“What was that?”

Kendal bolted upright beside Jason, peering into the dark jungle.

In the same instant they both saw the figure move. It was a young woman, crouching in the undergrowth like a frightened animal.

“It’s the same girl who was outside the hotel,” Kendal whispered at Jason’s shoulder. “The one who had the child with her.”

She emerged into the moonlight and beckoned them. Kendal started to get up, but Jason grabbed her arm.

“That little child!” she protested. “What if he needs us?”

The woman led them into the jungle over a dappled moonlit path to a small cave where trickles of water dropped over the opening. “Aquí,” she said softly, putting a finger to her lips. In here.

Inside, the sleeping form of a tiny boy was visible curled up on a brightly woven blanket. He was pretty, like his mother, except his mouth and jaw didn’t look right.

“Oh,” Kendal breathed, feeling her heart melt.

Dear Reader,

When I ventured into the Yucatán jungle to visit with a Mayan medicine man a couple of years ago, I had no idea what I would find.

But as I followed my guide deeper into the heart of the jungle, the isolation and the ancient peace of the place closed around me. In such a remote setting, I realized, twenty-first-century trappings could quickly fall away. In such a setting, time would slow, priorities would emerge, sensations and feelings would be amplified.

The medicine man was not what I expected. A humble little man who spoke to my guide in the quiet, clicking cadence of the Mayans, he kindly shared with me his efforts to help his people attain better health, using simple herbs and ancient remedies.

Not long after that, I met a doctor who had performed surgeries for the Doctors Without Borders organization in the same region. I am very grateful to Dr. Michael Bumagin for sharing his technical knowledge of reconstructive surgery and the details of his service in Chiapas. (This is a work of fiction, of course, so any creative embellishments are mine, not Michael’s.)

Those experiences came together to form this story, where two people, swept away by both passion and compassion, find something unexpected in the remote jungle. They find a child who opens their hearts. And as they struggle to save that child, they find something else unexpected—a deep and lasting love for each other.

I treasure my reader mail. Contact me at P.O. Box 720224, Norman, OK 73070, or www.darlenegraham.com.

My best to you,

Darlene Graham

To Save This Child
Darlene Graham

www.millsandboon.co.uk

This story, my tenth Superromance novel,

is dedicated with deep appreciation to the gifted and

hardworking editors who have given me so much

encouragement and help over the past five years:

Paula Eykelhof, Zilla Soriano, Laura Shin and

Kathleen Scheibling

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

EPILOGUE

PROLOGUE

Somewhere over the remote mountainous regions of Chiapas, Mexico

KENDAL COLLINS breathed a prayer of thanks that at last they were safe. At last. Safe.

Though the mountains rolling beneath the belly of their small plane looked rocky and steep, forbidding in their vast isolation, Jason Bridges appeared to be in control, his hands relaxed on the yoke of his Cessna Conquest as he executed flying maneuvers with his usual precision.

Shuddering, Kendal released what felt like the first full breath she’d drawn in days. Even during the dark time of their captivity, Jason had always sworn he would keep her safe, but only now that they were airborne would she let herself believe it. Finally, they were leaving Chiapas far behind.

“Hang in there, sweetheart.” Jason released the yoke long enough to squeeze her hand.

She gave him a brave smile, then twisted her torso, extending that smile to the two dear people strapped together into one of the rear-facing seats. Miguel Vajaras, age two, slept like the baby he was with his beautiful dark head lolling against the slender shoulder of Ruth Nichols, Jason’s scrub nurse. Ruth adjusted Miguel on her lap and put a shushing finger to her lips. Kendal nodded her understanding. Miguel had been so frightened, confused and crying right up until the plane had lifted into the air.

“Miguel.” Jason had distracted the child. “Look! Mountains!”

At the sound of Jason’s deep voice, Miguel had quieted abruptly, straining forward in the seat to look out the window. “Moun-nan,” he had echoed in baby talk. “Moun-nan. Eh-pane.” He had repeated the unfamiliar English words over and over, until the drone of the plane’s engine had finally put the exhausted toddler to sleep.

Kendal studied her adopted son’s innocent brown face, so angelic in repose, not quite able to believe this sweet child was, at last, going to be safe and was soon going to be her very own. This ordeal had been so hard on all of them, but now they were safe. Safe.

She longed to be back in Ruth’s seat so she could comfort her baby, but Jason wanted, needed, Kendal in the copilot’s seat. They weren’t out of Vajaras’s territory yet.

“Get in front in case I need a navigator,” Jason had said as he helped her into the plane.

And Ruth would take good care of Miguel. Ruth had always been good with the children, adept at calming their fears. Miguel was in good hands. Kendal tried to relax as she gave her sleeping little boy one last loving smile.

Ruth returned Kendal’s smile before she closed her eyes in exhaustion. Their flight from terror had worn the poor woman out.

Kendal glanced at her future husband. His muscular neck was craned as he concentrated on the terrain below.

“Look at that, sweetheart,” he said.

Kendal glanced out the small plane’s window as the Canon del Sumidero came into view. The scenery rolling below them was exotic, breathtaking, but Kendal was sick of Chiapas and its strange seductive beauty. Right now she wanted to feast her eyes on the plains of Oklahoma…and on Jason.

She studied his handsome profile for a second before her gaze was drawn down to his hands gripping the control yoke. She had noticed those hands the very first time they’d met in his office. The rest of his appearance could border on scruffy at times, but his hands were always immaculate, smooth and clean like any good surgeon’s.

She would probably admire Jason’s hands for the rest of her life. Even the way he wrote was strong. She loved to watch as he jotted orders or slashed his signature across a chart in neat, bold strokes.

But it was seeing him use those hands in surgery that had finally won Kendal’s undying admiration. Jason Bridges made real miracles happen every day. She had witnessed those miracles in the worst of conditions down here in Chiapas.

Her eyes trailed from the control yoke down to his legs, also tanned and oh-so-muscular, bulging against wrinkled khaki shorts. It seemed his whole body functioned like one long, taut muscle. A six-foot-tall granite statue—that’s what Jason was.

Her gaze flitted up to his cropped hair, dark as midnight, with strands of silver at the temples that created a delicious contrast to his clean profile, his chiseled lips, his square jaw. His skin, deeply tanned from the Mexican sun, glowed in the slanting sunshine that streamed through the plane’s compact windshield. She sighed again, utterly content to just admire him.

He glanced over and smiled when he caught her doing so.

“What’re you thinking about?”

“How much I love you.”

He smiled. “I love you, too. Is Miguel okay now?”

She nodded and raised her finger in the same silencing gesture Ruth had used. Jason glanced back at his sleeping passengers. Then he reached across the narrow space and wrapped a possessive palm around Kendal’s inner thigh. She wrapped her fingers around his wrist. His pulse felt steady, strong.

“God, I’m glad we’re finally out of there,” he murmured.

“Me, too.” But Kendal found that she could still summon up the fear. The danger is over, she reminded herself as she suppressed tears, and gripped Jason’s wrist harder.

“Ah, now.” Jason flipped his hand up, capturing her fingers. “Please don’t cry, sweetheart.” He leaned toward her, glancing back and indicating that he wanted to speak near her ear. Their heads touched halfway over the center console. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

“I know.” Kendal closed her eyes, flooded with relief as she pressed her head into his broad shoulder.

“Just remember how much I love you,” he murmured. “And that I can’t wait to be alone with you,” his voice lowered further still, “so I can show you exactly how much.”

She opened her eyes, tilting her head up to flash him another brave smile. The sun bounced off the Cessna’s white engine cowling up onto Jason’s aviator shades. Behind the sunglasses, Kendal knew, her lover’s eyes were as blue as the Pacific Ocean that stretched beyond the endless horizon at their backs. And she knew what those eyes looked like when they were brimming with tenderness, burning with desire.

“I can’t wait,” she said as she leaned in closer to him and caught a heady whiff of his scent. But in that same instant her vision was snagged by a peripheral glimpse of the fuel gauges.

“Jason!” She jerked her head up, pointing.

“What?” His voice echoed the sudden alarm in hers.

“Shhh!” Ruth shushed them from behind.

But Kendal ignored her. “The fuel!” The dial for pounds of fuel remaining read unbelievably low and the dial for fuel outflow read unbelievably high.

Jason stared at the gauges and Kendal blinked hard, hoping her eyes, her brain, had made some kind of horrible mistake. But when Jason pulled on the red knob to stem the flow and frantically flipped the switch for the backup tank, she knew he was seeing the same thing she was seeing.

“What’s wrong?” Ruth, sensing trouble, clutched the still-sleeping child’s head to her breast while she twisted to see, stretching her seat harness.

Right then the warning lights flashed, and the low fuel alarm started to blare.

“We’re almost out of fuel,” Kendal spoke above the insistent warning chimes and the even louder drone of the engine, which to Kendal seemed to be already making an ominous straining noise.

“How can that be? We just left!”

“I will,” Jason ground out through clenched teeth, “kill Vajaras with my bare hands.”

“How could he do this!” Kendal cried, horrified to realize the man was so evil that he would arrange the death of his own grandchild.

“How could he do what?” Ruth demanded, clearly panicking.

“Vajaras must have arranged for one of his goons to puncture our fuel lines before takeoff,” Jason explained as he eased the plane to a lower altitude. “He knew we’d be over the continental divide by the time it leaked out.” He was executing a careful fuel-conserving turn in a narrow mountain valley. “Stay calm,” he said. But his own lips were stretched white with fear. “Our best bet is to circle back to the airport.”

Jason gripped the control yoke while the low fuel signal continued to chime like a death knell.

In the back seat Miguel whimpered, awakened by the loud alarm. Kendal looked back to see his thickly lashed little eyes growing wide with fear.

“It’s okay, honey,” she said in a Chiapas dialect, “Mamá está aquí.”

But the toddler started to cry, struggling against Ruth’s seat belt and stretching his thin arms toward Kendal. All Kendal could do was reach a hand back, awkwardly trying to reassure the child. She rubbed her palm gently on his little shoulder while Ruth murmured reassurances in his ear.

In only minutes, the mountains gave way to a broad valley, then the patchwork of fields and forest revealed clusters of thatched huts and finally the large metropolis of buildings that was Tuxtla Gutiérrez appeared in the distance. When the airport runway came into sight the three adults held a collective breath.

Maybe they could make it down.

Jason’s strong fingers gripped the landing gear control handle as they closed in over the crude airport, but suddenly he lurched forward in his seat.

He cursed and, without further warning, jerked back hard on the yoke. The nose of the plane peeled up in a gravity-defying climb that pitched the three passengers sideways. In the same instant Kendal heard the unmistakable pop-pop-pop pop-pop-pop of gunfire from below. A bullet ripped through the fuselage as she twisted her face to the window, looking down to see several men running out of a hangar, strafing the sky with submachine guns.

In seconds Jason had pushed the little plane up to an air speed that made Kendal’s hair stand on end.

“What are you doing?” she screamed as he continued to climb.

“Keeping us alive!” he screamed back.

“The fuel!” she argued, knowing his maneuver was gobbling up what little remained. But Jason only pulled the plane up higher, out of range of the gunfire.

The Cessna’s engines were tough, but they weren’t designed for dogfight maneuvers, and the plane stalled as the fuel was sucked away to mere fumes. They plummeted back to earth in a screeching nosedive.

While the alarms rang and the warning light panel on the Cessna lit up like a Christmas tree, Jason managed to pull the plane out of the dive.

Dizzily, Kendal looked back to see the machine-gunners running across the landing strip toward an aircraft that she hadn’t noticed before. In the next few minutes those men would take off, and their plane looked bigger, faster than Jason’s.

“We can’t outrun them,” Jason yelled. He leveled the plane just as the engines coughed once more, sputtered, and died. “Put on the life jackets,” he commanded. “And strap Miguel in his own seat. We’ll have to go for a controlled landing out on the river.”

The Rio Grijalva came into view. It was wide in places where it had been dammed, but it was carved deep into the Canon del Sumidero. From their altitude it looked like a broad navy blue ribbon curving at the bottom of three-thousand-foot-high cliffs. But it was the only place where the jungle canopy and the rugged mountains parted enough to put a plane down.

“Oh, God.” Kendal felt her face draining pale, paler, as with trembling hands she pulled the life vests from behind the rear seats and hurriedly helped Ruth strap the wailing Miguel into his, then quickly slipped on her own. Ruth secured Miguel into the other seat.

Jason grabbed the CB-like microphone off the instrument panel.

“Mayday! Mayday!” he shouted into the mike. “We are making a forced uncontrolled landing over the Rio Grijalva gorge. Cessna Conquest call numb—”

His words were cut short as the dying plane tilted and careened, and he had to wrestle the yoke with all his might. In a panic Kendal tried to wedge a life jacket behind him, but he shrugged her hands away. She studied his grim face, and then twisted to see the steep rocky walls of the canyon below, hurtling rapidly toward them. We are going to die, she thought.

How had it come to this?

She reached back to clutch her howling baby’s tiny leg. With her other hand she gripped Jason’s muscular shoulder, then pressed her forehead against his hard flesh. She hadn’t touched either of them enough, not nearly enough. They couldn’t die now. Her mind rolled back to the amazing way it had all begun, and she thought, Oh, God, please. It can’t end like this. Not after all we’ve been through. Do not abandon us now, God. Not now. Not when at long last we have discovered the meaning of true love.

CHAPTER ONE

Three months earlier in the tenth-floor Oklahoma City offices of Dr. Jason Bridges. 7:06 a.m.

“I SEE YOU’VE GONE and pulled yourself another all nighter.” Kathy Martinez stated the words calmly, as if all-nighters were a boring fact of life with her boss, which they were.

“Now, now, Mother Martinez. Stop scowling. I feel great.”

But Kathy Martinez only frowned harder. “Well, Doctor, you don’t look great.” She patted her own kinky dark coif as she studied the young physician who had enticed her with a generous salary three years ago. Jason Bridges was a cutie-pie, all right. Mmm hmm. But this young man could sure use some neatness lessons. Jason Bridges ran around this hospital looking more like a rebel in a Gap ad than a gifted surgeon. Mussed dark hair, an overnight growth of beard, faded jeans, loafers with no socks, a leather jacket opened wide over a wrinkled gray T-shirt that looked like he’d slept in it. “If you ask me, you don’t even look like a doctor.”

“I didn’t ask you.” He reached for the clipboard with the day’s schedule.

The faded T-shirt stretched too tightly over a chest sculpted by weight training. But Dr. Bridges didn’t spend all that time in the gym so he’d look good. Although he most certainly did look good.

Dr. Bridges built his body up so he could use it like a machine. Or rather, abuse it like a machine. Everything this young doctor did focused on one thing and one thing only—performing surgery. Performing countless surgeries, in fact. Dr. Bridges worked like a man possessed, as if his were the only hands that could undo the damage, the defects, the heartache that fate had dealt his patients.

And in certain respects, it could be argued that his were the only such hands. Because Dr. Bridges frequently, and successfully, attempted risky surgical techniques that other surgeons in his field were too intimidated, too terrified, to even try. Her boss, Kathy always said, was gifted. His hands, especially, were gifted. The most gifted of the gifted.

Others were not so admiring. Kathy had heard the stories. Nurses he’d had affairs with had labeled Dr. Bridges “The Wolf.” The image fit. His eyes, deep-set and icy blue, often squinted or flicked sideways with a sort of wariness, a watchfulness, that bordered on predatory. He seemed to be consumed by some sort of insatiable hunger, though he hid his drive behind a smoke screen of endless jokes. But when Kathy had seen him angry, which was not often and only in response to some idiot’s incompetence, Jason Bridges could be genuinely scary.

Kathy Martinez tugged the lapels of her starched snow-white lab coat over her broad bosom. With a renegade doctor like this one, somebody had to maintain standards. “No, sir. You don’t look like a doctor at all,” she sniffed. “In fact, I’d say you look like the devil himself.”

He looked up from the clipboard, and his bloodshot blue eyes flashed mischievously before they narrowed. He twisted his face into a mock diabolical expression, arched his dark brows and flared his nostrils. “You found me out, Mother Martinez.” He rubbed his stubbled jaw and leaned toward her. “I am…the devil himself. Mwah-ha-ha-ha.” He punctuated the fiendish laugh with a little pinch at her stout waist.

“Stop that.” Kathy slapped his hand. She pursed her chubby carmine lips, refusing to smile.

“You know what I mean.” Over her half glasses she skewered him with her black eyes. “You don’t get enough sleep and then you come in here looking like something the cat dragged in. It’s just plain shameful.”

“Ah, now.” Jason faked a pout. “Would you forgive me if I told you I had an emergency?”

“What was it this time?”

He sobered, shrugged. “Teenage girl who tried to exit her car via the windshield. Let’s just say her face looks considerably better now than it did at two o’clock this morning.”

Kathy gave a brisk nod of approval, then returned to her agenda. Middle-of-the-night surgeries notwithstanding, other doctors managed to shave. “You gonna get cleaned up before you make rounds?”

Dr. Bridges released a long, lionesque yawn. “Already made rounds, sweetie. And I’m sorry to report that the sticky buns on the ninth floor are done gone.”

Kathy planted her fists on her double-wide hips. “I didn’t say I wanted any dang sticky buns.” With a huff she stepped behind the desk and proceeded to rearrange the stack of charts that the staff had pulled the evening before. Only yesterday, she had embarked upon a strict diet. The latest in a long line of strict diets calculated to return her figure—in thirty days or less—to its prepudge state, before she’d added five pounds with each of her five pregnancies. Okay, ten pounds.

“Ah. You’ve found another foolproof diet?” Dr. Bridges’s grin was wicked. He was the devil, all right.

“Absolutely.” Kathy squared her shoulders.

“I’ve told you before, Mother Martinez. If you’d stop messing with your appetite, your body would eventually find its perfect shape.” He pulled a PalmPilot out of his hip pocket and started punching at it.

For a surgeon who spent his days repairing faces, Jason Bridges had some pretty laid-back notions about bodies. He always acted like Kathy wasn’t really all that fat. But she was F-A-T, fat. And she suspected it was her weight that had gotten her into a teensy bit of trouble. Well, they’d discuss her medical problems in a minute. Patients first.

“I wish it were that simple.” Kathy finished putting the charts in the proper order. The staff had to do everything possible to keep their gifted young surgeon on track. “What with the nurses and their sticky buns and the drug reps hauling in trays of food every week. Everybody’s always celebrating something around here. Tomorrow’s Valentine’s Day, and sure enough, a basket of cookies has already arrived.” She flipped a dismissing hand at the end of the counter, where a gigantic red basket, lined with pink foil wrap, overflowed with gift pens, notepads, and heart-shaped cookies.

Dr. Bridges turned his head toward the gaudy basket. “Good Lord! Who sent that thing?”

“That drug rep from Merrill Jackson.” Kathy watched Dr. Bridges saunter over and pluck out the card protruding from the basket. He read it, sniffed at the paper, raised his eyebrows with interest, then slipped the note in the pocket of his leather jacket.

Kathy rolled her eyes. She would bet her last sticky bun that that young woman, just like every other eligible female around this hospital, was after a whole lot more than the doctor’s pharmaceutical business. Heart-shaped cookies. Phooey.

“Those drug reps are after you like ducks on a June bug. Another one was supposed to bring breakfast tomorrow, but she canceled.”

“Doubt I could have made it anyway. I’ve got that periorbital reconstruction at dark-thirty and then a bilateral resection of parotids.” Dr. Bridges returned his attention to his PalmPilot. “But you nurses can have a treat now and then without obsessing about your weight.”

“Easy for you to say. You aren’t a fat black woman.”

“And neither are you, Mother Martinez. What you are is the most efficient and kind nurse I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. And you are absolutely gorgeous.”

Kathy rolled her eyes at him. This is why he was such a lady-killer. “You can just stop that old sweet talk.”

“You know you look fine.”

She swatted the compliment away. “I wish I could say the same about you, Doctor. You need a shower.”

He finished with the PalmPilot, scratched his chin again and checked his watch. “It’ll have to be a quickie in the doc’s lounge. I’ve got to be in surgery by seven-thirty.”

He probably hadn’t caught a wink of sleep since he’d rolled out of bed, jumped in that silly little sports car of his and raced to the hospital in the middle of the night. Kathy frowned at his unshaven face. And he’d probably come back to the office after surgery looking just as scruffy. She had very particular ideas about how surgeons ought to comport themselves, and those ideas didn’t include running around looking like a wild man.

He narrowed his gaze at her. “I can either rebuild people’s faces or keep myself all purty. Take your pick.” He gave her an engaging grin as he thrust out the other hand in a gimme gesture. “Are you gonna let me see those charts before I head back down to the O.R.?”

Kathy handed him the charts. “There’s a bunch.”

“Excellent. Now maybe we can pay the light bill.”

She eyed Dr. Bridges’s backside as he sauntered down the hallway, already absorbed in the day’s cases as he walked. Pay the light bill. Because he worked like one possessed, the man was making money hand over fist. But money wasn’t his motivation.

Kathy Martinez was one of the few people who knew the truth about The Wolf. Before he’d even arrived at Integris, her sister from Texas had told her all about the new doctor, about his sad history down in Dallas. It had been on TV, her sister said, had made all the papers, back when it happened.

“Oh.” The doctor stopped and tossed a killer smile over his broad shoulder. “Could you please get me a cup of coffee?”

When she scowled at him, he said, “Pretty please, Mother Martinez?” and blew her a kiss.

The Mother Martinez bit didn’t bother her. She was a mother, the uber-mother, and he gave everybody nicknames. But beneath the teasing, Jason Bridges exhibited more respect for and far more trust in his staff than any other doctor she’d ever worked for. And even if Kathy was old enough to be his mother, that didn’t stop her and every other female in Dr. Bridges’s orbit from appreciating his astonishing male beauty. It was sad, really, and a major waste that such a handsome specimen of a male remained so stubbornly alone.

What that young man needed was a good wife.

But Kathy suspected that the same thing that made him so driven kept him alone, too. That his past, in fact, was the cause of his loneliness.

She went into the break room and filled a foam cup with the coffee she’d put on to drip when she arrived at seven o’clock. While she stirred in the right amount of sugar, she heard some of the other staff calling out as they came in the back door. She looked at her watch. Seven-fourteen. They were getting a jump start on the day. Well, who could blame them? The week before the doctor left for Mexico was always a crazy one.

“Is Dr. Bridges here?” his scrub nurse Ruth asked as she swept into the break room.

“Back in his lair, getting ready to rev up on coffee.” Kathy held the cup aloft. “Pulled an all-nighter. No rest for the wicked today.” She headed down the hall. She hated to tell the doctor her bad news right before he went into a difficult surgery, but the sooner, the better.

She opened the door to his office. He was standing behind his desk, threading his long arms into a stiffly pressed lab coat with his name stitched above the pocket. A grudging concession to her standards, she supposed. But the crisp white garment only accentuated his bronzed skin and made his looks seem all the more rugged by contrast.

“Now do I look doctorly enough?” he taunted.

“No. Is this car accident case going to interfere with the trip to Mexico?” She handed him the coffee.

He took a sip before answering. “Hope not. I think Mike can cover for me.”

He sipped the coffee again with a concerned frown. “My main worry is the kid’s maxilla. Both sides were affected, and there was a lot of swelling before I got to her. I couldn’t really tell what she was supposed to look like. May end up with a redo. I’ll decide once I see her ‘before’ pictures. The mother’s bringing them this morning.”

Kathy nodded and stepped to the window where the morning sun was winking up over the matching Doctors’ Tower to the east. She closed her eyes against the brilliance. Their work could be so heartbreaking, but they seldom allowed themselves the luxury of dwelling on their patients’ grief. Bridges kept his team on an even keel with his own resolve, with his cool decision-making style, with his constant jokes. But it proved a delicate balancing act. Because the more his reputation spread, the more challenging the cases he attracted. His skills just kept growing, and he kept pushing the envelope while the staff scrambled to keep up. He decided what had to be done and then they all did it. They went to the wall for their patients, nothing held back, nothing spared in the fight against their enemies—disfigurement, deformity, pain.

When he had relocated to Oklahoma City three years ago, Jason Bridges had assembled an experienced, top-notch staff. He paid them well and expected them to give their jobs their utmost, just as he did. Every day they threw themselves into the fray, warriors in a never-ending battle.

But no one seemed to mind the long hours and the exhausting work. None of them had ever been involved in a practice this exciting, this dedicated. Dr. Bridges was truly a young miracle-worker, an amazing leader. He had already treated patients from a four-state area. Their work made them all fiercely proud.

And then there was this yearly mission to Mexico. The ultimate payoff—three weeks working down in the remote state of Chiapas. They had started out with the Doctors Without Borders organization, but now Jason had turned renegade, flying his own plane in, circumventing customs.

Oh, yes. Working for Dr. Jason Bridges was exciting, to say the least.

Mexico had become their ultimate proving ground, their yearly high. Every spring Jason Bridges closed his office for three weeks and headed south to continue his humanitarian work. He was welcomed with open arms by the indigenous people in the isolated mountains and jungles.

The back-to-back surgeries in the horrible conditions—dust, heat, mosquitoes, flies—always seemed to go on without end, but when their three weeks were up, nobody ever seemed to want to leave. They’d all become as hooked on the experience as the doctor himself. Every year Bridges took along his scrub nurse, Ruth Nichols. Every year he took Kathy. The rest of his staff rotated, but Kathy and Ruth were indispensable, Kathy because she was the only one in the office who spoke Mexican Spanish fluently. She’d learned it from her husband, a gentle Hispanic from south Texas.

Damn. She was going to hate missing out on the Mexico excursion this year. She so hated to tell Dr. Bridges the bad news.

He had seated himself at his desk, sipping coffee and pouring over the charts with a concentration that seemed totally undimmed by sleep deprivation. He wasn’t a wolf. He was a superhero, that’s what Kathy thought.

“Doc, I need to tell you something.” She turned from the window to face him.

He glanced up, caught her expression. “Hey. You okay?”

She sighed. “Not really.”

“Martinez?” His deep voice became quiet with concern. “What’s going on?” He stood and rounded the desk, propped his rear on it and folded his arms over his broad chest. His blue eyes fixed on her with the kind of sympathetic attention he usually reserved for his patients.

She crossed to one of the chairs facing the desk and lowered herself into it. “I’m afraid you’ll have to find a new interpreter for the Mexico trip.”

“Really? Why?” His face was intent, serious. All hints of the teasing Dr. Bridges was gone. She had to hand it too him. The man had infallible instincts.

“I’ve got to have surgery. Doc Marshall said the sooner the better.”

“Marshall? It’s a G.I. thing?”

“Gallbladder.” Kathy felt her face heat up. Fat, fifty and flatulent, that’s what she was. “He’ll do a laparoscopy, of course. No big deal. But I thought I’d better get it over with while the office is going to be shut down for three weeks. I’m sorry. I really hate to leave you without an interpreter. And on such short notice.”

“Don’t sweat it.” His gentle, compassionate tone made Kathy feel all the worse for letting him down. She wished he’d say something smart-alecky now.

But instead he crossed to her chair and squeezed her shoulder with his large, warm palm. “Your health comes first. I’ll find another interpreter. No problem.”

But it was going to be a big problem, Kathy knew. Jason Bridges understood Spanish, of course, but the Mayan cadences of the dialect spoken in the Chiapas region were tricky. Especially when the patient was a frightened peasant or when Jason started firing off fast and furious instructions to the local help. An interpreter who could put the patients at ease was critical. Finding somebody with the right combination of medical knowledge and compassion was going to be really tough. And finding somebody willing to endure the physical discomfort of the region, the daily rigors of Jason’s mission, was going to be an even bigger problem. An enormous problem. But problems didn’t stop Jason Bridges. He plowed through them like a machete through jungle growth.

Jason didn’t want to make Kathy feel any worse than she already did, but she knew he was thinking, Where? Where on earth would they find someone who could drop everything to hop on his private plane to Mexico in only one week?

“I’m sure I can find someone,” he repeated.

“I know I shouldn’t even ask,” Kathy glanced up at him, wincing. “But I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’d postpone this trip? I’ll be good as new in a couple of months.”

Jason stepped around his desk to a giant topographical map of Mexico that was anchored to the wall. Just looking at the thing made him wonder what fresh atrocities Benicio Vajaras had inflicted on the people in the Tzeltal villages around San Cristóbal.

“Right here—” he tapped the area at the bottom where Mexico funneled into Central America “—we have good old Jose and his family. And their baby girl, Chiquita.”

Kathy rolled her eyes.

“Chiquita’s a sweet-tempered child,” he went on, “even if she is named after a banana. Smart, healthy in every respect. Except, of course, for that harelip splitting her face in half.”

Kathy frowned. He knew she was seeing the parade of such children they’d treated in the past three years. And others, too. Older children who had been maimed by the faceless monster named Vajaras. Parents who had been wounded in armed combat. Sometimes Jason felt like a surgeon patching up a tide of wounded on a battlefield. Only he fought this war year in, year out. Because his enemies were not only endless disease and poverty, but the cruelty and inhumanity of a ruthless overlord.

“So—” Jason focused his gaze on the map “—at this late date, Jose and Rosita have already loaded up the rental donkey and are making the arduous trip—” he ran his finger over the mountainous region on the map in a slow, twisting path north “—in the hope of getting a miracle for their baby.” He flashed a wicked smile at Kathy. “Cancel? Don’t think so.”

“Then the least I can do is help you find my replacement. I want you to know—” she glanced over at him again, this time with apology in her eyes “—that I only found out about this on Friday.”

“Maybe I can locate an interpreter in the region,” he offered. The Miami-style hotels facing the turquoise ocean in Cancún were crawling with bright young bilingual Mexicans looking for ways to improve their economic status. But even crossing the border without a Spanish-speaking cohort could be very risky, especially when you were trafficking medical supplies and drugs and sharp instruments past Mexican customs.

“Even if you can hire some bright kid to travel across the peninsula to the Chiapas clinic, if he or she doesn’t have a medical background…” Kathy left the rest unsaid—that such a person couldn’t adequately explain the strange and frightening procedures to the patients. She stood, facing her boss. “I really am sorry.”

“It can’t be helped.” Jason walked around the desk and gave her shoulder another reassuring pat. “Now get your behind back out to salt mines.” He winked at her.

“Watch it. I’ll turn you in for harassment.” Kathy quipped as she walked to the door. She paused with her hand on the knob. “I hate leaving you with this snafu.”

“Go drown your guilt with a cookie, Martinez.” He flapped a dismissing palm at her.

“Hold it. I do know someone who speaks fluent Spanish, who might even understand the Chiapas dialects. What was that drug rep’s name? The one who brought the cookies?”

“Kendal Collins?” He’d seen the woman around the hospital. Something about Kendal Collins had definitely snagged his interest.

“Yeah.” Seeming excited, Kathy hurried back to his desk. “Could I see that card you stuck in your pocket?”

He swiveled the desk chair to his coatrack and dug in the vest pocket of the leather jacket. “Kendal Collins speaks Spanish?”

Kathy took the card. “Yeah. Can I keep this until tomorrow? I might be too swamped to call her until this evening.”

“You’re going to ask this little drug rep to go to Mexico?”

“No. I’m offering her the open brunch slot. She’s on your waiting list. You’ll at least need to make an appearance. Maybe if we do her a favor, she’ll do us one.”

He nodded. The drug reps lined up to get his ear. There was never enough time to listen to everybody, never enough time for anything, which was why he wanted Martinez to cut the blather and split.

“It’s worth a shot. Now beat it, Martinez.”

Kathy closed the door with a quiet click and a smile.

Jason finished the charts, then sank back in his desk chair with a worried frown. He wondered how long Kathy’s gallbladder had been acting up. She never missed a day of work. Sometimes he felt guilty for pushing his staff too hard.

But he didn’t push anyone any harder than he pushed himself. It seemed the only thing that gave him any peace was healing the scarred and hurting.

He closed his eyes. He had been too young, too dumb, to save Amy. The pain had dulled with the passage of time, of course, but on some level the tragedy haunted him every day. Every scarred face was Amy’s. Every broken nose, every collapsed eye socket, every deformed palette…every burn contracture. He cut and stitched and mended as if he were trying to repair the past. It was like a giant, lifelong undo. But what had happened to Amy could never be undone. No matter how hard he worked, it would never be enough.

He placed his open palm on the stack of charts before him. Still, he could save these. And the ones in Mexico. One case at a time. One life at a time.

CHAPTER TWO

ON THE NIGHT of her thirty-first birthday, Kendal Collins sank into her giant Jetta tub until the bubbles grazed her chin. After brooding for one full, uninterrupted minute, she slowly raised a limp hand from the sudsy water and picked up one of the heart-shaped gourmet cookies she’d stashed at the side of tub. She unpeeled the cellophane wrapper, then thoughtfully nibbled the sinful treat. The second cookie went down a little faster. She washed the third down with a tall stemmed glass of very expensive merlot.

The cookies were verboten. So was the wine for that matter. Kendal always struggled with a teeny, tiny weight problem that her best friend Sarah insisted on calling “voluptuousness.” But today was her birthday, Kendal told herself. And Valentine’s Day. She reached for another cookie. She deserved a little celebration. But as she drained the last of the wine, she knew she wasn’t celebrating.

She started to cry.

At first her weeping was gentle, controlled, like a character in a soap opera trying not to wreck a mask of makeup. But before long she broke down, sobbing, hiccuping, letting the tears run down her face as she sank lower into the scented water. Finally, she had scooted so low that her lips skimmed the surface. Another inch, she thought, blubbering, and I could just go ahead and drown myself.

She rolled her eyes at such a ridiculous thought. But in this past year she had not let herself have one single pity party. And by Jove, she was going to have herself a doozie tonight.

In this past year, she had been brave, trying to show everyone that she was okay. Somehow she’d been strong this whole long, lonely year since Phillip had dumped her. Dumped was such a brutal, ugly word, but nonetheless a true one, and Kendal was all about truth these days. The ugly, unvarnished truth. She was fat. And childless. And Phillip had dumped her.

“It’s not working anymore,” Phillip had announced on the night of the fifth anniversary of their so-called relationship, which was also the date of her birthday. Which was also Valentine’s Day. Which was also this exact hateful date.

“I’m sorry. It’s just not.” His big brown eyes had looked pained as he’d said it. As if the breakup was something totally beyond his control and he was so sad, so powerless, about the whole thing.

Kendal had asked the usual questions that sputter out of the shocked and bereaved—the dumped.

What do you mean? Are you saying it’s over? Just like that? Are you moving out?

But of course he was moving out. Phillip was already packing his bags, right there in front of her eyes. And he was consulting one of his never-ending lists while he did it. He’d apparently given this considerable thought. But then, Phillip gave considerable thought to taking a poot. That’s why Kendal had never expected this kind of rash act from him.

Kendal had wanted to scream. You can’t just walk out like this! It’s our anniversary! And it’s Valentine’s Day! And it’s my thirtieth birthday, for crying out loud! Instead she forced herself to remain calm, adult, as she followed Phillip around the bedroom.

She argued that they’d built a life here. That they’d even bought this town house together.

“I’ll need my equity back,” he said flatly as he meticulously stacked underwear into his suitcase.

“You know I can’t come up with that kind of money!” Her false veneer of calm cracked as reality slammed into her. Phillip was leaving. And on the heels of that realization came another. This lifestyle they’d built had become rather expensive. “And you know I can’t come close to affording this place on my own.” The two of them had been on the rise in their careers, and Kendal had been foolish enough to assume their live-in relationship would eventually lead to marriage. Though she certainly had no intention of mentioning the M-word now, not while Phillip was packing his suitcase like some felon on the run.

Phillip carefully arranged the last of his socks in a zipper pocket. “This place was your choice, not mine. Let’s face it. We are not a good match in so many ways.”

“How did you suddenly come to that conclusion?” Kendal demanded. “Did you make another one of your damned lists or something?” Phillip was the ultimate anal-retentive pharmaceutical rep. He lived by lists. Elaborate, extensive, three-tiered lists. That was one of the things Kendal had found so comforting about him. With Phillip, nothing was ever left to chance. Once, back when their relationship had drifted into the doldrums and he couldn’t quite make up his mind to walk down the aisle, he had actually come to her with a pro and con list, suggesting that she make one of her own.

“As a matter of fact, I did,” he admitted now, “right before I made my final choice.”

“Your final choice?” Kendal echoed.

But he turned away. “Let’s face it,” he repeated. “This relationship is just not working.”

Why did he keep saying that? By the time he faced her at the front door with one last parting look of regret and one last “I’m sorry,” Kendal was reduced to mumbling, “I understand.” Though she really, really did not understand. She’d only said that because she couldn’t endure the sight of his guilt-stricken eyes for another single second.

But two weeks later, she’d wanted to scratch those big brown eyes out when she learned that dear Phillip was involved in a new relationship—one that worked, a woman who fit his list, Kendal supposed. The woman, Kendal suspected, who had been at the root of their troubles all along—Stephanie Robinson. The snotty little drug rep who pulled down stellar sales for Merrill Jackson’s chief competitor, McMayer. The woman who now had Phillip cozily moved into her condo.

Kendal had seen Phillip only once after he’d moved out, when both of them were in Dallas for a Merrill Jackson sales meeting. He was coming down an escalator at the enormous Galleria mall and there was that hated woman, glued to his side. That hideously tall stick-figure blonde had actually spotted Kendal, grabbed Phillip’s arm and steered him in the opposite direction.

Kendal had suffered a very bad moment then. Really suffered.

She’d staggered into a nearby soup shop. Sank into a booth. Blindly ordered French onion, extra cheese. Normally she would have dived into the melted topping with gusto. But that afternoon she had stared at the bowl without so much as lifting the spoon, wondering why, why, why?

All their friends, the other pharmaceutical reps at Merrill Jackson, had sided with Kendal after the breakup, labeling Phillip the L.M.B.—List-making Bastard—and labeling Stephanie Robinson an anorectic bimbo. Which seemed like a bit of an oxymoron to Kendal but she enjoyed the sound of it anyway. She tested the words out loud against the bubbles, “Anorectic bimbo.”

But her friends’ anger on her behalf hadn’t really helped. In the long run, she had ended up missing Phillip and their tidy upscale life. Missing him with a strangely hollow pain that surprised her in fresh waves every few weeks.

As the year dragged by, Kendal’s long, lonely nights seemed to only get longer, lonelier, while she watched another of her girlfriends get married and another have a baby. And when she’d heard a few months ago that Phillip and Stephanie had also gotten married, the pain had solidified into a heavy, solid thing, squeezing like a vise around her heart. Kendal thought she had succeeded in sealing away the hurt where she wouldn’t have to feel it. Except that now, on her thirty-first birthday, here she was, with her tears pouring down into her fancy bathtub.

And fast on heels of the hurt came the fear.

Kendal had to admit that she had some major fears. Her future, without Phillip, looked a little shaky, a little scary. Too scary to contemplate after a hefty glass of merlot. Thoughts of her looming mortgage payment made her wish she hadn’t wasted money on a manicure. She raised a hand out of the sudsy water and examined her perfect French nails through the haze of tears. She’d had them done in anticipation of the girls’ night out that her friends had cooked up for her birthday. Knowing this was now the worst night of her life, they’d made a big deal out of celebrating “the one-year anniversary of Kendal Collins’s emancipation.”

She supposed the whole exercise was meant to be therapeutic, and she loved her friends dearly for trying, but she found she simply didn’t have the heart for a party.

After a hard day on the road with her boss—he seemed to be insisting on spending field days in the car with Kendal more frequently—the idea of getting all fixed up and oozing false cheer in some trendy bar seemed more like drudgery than fun. She’d called Sarah and begged off. She just could not do it, she told her protesting friend. Not tonight.

The real truth was she wanted to stay home and brood about her life.

She studied her fingers, and suddenly the expensive manicure looked like a metaphor for all that was wrong with her life. It was too perfect. Perfect nails, perfect clothes, perfect car, perfect town house—her whole life looked like a magazine ad. And she hated it. Suddenly it all seemed so sterile, so false. And she hated Phillip for leaving her all alone with it. And all alone to pay for it.

Why did she persist in living a lifestyle that no longer had meaning? Because she didn’t know how to do anything else? Because she didn’t actually have anything else? And if this was all she had, how was she going to continue to pay for it?

Her district sales manager’s voice came worming up out of her memory.

“Collins?” They were in her company Taurus, on their way to a tiny hospital in western Oklahoma. What had started out as a quick road trip had been hampered by thunderstorms and road construction. Warren’s mood was as testy as the weather. To mollify him, she’d slipped him a Valentine’s cookie from her stash in the glove box. But he’d just called her by her last name. Not good.

“I’ve been going over the western region’s sales figures, yours in particular.” Warren bit into the cookie. “Your numbers have certainly fallen off a bit in the past year, haven’t they?”

“Yes, but…” But what? Kendal didn’t have a good answer here. She knew she’d let her sales numbers slide. She regretted that for more than one reason and had vowed more than once to change it—along with everything else about her life. “I’m taking steps to correct that.”

“I was wondering…” Warren was talking with his mouth full, a small slight, perhaps another ominous sign. “Have you made any progress in getting Dr. Bridges on board with Paroveen?”

Dr. Bridges. The very name made Kendal’s insides seize up. Dr. Jason Bridges, the up-and-coming facial reconstruction surgeon whose thriving practice sat smack in the middle of Kendal’s territory, yet remained frustratingly out of her reach. She’d heard all about him. Supposedly, he was some kind of handsome bad boy. The Wolf. That’s what the single women at Integris had labeled him. They said any woman who attempted to slip a choke chain onto that man’s neck, much less jerk on it, would quickly find herself dumped.

But she also knew Jason Bridges leaped at the chance to use his brilliant mind and his incredible hands to help people. Aggressive was hardly the word for him. Coming straight from an extended residency at Johns Hopkins, he had burst onto the scene at Integris and nothing had been the same in the surgery department since.

People had talked about him from day one. Within months patients had started flocking to him.

Kendal represented Paroveen, the perfect drug for a busy doctor like Bridges. Paroveen was now being aggressively marketed after years of research and development, and promised to dramatically reduce post-op swelling and scarring with almost no adverse side effects. Kendal believed in its efficacy wholeheartedly, but getting Bridges to believe in it was another matter. He stubbornly persisted in using the competitor’s equivalent, Norveen.

Warren swallowed his bite of cookie. “When I saw you at the Christmas party, you told me you were going to close in on Bridges right after the first of the year. And now—” he waggled the cookie “—it’s already Valentine’s Day.” Warren smiled a coercive smile that was anything but sweet.

Since Christmas, Kendal had launched a one-woman campaign to get Bridges to switch. To no avail. She’d done everything in her power to forge a positive connection with the man, arriving earlier and earlier at the hospital to catch him on rounds. Didn’t the man ever sleep?

But so far she’d barely gotten her foot in the door of his tenth-floor offices. And that was only thanks to getting on a first-name basis with Bridges’s nurse, Kathy. And that was only because over a box of doughnuts one morning they’d discovered their mutual loves—chocolate and the Spanish language.

“Uh, actually, I haven’t made as much progress with Dr. Bridges as I’d like, but I’m working on it.” She bit her lip before she blabbed about the basket of Valentine’s cookies and promos. Recent regulatory codes prohibited such gifts, but Kendal was desperate. She couldn’t ever seem to schedule a sanctioned breakfast or dinner in Bridges’s office, which, of course, just happened to be Warren’s next suggestion.

“Why don’t you set up an in-service breakfast in his office?”

Duh.

Kendal wondered if the other reps got micromanaged like this. “I’ve offered to do that many times, but the nurses keep saying Bridges doesn’t have time. He’s got an awfully full surgical schedule. The man’s apparently some kind of freaky machine—doing surgery from dawn ’til dusk.”

“I am well aware of that. That’s why he’s the number one facial reconstruction surgeon in the region, our highest potential market.” Warren had stretched out the words well aware with exaggerated patience. Indeed, that was the point. Everybody in the business was well aware that if a prolific, fastidious surgeon like Bridges used Paroveen, the rest of the local surgeons would soon follow. “That’s why we need to get him to at least try Paroveen. We’re never going to get him to prescribe the drug until we get him to at least try it.”

Kendal let the wipers beat to the count of two, seeking the right words to defuse her boss. “I know things have slipped in my territory. But I’ve done everything I can to meet this guy. I try to leave samples. I talk to his office staff a couple of times a week, but I have yet to lay eyes on the man—”

“I don’t have to tell you how this stuff works, Collins.” Warren pronounced each word as if she’d suffered a lobotomy. “You used to be one of the best reps in the business. I’m telling you, do whatever you can to impress him.”

There was her last name again. That and Warren’s choice of words—used to be—sent a warning buzz ripping straight from Kendal’s toes to the top of her head. Kendal used to be Merrill Jackson’s hotshot sales rep, the one who won all the quota awards at the national meetings. But when Phillip had bugged out on her, it had felt like he’d pulled some kind of plug. All of her confidence had been seeping like air from a tire ever since. While she should have been aggressively garnering new business, Kendal found it was all she could do to get out of bed some mornings. The truth was she had been too busy surviving emotionally to expand her business. And in the cutthroat world of pharmacy sales, stagnation was bad. Real bad. Now she was stuck with a dwindling territory, a lifestyle built around two handsome paychecks instead of a single meager one and a growing pile of debts.

Her manager knew Bridges was a tough sell. Very set in his ways. Very particular about patient care. Very brand loyal. This was a test.

“Look, if you don’t want to go after Bridges, I can always call—”

“No!” Kendal wasn’t about to let some other rep take part of her territory. She would get Bridges or die trying. “Don’t worry. I’ll find a way to tap into his schedule, and when I do, I’ll wow Bridges and his crew.”

“’Atta girl, Kendal.” Warren had smiled, and Kendal had actually been grateful when he used her first name.

She sat up and smacked the sudsy water with her beautifully groomed hand, railing at the one who started this mess. “Phillip Dudley, I hate your freaking guts!” She raised her chin higher to the ceiling, shrieking even louder, “And I hope you die!” The word “die” echoed back off the Italian tile walls, sounding so ugly that it shocked Kendal to her senses. What kind of bitter woman was she becoming? She slid back down into the water and might have dissolved into tears again if the portable phone on the counter next to the tub hadn’t bleated in her ear.

Annoyed, she grabbed the thing. This was Sarah, no doubt, trying one last time to talk Kendal out of staying home alone on her birthday. But the caller ID displayed an unfamiliar number. With a sudsy finger, she punched Talk. “Hullo.”

“Is this Kendal Collins?” A vaguely familiar female voice.

“Yes.”

“Hi, Kendal. This is Kathy Martinez from Dr. Bridges’s office.”

Kendal tried not to make watery noises as she sat up straighter in the tub. Dr. Bridges’s nurse?

“Did I catch you at a bad time?”

Kendal leaned forward in the water, adjusting the phone. “No, actually, I was just…relaxing. What can I do for you, Kathy?” She was grateful that she was able to maintain a fairly coherent business voice, despite the wine.

“Stephanie Robinson—” the nurse started, “do you know Stephanie?”

“I know the name.” Stephanie Robinson. Kendal gripped the phone, thinking that if Stephanie Robinson were anywhere near this bathtub, Kendal would drown the woman. Why was Dr. Bridges’s nurse calling her about Stephanie Robinson? To rub in the fact that her boss was still prescribing Stephanie’s drug like candy?

“Well, she had to cancel a breakfast she had arranged for Dr. Bridges and the staff. I knew you were on our waiting list in case we had a cancellation. You wouldn’t be interested in doing it, would you?”

Kendal almost slid under the water in disbelief. Would she do it? Would she do it? Was the sky blue? Did the Pope wear a beanie?

“Actually, I’d love to.” Was she saying actually too much? She frowned at the empty wineglass.

“Great! Apparently Stephanie’s expecting and has such a dreadful case of morning sickness that she can’t even function until noon most days.”

Expecting? Stephanie was pregnant? Kendal raised her knees out of the sudsy water and propped her elbows on them. She pressed her forehead with the butt of one hand and squeezed her eyes shut while she fought down tears. Pregnant. With Phillip’s child.

When Kendal remained quiet too long, Kathy Martinez said, “Kendal? Are you still there?”

By an act of will so fierce it sent a tremor through her, Kendal dragged her mind back to the conversation, focusing on the good fortune that had suddenly dropped in her lap.

“When do you want me to come?”

“Tomorrow. Seven o’clock.”

Tomorrow. So much for the pity party. She’d be busy getting her act together for a presentation instead. “Great. I’ll see you then.”

They hung up, and Kendal slid back down in the water, feeling far, far worse than she had before the nurse called, if that was possible.

So Stephanie Robinson, no, Stephanie Dudley in her nonprofessional life, was pregnant.

She, Kendal, should be the one who was pregnant by now. That had been the plan. At least that had been her plan. To pay down the town house for about a year, then, as soon as they were married, get pregnant. Then combine their home offices, convert the third bedroom into a nursery and live happily ever after. Her longing for a child overcame her suddenly, an ache in her middle, a physical hunger.

Did she really miss Phillip so much, or was it this fantasy she missed? The idea of a family. They weren’t getting any younger, she’d told Phillip more than once, hoping to inch him toward the altar. They’d have to start on a family as soon as they were married. She’d never dreamed the malleable Phillip wouldn’t go along with her program.

Only in hindsight had she recognized that Phillip had been mostly silent during these one-sided conversations. Ominously silent.

She got out of the tub and pulled the plug. She stared at the draining water for a moment while she thought, Goodbye tears. Kendal Collins is all done crying. Kendal Collins was, by Jove, going to have Dr. Bridges eating out of the palm of her hand within the month. She would make so much money that she could pay for this stupid town house outright if she wanted to.

Almost angrily, she started toweling off. She stopped when she caught her reflection in the floor-to-ceiling mirror that covered one wall. She gave herself a determined glare, straightening her shoulders. Yes, indeed, Kendal Collins was going to take her life back, make buckets of money and forget all about marriage and babies…and pain.

But when she started toweling again she thought, Who am I kidding? She couldn’t forget about marriage and babies. Because that was what she really wanted. Underneath the manicures and cars and clothes, that was all she really wanted.

But now, instead of marriage and babies, she found herself on her thirty-first birthday, all alone and struggling to survive in a very competitive business.

She closed her eyes, wondering again why Phillip had left her. Oh, sure, their love life hadn’t been the hottest in history. But she had thought that was the way Phillip preferred it. He’d always been reserved…almost to the point of being passive. She had always feared that unleashing her own fierce passions might scare the pusillanimous Phillip off.

So ironic. He had left anyway, despite her efforts to mold herself to suit him. Was there something wrong with her? She opened her eyes and gave her reflection a critical once-over. She was cute. Everybody said so. She was healthy and…shapely. Was she perhaps a little too shapely? Phillip had hinted as much so many times that Kendal had struggled to lose weight, trying to keep him happy. But Phillip had dumped her for the anorectic bimbo anyway.

She turned sideways and lifted her chin. Okay, so she was endowed with some pretty serious curves, but she also had a healthy mane of coal-black hair, riveting green eyes and skin like a China doll. She unhooked the clip that held her hair high and let the heavy waves tumble down. They felt cool against her bath-warmed back. She looked, she decided, like a Madonna, like a woman born to be a lover…a mother.

To hell with Phillip. She liked herself the way she was, and even if she never found a man, never had babies…

She clutched the towel to her front and closed her eyes. Never? She had turned thirty-one on this very night. Never was looking like a real possibility.

“Please, God,” she whispered to a deity she seldom thought about, much less prayed to. A deity so remote, so powerful and elusive, that she refused to even assign “it” a gender.

“Please,” she prayed, “send me a husband.” And as long as she was asking she decided to add, “And a child, too. That’s all I really want. A family. I don’t even care how you do it.”

CHAPTER THREE

KENDAL EXITED the elevator at the tenth floor, pulling her rolling travel cart behind her, reflecting that sometimes a pharmaceutical sales rep resembled nothing more than a glorified bag lady. Hauling your business around in the back seat of your car, up and down elevators in a silly rolling cart. So much paraphernalia—the cell phone, the pager, the laptop, the PalmPilot, the boxes of samples, the promo items, the paperwork. Kendal’s constant challenge, and one of her chief strengths, was keeping it all organized. From her home office to her company car to the wheelie nipping at her heels, Kendal’s life was a study in constant and careful order. Control, unrelenting control, was the key.

She opened the door of Dr. Jason Bridges’s office and hoped Daylight Deli hadn’t delivered the quiche, pastries and fruit trays yet. The waiting room was empty—a good sign. She wondered what kind of pull Stephanie Robinson had that she could conveniently get a breakfast scheduled on the one morning in a million when Dr. Bridges wasn’t in surgery. A youngish receptionist sat in her chair behind a glassed-in cubicle. Kendal didn’t see Kathy Martinez.

The lobby window rolled open and the young receptionist said, “May I help you?”

“I’m Kendal Collins, I’ve brought breakfast for your office, courtesy of Merrill Jackson.” Kendal gave her an engaging smile and handed the woman one of her business cards.

“Oh. Of course. Kathy!”

A familiar brown face appeared around the window of the reception area. “Kendal?”

“Hi, Kathy! Thanks for calling me last night.”

“No problem. Thanks for coming on short notice.” Kathy Martinez’s black eyes fixed on Kendal. “Now, didn’t you tell me that you’re—” she paused one millisecond before saying the next words as if they had some special significance “—fluent in Spanish?”

“Sí. Cómo le va?”

“Muy bien, gracias.” Kathy chuckled. “Ha estado alguna vez en Chiapas?”

Had she ever been to Chiapas? Kendal’s conversational Spanish was excellent, so she hadn’t misunderstood, but she didn’t get the point of the woman’s question. Still, she kept her cordial smile in place. “No, but I’ve been near there—to the Yucatan Peninsula.”

In her business, any connection she forged might help with future sales. It was all about building the relationship. If she was lucky, she and Kathy might move on to the subject of Paroveen sometime before noon.

“Listen. I need to talk to you about that.” Kathy Martinez clutched Kendal’s arm.

“Okay.” Kendal couldn’t imagine why this nurse, who barely knew her, was acting so excited. Did they need an interpreter for a patient? “But I’m expecting the food trays any moment, and I’d like to get my brochures and samples set out first.”

“Of course. Let me show you to the break room.” Kathy’s smile seemed unnaturally bright.

Kathy led Kendal through a warren of offices and exam rooms, then opened a door to a sparsely decorated room with green Formica counters on three walls and a large round faux-wood table in the center.

Kendal parked her rolling case against a wall plastered with unappetizing anatomical charts and went to work with her usual efficiency.

First, she pulled all the chairs away from the table and lined them up against the wall. She didn’t want people to sit down without looking at her materials. It was better if they moved around.

Then she unzipped the suitcase and whipped out a portable easel. Faster than a magician, she assembled it and set it next to the table. She then pulled out a giant tri-fold poster featuring Paroveen and propped it open on the easel. Lastly, she covered the ugly table with a paper tablecloth—royal purple, Merrill Jackson’s signature color. She’d found a stack of the cloths on sale at a paper goods store and bought the lot. Just the kind of subliminal touch that helped people remember the occasion and your product—and you.

She applied this kind of forethought to her personal appearance as well, lacing her business wardrobe with subtle touches of purple.

She felt a teeny bit puffy today after indulging in the wine and cookies last night, so she’d chosen a crisp black suit with a pencil-slim calf-length skirt and a crisp lavender microfiber blouse. Her only jewelry, save her perennial one-carat diamond earrings and a Merrill Jackson name tag, was a sterling silver lapel pin shaped in the Merrill Jackson logo. She’d been awarded that one for high sales.

The skirt felt a tad snug as she squatted to unzip a low pocket where her brochures and business cards were stashed.

The door to the small room opened and a really good-looking guy in a white T-shirt, leather jacket and snug jeans balanced a trio of long rectangular boxes as he entered the room, tilting his broad shoulders sideways.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.” Kendal barely gave him a glance and turned back to her task. “Would you mind taking the food out of the cartons and putting the trays out on that purple tablecloth? I’m running a little late here.”

Kendal was very good at making the most of her time by delegating tasks and soliciting help from others.

“Bossy workaholic,” her sister Kara had called her one time when Kendal had pressed her into stuffing envelopes while they visited.

“Ah. So you want me to quit working so much?” Kendal, already hard at the task, had asked her sister sweetly.

“It wouldn’t hurt you to slow down, you know.”

This, Kendal thought, from the woman whose leisurely days included naps with her toddler while her hardworking husband pulled down six figures.

“Then I guess old Matt wouldn’t mind paying my bills, too.” Kendal knew that was unkind, implying that her sister was some sort of deadbeat, a burden on her poor husband.

But Kara had merely rolled her eyes indulgently at her older sister. “For your information, Matt and I are a team. Matt enjoys taking care of his family. Unlike that weakling you’re hooked up with. The way Phillip insists on divvying up every last cent the two of you spend…that’s not commitment, Kendal honey. And it’s not true love. Don’t kid yourself.”

Kara’s honesty had seemed harsh at the time. But as it turned out, Kendal’s younger sister had been absolutely right about dear old Phillip.

Sensing no movement from the direction of the door, Kendal glanced over her shoulder again. The man with the boxes was still standing there, giving her rearview a once-over.

“You are definitely not Stephanie Robinson,” he said and smiled.

Kendal frowned at him. What an odd thing to say. And because Stephanie was ultra slim, and Kendal was not, and because he was looking at her backside, his implication pricked her pride a teensy bit. All of a sudden she really didn’t care for the way he was looking her up and down. Sort of brash for a delivery boy. She stood and straightened her skirt.

“Stephanie’s not coming,” she explained in a tone that was intentionally frosty. “I’m Kendal Collins, from Merrill Jackson. The McMayer presentation has been canceled.”

“I know.”

“Oh.” She had placed a last-minute call this morning to the same caterer that Stephanie used, figuring they’d be glad to switch the order. Daylight Deli was reasonably priced and located right here in the vast Integris medical complex. They were good, even if their delivery boy was a little rough-looking.

“Then would you mind?” She flipped a hand toward the table. “I’d like to hurry and get set up.” Kendal walked over and quickly fanned her promotional materials on the countertop next to the coffeepot. “The staff will be coming in here at seven.”

“Only if I say so.”

An electric rush zapped through Kendal’s middle. Oh, no. Her eyes fixed on the counter for one split second, then squeezed shut the next as realization turned to horror. People said the elusive Dr. Bridges dressed like a motorcycle punk.

Kendal whirled around, struggling to recover her poise. “Pardon me?” She smiled as if totally confused.

“I’m Doctor Bridges.” He sauntered up to the counter where she stood, and slid the cartons onto the remaining space next to the coffeepot. Then he stuck out his hand.

She took it, hoping hers wasn’t too sweaty with shock. She’d been trying for months to meet the man, and here he was, big as life. Truly big. Even his hands were large. And very warm. She shook his hand while her mind did an instant replay. Had she said anything rude while she’d been assuming he was just an ogling delivery boy? “I-I’m Kendal Collins,” she stammered while he held onto her hand and her heart started to pound. “I don’t think we’ve ever actually met.”

“No, I don’t think we have. But I’ve heard of you.” He hadn’t released her hand. A fact that screamed through Kendal like a fire alarm. Besides being warm, his hand felt smooth. A by-product of being a surgeon, she supposed. And talk about strong. His clasp was electric with purpose, intelligence, life.

The twinkle in his eye acknowledged that the charge passing between them as he pressed her fingers in his strong, warm ones, was very real. She’d never met a man whose very touch sent an electric current all the way to her toes.

“You have?” He’s heard of me? she wondered. How? She hoped it was in connection to Paroveen.

He nodded, smiling, but didn’t elaborate, which was unnerving, considering that his eyes were raking over her frame like a tiger sizing up lunch.

He stepped closer. He was much taller than Kendal, and she had to tilt her head back as she looked up into his face. “Well…huh—”

His flashing blue eyes, so sparkling and intelligent that they actually made her breath catch in her throat, were scrutinizing her face now with the same avid attention he’d given her figure seconds before. He finally let go of her hand, grinning while he studied her from hairline to chest. He definitely reminded her of a tiger circling a shivering fawn, and he seemed all too aware of his effect on her.

Kendal waved her emancipated hand in the air nervously. “I hope you don’t mind, but when I found out that Stephanie had canceled her breakfast, I offered to bring some food in for the staff instead. So they wouldn’t be disappointed,” she trailed off, “and all.”

“How very considerate!” he spoke with the barest hint of sarcasm.

They both knew why she was here. Kendal imagined his thriving practice was overrun with eager drug reps like herself.

“So. What did you bring us?” He raised the lid off one of the boxes. Kendal could see the tray of expensive pastries, covered with cling wrap. “Not too shabby,” he said as he reached to lift the wrap. “Got enough here for a hungry doc?”

“Afraid not.” Kendal gave his hand a light slap.

He laughed. Then he quirked a smug grin at her, digging around under the cling wrap anyway, and she gave him a wry little smile in return.

“I’d be all too delighted if you’d eat with us,” she said, “since you’re the real reason I’m here.”

“You’re interested in little old me?” He took a bite of a roll.

She smiled at his flirting. “No. Only in your business. Allow me to introduce my latest miracle drug.” She swept an arm toward the easel.

He chewed as he squinted at the giant poster promoting Paroveen. “Always the latest miracle drug,” he muttered.

“But mine really is miraculous. I’m only asking you to give it a try.” She handed him a brochure, then reached around him and slid the box of pastries off the counter. “I’d better get these set out before the staff gets in here.” She often found it prudent to give the docs a moment to read her materials uninterrupted.

But to her disappointment, he didn’t even look at the brochure. Instead, he folded his arms over his chest and watched her. “I’d rather hear what you have to say about it.”

She was aware of his eyes following her as she quickly arranged the food on the table. “Okay. I’d love to.”

She spouted a few startling scientific statistics about Paroveen while she pulled out paper plates, forks and napkins stamped with the Merrill Jackson logo from her rolling cart.

When she was finished her spiel, he stuffed the brochure in the pocket of his leather jacket, sauntered over and proceeded to pile food onto a plate. “I’m afraid I’ve got to get back down to surgery, so—” he popped in a grape, then reached for cubed ham “—maybe we can get together some other time to finish discussing your wonder drug.”

Kendal wasn’t sure, but her instincts warned that The Wolf was interested in more than the drug. Maybe it was the way his teeth flashed in that cocky smile right before he bit into a cube of ham.

But she couldn’t pass up the chance to push her product. “Anytime.” She’d worry about his motives after she got his business. For now, she knew she’d only have his ear for as long as it took for him to gobble down that last piece of ham. She had to talk and talk fast.

“You understand that I don’t like switching drugs,” he said.

“I understand, but our studies indicate that every doctor that upgrades to Paroveen gets an eighty percent reduction in edema in half the time. Plus our physician education and support services are outstanding,” she finished in a rush.

“Samples?”

“All you want,” Kendal bargained.

“You’ll personally provide technical support?” He wiped his hands on his napkin and gave her that eager smile again, as if she might make a nice little dessert right now.

“Absolutely. I’ll be available to you twenty-four, seven.” Shoot! Why’d she say it like that?

He smirked. “Day and night? My, my. You are the dedicated one.”

Kendal was about to say something to show that she was totally professional, something that might put this handsome dog in his place, when the door swung open.

“Hello!” As if the smell of food had summoned them, Kathy Martinez and two other nurses, a tall one wearing surgical scrubs and a paper cap and a smaller girl, came waltzing up to the table.

“Hi, doc!” The nurse in scrubs winked at Jason Bridges. “Didn’t expect to see you up here, what with no patients out front.”

“I’m headed down to surgery in a sec.”

“We’ve got a bilateral resection of inflamed parotids,” the nurse in scrubs explained to the shorter one.

“Oh, I forgot about that,” the smaller office nurse said.

Kendal had heard about the complex microsurgery that could take up to three hours. It was exactly the kind of procedure where Paroveen would be a benefit.

“We’re doing the deed right after I have another one of these little muffins. Man. These are good, Miss…tell me your name again?” He popped in a muffin, chewed and frowned at Kendal.

Was he being intentionally obtuse? After all, Kendal was wearing a big purple name tag. She pressed her fingers to it and smiled. “Collins. Kendal Collins.”

“Kendal,” he said, and swallowed.

“Help yourselves,” Kendal told the nurses as she swept an arm over the food trays.

“Kendal—” Kathy started the introductions as the women filled their plates “—this is Mary Smith and Ruth Nichols. Mary’s one of the office nurses. And Ruth is Dr. Bridges’s scrub nurse.”

Mary, nibbling a strawberry, reminded Kendal of an anxious little mouse. She was short, wearing a faded scrub jacket stamped in a teddy bear pattern, had cropped nondescript brown hair and rimless glasses crammed tightly against the bridge of her button nose.

The one named Ruth was exactly the opposite. Even in the baggy surgical scrubs, her tall body exhibited the svelte lines of a supermodel. Even the ugly paper surgical cap did not detract from her beauty. The dusty blue color seemed to merely emphasize the flawlessness of her ivory skin.

“My extra set of hands.” Bridges winked at the attractive young woman. “And my eyes. And my ears. And some days even my sense of smell.”

“Just call me the doctor’s scrub nose.” Ruth giggled and actually tapped a fingertip to Jason Bridges’s handsome nose.

Everyone but Kendal laughed. Apparently this was some sort of inside joke.

“I hope I brought enough food.” Kendal turned to the table, feeling strangely uncomfortable with the couple’s flirting. “How many more people are we expecting?”

“Four more from the office.” Kathy smiled. “This food looks fabulous, by the way.”

“Too bad you just started that nasty old diet.” Dr. Bridges teased his chubby head nurse.

Kathy whapped him on the shoulder and popped a glazed doughnut hole into her mouth.

When Kathy swallowed the treat, Kendal noticed the older lady leaning over toward Dr. Bridges, mumbling something.

From across the table the last of it sounded like, “…about the Spanish.”

Bridges shot Kendal a look bright with interest. In that split second when their gazes locked, Kendal began to understand how The Wolf might have gotten his nickname.

He stepped around the table to her. “Kathy tells me you speak Spanish?”

“Yes.”

“Fluently?”

“Yes.” Kendal frowned.

“Mexican dialects?”

“Yes.” Kendal was not at all sure she liked the way he was looking at her.

“Ever been there?”

“Where?”

“Mexico. Chiapas, specifically. You ever been down there?”

There was that weird question again. “I’ve been to the Yucatan Peninsula a couple of times. To Cancún.”

“Did you go out into the jungle or just lie on the beach?”

“I went to some Mayan ruins…in the jungle. Some remote ones.” Why was Kendal explaining herself to him? But his eyes were boring into hers with such intensity that she could hardly make herself look away, and her answers just seemed to fall out of her mouth.

“I assume you have some medical background?”

“Of course. Anatomy. Physiology. I specialize in surgical physiology and pharmacology.”

“Great! Wanna run away to Mexico with me?”

Behind him, she thought she heard the mousy nurse twitter.

“Not particularly.” Kendal didn’t get it. Run away to Mexico?

“You don’t care for Mexico?”

“Love it. Can’t wait to go back. But…” she trailed off, leaving him to fill in that the idea of going with him was the impediment.

“But not with a guy like me.” His blue eyes flashed with amusement.

Another twitter from the nurse entourage.

“Not even if it was for a good cause?”

“What is this about?” Kendal leaned around his broad form to get a look at the nurses, who obviously knew what the doctor was getting at.

But he leaned imperceptibly also, blocking her view. “I have a proposition for you, Kendal.”

Kendal wanted to say something sarcastic like Be still my beating heart because when a man like The Wolf used a word like “proposition,” her urge to resort to sarcasm was strong. “I hope this has something to do with Paroveen.”

“It does.”

That surprised her. His attitude had been so flippant that she wasn’t prepared for this conversation to lead anywhere serious.

“I’m listening.”

“For three weeks out of the year, every year, I go to Chiapas, Mexico, to work with the local peasants. I do as much surgery as I can on as many patients as I can for those three weeks. You’ve heard of Doctors Without Borders?”

Kendal had. The international relief effort manned by idealistic young doctors had originated in France. They brought medical care to the poor in Third World countries around the globe. Their efforts on behalf of children had always appealed to Kendal’s altruistic side. “I have. The work they do sounds wonderful.”

“My mission is similar. How would you like to be part of that mission?”

“Me? How?”

“Because you speak the Mexican dialects. Because I’ll promise to give Paroveen a thorough clinical trial down there. You can bring a case of the stuff with you. You can keep your own records. Merrill Jackson will love it. They should even get some great PR out of the deal.”

Behind him, Kendal now noticed, Kathy Martinez was smiling broadly, encouraging her. The nurse named Ruth was smiling, too, but with a kind of uncertainty.

“You’re saying you need an interpreter?”

“Absolutely. I speak a little Spanish, of course, and so does Ruth—” he motioned to the beautiful nurse “—but not fluently. The patients are hurting, frightened. They talk fast and the dialect is tricky. A good interpreter is crucial. What do you say? Will you consider it?”

“When?”

“Next week.”

“Next week?”

“Sorry. My regular interpreter got sick. I just found out yesterday.” He shot Kathy Martinez a meaningful glance.

“Isn’t that pretty short notice for getting me on board for a trip to Mexico?”

“You said you’d been there. I assume your passport is still current.”

“Well…yeah, but—”

“The other arrangements won’t be a big deal. Every year, I choose my own team, fly my own plane. We take our own security guard, Ben Schulman from the hospital. All of these nurses have gone down there at one time or another.”

The trio behind him nodded in affirmation.

“Ask them how fulfilling it is to help the poor, to change lives for the better. It will be a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the effectiveness of your new drug in a setting where it is desperately needed. Maybe Merrill Jackson would donate some immunizations, too.”

Kendal didn’t know how the conversation had taken this radical turn from slightly flirtatious to genuinely idealistic, but it had.

“I see. I…I’ll have to check my schedule. And I’ll have to get approval from my company.” But that wouldn’t be a problem, she was sure. Her boss had been very clear—do whatever you have to do.

“Of course.”

“We’d better get downstairs,” the willowy Ruth interjected. She stepped up beside Bridges.

But Jason Bridges stepped toward Kendal, facing her squarely, moving in close with his palm outstretched. “Give me one of your cards,” he said. “I’ll call you and we’ll set up a time to get together and discuss this. I’ll also have to teach you a bit about the types of surgery we do. You’ll end up answering a lot of questions for the patients and families. We’ll have a lot of preparation to do in a week’s time.”

“Okay. I’ll think about it.” But while she was handing him one of her cards Kendal was thinking, He can’t be serious. Me? On a medical mission to Mexico? In only a week?

He took the card. He glanced at it, then smiled into her eyes again. And again Kendal thought of The Wolf and how thoroughly dangerous it felt to be the object of this man’s attention. Like he could talk you into almost anything. She felt her cheeks heating up and was glad when he turned back to Ruth.

He stuffed Kendal’s card in the pocket of his leather jacket with the brochure, then said to his scrub nurse, “The patient is elderly. Very fragile. No room for screwups. I’d like you to be the one to set up downstairs, not one of those O.R. nurses.”

“Already done.” Ruth favored her boss with a cover model smile and a look of supreme confidence.

“Great. Remind me to give you a big old Christmas bonus.” Jason put a guiding hand to the small of his nurse’s back, and as the two of them hurried out the door his flashing eyes fixed on Kendal one last time. “I’ll talk to you soon, Kendal.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“PARDON ME?” Kendal tapped the security guard’s huge shoulder, which felt like it was carved out of marble. “You’re Ben Schulman, right?”

He turned, and Kendal looked up into the kindly handsome face that went with the killer body. The name tag on his massive chest read SCHULMAN, so of course this had to be the Gentle Ben that the nurses all talked about. Usually their talk bemoaned the fact that this fabulous hunk of male was not interested in women.

“Yes, ma’am.”

Kendal always greeted the younger man when she came into the hospital early in the mornings, when she was trying to catch up with the surgeons before they got too busy. He was always polite, always calling her “ma’am.”

Covering the night shift, Ben Schulman made for an imposing presence at the front entrance of the hospital. He was a six-foot-four blond wunderkind with a body builder’s physique and a choirboy’s face. The endless, swirling hospital rumors had painted Ben with a pretty broad brush. Religious fanatic. But a not-so-latent homosexual. But Kendal’s impression of him was that he was totally professional. Stoic, polite, nice. Approachable, should one need help. Aggressive, should one be up to no good. Definitely idealistic. A real “serve and protect” kind of guy.

“I’m Kendal Collins.” She extended her hand and he gently shook it. “I understand you accompany Dr. Bridges on his Doctors Without Borders missions to Mexico.”

His face broke into a boyish smile. “We’re not associated with Doctors Without Borders, per se. But yes, this will be my third trip to Chiapas.”

“Could I ask you a few questions about that? When you have a minute?”

He frowned. “Why? Are you a reporter or connected to the hospital PR department or something? I was under the impression you did sales of some kind.”

“I do.” She handed him the card she had at the ready. “I’m in sales for Merrill Jackson. But Dr. Bridges has asked me to accompany him on the Chiapas trip as an interpreter. I thought we should meet, and I’d like to find out a little more about what I’d be getting myself into.”

Ben studied the card, then her. His expression was carefully neutral, not surprising considering his job, but even so, Kendal could see that he was uncomfortable about something. “Working with Dr. Bridges is quite an experience. But I’ll be happy to tell you everything I know.” He checked his watch. “I get off in twenty minutes.”

“Meet me at the Daylight Deli then. I’ll buy breakfast.”

DAYLIGHT DELI was situated in the middle of the hospital concourse that connected four enormous buildings. It faced an open courtyard and had the kind of atmosphere desperately needed in a place where people were suffering and worrying and working too hard. An atmosphere that said, “Peace. Relax. We’ll feed you.”

The food was excellent, and the place was often packed with hospital personnel in lab coats and scrubs, business-suited executives, casually dressed visitors, exhausted relatives and even the occasional patient. It was especially busy at eight o’clock in the morning. Everybody was hustling for a mug of the deli’s gourmet coffee, a cup of fragrant herbal tea, a fresh-baked muffin or one of its infamous sticky buns.

Kendal felt fortunate when two lab techs vacated a small table that was out of the way by the windows. She rolled her cart into the nearby corner, sat down and waited, thinking about what she should ask the security guard.

Before long Ben came in. From behind the counter the owner looked up. The man wore an earring and a kerchief on his head and called most of his customers “sweetie.” He hollered, “Ben!” and Ben answered, “Hey, Nolan!”

When Ben spotted Kendal in the corner, she waved at him.

“What can I get for you?” Kendal offered as Ben approached the table.

“A strawberry banana smoothie would be great, thanks.”

The owner winked at her when Kendal and Ben walked up to the counter. He was already making the smoothie. “He always has the same thing. What can I get for you, sweetie?”

Kendal craved a sticky bun in the worst way, but she ordered a small serving of fruit salad instead. This kind of discipline was second nature to her by now, but it was never easy.

Once he got the smoothie whirring in the blender, the owner said, “You guys know each other?” while looking back and forth from Ben to Kendal.

“Kendal Collins. Nolan Nelson. Kendal’s a pharmaceutical sales rep around here.”

“Didn’t I fill a big order for you a few days ago?”

“Yes. For Dr. Bridges’s office. The quiche was excellent.”

“Kendal wants to ask me some questions about the Chiapas trip,” Ben said. “Dr. Bridges has asked her to go along.”

The owner’s eyebrows shot right up to the edge of his kerchief. “Bridges asked you to go to Mexico? Don’t do it, sweetie! That man’ll break your heart.”

The man’s tone left no doubt about what he was implying. Kendal felt her cheeks flush to a neon red. “I—”

“Nolan,” Ben intoned with undisguised impatience as he looked around the crowded space. “The doc asked her to go along as an interpreter.”

Nolan looked abashed, but even so, he said, “Oh, right. That’s what he claims.” He turned to dish up Kendal’s fruit salad.

While she dug in her purse for the money, the caterer studied her with open skepticism. “He sure picked himself a pretty little interpreter. What happened to Kathy?”

“She’s sick and can’t go,” Ben supplied. Apparently Ben had an inside track on events in Bridges’s office.

“Nothing serious, I hope.” The smoothie was done and Nolan poured it into a glass.

“Gallbladder.” Ben took the glass.

“You take care, sweetie,” Nolan said as Kendal picked up the fruit salad.

As they walked away Kendal was still feeling her cheeks burn at the caterer’s implication that she might be accompanying Jason Bridges to Mexico as some sort of paramour. She wasn’t like that. Not at all. In fact, she’d suffered in stubborn celibacy this whole year since Phillip had left. A few men had asked her out, but she wasn’t attracted to them. She was beginning to wonder if she’d ever feel real passion again, or if Phillip’s betrayal had killed that part of her for good.

“Don’t mind Nolan,” Ben said quietly when they got back to their table. “He doesn’t like Dr. Bridges. Thinks he’s a player.”

“Is he?”

“How should I know? Nolan’s just bitter. His sister’s a nurse down in surgery. She dated Dr. Bridges for a while, went all gaga over him, baking him banana nut bread and stuff. Just because it didn’t work out, that doesn’t make Jason a bad guy.” Ben didn’t elaborate further, but Kendal could fill in the blanks. The relationship between the doctor and Nolan’s sister had probably ended with a broken heart—hers—and The Wolf had moved on to his next conquest. But Ben wasn’t about to criticize this doctor, who he obviously admired.

“You like Dr. Bridges?”

“Jason’s a stand-up guy.”

A small cross shone dully from the open collar of Ben’s shirt, and Kendal wondered what “stand-up guy” meant to someone with Ben’s convictions. Someone who serves mankind under the worst of conditions? Someone who plays around but apparently thinks he’s exempt from breaking hearts because everybody understands that he’s The Wolf? “What do you mean?”

“You’ll find out what Jason’s like soon enough if you go down to Chiapas with him.”

“You mean that he’s a good surgeon?”

“He is that, but it goes deeper. He’s put himself in some tight spots helping those people.”

“Like what?”

“Like there are factions down there that want to force the government to get involved and bring those people into the twenty-first century, and there are other factions that want the area to stay isolated. Jason has been caught between them a time or two, right along with the poor people he’s trying to help.”

“That’s why Dr. Bridges handpicked you? For security?”

Ben’s handsome face looked abashed. “I can use a gun—and my fists—if I have to, but the truth is, I’m really more like Jason’s pack animal,” Ben smiled. “Actually, I like to go because Dr. Bridges pays all my expenses and he gives me time off to visit the missions around San Cristóbal de las Casas. That’s what I really want to do someday—missionary work.”

“That’s wonderful! Tell me what it’s like in Chiapas.”

Ben’s descriptions of Chiapas were romanticized, but graphic. He told her about the fascinating culture, of the superstitions that persisted among the descendants of the Maya. About the beautiful waterfalls, lakes and rain forests. He didn’t pull any punches as he described the intense heat, the altitude sickness, the man-eating mosquitoes and the inevitable onset of Montezuma’s revenge.

“Turista, the locals call it. Thought I’d die the first time it hit me. The cramps! Never had such a bad case of diarrh—” He noticed the revolted look on Kendal’s face and stopped. “Sorry.”

He sipped his smoothie while he eyed her impeccable manicure and silk power suit. “Are you sure you’re up to this trip?” he asked. “No offense, but you seem like more of an indoor type gal.”

“I’ve had my share of adventures,” Kendal asserted. Which was at the least misleading and at the worst an all-out lie. Her “adventures” consisted of skiing down a double diamond slope at a fancy resort or finding her way on the Metro line in Washington D.C. “I’ve been to Mexico before,” she added for good measure, leaving out the fact that her trips had mostly been confined to the Miami-style resort areas of Cancún.

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