A stolen moment...
A lifetime together?
Three years ago, single mom and nurse Lacey lost her husband in the same IED blast that left his best friend, ER doc Scott, with an injured leg and survivor’s guilt. Thrill seeker Scott’s sworn to always be there for cautious Lacey... And on one fraught night shift, this leaves them entwined in an electrifying kiss—an impulsive encounter that has him longing to keep her in his protective embrace always...
Scott eased out of the kiss, withdrawing slowly until there was only a small sliver of space between them.
She blinked up at him with eyes that went from startled to horrified in a second.
She stared at him as if she had never seen him before. But then, she had never seen this side of him, had she? Even though the two of them were close, they’d always been careful to keep things free of anything that could be interpreted as more than friendship.
“This never happened,” Lacey whispered, then backed away from him.
“Wait,” he said as she continued to put space between the two of them.
He watched as she all but ran from him. What had he been thinking? He’d crossed that invisible line that lay between friends and lovers, a line that no one ever crossed without there being consequences to their relationship. A line he had never dreamed he would cross. For the second time that day, time had stood still for him, except that in this instance, instead of a nightmare, it had felt more like a dream come true.
Dear Reader,
Once again I would like to take you to one of my favorite cities, New Orleans. Home to great cuisine and historical architecture, New Orleans is also known as the birthplace of jazz and there’s a musician on every corner of the French Quarter waiting to entertain you. As I was listening to some music for inspiration with this book, I heard a song by Louis Armstrong, “A Kiss to Build a Dream On,” that made me wonder if just one kiss would be enough for two friends to risk their friendship. Stolen Kiss with the Single Mom is the result.
After the death of RN Lacey Miller’s husband and Dr. Scott Boudreaux’s best friend in Afghanistan, the two of them developed a great friendship, but the both of them are still lonely. Fortunately, with the help of a kiss and the romance of music, that is going to change.
I hope you enjoy Scott and Lacey’s story as they work to find their happily-ever-after.
Best wishes,
Deanne
Stolen Kiss with the Single Mom
Deanne Anders
Deanne Anders was reading romance while her friends were still reading Nancy Drew, and she knew she’d hit the jackpot when she found a shelf of Harlequin Presents books in her local library. Years later she discovered the fun of writing her own romances. Deanne lives in Florida with her husband and their spoiled Pomeranian. During the day she works as a nursing supervisor. With her love of everything medical and romance, writing for Harlequin Medical Romance is a dream come true.
Books by Deanne Anders
Harlequin Medical Romance
From Midwife to Mommy
The Surgeon’s Baby Bombshell
Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com.
This book is dedicated to all the hardworking emergency room nurses, physicians and techs I have the privilege to work with. You amaze me with the care and dedication you show every day. You have one of the hardest jobs in the hospital, but you make it look easy.
Also, a special thanks to CAPT David Olson, USNR (ret), for founding the Combat Wounded Veteran Challenge and to his wife, Teresa, for her work with the veterans. Your work lives on with the veterans you touched.
Praise for Deanne Anders
“What an utterly captivating, fast-paced, memorable read Ms. Anders has delivered in this book where the chemistry between this couple is off-the-charts...the dialogue was entertaining and had me hooked from the very beginning and even more so once the hero and heroine come face-to-face....”
—Harlequin Junkie on From Midwife to Mommy
Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
EPILOGUE
EXCERPT FROM THE NURSE'S ONE NIGHT TO FOREVER BY JANICE LYNN
CHAPTER ONE
FOUR O’CLOCK IN the morning could be considered the witching hour in any ER, Lacey was sure, but for a hospital smack-dab in the middle of New Orleans, where voodoo and ghost stories were the norm, it seemed especially true.
Not that she really minded the unusual assortment of patients who seemed to find their way into the emergency room at that time of morning. If nothing else it definitely helped pass the last few hours before the sun started peeking through the windows—the first sign that the next shift would be there soon.
Unfortunately, the early-morning hours hadn’t seen their usual influx of eclectic patients today, and now the hours till shift-change had begun to drag.
“What’s he looking up now?” the young unit coordinator asked.
Lacey looked over to where Scott Boudreaux, one of the on-duty ER doctors, sat studying his computer screen.
“Planning his next adventure, I’m sure,” she said.
Lacey had never understood the man’s desire to put himself at risk for the thrill of survival, but she had learned she might as well keep her concerns to herself. Hadn’t she had almost the same conversations with her husband when he had been alive? And what good had it done her?
The two men had always been more than she could handle, with neither of them ever listening to her concerns. Then they’d both volunteered for that last deployment to Afghanistan and now Ben was gone.
There had been a time when she had blamed Scott for her husband’s death, though she had known even then that it was stupid to think that way. Ben had wanted to return and help the injured soldiers on the field as much as Scott. The two of them had been like two peas in a pod through medical school, and she had finally learned to accept their adventures together, thinking the two of them would be safe as long as they were together.
She’d been wrong.
Scott had been lucky to come out with only an injury to his leg after an IED had exploded, but he’d been left with this need to always prove himself. She just couldn’t understand why he felt he had to spend his life searching out thrill after thrill. Just the experience of working in the emergency room alone gave her all the taste of adventure that she needed. Add to that the trials of being a single mom and she had all the thrills she could handle.
“The next Extreme Warrior trip is only a couple weeks from now, and I think the winter trip to Alaska is pretty much planned, so he’s probably working on the spring trip.”
“There’s a rumor that they’re going to hunt Sasquatch next,” the unit coordinator said.
Lacey laughed at the idea of a bunch of war veterans trying to hunt down the mythological hairy creature.
“Now, that would be extreme,” she said, then looked over to Scott to see his reaction.
“Y’all know I can hear you, right?” Scott said as he glanced over to the two of them and then winked.
The UC let out an audible sigh and Lacey couldn’t help but understand why. With his longish blond hair curling around his collar and those unusual gray-green eyes that she had always found to be seductive, he’d broken more than a few o
f her co-workers’ hearts.
“And I’m adding the Sasquatch hunt to my list of possibilities.”
Lacey laughed again when the UC’s mouth dropped open. Though she knew Scott had meant to tease the girl, she wasn’t sure that he wasn’t totally serious. He lived to come up with new ways to challenge the group of veterans he worked with. The whole bunch of them were crazy as far as she was concerned.
When Scott had come back from Afghanistan without Ben he’d been just as lost as her. The two of them had struggled through that time together, and when he had first brought up the idea of starting the Extreme Warrior program that he and Ben had been planning before Ben’s death she had been supportive.
He’d had no idea how fast the program would grow, with more and more veterans attending the meetings and applying to go on the extreme trips that Scott planned. Now, with the fast growth of the program, Scott was looking for some hands-on help, and had begun pressuring her to join the group.
Though she knew Ben would want her to help his friend in any way she could, in her heart she knew it was Ben who should have been there to help Scott, not her. The memories of sitting around the table with the two of them as they made plans to serve the military veterans in the New Orleans area just reminded her of how much of life Ben had missed out on.
The thought of her husband’s death took all the humor she’d felt minutes ago out of her. She’d planned her life so carefully. She’d seen her mother struggle as a single mom, after Lacey’s father had walked out on them, and she had sworn then that she’d make a different kind of life when she grew up.
So she’d gone to college and gotten the nursing degree that had allowed her to live independently and she had been happy. Then she’d met Ben, and had known right away that he was a man she could trust her heart with.
When she had married him the thought that she might lose him had never entered her head. He’d been a doctor, not a soldier. He hadn’t been supposed to die so young. He hadn’t been supposed to leave her with a four-year-old son who couldn’t remember his daddy.
The radio on her desk went off and the voice of one of the city’s emergency medical technicians began spitting out information concerning the patient they were transporting.
“Patient is a fifty-four-year-old male suffering from multiple injuries, including a laceration to the head. No loss of consciousness after a car versus light post MVA. Vital signs are: heart-rate in the one-tens, BP one-sixty-five over ninety and respirations twenty-four, with an oxygen saturation of ninety-two on five liters oxygen. ETA ten minutes, and arriving with New Orleans Police Department officer on board.”
She looked at the room’s tracking board, then hit the button on her radio. The EMTs hadn’t called the patient in as a trauma, and the patients vital signs were stable, so she didn’t want to tie up a trauma bed unnecessarily.
“Room Thirty-Two on arrival,” she said, and then got up to get the room ready for the new patient.
“Am I getting a patient?” asked Karen, one of the RNs who regularly worked the night shift, as she walked by.
“No, I’m going to take this one,” Lacey said.
The night had been dragging, and the fact that a police officer was aboard the ambulance with the patient might prove to be interesting. She wouldn’t mind a little excitement to help the last hours of her shift pass by. She’d spent too much time tonight thinking about things she couldn’t change.
* * *
At the sound of Lacey’s laughter Scott pushed back from his desk and looked down the hall to where she stood with one of the other nurses. Unlike the high-pitched giggle of some of the women he had dated, Lacey’s laugh had always been genuine.
It had been her laughter that had caught his attention the first time he’d seen her. With her head of dark red hair thrown back and her bright green eyes shining with humor, she’d been a vision. Never had he seen someone actually glow with happiness till that night. He’d known then that she was one of a kind, and only the fact that his best friend had laid claim to her first had kept him from pursuing her.
But she wasn’t the same woman she’d been then. She was older now, more mature, yet still just as beautiful as the first day he had set eyes on her. Life had knocked her down with Ben’s death, but she’d managed to get back up. It had been hard, and there had been a time when he had thought he would never hear her laughter again, which only made the sound of her laugh sweeter to his ears now.
If only his best friend was there to hear it.
As it always did when he thought of Ben, guilt slammed through him. He’d never understand why it had been him who had made it home and not Ben, who’d had a wife and son waiting for him. He knew it should have been Ben who had survived.
Watching as Lacey continued walking down to the back of the unit, he wondered if she ever thought the same thing. Did those thoughts haunt her as they did him?
Turning back to his computer, he pushed thoughts of his friend’s death to the back of his mind so that he could return his focus to work. After checking the lab work on the elderly patient who was next to be seen, he picked up the man’s chart and headed down the hall.
* * *
Lacey had just gotten the room stocked with the suture supplies she thought Scott would need when the ambulance crew rolled in with their patient, and a tired-looking police officer on their tail. The smell of alcohol hit her before she could even get a glance at the patient, which was enough to explain the presence of the officer.
“Thanks, Larry,” she said to one of the techs as he came in, and they both assisted the EMTs in transferring the man over to the stretcher. The patient remained unresponsive as they moved him. Whether that was from the accident or the alcohol intoxication she couldn’t tell.
She hooked the patient up to all the monitors and noted that the man’s heart-rate and other vital signs appeared to have deteriorated from when she had gotten the initial report. She began checking the man’s body for injuries. There was a cut above his right eye that oozed blood. It would need a few stitches. But her real concern was the possibility of a traumatic head injury due to whatever the man had hit his head on during the MVA.
She mentally moved the man to the top of the list of patients who needed to go to Radiology to get a CAT scan. They’d need his chest and abdomen scanned as well as his head.
“You said he didn’t lose consciousness at first?” she asked the EMT who’d remained in the room, and was now filling out the needed paperwork.
“Not that we’re aware of. He was awake when we got there. He passed out on the way here,” he said. “His alcohol level has to be at least in the three hundreds.”
She walked back over to the stretcher and rubbed the man’s sternum hard enough to get a response. The man moaned and one bloodshot eye opened. He looked around the room, moaned again, and closed the eye. So he did respond to pain. But still those vital signs bothered her.
“Name?” she asked.
“James Lyons,” the EMT read off his paperwork, then tore the form from his pad, handed her a copy, and walked out the door.
She looked over at the police officer who had taken a spot by the door.
“What are you charging him with?” she asked him.
“DUI,” the man said. “Along with property damage and driving with a suspended license. He swiped the side of a car before he hit the light pole. It’s not his first DUI. He served time for his last one. If someone had been sitting in the car he sideswiped they’d be dead now.”
“Mr. Lyons, can you hear me? I need you to wake up for me.”
This time the man opened both his eyes. Hopefully his unresponsiveness earlier had more to do with his alcohol consumption than injury. Or the man could be playing possum instead of dealing with the police officer in the room. She didn’t have enough information to know yet.
“Do you hurt anywhere?” she asked as she
shone a light into his eyes. His pupils were reactive, but she still felt there was more to his injuries than what she was seeing.
The man moaned, then grabbed his left side and looked over to the corner, where the cop was now sitting. Looking at the monitor, Lacey noticed that his oxygen saturations had dropped again, and his respirations had increased too. Pulling her stethoscope from around her neck, she placed the chest-piece against his chest and listened He was definitely moving less air on the left side.
“If you can get a line in for me, Larry, and draw the standard labs, I’d appreciate it. I’ll go get some orders from Dr. Boudreaux and then we’ll get over to CT,” she said, as she turned the patient’s oxygen up, then started out of the room. “And can you keep an eye on those vitals too? If there’s any change just call me on my radio.”
Not seeing Scott at his desk, she went in search of him in one of his patients’ rooms and found him sitting on a stool having a conversation with an elderly man. The man’s hair was pure white, his body thin and bent with age, but his smile lit his wrinkled face and his eyes sparkled with pleasure.
“Lacey, come in here,” Scott said when he saw her. “I want you to meet Lieutenant Hines. He was in Europe in World War Two.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Lieutenant Hines,” she said to the elderly man, who seemed to be embarrassed from all the attention he was getting.
“It’s Frank, Miss Lacey,” he said. “My days of being a lieutenant are long gone.”
“It’s nice meeting you, Frank,” she said.
She hated to interrupt Scott, but she knew he would be tied up here for a while, talking to and examining this patient. She needed to get her new patient to CT as soon as possible, and with the increase of his oxygen needs she didn’t have time to wait till he was finished.
“Can I speak to you for a minute, Dr. Boudreaux?” she asked.
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