A DOCTOR’S VOW (SE #1293)

by Christine Rimmer,

THEIR LITTLE PRINCESS (SE #1298)

by Susan Mallery,

DR. MOM AND THE MILLIONAIRE (SE #1304)

by Christine Flynn,

“It’s not that you can’t,” Chase said. “It’s that you don’t want to.”

She hadn’t expected him to force her hand. “Well,” she started, “you’re my patient. It wouldn’t be professional.”

“So I’m your patient. I’m also the brother of friends of yours. There’s nothing unprofessional about you staying at my house. I won’t even be there,” he argued.

Eyeing her tightly crossed arms, he reached toward her and slipped his fingers around her exposed wrist. As he did, his knuckles brushed the soft undercurve of her breast. At the intimate contact, their eyes locked, something electric happening between them. Her breath hitched.

No, he wouldn’t be there, but how she wished he would be.…

Dear Reader,

Happy 20th Anniversary, Silhouette! And Happy Valentine’s Day to all! There are so many ways to celebrate…starting with six spectacular novels this month from Special Edition.

Reader favorite Joan Elliott Pickart concludes Silhouette’s exciting cross-line continuity ROYALLY WED with Man…Mercenary…Monarch, in which a beautiful woman challenges a long-lost prince to give up his loner ways.

In Dr. Mom and the Millionaire, Christine Flynn’s latest contribution to the popular series PRESCRIPTION: MARRIAGE, a marriage-shy tycoon suddenly experiences a sizzling attraction—to his gorgeous doctor! And don’t miss the next SO MANY BABIES—in Who’s That Baby? by Diana Whitney, an infant gir1 is left on a Native American attorney’s doorstep, and he turns to a lovely pediatrician for help.…

Next is Lois Faye Dyer’s riveting Cattleman’s Courtship, in which a brooding, hard-hearted rancher is undeniably drawn to a chaste, sophisticated lady. And in Sharon De Vita’s provocative family saga, THE BLACKWELL BROTHERS, tempers—and passions—flare when a handsome Apache man offers The Marriage Basket to a captivating city gal.

Finally, you’ll be swept up in the drama of Trisha Alexander’s Falling for an Older Man, another tale in the CALLAHANS & KIN series, when an unexpected night of passion leaves Sheila Callahan with a nine-month secret.

So, curl up with a Special Edition novel and celebrate this Valentine’s Day with thoughts of love and happy dreams of forever!

Happy reading,

Karen Taylor Richman,

Snior Editor

Dr. Mom and the Millionaire
Christine Flynn

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my editor, Debra Robertson, with thanks for her insight and patience

Books by Christine Flynn

Silhouette Special Edition

Remember the Dreams #254

Silence the Shadows #465

Renegade #566

Walk upon the Wind #612

Out of the Mist #657

The Healing Touch #693

Beyond the Night #747

Luke’s Child #788

Lonely Knight #826

Daughter of the Bride #889

When Morning Comes #922

Jake’s Mountain #945

A Father’s Wish #962

*Logan’s Bride #995

*The Rebel’s Bride #1034

*The Black Sheep’s Bride #1053

Her Child’s Father #1151

Hannah and the Hellion #1184

From House Calls to Husband #1203

*Finally His Bride #1240

The Home Love Built #1275

Dr. Mom and the Millionaire #1304

Silhouette Desire

When Snow Meets Fire #254

The Myth and the Magic #296

A Place To Belong #352

Meet Me at Midnight #377

Silhouette Romance

Stolen Promise #435

Courtney’s Conspiracy #623

Silhouette Intimate Moments

Daughter of the Dawn #537

Silhouette Books

36 Hours

Father and Child Reunion

CHRISTINE FLYNN

admits to being interested in just about everything, which is why she considers herself fortunate to have turned her interest in writing into a career. She feels that a writer gets to explore it all and, to her, exploring relationships—especially the intense, bittersweet or even lighthearted relationships between men and women—is fascinating.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Epilogue

Chapter One

Dr. Alexandra Larson had a fantasy. It was decidedly tame, as fantasies went, but she’d never regarded herself as terribly creative or adventurous. She didn’t even have what she considered any real sense of style. She just played it safe. She wore her dark hair short, her make-up soft and her clothes either simply tailored or loose, depending on her mood or what was handy. And she always shied away from the extravagant, the outrageous or the truly indulgent.

She considered her little daydream the ultimate indulgence.

In it, she was alone. In a hot bath. The kind of bath a woman had to carefully ease into while aromatic steam fogged the room, beaded on her chest and filled her lungs. The kind where skin pinked and knotted muscles relaxed in the liquid heat, and the mind emptied of everything but the knowledge that all she had to do was…soak.

She savored that image, lingered over the details, letting her mind drift to it as she ran between surgery, hospital rounds, clinic appointments, day care and, occasionally, the vet.

She’d been caught indulging in it when her pager had gone off as she’d pulled into her driveway forty minutes ago. It was her thirty-second birthday. She should have been able to toy with the thoughts a little longer. Instead, she was scrubbing in for surgery with barrel-chested Ian Whitfield, one of the trauma doctors from emergency, and the fantasy of aromatic steam had given way to the reality of antibacterial scrub.

“What can you tell me?” she asked, working lather from her fingertips to beyond her elbows. “I was only told that we have a thirty-four-year-old male with a compound femur. Are we dealing with anything else?”

“CT shows no concussion or other internal injuries. The compound break in the left leg is the worst of it. That’s why I asked for the orthopedic surgeon on call.”

Between the green cap covering the man’s receding hair-line and the band of white mask obliterating the bottom half of his ruddy face, only his bespectacled eyes were visible. They narrowed, light bouncing off his lenses, as he shook his head. “That’s one lucky man in there. According to the paramedics, a truck blew a light and nailed him full on the driver’s door.”

“He was driving?”

“Apparently.”

That meant the victim had borne the brunt of the impact. Alex stored that detail as she reached for a brush to work under her short, unpolished nails. The force of that impact also explained how such a strong bone had penetrated the lower thigh.

She’d already seen her patient’s X-rays. The femur, the long bone of his upper leg, had fractured in two places. The distal break, the one closest to the knee, had also splintered into a jagged spike.

The good news was that she’d seen far worse. The bad news was that this sort of break often led to nasty complications.

“Was anyone able to get a medical history from him?” she asked.

“They had him full of morphine when they brought him in, but we got enough to determine that he’s never had any medical problems. Except for his injuries, he appears to be in excellent shape.”

“Excellent is an understatement.” A gowned and masked surgical nurse with an awestruck look in her heavily made-up eyes rustled through the bright, white-tiled room in her paper booties. “That has to be the most gorgeous hunk of muscle and testosterone to ever grace an operating table. No man that rich should look that good.”

Alex glanced up. As a surgeon, the emergency patient’s identity made no difference to her. She helped where she could, in and out of the operating room, and this man definitely needed her assistance. But the female part of her—the part she tended to neglect the most—was suddenly curious to know who she was about to put back together.

The X-rays had been labeled C. Harrington. Beyond that, all that had registered was the damage done to an otherwise impressively healthy bone.

Rita Sanchez, one of Alex’s favorite scrub nurses, approached the door of the surgical suite. “He may be gorgeous, Michelle,” she conceded, her tone disapproving, “but he’ll walk over anyone to get what he wants. That’s what I read in the papers, anyway.” Her back to the door to push it open, her hands in the air to keep them sterile, she paused. “I wonder what he’s doing in Honeygrove.”

“There can only be one reason Chase Harrington would be here.” Pushing forward on the horseshoe-shaped knee handle to turn off the water, Whitfield snagged a sterile towel. “The man lives, eats and breathes mergers and takeovers. We’ve had a couple of manufacturing facilities take off here in the last couple of years. I’ll bet my golf clubs he’s after one of them. I just wish I knew which one it was,” he muttered. “The stock is bound to go up.”

“What about you, Doctor?” the matronly nurse asked Alex. “Why do you think he’s here?”

“I haven’t a clue.” Alex flashed her a smile, taking a towel herself. “I really don’t know that much about him.”

All she did know was that Chase Harrington was one of those people whose name popped up on newscasts and in print because what he did and what he owned set him apart from the masses. As she understood it, the man’s lust for multi-million-dollar mergers and trades was as legendary as his drive, his ambition and his tendency to run over anyone who stood in his way. Since his image routinely graced the covers of Time and Newsweek in waiting and exam rooms, she even knew what he looked like. She wouldn’t go quite as far as the early-twenty-something Michelle had in her sighing description of the man, but he was rather attractive—if one was drawn to the lean, chiseled type.

As for the body the impressionable nurse had described, when Alex, gowned and gloved, backed through the door of the surgical suite, all she could tell was that it was…long.

The familiar beep of the heart monitor underscored the quiet murmur of conversation as she approached the blue-draped form on the operating table. The trauma doctor and the anesthesiologist hovered at the head. At the other end, the surgical nurses and another assistant were setting up stainless-steel trays of barbaric-looking instruments that appeared more suitable for torture than healing.

The only exposed parts of the patient were the facial laceration Whitfield had already starting suturing and the thigh she would repair.

The thigh was what had her attention.

It was a mess.

“Ouch,” she whispered, and reached for the large plastic bottle of clear antibiotic wash Rita had anticipated she would want.

“Was he alone?” she heard Michelle ask.

Rita clamped a gauze pad with a hemostat, holding it ready. “You mean, was there a woman with him?”

“This suture’s too big.” Metal ticked softly against metal when the curved needle Whitfield tossed landed on a tray. “I need a one-point-three.”

Michelle was the float nurse, the one who moved about the room taking supplies and materials to and from the team members at the table. “I’m just curious,” she defended on her way to the supply cabinet a few paces away. “If he’s alone, he might appreciate a little extra TLC when he wakes up.”

“I’d give up that idea right now,” Alex’s assistant chided. “I’m sure he has someone waiting to give him all the TLC he needs. The man dates models.”

Paper crackled as Michelle peeled a small packet open and held it out. “Maybe so. But no one’s been able to get him near an altar yet. Maybe he’s tired of male-fantasy quality women and rich society types.”

The bushy-browed anesthesiologist snorted. “I doubt it.”

Whitfield held up the fine-threaded and curved suture, eyed it, and went back to work. “I don’t think he spends as much time running around as the press says he does. I read an article in Forbes that said he puts in sixteen-hour days. His latest thing is the high-tech market. And sailing,” he added, as he methodically stitched. “It’s his passion. That same article said he’s putting together a team to race in the next America’s Cup.”

Checking his patient’s vital signs on the monitors, the anesthesiologist tweaked the flow of gas keeping the man under discussion…under. “I thought it was rock climbing he was into. Didn’t he climb Mt. McKinley last year?”

“I’d heard that, too.” Reverence entered Whitfield’s voice. “The man never slows down. I don’t know which I envy more. His investment portfolio or his stamina. I hiked the Grand Canyon a few years ago, but I can’t imagine climbing a mountain.”

Michelle sighed. “I wonder what he’d planned to do next.”

“I hope it wasn’t anything he had his heart set on,” Alex murmured. “The only thing this guy’s going to be climbing for a while is the training stairs in the physical therapy department.”

Looking from the four-inch gash in his thigh, she critically eyed the X-ray on the monitor beside her to judge the position of the upper, unexposed break. The team was still talking, their voices low, but everything they said only made Chase Harrington sound more and more like a man who played as hard as he worked and who wouldn’t have anything left for a relationship even if someone did slow him down long enough to snag him.

No woman in her right mind would want to fall for a man like that. A woman needed a partner, someone to share with. Someone who cared enough to be there even when things got rough. Someone who wouldn’t walk away, leaving her to handle everything alone just when she needed him most.

She jerked her glance toward the head of the table, annoyed with herself for becoming distracted, displeased with the unwanted direction of her thoughts.

“Move that retractor higher. Perfect,” she murmured, pointedly turning her attention to debriding the open wound. “I need to cauterize these bleeders.”

Ian took his last stitch. “I’m ready to assist.”

“Would you like your music, Dr. Larson?” Rita asked her.

Alex usually liked to have music while she worked, preferably classical and mostly to keep from inadvertently humming whichever Disney tune her four-year-old son had plugged into the car stereo. But she declined the subliminal diversion tonight. As she set about the painstaking task of manipulating, drilling and pinning to stabilize the breaks, her only other thought was that Chase Harrington was going to slow down for a while, whether he liked the idea or not.

The surgery took over two hours. It took Alex another half hour to dictate nursing instructions and the surgical notes chronicling the procedure that, given the hour, she probably could have put off until morning.

She never put off anything when it came to her patients, though. It was the personal stuff she let slide—which was why her washing machine still leaked, why she hadn’t started the renovations on the potentially lovely old house she’d finally plunged in and bought last year. And why, she remembered, grimacing when she did, she was always running out of milk at home.

She’d meant to go to the grocery store after she’d picked up Tyler from child care, but they’d stopped at Hamburger Jack’s for dinner because Tyler had really, really needed the newest plastic race car that came with the kiddy meal and she’d flat forgotten about the milk.

Hoping she wouldn’t drive right past the Circle K on her way home and forget it again, she headed for the recovery room. If she hadn’t been up to her eyebrows in student loans and house and car payments, she’d have hired a personal assistant. Someone to tend to details like picking up the dry cleaning, paying bills and keeping the kitchen stocked with SpaghettiOs and Lean Cuisine.

She’d bet Chase Harrington had one.

She’d bet he had a whole bloody staff.

His long, lean body lay utterly still on one of the wheeled gurneys in the curtainless, utilitarian room. Tubes and monitor lines ran every which way, his body’s functions converted to spiking lines and digital numbers on screens and illuminated displays. The surgical drapes that had helped make him more of an anonymous procedure than a person were gone, replaced with a white thermal blanket that covered everything but one arm and his bandaged and braced leg.

Nodding to the nurse in green scrubs who’d just administered the painkiller she’d ordered, Alex stopped beside the gurney. A white gauze bandage covered his upper left cheekbone and a bruise had began to form beneath his left eye. Even battered, broken and with parts of him turning the color of a bing cherry, he was an undeniably attractive man. His features were chiseled, his nose narrow, his mouth sculpted and sensual. Dark eyebrows slashed above curves of spiky, soot-colored lashes. His hair was more brown than black, cut short and barbered with the sort of precision she supposed someone with his wealth might demand of those he paid to tend him.

“Mr. Harrington,” she said quietly, knowing he couldn’t yet focus but that he could hear her well enough. “Chase,” she expanded, offering him the comfort of hearing his name, “you came through surgery just fine. You’re in recovery. You’ll be here for a while before they take you to a room. Everything went really well.” She knew many patients emerged from anesthesia unaware that the procedure was already over. Some returned to consciousness worrying about the outcome. Either way, she never hesitated to relieve whatever anxiety she could as soon as possible. “Are you with me?”

His eyes blinked open, but she’d barely caught a glimpse of breathtaking blue before they drifted closed again.

“What time is it?”

His voice was deep, a low, smoky rasp made thick by drugs and raw from the airway that had been in his throat.

“After eleven.”

Once more he opened his eyes. Once more they drifted closed.

“Morning or night?”

“Night. You’ve just come from surgery,” she repeated, thinking he was trying to orient himself. “You were brought up here from Emergency. Do you remember what happened?”

His brow furrowed. “I was in an accident,” he murmured, trying to lift his broad hand to his forehead. An IV was taped into place in a vein above his wrist. From beneath the open edge of his blue-dotted hospital gown, EKG leads trailed over the corded muscles of his wide shoulders. “I need a…phone.”

Too drugged to master the effort, his hand fell. “I missed a meeting. It was…where was it?” he asked, sounding as if he were trying to remember where he was supposed to have been. “Why can’t I think?”

“Because the anesthetic is still in your system,” she told him, rather surprised he sounded as coherent as he did. It took a while for such heavy anesthesia to loosen its grip. Normally, all a patient wanted to do was sleep. Yet, he refused to give up and let the drugs carry him off again. “That’s perfectly normal. Just forget about the phone for now.”

“Can’t. It was important,” he stressed thickly.

“Nothing’s as important right now for you as rest.”

His hand lifted once more, this time to stop her. “Don’t go. Please.” The word came out as little more than a whisper. “Don’t.”

The metal siderails were up on the gurney. Catching his arm to keep him from pulling on a lead or bumping the IV, she lowered it to his side.

His hand caught hers. “I need to let them know.”

“Let them know what?” she asked, as surprised by the strength in his grip as by the urgency behind his rasped words. Given the sedation he’d had, that urgency totally confused her. It was the same sort of frantic undertone she’d encountered when accident victims came out of surgery worried about someone who’d been in the accident with them, an overwhelming need that reached beyond any immediate concern for themselves.

But he’d been alone. And he was talking about a meeting.

“They need to know I didn’t…stand them up.”

The soft click and beep of monitors melded with the quiet shuffle of the nurse moving around Alex as she stood with her hand in his, studying the compelling lines of his face. She couldn’t begin to imagine what sort of deal he had going that was so important to him that he’d fight through the fog of drugs to keep from jeopardizing it. It was none of her business anyway.

He was her business though. And she definitely recognized signs of an iron will when she saw one. Right now, that will was definitely working against him.

Shelving an odd hint of dread at the thought of encountering that will when he was conscious, she curved her free hand over his shoulder. She wanted him calm. Better yet, she wanted him sleeping. “What time was your meeting?”

Over the blip of the heart monitor, he whispered, “Seven-thirty.”

“As late as it is, I’m sure your party has already figured out that you’re not showing up tonight. You can talk to your secretary in the morning and straighten out everything.” Practicality joined assurance. “You wouldn’t be able to carry on a phone conversation anyway. Your voice is barely audible.”

His brow furrowed at that.

“Try to let go of it for now,” she urged. “Get some rest.”

The muscles beneath her hand felt as hard as stone, but she could feel him relaxing beneath her touch. He said nothing else as she stood there watching the furrows ease from his brow and listening to his breathing grow slow and even.

Letting her hand slip from his, Alex stepped back, her glance cutting to the nurse hanging a fresh bag of saline for his IV. She didn’t believe for a moment that he’d accepted her logic or her suggestion. The painkiller he’d been given had just kicked in. With the sedatives still in his system, he couldn’t have stayed awake no matter how hard he’d tried.

She glanced at the institutional black-and-white clock high on the wall.

Her day had started nearly twenty hours ago and she was tired. Not exhausted the way she’d so often been during her residency. “Exhausted” came after forty hours with no sleep. But those days of honing her skills in the competitive battlefield of a teaching hospital were over. She had a normal life now. As normal as any practicing surgeon and single mom had, anyway. This kind of tired was a piece of cake.

“I don’t imagine any of his family is here yet. Did they want me to call?”

“His family wasn’t notified,” the soft-spoken nurse replied. “His chart says the only person he wanted contacted was his lawyer.”

“His lawyer?”

The nurse shrugged. “That’s what he told them in Emergency. Some guy in Seattle. The only other thing he wanted was to make a phone call about a meeting. The one he was talking about just now, I guess. They told him they’d call anyone he wanted for him, but he apparently insisted that he had to make the call himself.

“He was in no shape to use a phone,” she continued, checking the monitors and noting the readings. “From the notes in his chart, the paramedics already had him full of morphine and all anyone downstairs cared about was getting his bleeding under control and getting him into CT and surgery.”

Alex slipped off her cap, threading her fingers through her short dark hair as she cast one last glance at the still and sedated man on the gurney. Even with the morphine, if he’d been conscious, he’d been in pain. Even then, in pain and bleeding, that meeting had haunted him.

Unless he was negotiating world peace or working on a deal to cure some disease, she still had no idea what would have been that important to him. But Honeygrove was hardly the Hague, there were no big medical research facilities that she knew of in town, and she was shooting in the dark. Her concerns tended to remain very close to home. It was people she cared about. Her family. Her friends. Her patients. There was no way to know what really mattered to a man like Chase Harrington.

She couldn’t relate at all to him. Yet, as Alex told the nurse to call her at home if there was any change and headed for the locker room, she actually felt bad for the guy. For all his wealth and notoriety, when he’d been hurt and in pain, when he’d just come through what had to be a horrific accident, there hadn’t been anyone he cared to call except the person he paid to look out for his interests. No wife. No girlfriend. No parent. No friend. Just his lawyer.

She found that incredibly sad.

It wasn’t long, however, before it became apparent that she was the only one inclined to feel compassion toward him. It had literally taken general anesthesia and a walloping dose of narcotic to end his insistence about needing to make his call. And while use of a phone no longer seemed to be a problem, Alex had the distinct impression when she left another emergency surgery the next morning that at least one member of the hospital administration and part of its staff would love to have him re-anesthetized.

Or, maybe, it was euthanized.

Chapter Two

“I’d appreciate it enormously if you’d see him and get back to me as soon as you can, Doctor. He’s not cooperating with me and I’ve been getting calls all morning from reporters and wire services wanting to know his condition and what he’s doing in Honeygrove. I simply can’t release the statement he gave me,” Mary Driscoll, the dedicated assistant to the hospital’s administrator, implored Alex over the top of her silver-rimmed half glasses.

Dressed in a dove-gray business suit with slashes of black that somehow managed to match her bobbed hair, Mary looked perfectly coordinated, as always, and enormously capable of handling the myriad crises she intercepted for her boss. Alex knew the administrator, Ryan Malone, personally. The dashing and diplomatic man who’d gone out of his way to make her feel welcome at Memorial had just married one of her friends. And she knew he trusted Mary’s judgment implicitly.

If Mary was finding Chase Harrington difficult, Alex thought uneasily, then he was definitely presenting a challenge.

“What did he tell you to say?” she asked, her voice low so it wouldn’t carry beyond the corner of the hallway Mary had cornered her in.

“He told me to say nothing about him other than that he’s in excellent condition following a minor accident.”

“Excellent?” Alex repeated, stifling the urge to laugh. “I don’t think so.”

“My point exactly.”

“I wouldn’t call it a minor accident, either.”

Looking vindicated, Mary murmured, “Thank you, Doctor. I tried to tell him that it’s hospital policy to issue the truth about a patient’s condition, even if it’s just a statement like ‘guarded’ or ‘stable.’ Or we could go with ‘no comment.’ His response was that rules are bent all the time. That was when I offered to let him discuss the matter with Mr. Malone,” she continued, as Alex’s eyebrows arched, “but he informed me that he’d already given me his statement, and that the hospital administrator was the last person he wanted to see. He doesn’t want anyone in his room other than necessary medical staff.”

The murmur of voices drifted toward them when the wide doors of the surgical department swung open. Stepping back so the gowned attendants could bring out a patient on a gurney, Alex could practically feel the weight Ryan’s assistant carried shift to her own shoulders. It was something in the woman’s eyes. The encroaching relief, probably.

“If that’s what he wants, we’ll do our best to maintain his privacy,” Mary said confidently. “I just need something I can give the press. You’ll call me after you’ve seen him to give me his official condition?”

Alex had been on her way to the med-surg floor to do her rounds when Mary had intercepted her. Mentioning that, she then assured her she’d call as soon as she could and started down the beige-walled hall.

She hadn’t made it a dozen steps when Mary paused at the stairwell door.

“I almost forgot,” she began, looking apologetic now. “He asked for a fax machine. A plain-paper one. Not the kind with thermal paper. He said he doesn’t like fighting the curling sheets. Anyway,” she continued, having dispensed with the details, “I told him I’d have to defer to you on whether or not he could have one. Since we have no specific policy regarding office equipment in patients’ rooms, I believe that decision would be entirely up to the physician.”

Alex thought the woman looked entirely too cheerful as she opened the door and disappeared. But then, she’d just unburdened herself of any further dealings with the man Alex was now on her way to see.

The med-surg unit was on the opposite side of the floor from the surgical suites. Working her way through the labyrinth of halls with her lab coat thrown on over her scrubs, Alex could hear the whine of a saw grow louder the closer she came to her destination.

A small crew was framing a doorway near the third-floor elevators, presumably to lead to the roof garden on the new wing presently under construction. The noise was awful but unavoidable, and undoubtedly contributed to the agitation of the nurse who bore down on her the moment she stepped through the unit’s doors.

Everyone knew Kay Applewhite. And everyone knew the irascible nurse hated disruption. When she was on duty, she ran the floor as tightly as any sea captain ever ran a ship, and she didn’t tolerate anything that upset hospital routine or her patients. Despite her grandmotherly appearance, she was a stickler for schedules, did everything by the book and had little compassion for whiners, slackers or malcontents. With her family grown and gone, her work was her life and she didn’t hesitate to let everyone know that forty years of nursing had taught her that those who helped themselves, providing they were capable, healed far faster than those who were coddled.

The nurses called her General Sherman behind her back.

She took it as a compliment.

Figuring she was about to get a reminder to shut out the noise, Alex leaned against the heavy door to get it to close faster while Kay, her gunmetal-gray curls permed too tightly to move and elbows pumping, kept coming down the wide, door-lined hall. Below the cuffs of her white scrub pants, her orthopedic shoes squeaked like a pack of chattering mice.

“I’m so glad you’re here, Dr. Larson.” Lowering her voice when she reached Alex, she turned with a squeak to accompany her to the nurses’ station. “I need to talk to you about the compound femur that came through Emergency last night,” she muttered, referring to the patient by injury the way staff often did. “But before I forget, Mr. Malone’s assistant has been looking for you. She needs to talk to you about him, too. That woman’s the epitome of patience and tact,” Kay said, speaking of Mary Driscoll, “but when she came out of his room, I could tell he even has her exasperated.”

“We’ve already spoken.” Looking as unruffled as she sounded, Alex stopped at the nurses’ station with its computers and banks of files. “What kind of trouble is he giving you?” she asked, watching the short, stout woman slip behind the long white counter and hand over a chart.

“Beside the fact that he’s demanding and uncooperative,” the woman said, her tone as flat as the metal cover of the chart Alex had just opened, “he’s now refusing his pain medication. He was due for it over an hour ago.”

Alex’s head came up.

“He says he doesn’t want anything but aspirin,” Kay continued, seeming gratified by Alex’s swift frown. “We tried to explain that he needs something stronger, and that even if we wanted, we can’t give him anything his doctor hasn’t ordered.” Her expression pruned. “He also wants some financial newpaper I’ve never heard of and a fax machine for his room.”

Ah, yes, Alex thought, the fax machine. “I heard about that,” she murmured, not sure which feeling was stronger, displeasure or dread. “What room is he in?”

“Three-fifty-four.”

“How are his vitals?”

“Better than they should be. I took them myself. Blood pressure’s a little high, though.”

A rueful smile touched Alex’s mouth. “Now there’s a surprise. I’ll take care of him,” she promised, feeling her guard go up even as she stood there. She hated confrontations. Especially when her reserves were low. And they were now. She’d managed exactly five hours of sleep between Harrington’s compound femur and an impacted radius and ulna. Some idiot had actually tried to catch a safe his accomplice had dropped from a second-story window.

“I also need to see Brent Chalmers and Maria Lombardi. And Dr. Castleman’s and Dr. McGraw’s patients, too,” she added, pulling a slip of paper from her pocket on which she’d written their patients’ names. Castleman and McGraw were the other two doctors in the orthopedic clinic that Alex had joined two years ago. Whoever was on weekend call from the clinic checked on all the clinic’s patients.

“I’ll pull their charts for you right now,” Kay assured her. “I know you’re anxious to get out of here today. I heard you and Dr. Hall talking in the cafeteria yesterday,” she explained when Alex, clearly puzzled by her comment, glanced back at her. “You were telling her how you hoped things would be quiet this weekend because the Chalmers boy will be staying with you while he goes through his therapy and you need to clean your guest room.

“I know it’s none of my business,” she continued, her keen hazel eyes softening, “and I won’t say a word about what you’re doing if you don’t want me to, but I think it’s really nice the way you take in some of these kids. That Brent’s a sweet boy,” she pronounced, speaking of a shy sixteen-year-old Alex had operated on two weeks ago. “He deserves a break.”

The sharp ping of a patient call light echoed over the clatter of a lunch cart being wheeled by and a page for an orderly to report to Three G.

“I can’t say the same for that man, though,” she muttered, noting on the panel behind her that the light for room three-fifty-four was lit.

Alex didn’t bother telling Kay not to repeat what she’d overheard in the cafeteria. Her plans for Brent were hardly confidential and if Kay had overheard her talking with Kelly, her obstetrician friend who’d talked her into taking her last houseguest, someone else had probably overheard, too. But finding time to put sheets on the guest bed wasn’t the only reason Alex hoped the rest of the weekend passed quietly. She and Tyler had plans with friends for an early dinner that evening. And tomorrow, she needed to take him to the mall for new shoes.

“Give me a minute with Mr. Harrington,” Alex said, wanting the nurse to hold off answering the light as she headed for his room herself. She wasn’t going to be any more rested when she finished her rounds, so she might as well face the showdown now.

The image of a long hot bath flashed, unbidden, into her consciousness.

Practically groaning at the delicious thought of it, she paused outside his door, indulging herself a full two seconds before drawing a breath that pulled her five feet, five inches into the perfect posture she’d learned from Miss Lowe’s School of Tap and Classical Ballet. Releasing it the way she’d learned in Lamaze class, knowing a person could get through anything if she just kept breathing, she walked into the room.

Her first thought was that the man had no concept of the word rest. The ceiling-mounted television was on, the volume muted. Stock quotes ran in a continuous ribbon beneath a talking head.

Her patient wasn’t watching the television, though. The head of his bed was partially raised and the upper half of his body was hidden by an open newspaper.

Walking past the empty bed by the door, her glance skimmed from the metal external fixation device stabilizing the breaks in his elevated leg, over a long expanse of sheet and settled on the headlines of the Wall Street Journal.

He didn’t move, but it was apparent he knew someone was there. Presumably, the nurse he’d rung for.

“I just need the blinds adjusted. If you don’t mind,” he expanded with far more civility than she’d expected. “It’s too bright in here to focus.”

His deep voice still held a rasp from the airway, but there was strength to it now and the smoky undertones sounded as if they belonged there.

“You can’t focus because you’re barely twelve hours out of surgery and your eyes are still affected by the sedatives. Give it time.”

Her tone was conversational, her manner deliberately relaxed as she walked over to the window and dimmed the buttery glow of the mid-June sun filling the room. She itched to get outside in all that warmth and brightness. Cloudless days were a rarity in Honeygrove. “How are you feeling this morning?”

She’d heard the faint crackle of newsprint as he slowly lowered the paper, but her focus wasn’t on his face as she turned from the window. It was on the round metal rods above his knee that formed a double H on either side of his leg and the four pins that went through it. At least, that was what had her attention until his silence drew her glance and she met his impossibly blue eyes.

Last night, she remembered thinking the color breathtaking. The observation had been purely factual, rather like the way a person would describe velvet as soft and rock as hard. Now, she actually felt her breath stall in her lungs. The phenomenon was disconcerting enough. What made it downright unnerving was the unabashed way he held her glance before his own moved slowly, boldly over her face.

The man was cut, broken and battered. He looked every bit as tired as he undoubtedly felt, and he needed a shave. His dark hair was rumpled and the burgundy bruise along his high cheekbone had bloomed to contrast sharply with the stark white bandage and his faint pallor. Yet, even looking as if he’d come out on the losing end of a bar fight and stripped of any trapping that might indicate status or power, the aura of masculine command surrounding him was unmistakable.

So was the sensual tug low in her stomach before his glance settled on the embroidered Alexandra Larson, M.D. on her pristine white lab coat.

It didn’t matter that she’d seen him before. Until the moment his eyes locked on hers, he’d been more procedure than patient, more media myth than man. Before that moment, too, she hadn’t been the subject of his attention. Being the sole subject of it now, unnerved by the fact that she hadn’t moved, Alex forcibly reminded herself he was on her turf and held out her hand.

“I’m Dr. Larson,” she said, jerking her professional composure into a subdued smile. “When we met last night, you were pretty groggy. I’m your surgeon.”

She rather expected him to go a little chauvinistic on her. With his reputation and considering what she’d heard of his attitude so far, a little alpha-male behavior wouldn’t have surprised her at all. Or so she was thinking when his hand engulfed hers and the heat singing up her arm made her feel more female than physician.

“I remember your voice.” His glance narrowed as it fell to their clasped hands. A hint of memory glimmered in his expression, as if he might have recalled the feel of her hand in his, too. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember what we talked about.”

Feeling strangely disadvantaged, Alex pulled back, letting her hand slide from his firm grip. “Mostly we discussed whether or not you were in any shape to make a phone call,” she replied, deliberately ignoring the tingling in her palm as she slipped her hands into her pockets. “I assume you’ve placed it by now,” she added, since a phone was within convenient reach on his bed table. “It was about a meeting last night that seemed rather important to you.”

Hesitation slashed his features. “Yeah,” he murmured. “I made it. Thanks.” Looking uneasy and not at all comfortable with the feeling, he nodded toward the bed. “So what’s the deal with the leg?”

It was as clear as his water glass that something about his business still disturbed him. It was equally clear that he wanted to change the subject.

“My question first,” she countered, more curious about his reaction than whatever his call had been about. “How do you feel?”

“Like I was hit by a Mack truck.” Moving gingerly, he set aside the paper someone had obviously gotten for him. Just as carefully, he eased back against the pillows. “Actually,” he muttered, looking paler from the movement, “I think it was a Ford.”

She’d expected antagonism from him. She’d been braced for bluster. She hadn’t anticipated raw sensuality or a dry humor that had somehow managed to survive obvious discomfort.

Feeling her guard drop, she eyed the wicked bruise edged beneath the left sleeve of his gown. She knew there was also one on his left hip. His thigh would be rainbow-hued for weeks. “I understand you’re refusing pain medication,” she said, reaching for the edge of his gown to lower it from his shoulder. “Why?”

“Because I don’t like the way it makes me feel.”

“You’d rather be in pain?” she asked mildly.

“I’d rather be able to think.” He hitched a breath when her fingers moved over the tender joint. “I just want my mind clear. I have things to do and I can’t do them if I can’t concentrate.”

Trying to concentrate herself, she made a mental note to have the nurses ice his beautifully muscled shoulder, then clinically ran her hand over his rock-solid trapezius muscle to the strong cords of his neck. The tension she felt there could easily have been a normal state of affairs for him. Her neck was definitely where she tended to carry her stress. But the impact would have strained his muscles, too.

“You’re going to be sore everywhere for a while,” she told him, frowning at the way the heat of his skin seemed to linger on her hands as she slipped the gown back in place.

“I was the last time, too.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“Not this way.” There was an edge in his voice that hadn’t been there a moment ago, a heavy hint of frustration that almost overrode the discomfort. “I broke my other leg skiing a couple of years ago. It’s an inconvenience, but it isn’t anything I can’t function with if I’m not taking anything that messes up my head. And as long as I can move around,” he pointedly added. “So let’s get rid of that scaffolding and just put a cast on it. I need to get out of here.”

“I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

Looking at her as if she couldn’t possibly have said what he thought he’d heard, he muttered, “Why not? All you have to do is take that thing off and wrap my leg in plaster of paris. It’ll probably take a couple of days to dry completely, but I don’t have to stay in the hospital for that.”

He was rubbing his temple. The one without the bandage. She didn’t doubt for a moment that he had a headache. She was also beginning to see why he seemed to be giving everyone else one, too. Especially Kay with her regimented routine and Mrs. Driscoll with her hospital regs. She seriously doubted that any man who’d accomplished what he had followed other people’s rules. He did things his way.

That was how he wanted them done now.

Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t in a position to call the shots.

Unfortunately for her, she was.

“You may have had a broken leg before,” she patiently allowed, still more concerned with the way he winced when he moved than with his obstinance, “but there are different kinds of breaks and this particular one can’t be casted. At least not yet. Your mobility is a priority but not our first one. The bone penetrated the skin and our biggest concern is infection. You’ll be able to get around with the scaffolding,” she assured him, referring as he had to the external fixation device. “But right now, you need a three-day course of IV antibiotics. As for letting you out of here, we’ll talk in a few days about how long you need to be hospitalized.”

“A few days isn’t acceptable. If I can get around on this thing, you can give me a prescription for whatever I need to take and I can get out of here now. I need to reschedule a meeting and I can’t hold it here.”

The man was clearly under the impression that it would take more than a speeding truck to slow him down. He also seemed to think her medical opinion of his treatment was negotiable, which, given his injuries, it was not. He held her glance, his carved features set and the furrows in his forehead speaking as much of pain as of impatience. He had work to do and he clearly intended to do it.

He seemed to overlook the fact that, at the moment, he couldn’t make it from the bed to the bathroom without help.

“You don’t seem to understand,” she said, every bit as determined to get her point across. She didn’t doubt for a moment that the man had a few dozen irons in the fire and that any number of them needed tending. Especially the meeting he was obsessing over. She understood career pressure. She was intimately acquainted with job stress. But she also knew that people in pain could be irritable, unreasonable.

“What you need right now are antibiotics. If you don’t get them, you could get an infection and, trust me, that’s the last thing you want. If you do get one, we’re talking six weeks of IV therapy. If that doesn’t work, you could lose your leg. It gets bad enough and we can’t control it, you could lose your life.”

He didn’t seem nearly as impressed as he should have been with the consequences. “Scare tactics, Doctor?”

“I’d be happy to bring you a few case histories to back up my conclusion.”

“I’d rather have a copy of the Financial Times.”

“Fine. You can cooperate and be back on your feet in a few months, or do it your way and have it take longer. And by the way,” she added, in that same velvet-over-steel voice, “you might not be acting like a wounded bear if you’d take what I prescribe. The pain is only going to get worse. Especially when they get you up in a few minutes so you can move around. I guarantee you’re not going to want to stand up without it.”

Pulling a small, rubber-tipped reflex hammer from her pocket, she swallowed her irritation at the deliberate challenge in his eyes and moved to the end of the bed. “Can you feel this?” she asked, refusing to let him bait her any farther as she ran the instrument over the top of his foot.

The relief Chase felt at the faint tickling sensation was buried as promptly as the fear he’d denied when he’d first seen the metal pins protruding from the bandages on his leg. Aching everywhere, trying desperately not to think about it, he purposely waited until his doctor glanced toward him before he acknowledged her.

“I feel it,” he finally said, trying to decide if he was impressed with her aplomb or just plain annoyed by it.

He did know he was intrigued.

With her attention on her exam, his glance skimmed the feathered sweep of her hair. It was too short for his taste, barely enough for a man to gather in his hands. But the color was incredible. Shades of ruby and garnet gleamed like lines of fire in rich, dark cinnamon. And it looked amazingly soft. Almost as soft as the skin of her long, graceful neck and the delicate shell of her ear.

A pearl stud gleamed on her earlobe. Simple. Understated.

Her profile was as elegant as a cameo.

Alexandra Larson looked nothing like someone who would replace hips and knees and piece together broken bodies for a living. With her delicate features and doe-soft brown eyes, she looked more like some advertiser’s idea of a kindergarten teacher. Or a dancer. He’d always been under the impression that orthopedic surgery required a little muscle. If he had to guess, there wasn’t a whole lot beneath the narrow white coat covering her scrubs.

He had no problem with her not looking like his idea of a doctor. He had no problem with her being female. His problem was with needing a doctor in the first place—especially one who seemed to think she knew his body better than he did.

Shelving that little annoyance, he settled back, mentally whimpering as he carefully let his body relax against the mattress he was certain had been constructed of concrete. As sore as he was, the surface felt as hard as a slab and was just about as comfortable. He tried to overlook that, too.

What he couldn’t overlook was how he could so easily recall her from last night. He’d been too drugged to fully comprehend much of anything beyond the pain and the need to get to a phone. But, somehow, he could still remember the soothing tones of her surprisingly sultry voice and feeling strangely calm when she’d rested her hand on his shoulder.

That feeling completely eluded him now. As she continued her examination, his thoughts flashed to the accident that had landed him on her operating table. A couple of seconds one way or the other and he wouldn’t have been in the intersection when that idiot had blown the red light. If he’d called to confirm his appointment from the airport rather than heading straight for his meeting, it wouldn’t have happened. If he’d taken an earlier flight instead of eking every possible minute out of the afternoon, he would already have been at the hotel.

The accident hadn’t been his fault, but that didn’t stop him from being angry with himself for not preventing it. He knew he’d been preoccupied. He’d been thinking of the two men he was to meet in the hotel’s lounge, worrying about what he would think of them. Or, more importantly, what they would think of him. He had no idea how he’d be received and the uncertainty had him feeling more unsettled and uneasy than he’d felt in his entire life.

He was thinking he’d give up half of everything he owned just to get that meeting over with when he felt his doctor’s hand rest on his bare calf. Small and soft, its warmth penetrated his skin, mercifully drawing his attention from his thoughts and focusing it on the one part of his anatomy that hadn’t been throbbing until he caught her scent and felt her touch when she’d checked his shoulder.

He’d had no idea that surgical soap could smell so appealing. He didn’t know either what she wore with it that made it so seductive. Or, how she could lower his blood pressure even as she raised it.

“I understand you’re from Seattle. If you’ll give me the name of your personal physician, I can start arranging a transfer to a hospital there, if you’d like.”

“I’m not leaving Honeygrove until I’ve done what I came to do.”

She hesitated. “Fine,” she said, again, when he was pretty sure what she actually thought was “great.” “We’ll just keep you here, then.”

“I need a fax machine.”

Something like resignation washed over her delicate features. Or maybe it was annoyance. The way she schooled her features as she crossed her arms made it hard to tell for sure.

For some reason he couldn’t begin to identify, her forced calm annoyed the daylights out of him.

“I heard,” she informed him, all business. “Unfortunately, we’re not equipped to set up an office in a hospital room. If you need something sent, I’m sure Mrs. Driscoll would be happy to take care of it for you.”

“I’m not asking to use your personnel or your equipment.” Curbing the quick flash of exasperation, he closed his eyes, fighting for the calm she seemed to manage with such exasperating ease. “I’ve already explained that.”

“You haven’t explained it to me.”

She had a point. She also actually looked willing to listen, which was more than anyone else had done so far. “I’ll buy a machine if someone will just get me a phone book so I can have one delivered and set up. I have a meeting in Chicago on Tuesday and I’d planned to finish the contracts this weekend. The drafts are in my briefcase, which no one can seem to locate,” he pointed out, trying hard to hold back his frustration but pretty sure he wasn’t succeeding. “If I had them, I could work on them instead of lying here doing nothing. Since I don’t, I’ll have my attorney fax me a copy. I’d have my secretary do it, but she’s at her son’s wedding this weekend.

“I know I won’t be going to Chicago myself,” he countered, sharp claws of frustration gripping hard when she pointedly glanced at his leg. “My attorney will represent me. That’s what I pay him to do.”

His terseness caused the soft wing of her eyebrow to jerk up. Looking a little cooler than she had a moment ago, she picked up the chart she’d dropped on the end of his bed. “I’ll get you the number for the fax at the nurses’ station,” she said, sounding as if she were willing to be reasonable even if he wasn’t. “You can have them sent there.”

“That won’t work.” There were changes he needed to send to his attorney and his attorney would have to send the documents back once the changes were made. Aside from the fact that he’d prefer his business dealings to remain confidential, he had other projects he needed to stay on top of, and he knew as sure as stocks rose and fell that the hassle with the head nurse wouldn’t be worth the trouble. “Attila out there has already pointed out that the nurses aren’t secretaries—”

“It’s General Sherman…I mean Kay,” his suddenly fatigued-looking doctor hastily corrected. “The woman’s name is Kay.”

“Fine. I’m sure General Kay isn’t going to like having her precious routine interrupted. I can do everything myself if someone will just get me a phone book.” His voice was low, partly because he had no intention of losing control to the point where he raised it; mostly because his throat felt as if he’d swallowed sandpaper.

That frustrated him even more.

“I also need to have the meeting I missed last night,” he muttered. “But that’s something I can’t do until you let me out of here.”

And that’s what bothered him most, he thought, and shoved his fingers through his hair.

Alex saw him wince, then heard him hiss a breath when the suddenness of his movement caught up with him and pain radiated from his shoulder. She didn’t doubt for a moment that his agitation had only increased the pain in his head. Strain dulled his eyes. Except for his bruises, the sheets now had more color than his face. She didn’t know if he was the most stoic man she’d ever encountered, or the most masochistic. She would concede that he was the most driven.

She truly didn’t care about his wheeling and dealing. Her concern was getting him well and keeping him comfortable while she was doing it.

“I realize you have obligations,” she conceded, certain he wasn’t coping with the pain anywhere near as well as he wanted her to believe. “But I don’t think you appreciate how much trauma your body has sustained. I’ll have your nurse bring you a phone book and I’ll change your pain medication to something that will take the edge off and leave your head clear. But you might as well call whoever handles your schedule and have them cancel everything for the next couple of weeks.”

She turned to avoid his scowl and headed for the door. “Oh, yes. One more thing. Your condition right now is, officially, stable. Do you want that released to the press, or do you want no comment.”

“I already gave my statement to the woman from the administrator’s office.”

“And you overstated your condition and understated the accident.”

For a moment, he said nothing. He just watched her with his brow furrowed while frustration warred with the pain that undoubtedly frustrated him, too. “I’m not going to argue with you, Doctor. Go with your call on the condition, but leave my estimate of the accident alone.”

He’d been there. She hadn’t.

He didn’t say as much, but that was the message she got as challenge slipped once more into those disturbingly blue eyes.

“Good enough,” she told him, wondering why he couldn’t have piled up his car when someone else had been on call. “Get some rest.”

She stepped into the wide hall, feeling more as if she’d escaped the room rather than merely left it. She’d dealt with demanding type-As, the chauvinism prevalent among some of her male colleagues and her son’s terrible twos. All of which, she felt, qualified her as something of an expert when it came to handling difficult men.

But a woman didn’t handle Chase Harrington. She worked around him. Still, she hadn’t lost her cool when he’d lost his patience. Or when he’d so cavalierly informed her of how she could handle his leg and his medication. And she thought she’d done a commendable job of ignoring the way his glance kept moving to her mouth as she spoke. All he’d done was make her forget to ask if he had any more questions about his condition, which was something she rarely failed to do with a patient.

Irritated with herself for letting him get to her, refusing to go back and let him do it again, she headed for her next patient intent, for the moment, on putting the man from her mind.

Her intentions were honorable. But Brent Chalmers axed them within ten seconds of her walking into his card-and-mylar-balloon-filled room. The gangly blond teenager with the shy smile had heard that Chase was there.

He’d never actually heard of Chase before. Until a few weeks ago when his throwing arm had been mangled in a thresher, the boy’s life had centered around sports, a car he was saving to buy and the little farming community of Sylo a hundred miles away. If he’d ever read the business section of a newspaper, it was only because he’d been required to write a report on it for class. He’d just overheard the nurses whispering about some rich guy who’d climbed Mt. McKinley and his ears had perked up.

Brent was usually serious and quiet, and whenever he saw Alex he worried aloud about his ability to ever use his arm. Today, though, as she examined his nicely healing wounds all he wanted to talk about was how awesome it must feel to reach the top of the world.

“Man,” he mused. “Can you imagine the shape he must be in to do something like that?”

The question was rhetorical, but she could easily have answered it. Even as she marveled at the boy’s excitement, a mental picture of a beautifully muscled male intent on conquering a mighty mountain flashed in her mind. She couldn’t begin to imagine the determination, the endurance, the sheer strength of will such a challenge required. But Chase apparently went after what he wanted, claimed it, then moved on.

The thought disturbed her, almost as much as the odd jolt she’d felt when she’d first met his eyes.

What disturbed her more was that he’d distracted her from her patient.

“Do you, Dr. Larson?” Brent asked, shaking his stick-straight blond hair out of his eyes.

“I’m sorry.” Pulling the top of his gown back up over the muscles developing in his bony shoulders, she blinked at his narrow, expectant face. “Do I what?”

“Think you could ask him how long he had to train before he made his climb. And maybe you could ask how long it took. I mean, that would be so cool. Climbing like that, I mean. Wouldn’t it?”

“Actually, I can think of about eight hundred things I’d rather do than struggle for oxygen while I freeze my backside over a mile-high drop-off.” Smiling easily at his unbridled interest, she nodded to the nurse to replace his elastic bandage and sling. “Tell you what. Now wouldn’t be a good time, but if you’d like, I’ll ask Mr. Harrington if he feels up to having company tomorrow. If he does, you can talk to him about the mountain yourself before I release you on Monday.”

The mix of emotions flushing his face was fascinating. “Oh, don’t do that,” he begged. “I couldn’t talk to him. I mean not, like, to his face,” he explained, sounding as if she’d just suggested a personal audience with the Pope. “But, thanks. Yeah, really.” The onslaught of discomfort gave way to a smile. “I’m getting out of here?”

“You sure are. There’s something I haven’t told you, though. I haven’t had a chance to redo the room you’ll be staying in since I bought my house. It’s sort of pink.” Wendy, the pregnant teenager who’d lived with her until she’d delivered and moved out last month, had called it rose. It reminded Alex more of antacid. “And you have to share a bathroom with my four-year-old.”

His expression suddenly shifted, concern moving into features sharpening with the first angles of budding manhood. “I don’t mind, ma’am,” he murmured, his voice cracking. “I’m used to my little brothers and sisters.”

She hadn’t meant for him to go shy on her. But that’s how Brent usually was. It had only been the prospect of the extraordinary that had breached the adolescent self-consciousness and quiet manners she normally saw.

“I know you are,” she told him, rather wishing she could see that enthusiasm again. He was such a neat kid. And his family was salt of the earth. She’d met all four of his brothers and sisters. They and his parents had held vigil while she and a team of vascular surgeons had reconstructed his arm. Their prayers and his doctors’ skills had brought him this far, but it would take months of daily physical therapy for him to regain use of the limb. The problem was his parents’ insurance. It wouldn’t cover a live-in rehab facility and his family’s circumstances and distance from town made outpatient treatment impossible.

Alex had figured that two more weeks of intensive therapy would give him enough of a start to continue on his own at home. His beleaguered parents had been thrilled, and embarrassingly grateful, when she’d offered to have him stay with her during that time. Since she was used to having someone borrow her spare room, she told them, it wouldn’t be an inconvenience at all.

Alex left Brent a few moments later to move on to her next patient. But as she headed for elderly Maria and her shiny new knee, she couldn’t help wondering if Chase had ever known what it was like to truly need something and not be able to get it.

She was thinking about him again. Irritated with herself for not being able to get him out of her mind, she started down the hall, deliberately humming a repetitive tune from one of Tyler’s tapes. Once that melody got started in her head, she knew it would take forever to get it out. It drove her positively nuts. But she figured even that was better than wondering what it was that drove the compound femur in three-fifty-four.

Chapter Three

The mind-numbing melody had been replaced by the theme from Tarzan by the time Alex and Tyler arrived at Granetti’s for dinner at six o’clock that evening. Parking her sedate silver Saturn in her spot at the hospital, since the restaurant they were going to was across the street, she explained to her son for the third time that she wasn’t going to work, that they were going to dinner and, no, they couldn’t go to Pizza Pete’s.

“But I want pizza.”

“You can have pizza here. Or spaghetti,” she told him, which reminded her to grab a handful of wet-wipes from the glove box to stuff into her purse. “You like spaghetti better, anyway.”

Alex stifled a sigh as she watched her little boy scrunch his nose. The tiny golden freckles scattered over it seemed to merge as he considered her observation. Sometime in the last twenty-four hours, his baby-fine blond hair had managed to grow to below his eyebrows. He now needed a haircut as badly as he needed new tennies.

She supposed she should see if Brent wanted a haircut, too. The boy was beginning to look like a sheep dog.

Tyler’s frown suddenly changed quality. She could practically see the mental gears shifting behind his dark brown eyes as he unbuckled his seat belt and opened his door.

“How fast will a Viper go?”

“A viper?” she repeated, doing a little mental shifting of her own. She had no idea how he’d gone from pizza to reptiles. “I don’t know, honey. Is that the kind of snake that goes sideways?”

“It’s not a snake.” he informed her, as if she should have somehow known that. “It’s a car.”

“It is?”

“Yeah. And they go really fast. Does it go as fast as a Cobra?”

That, she knew, was definitely a car. Her next door neighbor’s son-in-law drove one. Tyler loved that thing. Especially when its tires squealed.

“It sure sounds like it should.” Checking her purse to make sure she had her pager, she looped the strap over her shoulder while Tyler scrambled out. She truly had no idea how his mind worked. The challenge was simply to keep up with him.

“Can we get a video with a Viper in it?” Tyler hollered, running around the back of the car.

Absently straightening the skirt of her sleeveless shift as she stood, Alex patiently told her forty-pound bundle of energy she didn’t know if they made Viper videos, then tucked the back of Tyler’s favorite T-shirt—a blue one sporting a green lizard—into the waistband of his cargo pants before she reached for his hand.

He was still talking as they crossed the street, informing her now that Tom, their cat, could watch the video with him, which somehow reminded him that he’d forgotten to feed his gerbil. With the low sun slanting its warm rays against her face and her precious, precocious little boy chattering away beside her, she should have been enjoying the moment.

Instead, she was trying to figure out what it was about Chase Harrington that disturbed her most. The way she’d seemed to absorb his agitation or the fact that she couldn’t seem to get him out of her mind.

The afternoon had been blessedly uneventful—if she discounted the fact that she’d discovered a new leak in her washing machine. After she’d finished rounds, she’d picked up Tyler at the hospital day-care center and headed for home. The guest room now had fresh sheets, the washing of which had revealed the leak, there was milk in her refrigerator and she and Tyler were on their way to a relatively quiet, uninterrupted dinner with her two closest friends and their families. There was no reason for her to be thinking of Chase now. She wouldn’t have to deal with him again until tomorrow.

Grasping that thought, she pushed open Granetti’s brass-trimmed door. The homey Irish-Italian pub-cum-restaurant was a comfortable, neighborhood sort of place that felt like a home away from home. On this particular evening, the atmosphere was even more welcoming.

Under the lattice-and-faux-grape-leaf-covered-ceiling and the Guinness beers signs on the back wall, a wide swath of black paper shouted Happy XXXII, Alex in bilious green. Neon-pink balloons hovered over the chairs.

Below the banner, tables had been pushed into a long line to accommodate the thirty-odd people who greeted her with a deafening “Surprise!” when she walked in holding Tyler’s hand.

“Wow! It’s a party, Mom!”

Stunned, Alex let his hand slide from hers. Before she could blink, her wide-eyed little boy had darted for the dark-haired preschooler dashing toward him. When he reached Griffin, his “very best” friend, they slugged each other and grinned.

“It’s about time you caught up with us. I hate it when you’re younger.” Kelly Hall wrapped Alex in a quick hug. Her honey-blond hair was plaited in its usual French braid and her hazel eyes were laughing. “Happy belated birthday.”

“We’d planned to do this yesterday, but you got called in.” Ronni Powers-Malone, Ryan Malone’s new wife and a good friend, moved in with a hug of her own. “Hi, Alex. Happy Birthday.”

“I can’t believe this.” Feeling her smile spread, Alex hugged her friends back and took in the banner once more. “I feel like I’m a superbowl.”

“The Roman numerals were the guys’ idea. Ronni and I would have preferred to give you a quiet dinner with a gorgeous male at Le Petit Cinq,” Kelly confided. “But we knew you were on call and it wouldn’t be worth the arm-twisting to get you to go if you’d just get called away anyhow. It was either this or Pizza Pete’s.”

Petite and pregnant, pediatrician Ronni tugged her toward the tables. “We figured this was better, since it was closer to the hospital.”

“And they have garlic-cheese bread. Ronni’s been craving it,” Kelly explained. “We’re also fresh out of gorgeous males. We got the last of ’em.”

“The lady has impeccable taste.” The hug this time came with the scent of aftershave. Tanner Malone, Kelly’s dark-haired, impressively built fiancé flashed a hint of his dynamite smile. “Hey there, Alex.”

“Hey yourself, Tanner.” Beyond them, the music of laughter and conversation underscored the strains of an Irish ballad. Wonderful aromas scented the air. “Where’s the baby?”

Alex fully expected Tanner to tease her, to express some sort of feigned exasperation over having fought his way through the crowd to get to her only to have her ask about his child. Instead, looking unusually subdued, he simply murmured, “She’s over there with Ryan and the nurses.”

Despite his oddly reticent manner, pride lit his eyes as he nodded toward the people collectively cooing over his adorable infant daughter. Alex and Tanner had a lot in common. He’d been a single parent himself, until Kelly had rescued him, and he was intimately familiar with trying to manage parental responsibility and a demanding career. He owned the construction company building the hospital’s new wing.

The thought of asking him if he could recommend anyone to fix her washing-machine leak was cancelled by the greetings of her colleagues from the clinic and the hospital as she was coaxed farther into the room. Ryan motioned to her from the knot of women cooing over the newest addition to the Malone clan, then pointed down to indicate that Tyler was with him and his kids and gave her an okay sign to let her know she didn’t have to worry about him.

A little overwhelmed by what her friends had done for her, and what wonderful friends she had, she waved back. Anyone looking at Ryan and Tanner could tell they were related. Both brothers had thick, dark hair, and the same chiseled jaw. But their eyes were what truly gave them away. Rimmed with dark lashes, they were the bluest shade of blue Alex had ever seen. A woman didn’t forget a man with eyes like that.

Rather like she couldn’t forget the patient in room three-fifty-four.

“Whatever it is you’re frowning about, forget it for now,” Ronni insisted, handing her a frosty glass of iced tea. She clicked her own glass of the same against the rim. “I’ve seen enough long faces today.”

“Me, too.” Kelly lifted her wine before glancing sympathetically toward her fiancé. The concern in her expression was too apparent to hide, though her attempt was commendable. “This is a party.”

If there was anything Alex could spot, it was strain. Now that the shock of surprise had worn off, she could see it clearly in her friends’ faces.

“What’s going on?” she asked, her glance bouncing between the petite redhead and the tall blonde. “I thought Tanner seemed a little quiet tonight. Is everything all right?”

Kelly and Ronni exchanged a glance. As if reaching some tacit agreement, they shifted closer, locking the circle so their voices wouldn’t carry.

“Do you remember that phone call Ryan received during our engagement party?” Kelly asked Alex, her voice low. “From the man who said he was their brother, Andrew Malone?”

“Of course I do. We were talking about who had the most unique engagement surprise, remember? You two with that phone call, or Ryan and Ronni with that huge anonymous cashier’s check for the new wing.”

“We never have figured out where that came from,” Ronni muttered. “But that was a good thing. This turned out awful. They were supposed to meet him last night,” she said, in a near-whisper. “But he never showed up. You can’t believe how disappointed Ryan is.”

“Tanner, too. He’s trying to hide it, but I know it’s eating at him. On the way over, he said he wished the guy had never called in the first place. If he lost his nerve, the least he could have done was phone. As it is,” Kelly continued, sounding as protective as she did irritated, “neither one of them heard from him until this morning. Then, he just left messages on their answering machines that he’d been delayed and said he’d be in touch later.”

Alex’s brow pinched as she watched both women look toward the men again, but she wanted to dismiss the thought that flashed in her brain almost as quickly as it formed. It had to be pure coincidence that Tanner’s eyes were so nearly the same blue as her patient’s. And it had to be coincidence that the rather stubborn line of his jaw had been carved at that same hard angle. Even if the world didn’t know that Chase Harrington was…well, Chase Harrington, he wasn’t built anything like Tanner. The younger Malone had the muscular physique of a man accustomed to physical labor. Chase was a little taller, according to his chart, anyway, and he had the lean, hard body of a runner. His hair wasn’t black like Tanner’s, either. It was more a rich, deep sable. If he looked like anyone, it was…Ryan.

“I don’t remember,” Alex prefaced, not sure she’d ever known the answer to what she was about to ask. “Where was this brother from?”

“Seattle,” they both said an instant before the clink of a spoon on a water glass had everyone quieting for a toast.

Alex tried to let it go.

She couldn’t.

For the next hour, while her friends and associates mingled and laughed and passed platters of pasta and eggplant parmesan, the suspicion that had lodged in her mind nagged with the relentlessness of a toothache.

She could overlook the physical similarities. There were a lot of men with dark, to-die-for looks and wickedly beautiful azure eyes who weren’t related to the Malones. She’d bet half the black Irish in Ireland fell into that category. But Chase had missed a meeting last night, too. One that had been so important to him that he’d come out of anesthesia wanting nothing other than to call the people he was supposed to see.

I need them to know I didn’t stand them up.

If it hadn’t been her own party, she’d have excused herself the moment she recalled the almost desperate undertones in her patient’s voice. Ryan and Tanner were her friends and if there was any chance that Chase Harrington was the man they’d been waiting for, she needed to do what she could to let them know their brother hadn’t simply decided not to show. But her friends had gone to a lot of trouble for her, so she made herself wait until the cake they’d brought had been cut and everyone was busy visiting again before she caved in and turned to Ronni.

“There’s something I need to check with a patient. Will you keep an eye on Tyler for me for a few minutes?”

Knowing Alex was on call, familiar herself with such interruptions, her friend didn’t even hesitate. “Sure. If you get hung up, just let me know and we’ll take him home with us.”

“I shouldn’t be that long,” Alex assured her, then slipped out to run across the street to ask a few questions of her patient.

At eight o’clock on a Saturday evening, the long corridors of the hospital were almost eerily quiet. The business of treatments and therapies and diagnostics that created traffic jams of gurneys and wheelchairs and lab carts was over for the day. Dinner trays had been cleared and sent in their huge stainless-steel carts back to the hospital kitchen.

The only sounds were from the television sets in a couple of the rooms and the muffled conversations of visitors bearing mylar Get Well balloons and tidy bouquets of flowers.

There were no visitors in Chase Harrington’s room. No balloons. And bouquet was too plebeian a term for the half-dozen fabulous arrangements filling the widow ledge and the tray table belonging to the other, empty, bed.

The head of Chase’s bed was raised higher than it had been that morning. He lay back against the pillow with his head turned from the door, his braced leg extended and his uninjured one bent at the knee to make a tent of his blankets. With a business card in his hand, he tapped a slow beat against the raised siderail while he stared out the window at the construction lights glowing in the dark.

When he didn’t notice her in the doorway, she glanced at the florist’s card on the arrangement nearest the door.

The exotic creation of red ginger, bird of paradise and anthurium was sent “with best wishes for a speedy recovery” from the board of Claussen Aerodynamics.

“We just closed a deal,” he said, talking to her reflection in the window. “I’m sure they were relieved all the i’s were dotted before I wound up here.”

“Maybe they just mean what the card says. That they hope you’re better soon.”

He turned toward her, his level expression telling her he didn’t believe that for half a second. The sentiment was business. An obligation. Nothing more.

“It’s a beautiful arrangement, anyway,” she told him.

“It’s a write-off. They all are.”

His cynicism was unmistakable. So was his displeasure with whatever it was he’d been thinking about as he gave the business card an impatient flip onto the document-covered tray-table beside his bed. She’d never seen him upright, let alone moving under his own steam. But the image of a tornado chained in place sprang to mind as she quietly closed the door. She had no trouble picturing him pacing as he worked, his mind racing, his beautifully honed body rarely still. All that leashed energy and power bent on conquering…everything.

She couldn’t help wondering if he regarded women as conquests, too.

She immediately banished the thought, along with the hint of warning that came with it. His sex life was none of her business. It was entirely possible that he would regard any part of his personal life as none of her business, too. But if she was right about who he was, there was far more going on with him than she had suspected, and the reasons for his agitation could be far more profound than she’d thought.

The soft fabric of her dress whispered faintly as she moved toward the glow of the reading light cocooning the bed. She hadn’t had time to consider how truly unsettling it would be for a person to face siblings he’d never met. Or to ponder the circumstance that had allowed such a relationship to go unknown for so long.

As she’d hurried through the hospital, she’d been more aware of the faint stirrings of guilt. She’d always prided herself on paying attention to her patients so she wouldn’t miss something that could impair their progress. With Chase, she’d simply adopted every one else’s opinion of him as a difficult man and ignored the first stirrings of sympathy she’d felt for him.

“I see you got what you wanted. Are you working now?”

A large packing box sat in the green plastic visitor’s chair by his bed. Its contents, a state-of-the-art fax machine, occupied the bedside table that had been positioned within easy reach. Someone had unplugged the phone for the other bed and run the fax line to it.

He’d gotten what he was after, but he still didn’t look very happy.

With a subdued, “No,” he pushed the tray-table aside, watching her as she stopped beside his bed. “I’m finished.”

“Your color’s improved,” she noted, mildly surprised. Judging from the amount of well-marked paper stacked on the tray-table, he’d been at it for hours. He should have looked exhausted. “How’s the new medication working?”

“Better.”

“Good,” she murmured, more aware than she wanted to be of his intense blue eyes. She nodded toward the night-blacked window, as much to get his focus off her as to ease into her reason for being there.

“I see our new wing had your attention. The construction was delayed for a while because of an embezzlement problem with the foundation funding it, but everything’s back on schedule now. Our administrator…Ryan Malone…” she said cautiously, watching to see if he reacted to the name, “managed to pull more funding together.

“We’re all anxious for the space,” she continued, when all he did was blandly glance back at her. “If the new wing were finished, we might have been able to accommodate the request you made for a larger room. I’m sorry, but we don’t have VIP suites here at Memorial.”

Despite bruises that were working their way from dark cherry to concord grape, he truly did look better than when she’d last seen him. The dull glint of deep pain was gone from his eyes. But his edginess remained. It seemed to linger just beneath the surface, as carefully controlled as the man himself. Bridled as that tension was, it seemed to curl through her, knotting her nerves as his glance slid over the simple navy A-line skimming from her neck to midcalf.

There was no reason she should have felt exposed. He wasn’t looking at her as if he were mentally disrobing her. As his glance lingered on her taut and slender biceps, then moved to where she toyed with the single pearl hanging just below her throat, he was studying her in a way that was almost clinical.

“You don’t strike me as the type who makes idle conversation, Doctor.” His dark head dipped toward the closed door. “And I can’t imagine we’d need privacy if all you came to tell me is that my request for a larger room has been denied. Why don’t you just tell me what’s bothering you so much that you left your party to talk to me?”

Alex didn’t fluster easily. Remaining cool under fire was as much a form of self-preservation as a professional necessity. But this man had a definite knack for knocking her off balance. She suspected he knew it, too.

“How did you know where I was?”

“I imagine everyone within earshot of the nurses’ station knows. I could hear them trying to decide who got to be at the restaurant when you arrived and who had to go over later and bring back cake.” His glance slid to where her ringless fingers grasped her necklace. “They were also speculating about whether or not you’d have a date. As of a few minutes ago, word was that you didn’t.”

“It’s nice to know the hospital grapevine is so accurate.”

“It’s an interesting distraction,” he admitted, sounding as if he’d used it to keep himself from crawling the walls. “So, if you didn’t have a date, who’s this Tyler who was with you?”

“My son,” she replied, and watched the dark slash of Chase’s eyebrows merge.

“You have a son? I thought they were talking about some guy.”

“He is a guy. He’s just a little one.”

That wasn’t what he meant. And she knew it. It was just impossible to know what other thoughts flashed through his mind. There was no denying that her having a child had given him pause. The hesitation itself was enough to nudge her defenses. There were some men who tended to shy from women with such an encumbrance. There were others who regarded children as nothing but burdens that cost money and delayed goals.

She had no idea how this man felt. She just knew that Tyler had nothing to do with why she was there—and that Chase Harrington had an uncanny knack for bumping old bruises.

He’d even managed to do it when he was out cold.

“How did you know something’s bothering me?” she asked, disquieted by that, too.

Sheets rustled as he crossed his arms, his fathomless eyes intent on her face as he considered her. A moment later, the quality of that consideration underwent a subtle shift when he nodded toward her hand. It was curled and resting below the base of her throat.

“Other than the reasons I just gave you, you’ve probably rubbed a full millimeter off that pearl since you walked in here. I wouldn’t say you look nervous. In your line of work, you’ve had to deliver too much bad news to start out by hedging. You’re too professional for that. But you’re not comfortable with whatever’s on your mind, either,” he told her, sizing her up as she suspected he did his allies. Or his adversaries. “I don’t have the feeling you’re here because you’re my doctor, either.”

Unaware of what she’d been doing until he mentioned it, she slowly released her grandma Larson’s pearl. It was disconcerting to be read so easily. Here, on her turf, she was usually the one making the analysis, judging, weighing. She was the one people looked to for answers. Her professional role was the one area of her life where she felt reasonably competent. It was everything else that threw her. Yet, there was no denying the man’s powers of observation, or disputing his conclusions. Most of them, anyway.

“You’re good,” she conceded, wishing she didn’t feel that there was more he’d noticed, but discreetly failed to mention. “And you’re right. I’m not here because of your treatment. But I’m not uncomfortable with what I want to talk to you about. I’m just not sure how to address it.”

“Under the circumstances, why don’t we just try the direct approach?”

He offered the suggestion mildly, encouraging her with a hint of a smile that threatened to be devastating if he ever put his heart into it. He hadn’t reacted to Ryan’s name at all, but she had the feeling he chose to reveal only what he wanted others to see. Since the tactic gave him an extraordinary advantage, she had no doubt he used it shamelessly.

“In that case,” she quietly began, “I need to talk to you about the meeting you missed Friday night. It’s possible that I misjudged its importance.”

He didn’t even blink. But he didn’t move, either. “What about it?”

“By any chance was it personal rather than business? If it was,” she said, before that formidable will of his could snap his guard more firmly into place, “and if it’s about what I think it is, maybe I can help.”

“Just what do you think it’s about?”

“Your brothers. I think you were going to meet them.”

For a moment, the only sounds in the room were the hum of the air system and the steady, rhythmic click of the IV pump beside his bed. She didn’t doubt that he was a master of control. She’d seen him battle to stay conscious when anyone else would have given up. She’d seen him pinch back frustration to keep from lashing out when pain would have had anyone else raging. But his defenses had been strained by the physical toll on his body and he simply hadn’t been prepared for her to hit in such a vulnerable place. Only seconds passed before he replied, but those silent seconds had already given her her answer.

He knew that, too.

Confusion and disbelief melded with a host of sensations he truly did not want to deal with. “How could you possibly have known that?”

“Ryan and Tanner were at my party.” Her voice seemed to soften. “I was talking with Ryan’s wife and Tanner’s fiancée when their meeting with their brother came up. When I learned that the brother was coming from Seattle, it was just a matter of putting two and two together. Even if the coincidence about the meeting hadn’t been there,” she said, her glance slipping from his face to his rangy body, “there are a few similarities between the three of you. Once you get past the bruises, it’s not that hard to tell you’re related.”

His glance cut warily toward the closed door. “Where are they now?’

“At the restaurant. You said that my being your doctor doesn’t have anything to do with why I’m here. I am your doctor, though. That’s why I can’t say anything about this unless you say I can.”

He was her patient. No matter how she felt about Ryan and Tanner, her patient had to come first. “I know how badly you wanted to get in touch with them.” She was drawn by that need, too. Now that she understood why it had been there. “If you’d like, I can help.”

Chase lifted his hand, threading his fingers through his hair. The gesture was new, recently acquired and absolutely no help in dispelling the agitation knotting every one of his already tender nerves. He hated that he couldn’t move. He hated that he couldn’t pace. More than anything, he hated the way his stomach jumped every time he thought about the moment he’d finally see the two men he’d never laid eyes on before.

His brothers.

Until a couple of months ago, he hadn’t even known they’d existed. But he’d discovered a lot of things in the four months since he’d learned that the people he’d thought were his parents…weren’t.

“You haven’t said anything to anyone?”

“No one,” she assured him, sounding as sincere as she looked.

“Then please don’t. I still intend to meet them, but not in a bed, and not wearing this.” Lifting his hand, trailing IV tubing with it, he plucked at the neck of his hospital gown. “I’ll call them after I get out of here.”

“They won’t care if you’re in a wheelchair or flat on your back on a gurney. And they certainly won’t care what you’re wearing.” All she’d have to do was make one phone call and Ryan and Tanner would be there in a heartbeat.

The set of Chase’s jaw turned defensive.

“I’ll care. I’ve already left messages that I’d been detained,” he said, dead certain she was going to argue with him. She had the same look that she’d had when she’d told him he was acting like a wounded bear. Stubborn and sympathetic. Only now it was confusion rather than exasperation that diluted the latter. “I’ll call them when I’m better.”

Alex opened her mouth, only to close it again. Her first thought was that he was just being his usual headstrong self and wanted the meeting to take place on his terms. Yet, seeing his brow furrow with strain as he reached to knead a spot above his brace, it didn’t seem to be ego or pride prodding him. When she’d explained the seriousness of his injury, how it was possible that, given the worst scenario, he could lose his leg—or his life—he’d scarcely blinked. What she saw in him now, was the anxiety she would have expected then.

That made no sense at all to her. But she’d seen enough fear in patients to recognize it all too easily. She just couldn’t imagine him being afraid of anything. Unless, she thought, caught short by the idea, he was afraid that if his brothers saw him now, they would accept him only out of pity. Or, maybe, he was afraid they wouldn’t accept him if he appeared weak. Not that they were likely to think such a thing with his reputation, she thought—then remembered that his brothers had no idea who he was. They’d been expecting Andrew Malone. Not Chase Harrington.

Conscious of how his jaw tightened when he leaned back, the feeling she’d had when she’d left him in recovery washed over her again. She remembered how he’d struck her then as being so very alone. Only now she had a strange sense that being alone wasn’t his choice. It was simply the only way he knew how to be.

“I won’t do anything you don’t want me to do,” she agreed, shaking off the disturbing thought. “But there is something I can do, if it will help. I can’t release you any sooner, but I can get you out of this room. For a while, anyway.”

His glance shifted to her, curious and intent.

“I’m sure it won’t do for you to meet in Ryan’s office. That’s his turf,” she added, letting him know she had a few observational powers of her own. “But I can find you an empty meeting room. You’ll have to be in a wheelchair, and you’ll still be hooked up to an IV,” she cautioned, “but your nurse can help you into your street clothes.”

She tipped her head, trying to think of what she’d overlooked. Trying mostly to ignore the way her stomach fluttered when his attention lingered on her mouth before settling on her eyes. “I can set up the meeting for you myself.”

He didn’t even try to hide his skepticism. It narrowed his gaze, seeped into his voice. “Why do you want to help me with this?”

“Because you’re my patient,” she told him, unable to imagine why he looked so suspicious. “And your brothers are my friends. I think you should know they want to meet you as badly as you want to meet them. And I know you do,” she informed him easily. “You wouldn’t have come this far if you didn’t.”

“I’d rather wait until I’m on my feet before I met them. It would just be…easier. I don’t have any clothes right now, anyway. They cut off what I was wearing in Emergency and I have no idea what happened to my travel bag.”

The words rang more of excuse than reason. He had to know that.

“It’s your call,” she conceded. “Just let me know if you change your mind. If you like, I can give you a number where I can always be reached.”

Looking as if he were complying only because it was easier than not, he nudged the business card on the tray-table toward her. It had landed face down, so she wrote her pager number on the back and dropped his pen beside it.

“For what it’s worth,” she said, because the knowledge might make it easier for him, “all that matters to them is that you’re family.”

He looked at her as if he hadn’t a clue what difference that should make. He didn’t ask, either. When ten seconds ticked by and he hadn’t said a word, she stepped back from the bed. She had no problem helping people when they really needed or wanted it. The one thing she’d learned not to do was step in where she wasn’t welcome. She’d done what she could for Ryan and Tanner. And for Chase. But Chase clearly preferred to handle the matter on his own.

The only thing he’d asked of her was why she would want to help him in the first place. He’d looked at her as if she had some angle; as if he couldn’t believe she wanted to help him simply because he needed it.

“I should get back.”

“Yeah. You probably should.”

There were people waiting for her. Telling him she’d see him tomorrow, telling herself there truly was nothing more she could do, she turned away.

She was halfway across the room when she heard him murmur, “By the way, I understand it was yesterday, but happy birthday.”

He watched her pause by the door. Surprise, then a smile moved over her face. That smile was as gentle as a spring rain and just as inviting.

“Thanks,” she replied, and slipped out before he could admit just how much he wished she’d stayed.

She must have thought he wanted his privacy. The door closed behind her, leaving him isolated with the thoughts that had him feeling as if he wanted to crawl out of his skin.

He hated the thoughts churning inside him, hated the sense of uncertainty that came with them. It hadn’t been so bad when he could numb himself with the anesthetic of work. As long as he was pushing himself mentally or physically, he was fine. When he wanted to avoid the very sort of thoughts plaguing him now, he simply switched into a higher gear, demanding more of himself and, by extension, everyone around him. He’d even managed to escape for a few hours that day, hassling with the fax and working on his contracts. Now, grounded, and with his contracts finished, he had no idea how to escape.

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