Talk about tap dancing in minefields.
Why the hell did he have to be the one to draw the Kaiser’s niece as a patient?
“The Kaiser,” as Karl Serrat was called by the staff when he was out of hearing range, oversaw all the residents in the psychiatric specialty program at the Massachusetts Hospital of Mental Health. They all considered him a taskmaster, but he seemed to ride Ty particularly hard. He also held Ty’s entire future—his completion of the residency program required before taking the exams from the American Board of Medical Specialties to become a licensed psychiatrist—in his twisted grasp.
The man was just looking for an excuse to kick him out. Karl Serrat had been on Ty’s back since their first meeting.
With the snow, the drive to Eternal took an hour and a half. Stomping his boots and shrugging out of his jacket at the ER nurses’ station, he asked the large-boned African-American woman behind the desk for the psych consult file and plowed down the hallway, reading the patient history as he walked.
He tapped twice with his knuckle on the door to evaluation room 5, counted to three to give her a few seconds to pull herself together, then took a deep breath and poked his head in. “Ms. Serrat, may I come in?”
The hell with Karl Serrat. He had a job to do and it didn’t matter if the woman waiting for him was Serrat’s niece or Mona Lisa. She was a patient, and he would do his best by her, consequences be damned.
Fixing that thought firmly in his mind, he pasted on a smile and said “Hi, I’m Dr.—”
The woman who turned to look at him from her place by the window nearly made him forget his own name. It wasn’t her beauty so much that stymied him, though she had that, as her intensity.
She stood as far away from the door as she could get. If she hadn’t been holding a disposable cup, he was sure her arms would have been folded tightly over her chest, fingers fisted. Her tousled mahogany hair was thrown back over her shoulders and her full mouth pursed slightly. Her eyes, as lush, green and mysterious as a tropical rain forest, glinted with tightly controlled anger.
Obviously she’d figured out he wasn’t here to give a second opinion on her bumps and bruises. Yet, instead of pouting about a psychological evaluation, or retreating inside herself, there was a challenge in her eyes.
The woman wasn’t just all good looks. She had moxie.
“Dr.—?” she asked, hooking one eyebrow.
“Hansen. Ms. uh—” He cleared his throat. “Serrat.”
She studied him critically. “My uncle sent you, I assume.”
“Uh, yeah.” Brilliant. Very eloquent.
Sighing in resignation, she hopped up on the edge of the examination table. “Well, let’s get this over with. I have a son to get home to.” Her feet dangled off the floor, exposing the delicate bare ankles at the ends of two very long legs.
“Sure. Uh, yeah.”
Heaven help him.
Mia had prepared herself to do battle with some pasty-skinned, condescending head-shrinker who had his name sewn over the breast pocket of his lab coat and who spoke through his nasal passages. She was ready, or she thought she was.
Never in her wildest dreams had she imagined they’d send someone like young Dr. Handsome, here, to check up on her. One look at him, and her game plan fell apart with an audible crash.
He was tall and tanned and lean, but with enough bulk under his blue denim button-down dress shirt to hint at a fit body. His hair was conservatively cut, but just enough overdue for a trim that the light brown ends curled over his collar. A few flakes of snow still clung in the cowlick over his left temple.
The cold had left ruddy spots on his cheeks, and the beginnings of a slight shadow darkened his jaw, but not grimly. The stubble, combined with brilliant hazel eyes, a lazy smile that only reached one side of his mouth and the battered leather jacket slung over his shoulder gave him a slightly harried, sleepy, sexy look.
She wasn’t ready for him at all.
She wondered if he knew exactly how disarming that lopsided grin of his could be. She wondered whether it was genuine or part of his psychotherapy-babble bag of tricks.
“Ms. Serrat?” He lifted his eyebrows in question.
Polite, too, still waiting for her to invite him in. Not a common trait in doctors, in her experience.
Despite his charm and his manners, she jutted her chin when she nodded, reminding herself he was the man standing between her and Todd. She needed to get home to her son, preferably before school let out for the day. She didn’t want him to know anything about this little incident.
He shouldered his way through the door and eased across the room, stopping about three feet away and extending his hand. Tricky, he was. Making her go to him. A subtle but effective shifting of power in the room.
On another day, she would have refused to play his mind games. But today, she decided an antisocial display would not further her cause.
Hopping off the exam table and stepping forward, she accepted his hand. His knuckles were scraped and swollen as though he’d been in a fight, she noticed. Young Dr. Handsome was one surprise after another.
Before she thought better of herself, she swept her thumb over the abrasions. “Rough day at the office, Doc?”
He looked puzzled for a second, then glanced down and extricated his hand from hers. “Just a little difference of opinion.”
It was her turn to look puzzled, but she didn’t ask for an explanation, nor did he offer one. It was best they get down to business, anyway.
“I’m sorry you had to wait so long,” he said, throwing his jacket across the foot of the bed. “I’d have been here an hour ago, but the weather’s taking a turn for the worse and the roads are getting nasty.”
An hour. What was one hour? she wondered.
An eternity to an eight-year-old boy. A boy waiting for his mother.
“Why don’t we get this over with so you can get back on the road to wherever home is, then?”
“Sounds like a plan.” He rubbed his hands together to warm them, looking her up and down.
Her spine tingled as if he’d run his fingers up her back. The look hadn’t been sexual at all—it was definitely a doctor’s appraising gaze.
Still, she had felt it.
As if he’d felt it, too, he took a step back.
Even fully clothed and with four feet of distance between them, she felt naked. Bare to the soul. Unable to resist any longer, she set her tea down and crossed her arms over the buttercup-yellow flannel pajama top Nana had brought for her.
She wished Nana had brought clothes, instead.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Fine,” she lied. Her hip hurt like hell. “The doctor gave me a clean bill of health.”
“Good. Do you know why I’m here?”
Her lips pressed together in a bleak smile. “You’re a psychologist.”
“Psychiatrist, actually. You know what happens next?”
She nodded and sat on the edge of the bed, her legs hanging over the side. She’d been through this before. At least he wasn’t patronizing her.
He asked a battery of questions. Her name. The date. The name of the current president. The immediate former president. Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?
She looked up at him quizzically. “Grant?”
He grinned. “Just seeing if you were paying attention. Thought I had you there.”
“My son loves riddles. I hear that one, or some variation on it, at least once a week.”
“What happened this morning?” Dr. Handsome asked. His gaze followed her as she hopped off the bed and paced, limping. She didn’t want to do this, but he wasn’t going to let her go home to Todd until she did.
“Why don’t you just come right out and ask me?” she said, hating the impatience in her voice.
“Ask you what?”
“If I tried to kill myself again.”
“Did you try to kill yourself again?” he said without missing a beat.
�
��No.”
“But you have tried before.”
Statement, not question. No sense denying it, she thought. The facts would be in her medical record.
“A long time ago,” she said flatly.
“After you lost your husband?”
“And my sister six months before that, and my parents a year before that.” Her heart constricted painfully at the memory. Memories.
A moment of silence passed. “That’s a lot to go through in eighteen months.”
“Too much.” She turned to him, her lips pressed in a grim line. “Or so I thought at the time.”
His smile was gone, and the look that had replaced it brought a lump to her throat. His face glowed with a warm, quiet concern.
Compassion.
“But not anymore?” he asked.
She took a deep breath, raw at having to expose herself like this to a stranger. Most people had a right to privacy. To dignity. Not so the mentally ill, or those suspected of mental illness. They were expected to drag their deepest fears, their most personal vulnerabilities out for inspection by anyone with the right abbreviations or acronyms behind their names.
She considered lying, knew it would only delay the inevitable. He would pick at her until he got the truth.
Looking down, she saw her hands were trembling and clasped them together to hide the weakness. “I spent eight months in the hospital learning to deal with my grief. I clawed my way back to normalcy day by day. Sometimes minute by minute or second by second, but I made it.” She threw her chin in the air. “My doctor there had me keep a journal. I still do it. I record my good days and bad days and why each was the way it was. As of this morning, I’d had three hundred and ten consecutive good days. Three hundred and ten.”
When she dropped her gaze again, she realized she’d fisted her hands so tightly her knuckles had gone white.
Dr. Hansen gave her a few seconds to collect herself, then asked gently, “What happened this morning?”
She hesitated. “I fell.”
He checked the file, then said in that same placid, calming tone, “You told the police you were pushed.”
“I was confused. I hit my head.” She touched the knot on her temple as if to prove it. Damn it, she shouldn’t have to prove anything to him.
But she did, if she wanted to go home, and she did want to go home, even if it meant lying. She’d told the police and the first doctor who had examined her that she’d been pushed into the road.
It hadn’t gone over well.
She ducked her chin. She would not give him reason to call her paranoid. “Maybe some snow slid off the trees and hit me in the back. The sun was warming things up pretty good.”
She lifted her head. “Or maybe I just stumbled. That’s how I ended up in the road.” Desperately, she tried to give him a reassuring grin. It wobbled and she gave up. “I did not throw myself over a cliff on purpose.”
To her surprise, he smiled back. “Good.”
She rolled her shoulder, feeling the tension easing out. He believed her. Didn’t he?
He made a few notes on her file and then raised his head. “What were you thinking about before you fell?”
“Todd’s Christmas present. My son, he’s eight. I was deciding what to get him.”
He made a sympathetic noise. “Tough age to buy for. Young enough he still wants all the good kids’ toys, but too old to admit it.”
“Exactly.” She couldn’t believe he understood. Maybe there was more to him than a pretty face. “You have kids?”
“No, but I was one once. And I know how little boys’ minds work. I am male.”
Surprising herself, she swept her eyes from his broad shoulders to his lean waist, long legs and back up again.
Definitely male.
It had been a long time since she’d noticed that about anyone.
“So what did you decide on?” He grinned at her. She couldn’t decide if he knew exactly what she’d been thinking or if he was really as innocently naive as he seemed.
“I didn’t,” she explained, heat rising to her cheeks. Focus. She needed to focus on the conversation. She had no business noticing anything about this man. He was a doctor. The doctor who held the power to declare her sane or crazy. “I was wishing my husband were there. He would know what to get.”
“How did it make you feel that he wasn’t there?”
She snorted, suddenly disappointed in Dr. Handsome. “Oh, please. Not the ‘how did it make you feel’ question. How do you think it made me feel?”
“Sad? Lonely?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Have you ever been married?”
“No.”
“Maybe if you had, you’d have some inkling of what it means to be twenty-five years old, with a four-year-old baby and to lose all the family you have, not to mention the man you love, the only man you’ve ever been with, without warning. Until then, don’t pretend to understand what I do or don’t feel about my dead husband.”
He stilled the pencil he’d been twirling between his fingers and looked her right in the eye. “Well said, and with lots of feeling. You’re very good. How many doctors have you used that shtick on?”
The accusation took her aback. Until she recognized it as the truth. “A few.”
“Did it work?”
“More times than not.”
He strolled toward her, his tongue in his cheek. “Then you’ve been seeing the wrong doctors.”
He locked his golden gaze on hers and she couldn’t look away.
“Let’s try this again,” he said, towering over her. “How were you feeling just before you fell?”
The irrational urge to run swept over her. He was too close. Physically and emotionally. He smelled like Polo cologne.
And tasted like fear. Her fear.
She was not crazy. She wouldn’t let anyone say she was.
“If you want me to say I was depressed, you can go to hell,” she said.
“Been there. Didn’t care for it.” His face remained impassive, but his eyes changed. Cool intellect gave way to a dark, hot fury that burned somewhere deep inside him. The kind of fury only someone who has suffered could feel.
“Me neither,” she said. “Depression was my hell. I almost had to die to do it, but I escaped. I won’t ever go back.”
He looked away as if he suddenly found their linked gazes too intimate. “You’re one of the lucky ones, then.”
“I am.” She touched the scars on his right forearm and he flinched as though she’d burned him. “What about you?”
“I’m working on it.” He raised his head, cupped her chin and looked into her eyes again, his own fires now banked. “I—” His fingers tightened on her face. “Damn.”
“What?”
“Did the ER doctor give you something when he treated you? Pain medication? A sedative?”
“No.”
“Your pupils are big as dinner plates.” He let her go and cursed again. “I can’t sign off on the evaluation if you’re medicated.”
She followed him when he turned his back and marched away. “I don’t need to be evaluated. I just need to go home. To my son. Please.”
He groaned like a man in pain. “I can’t. I have to talk to you when your head is clear. I can’t afford to mess this up. Director Serrat—”
“Uncle Karl?”
He stiffened, and she knew she’d made a mistake mentioning her uncle. His boss.
He picked up his jacket and shrugged into it without turning. “I’ll come back to finish the evaluation tomorrow.”
“Let me go home and I’ll come to you in Belier in the morning.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I just can’t risk it.”
Understanding exploded with a burst of bitterness on her tongue. “Worried about my life or your career?”
“Neither,” he said stiffly. “You have a son.”
Rage rose to the surface. “I would never hurt my son. Never!”
“I’ll talk to y
ou tomorrow.” He headed toward the door, but stopped just inside, shoulders stiff.
“Wait. Please!” Desperation propelled her across the room after him. She stopped just short of touching him, her arm extended.
“Tomorrow,” he said without turning. “Try to get some rest. I’ll be back early.”
He was gone before she could argue. Before she could plead.
Alone again, Mia propped her hips on the edge of the bed, fighting back the desperation. The humiliation.
Maybe he was right. Maybe they were all right, and she’d imagined someone else with her on the bluff. A sinister shadow behind her.
Three hundred and ten days, she thought, her eyes welling with tears. She’d had three hundred and ten good days.
And tomorrow, she’d have to start over again at one.
Chapter 3
Ty felt like a heel as he left the Eternal Emergency Care Clinic. Not because he’d admitted Mia Serrat for overnight observation when she so clearly wanted to go home—standard procedure was standard procedure, and he dared follow nothing but when the patient was Karl Serrat’s niece. There was also her son’s safety to think about.
What troubled him was the niggle of pleasure he’d felt at the knowledge that, by admitting her, he’d have to see her again in the morning.
She was a patient, for Christ’s sake. He knew better than to think of her in any other terms.
She was also a woman, though. A spirited, strong-willed, self-reliant woman.
Exactly the kind of woman he liked.
Shivering, he turned the heater on full blast in his ancient VW Beetle and pulled out onto Highway 18 toward Belier. Snow swirled furiously around his little car, falling faster now than when he’d driven in, and whipped into a frenzy by a fierce north wind. Windshield wipers and headlights hardly penetrated the miasma.
He leaned forward, peering into the blizzard to make out the road, but instead he kept seeing her defiant green eyes, the determined set to her full lips.
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