Let Me Call You Sweetheart

5

You’ve changed my life, Dr. Smith… That was what Barbara Tompkins had said to him as she left his office earlier today. And he knew it was true. He had changed her and, in the process, her life. From a plain, almost mousy woman who looked older than her twenty-six years, he’d transformed her into a young beauty. More than a beauty, actually. Now she had spirit. She wasn’t the same insecure woman who had come to him a year ago.

At the time she had been working in a small public relations firm in Albany. “I saw what you did for one of our clients,” she had said when she came into his office that first day. “I just inherited some money from my aunt. Can you make me pretty?”

He had done more than that-he had transformed her. He had made her beautiful. Now Barbara was working in Manhattan at a large, prestigious P.R. firm. She had always had brains, but combining those brains with that special kind of beauty had truly changed her life.

Dr. Smith saw his last patient for the day at six-thirty. Then he walked the three blocks down Fifth Avenue to his converted carriage house in Washington Mews.

It was his habit each day to go home, relax over a bourbon and soda while watching the evening news and then decide where he wanted to dine. He lived alone and almost never ate in.

Tonight an unaccustomed restlessness overcame him. Of all the women, Barbara Tompkins was the one most like her. Just seeing her was an emotional, almost cathartic experience. He had overheard Barbara chatting with Mrs. Carpenter, telling her that she was taking a client to dinner that night in the Oak Room at the Plaza Hotel.

Almost reluctantly he got up. What would happen next was inevitable. He would go to the Oak Bar, look into the Oak Room restaurant, see if there was a small table from which he could observe Barbara while he dined. With any luck she wouldn’t be aware of him. But even if she was, even if she saw him, he would merely wave. She had no reason to think that he was following her.