do as many as she could of this one exercise with which he was familiar and at which a man, with superior upper body strength, should excel.

But she, her body perfectly aligned, pushed up and
down as though she were motorized, while he did one to her two, his muscles burning and screaming with pain.

He finally slumped to the mat while she continued to count. Then he watched in a haze of exhaustion as she pushed herself up, then eased herself down, and suddenly his mind skewed what he saw and he imagined her in the act of loving a man—him—with that same inexhaustible enthusiasm.