The Billionaire's Christmas Wish

by Tina Beckett

  But she was much sought after in the States. So maybe they shouldn’t try to stuff her into a box she didn’t fit into. Even if Theo himself had created that particular box.

  “I understand. And I’ll respect that decision. To a degree.”

  What had happened to not pushing Ivy’s needs to the forefront? Or telling her that those meetings were optional?

  “I’m sorry? What does that mean?”

  “Just that the hospital uses these meetings not only as a chance to bounce around ideas but also to provide accountability to all the players.”

  “Accountability.” Her palms pressed against the surface of the desk, an edge of tension beginning to infuse her words. “As in you don’t think I’m carrying my weight here?”

  She was getting angry, and hell if he didn’t like the little hints of emotion: the sideways tilt of her head, the color sweeping up her cheeks...the way her gaze remained riveted to his face.

  Especially that last part.

  Damn. So much for keeping this cool and impersonal.

  “I phrased that badly. Let’s call it curiosity. I would like to know your thoughts on their thoughts. I was hoping to get to that meeting today as well.”

  Her hands dropped into her lap and the tension seemed to flow out of her.

  “I’ll be happy to share my thoughts. I just don’t want to waste my...” She smiled. “Sorry, badly phrased. I don’t want to spend two hours in a chaotic team meeting when I could be looking down other avenues. I promise I do glance over what the team discusses. It just takes me a while to get into my work mode, and having my day cut into pieces with meetings makes it doubly hard, especially if I’m trying to piece together a complicated list of symptoms.”

  “Understood.” Theo, whose days were often “cut into pieces,” as she put it, often wished he could just put a “Do Not Disturb” sign on his door and get in eight hours of uninterrupted work. “Would you prefer to just write up your findings and send them to me?”

  “I think it would be faster to tell them to you directly, if that’s okay. It can be a voicemail, if you’re too busy to take my call.”

  He was never too busy to discuss Ivy. “I’ll make time. But if you want to pass on information directly, why don’t we set up our own face-to-face meeting of sorts? You tell me the time that works best for you.”

  “Okay, that’s easy. The end of my official work day. Six o’clock or so?” She sat up, so the ends of her hair no longer brushed along the top of her desk. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t stop the image of that hair sliding across his skin—skin in an area that was suddenly shifting upward at an alarming rate.

  She tossed the offending locks behind her shoulder, going back to that professional demeanor he’d come to recognize, while he struggled to regain control of thoughts that were anything but professional.

  “That works for me. I was just getting ready to head down and see Ivy. Do you want to go with me?”

  He shouldn’t. He should put some distance between them for a while—at least until his strange reaction to her had a chance to power down.

  Then his gaze went to the right-hand side of her desk, where that little notebook had sat. Was she taking that with her?

  That made his decision. “I haven’t checked on her in a couple of hours, so I think I’ll join you.”

  A buzzing came from the other side of the desk and she lifted a finger, asking him to wait. Lifting her cellphone, she looked at the readout and then put the device to her ear. “Dr. Archer here.”

  She listened to whoever was on the other end of the line, frowning slightly. “And the others?”

  Her chest lifted and she expelled an audible sigh. He could fairly see the tension that had gathered in her shoulders. “Okay, thank you for letting me know.”

  Setting the phone on the desk, she pressed her fingertips against the surface for several seconds.

  “Was that something about Ivy?”

  “The test results came back from her Lyme panel.”

  “And?” He waited, his heart in his chest. Was this the answer they’d been looking for?

  “I’m sorry, Theo, but they’re negative. All of them. Ivy doesn’t have Lyme disease.”

  * * *

  Sitting on the side of the bed a half-hour later, listening to her little patient talk about what she’d had for lunch, caused a lump to form in Madison’s throat. It looked like Santa was going to have a hard time delivering the first wish on Ivy’s list.

  Had Theo peeked inside that book before she’d come into the office? She should have written the list somewhere besides the first page, but she’d had no idea at the time that the girl’s first request would be something of such a personal nature.

  Looking at the stiff way he stood in the corner, watching them, it was hard to imagine him ever liking the holiday, especially since the news they’d been waiting for hadn’t materialized. She had pinned her hopes on Lyme disease being the culprit, especially since the symptoms of it were often vague and could appear like those that Ivy had. They were back where they’d started yet again. She should be used to it. And she was. The challenging nature of her work had always energized her.

  But not today.

  For each terrible disease that was ruled out, another waited in the wings.

  And right now Theo looked pretty exhausted, the smile lines around his eyes now tinged with white.

  She ached for him. Wished there was something she could say or do that would make this easier.

  She’d been surprised to find him in her office earlier. Surprised at the way her heart had jumped to attention.

  Was that why she’d agreed to meet him personally to review the details of the case?

  Not smart, Madison.

  There was something about the man that touched a spark within her, though. Maybe it was the brave front he was putting on for his daughter’s sake. Or the fact that he’d walked through some hard years, something to which she could relate. She’d struggled through some heartache of her own as a kid. Since reaching adulthood and graduating from medical school, though, things had been smooth sailing.

  Sure they had. Because she was on a roll as far as the dating scene went.

  Actually, things were pretty dry. Men weren’t exactly lining up to go out with a diagnostician. Then again, she wasn’t scrambling to go out with them either. Her days had been too full of work and...work. She was busy. Which made the lonely nights a little easier to bear. Right?

  Her glance tracked back to Theo, and she swallowed.

  “Did you get to see Doodle?” she asked, forcing her thoughts back to Ivy.

  Doodle, the labradoodle, had been a regular visitor around the hospital, thanks to Evie, the ICU receptionist who was slated to return to nursing school after the holidays. She’d come up with the idea of bringing in a Pets as Therapy dog. He’d been such a hit with the children that the dog and his handler, Alana, came by most days to visit the different pediatric areas. The family suites were probably some of the last on the list today. But Evie had said the pair would be by soon.

  “Yes, this morning. He was so sweet and nice. I really would love...” Ivy’s eyes went to Theo, and then her shoulders slumped. “Oh, well.”

  Madison’s heart cramped. The little girl had almost blurted out that she wanted a dog. Maybe she should have. It was better for Theo to give her a definite answer than for Ivy to pine after something she might never have.

  Like the love of a mother?

  Madison’s breath stalled for a few painful seconds.

  Ivy’s mom had died, but surely she’d loved her daughter.

  That didn’t make the loss any easier. But at least she hadn’t simply wandered in and out of Ivy’s life, until one day she hadn’t been there at all—leaving a heartbroken child to wonder what she’d done to make her mother go away.

&nbs
p; Was she thinking of Ivy? Or herself?

  Madison had done the rounds in various foster homes after her mom had disappeared. Finally, she’d been sent to a group home when she’d been a teenager, where she’d stayed until she’d graduated from high school.

  The chaos of moving from place to place had made it hard to develop long-term friendships. Maybe that was why she preferred working on her own. And why colleagues saw her as aloof and unfriendly. She’d relied on herself for so long that she didn’t know how to ask for help. Or to trust that someone would catch her if she fell.

  “I didn’t realize they brought the dog in here.” Theo’s low voice was neutral. A little too neutral.

  “They did, and I loved him so much. He even fell asleep on my bed while I was stroking him.” She pulled her covers up to her thin chest. “Do you think Doodle can come and see me again?”

  Theo moved from his position against the wall to sit in a chair beside her bed. “I’ll have to see how those visits work, exactly, but I think it can be arranged if you would like that.”

  “Oh, I would!”

  Theo glanced at Madison with brows that went up slightly. In accusation? Had Ivy shared with him her desire for a puppy of her own, or...and here went her wandering thoughts once again...had he looked inside that notebook after all? She gave a slight shake of her head to indicate she hadn’t put Ivy up to it.

  “They’ve been trying to bring him by to visit all of the children before Christmas. He’s been wearing his elf hat, since he’s one of Santa’s helpers.” She hoped he’d understand what she was trying to say, that they were linking the visits with the man the hospital had hired to play Santa. “I guess it was just Ivy’s turn for a special visit.”

  “I guess it was. An elf, huh?” His voice, like his eyes, had a speculative sound to it. So what if he thought she was behind Doodle’s visit or that she was inserting herself where she wasn’t welcome? Once they were alone, she would set him straight. Or maybe she would ask Evie to make Ivy a priority and have the labradoodle stop by more often.

  Although why she wanted to make him uneasy, she had no idea. A little quid pro quo for the way he hung around in her thoughts—where he most definitely was not welcome?

  “Yep, an elf. It seems Santa sometimes uses locals to help him do his work.”

  “And sometimes he uses people from a long way away to do his miracles.” The graveled plea behind the words made her tummy twist and turn.

  So much for a quid pro quo. Any desire to make him uncomfortable vanished, replaced by a plea of her own.

  Please don’t pin all your hopes on me.

  And yet he was. She knew it. Knew he’d called her to come to the hospital because of this very skill set. Normally Madison thrived under that kind of high-pressure atmosphere, the urgency making her job exciting and unpredictable. Her mind seemed to revel in taking a scattered array of seemingly unconnected symptoms and somehow fitting them together.

  Only she’d never been colleagues with a parent before. Or connected with a child the way she had with this one.

  Her fingers tweaked Ivy’s hair and she forced a smile, pretending the wordplay hadn’t suddenly become deadly serious. “Miracles can come from many different sources.”

  “Will Pablo get a miracle?” The little girl glanced up at her.

  Madison saw Theo go still at the mention of the little boy diagnosed with muscular dystrophy who’d been a couple of doors down from Ivy’s room until they’d moved him to PICU.

  Madison swallowed. “Pablo left today.” She tried to put enough subtle emphasis on the word “left” that Theo would realize she wasn’t talking about going home.

  A muscle went to work in his jaw, pulsing a couple of times before going quiet. He got it.

  He lowered himself into a nearby chair, elbows on his knees, head down.

  Thinking about how Pablo could just as easily have been his daughter?

  Unwilling to leave him to figure out a way to respond to Ivy’s question about miracles—or the lack thereof—Madison spoke up. “Why don’t we see if we can challenge your dad to a game of Go Fish?”

  Up came Theo’s head, eyes fixed on her. “Go Fish?”

  Those two words had never sounded as elegant as they did in that accent of his. It forced a smile from her.

  “It’s a card game that uses a special deck.” She never knew what kind of cases she might be called in on, so she’d gotten used to carrying a pack in one of her pockets. Sometimes getting someone’s mind off an illness helped calm nerves, whether it be children, parents, or anyone else. She’d been kind of famous for producing that deck of cards at her hospital in the U.S., had often being called on to help calm a child who was being prepared for surgery. It was the one time she’d felt wanted—needed—for something other than her skills at diagnosis.

  “I know what it is. I’m just not sure how you’re going to manage—”

  Out came the pack of cards. Theo’s head gave a funny little tilt as if he couldn’t believe his eyes.

  “Now I’ve seen everything.” His glance landed on her. “Madison the magician.”

  The way he’d said that...

  A shiver rolled over her that she did her best to suppress.

  “It’s good therapy for cognitive and fine motor skills.”

  And it gave Madison a way to observe her patients, looking for any tiny changes that she might miss otherwise. If she played a quick game over a period of a couple of weeks—or months—she could see disease progression. The first game gave her a base from which to compare progress or deterioration. In this case, she prayed she wouldn’t see the latter.

  She let the magician comment stand, instead of going into that kind of explanation. Maybe later.

  Nodding at the spot on the bed next to her, she said, “Move closer, Doc, so I can deal.”

  There was a moment’s hesitation, but he finally got up and sat on the mattress, watching as she dealt the first hand and placed the rest of the deck face down between them. She hoped he didn’t see the slight tremor in her hand as she did so.

  Although she’d come prepared to play, Theo’s presence was threatening to derail her. And although she’d invited him to sit next to her, she was now wishing she hadn’t. She was hyper-aware of everything about him. His scent. The way the fingers of his left hand rested on his thigh.

  The way he was avoiding looking at her.

  Lordy. She was in trouble.

  When dealing with children, she sometimes adopted rather goofy voices as a way to make her patients laugh. Ha! There was no way she was going to do that today.

  Ivy picked up her hand, although it took some effort to do so. The little girl’s struggle poured an icy dose of reality over her. Madison tensed, resisting the urge to offer help, and when Theo looked like he might intervene, she spoke up. “She can do it. Let her.”

  “Yeah, Daddy, I can do it.” She carefully separated her cards, fumbling a little and dropping one of them in the process. There was silence as she recovered and picked it up again.

  “Player to the left of the dealer goes first.” She would have had Ivy go first, no matter which side she’d been on.

  The girl’s eyes swiveled between the two of them before focusing on her father. “Do you have any threes, Daddy?”

  Theo handed over a card. “I have one.”

  Ivy’s grin lit up the room. “I knew it.” She asked for another card, this time from Madison, who didn’t have the requested item. Then it was Theo’s turn.

  “Madison, do you have any aces?”

  “Go fish.”

  He didn’t move for a second. “How about up your sleeve? Do you have any there?”

  She froze as his eyes finally met hers. Nerve endings crackled as she stared back at him.

  “Daddy! That would be cheating, and Madison doesn’t do that.”

/>   Madison snapped her gaze back to her cards, none of the numbers coming into focus.

  She would cheat in a heartbeat if it meant outsmarting whatever was going on inside Ivy’s small body.

  It took them fifteen minutes to declare Theo the winner, and to Madison it seemed like an eternity. All she wanted to do was retreat to the safety of her office, lay her head down on her desk and try to come up with some kind of answer. For Ivy. And, heaven help her, for her father.

  Especially after seeing slivers of change in Ivy over the course of the game. Her cards appeared to get heavier and heavier, the young girl having to set them down in between hands. But her mind was as sharp as ever. In fact, she seemed to make up for her deteriorating condition by memorizing what was in her hand. And when she said, “Go fish,” without even looking, neither Madison nor Theo challenged her. By the end the girl was yawning, even though it was only six in the early evening.

  “Tired, kiddo?” she asked.

  “No.”

  Theo gathered the cards into a neat stack then leaned over to kiss his daughter’s head. “Why don’t you rest for a little while, and I’ll help Dr. Archer put these away, okay?”

  “Will you tell me a story later?”

  “Of course.”

  Ivy lay back against her pillows, her face pale, the muscles in her thin arms lax and still. She made no move to hug her dad. Or wave goodbye. For a child who was normally so affectionate, it struck a chord of fear in Madison.

  If she felt it, then that chord had to be a million clanging gongs going off in Theo’s head.

  God, why couldn’t she figure this out?

  A hot wave of nausea seared up her esophagus as she pictured Theo tucked in next to his child, reading her a bedtime story.

  How many stories did she have until that bed was empty? Just like Pablo’s.

  Twenty? Ten?

  Two?

  The pain grew, engulfing her with a terrible sense of responsibility.

  She needed to fix a picture of that bed in her head and stare at it. Force herself to get to grips with the reality that this was life or death.