Tangling With Ty Read Online Free Page A

working too hard? Are you getting any rest? Are you eating right? Are you ever going to call me and put my mind to rest that my baby isn’t working herself into an early grave?”
    Nicole sank to her bed and ran the towel over her short mop of hair—her idea of styling. Since she’d just called her mother last week, in fact, called every week, she refused to feel guilty.
    â€œOnce a week just isn’t enough, Nicole,” her mother said with her perfectly startling ability to read her daughter’s mind. “I want to hear you.”
    Nicole rolled her eyes but a smile escaped anyway.
    â€œHoney, listen. I’m making pot roast on Sunday. Your father called your sisters and everyone is coming—the husbands, the kids, everyone.”
    Oh, good God. Nicole had three sisters, each of whom had a husband, the requisite minivan, the house in the burbs and at least two kids. The thought of that entire noisy, happy bunch all in one place made Nicole suddenly need another hamburger.
    â€œSo, honey, you have to come. We’ll expect you by four, and let me warn you, if you don’t show, I’ll…well, I’ll call you every single day for a week.”
    As Nicole’s mother was quite possibly the bossiest, nosiest, most meddling, warm, loving person on the planet, Nicole believed her.
    But everyone under one roof? Laughing, talking,happily arguing sisters, sticky toddlers, drooling babies, stinky diapers… She felt a headache coming on already. She loved her family, she did, but sometimes she felt as if she was an alien, plopped down in the middle of a planet where she didn’t belong. They were all so…normal. Something she’d never been. Despite her genius IQ, she couldn’t deal with people outside of medicine. It was so difficult for her to get out of her own head, she rarely knew what to say to people and some of the basic niceties escaped her. That her family loved her anyway, even though she was intensely introverted, was a strange and odd miracle she tried not to think about too often.
    â€œSo, we’ll see you Sunday,” her mom said as if it’d been decided. “It’ll be fun to be all together.”
    Fun wasn’t quite the word Nicole would have come up with. Maybe she’d have work. Yeah, that was it, she could add a shift and—
    â€œLove you, baby.”
    Ah, hell. Sunday it was.
    Still naked, she plopped on the bed. It only took two pillows over her head and approximately twenty seconds for sleep to conquer her the same way she’d conquered her world.
    She dreamed. She would have thought she’d be haunted by the blood of her second surgery that day. A patient had burst an artery and by the time she’dgotten everything under control she’d been standing in a sea of red.
    But blessedly she’d left that behind at the hospital. Instead, in dreamland, she was two years old again, and memorizing the book of presidents her parents had kept on the coffee table. For fun, she’d recite them backwards to her hotshot, know-it-all sisters Annie and Emma.
    It had been their first inkling that Nicole was going to be different.
    The dream shifted and she was six, helping Emma with her seventh-grade algebra.
    At twelve, she’d helped Annie with her PSAT testing. A genius, were the whispers around her. Off-the-scale IQ, they said. A prodigy.
    At twelve, Nicole should have been into lip gloss, pop bands and boys. Instead she’d been fascinated by science. She operated on frogs. She dissected bugs.
    Yet kids her own age remained a mystery to her, a complete mystery.
    And now that she was grown up, she was still different. She should have learned to deal with others by now. Learned to be a social creature, well rounded and defined.
    But the reality was that she’d rarely dated and had no idea how to do anything but heal. It was what she was. Who she was. A doctor.
    Nothing else.
    So why did the next dream