She spotted Derek at one of the buffet tables, paper plate in one hand, a plastic glass of wine in the other. He had changed into black linen slacks and shirt and his hair was combed straight back off his forehead.
“Gawd, what a day it’s been.” He speared a piece of bacon-wrapped shrimp. “One damn thing after another. D’you reach Connaughton yet? Selena Bliss paged me twice tonight. Says I owe her a favor and she has to talk to him, or she’ll never give us any decent coverage again. What are these things?” He gestured at a silver chafing dish. “Alpo balls?”
“Swedish meatballs, I think.” Catherine piled some celery and carrots on her plate, doused them with a scoop of diet ranch dressing. “No luck with Connaughton. I’ll go up to the unit first thing in the morning. The babies should have all stabilized by then, so maybe he’ll be more receptive.”
“Good.” He ladled meatballs on his plate then stopped to inspect a silver tray. “Keep trying. There’s been a new development, and we need to be sure Grossman and Connaughton are singing out of the same hymnbook.” He lowered his voice. “There’s no love lost between the two of them.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Grossman thinks he’s God and so does everyone else at Western, except for Connaughton. Now Grossman wants to try this new surgery that’s never been tried on a kid this size, but Connaughton thinks the kid’s too sick and he’s not making any secret of it.” He dug a toothpick into a meatball. “The problem is, I want to promote this teamwork concept and…what are these little numbers?”
“Rumaki.” Catherine dipped a carrot stick in dressing. “Teamwork concept?”
“Exactly.” Derek winked at a passing reveler in formfitting black leather pants. Face flushed with wine, he poked a toothpick into a wedge of cheese. “What was I saying?”
“Teamwork.”
“Right. The Freeway Triplets and Western’s team of miracle workers. Connaughton who delivers them, cares for them in our state-of-the-art NICU. Grossman who performs this miraculous, life-saving surgery. Fabulous PR. Jordan loves it.”
Catherine watched a conga line form a few feet away. A man she recognized as one of the lab techs, motioned her over to join him. She shook her head, then leaned closer to hear Derek’s voice over the noise. A wave of wine-scented breath forced her back.
“What makes this whole triplet thing particularly timely—” Derek brought his face closer “—is that Ned Bolton has been nosing around lately—”
“Ned Bolton?” Catherine frowned. “The medical writer with the Tribune?”
“The same.” Derek nibbled a piece of cheese. “Bolton’s specialty is striking fear into the hearts of public relations people. I suspect he secretly wants to bring every hospital in his circulation area crashing down in an avalanche of scandal. Anyway, last month we had a couple of, uh, surgical mishaps that Bolton thinks we’re trying to cover up. He hinted—not very subtly—that the incidents were a result of underlying management difficulties.” Derek drained his wine. “Jordan nearly hit the roof when he heard that one.”
She nodded. Although she hadn’t yet dealt with the chief of administration directly, she had attended executive meetings with Derek and, on occasion, had seen Jordan’s sudden bursts of temper. “Is there any truth to the allegations?”
Derek waggled his hand, palm down. “Yes and no. It’s a long story. The point though is to divert Bolton and the rest of the pack with this triplet thing. That’s why we need to milk it for all it’s worth.” He glanced at his watch. “Listen, I’ve had about all the holiday cheer I can handle for one night. Jordan gives his speech at eight. We need to get something in the newsletter. Stick around for it, will you?”
Catherine opened her mouth to speak, then closed it, silenced by the thought of how much she needed her job. Another half hour seemed like a life sentence, but she dragged up the phony smile she’d perfected during her marriage and sweetly agreed to stay. In need of a stimulant to keep her going, she started over for the coffee urn at the far end of room and collided with a tall blond man. He introduced himself and, in amazingly short time, regaled her with details of his stock portfolio, real estate and assorted collection of cars and boats.
“I ski Mammoth,” he rambled. “Got a condo up there, all exposed beams and glass, hot tub, wet bar. Ski all day, party all night.”
Catherine smiled politely and considered possible avenues of escape. Her head ached and the smell of overheated bodies and reheated food was making her feel slightly sick. Even if she had the time or inclination to date, she reflected, if this was an indication of what was out there, she’d go without.
He flashed dazzling white teeth and moved a little closer, his eyes appraising. “So, what do you do for fun?”
“Not a whole lot.” She inhaled a cloud of aftershave, took a step back to avoid nose-to-nose contact and searched her mind for a sufficiently unexciting activity. “Gardening,” She took another step backward. “Cooking.” In this way, she could eventually backstep her way out of the room. “Work.”
He shook his head and moved a step closer, continuing their little pas de deux. “Y’know what they say about all work and no play, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but I don’t care.”
“Hey, babe.” He looked into her eyes. “Want to split this place, go get a drink somewhere?”
As she formed the words of refusal, she heard a male voice behind her.
“Excuse me, I need to talk to Catherine.”
A male voice with an Irish accent. She knew without turning that it was Martin Connaughton.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE MARKETING MAN, caught momentarily off guard by the intrusion, rallied quickly. “Hey, that’s cool. No sweat, I’ll just mosey over there and check out the munchies.” He shot Catherine a parting wink. “Catch you later.”
Catherine watched him disappear into the crowd, then turned to Connaughton. A beer bottle in one hand, he wore a battered tweed jacket, some sort of collarless shirt under it and jeans. His reddish-brown hair fell untidily over his forehead, and his eyes were lined with exhaustion. But as she looked at him, all she could think of at that moment was how attractive he was—not handsome, or conventionally good-looking, but attractive: sexy, slightly disheveled, more than a little weary and, she suspected, completely unconcerned about the way he looked.
“Martin Connaughton,” he said as though perhaps she’d forgotten. “You’re looking for me?”
“I was looking for you. About four hours and five messages ago. You didn’t answer your page or your messages. Again.”
“Well, now I’m here.”
“How do you know you didn’t just barge into an important conversation?” A vestige of irritation lingered. Now he was ready to talk. “That guy might have been…I don’t know, the love of my life.”
He raised an eyebrow. “In that case you were managing to conceal it remarkably well. I’ve been watching you from across the room for the last…” He glanced at his watch. “Ten minutes. You looked bored stiff. Actually, I thought I’d do you a good turn by rescuing you.”
“You did?” Surprise deflated her anger like air from a balloon.
“I did.” A faint smile played across his face.
She stood there, momentarily robbed of words by an intense awareness of his physical presence. His height, the way his jacket fit across his shoulders, the slight shadow of beard. Maybe he’d come straight from the hospital, just changed from his scrubs. She felt weird, breathless almost. Everything around them seemed distant and unconnected.
“So?” His smile grew wider.
“So.” She felt her face color. “We need to talk.”
He caught her arm, shepherded her to an empty space by the door. “I suppose that this is the part where I throw myself on your mercy and tell you that it’s been a hell of a day so please accept my abject apologies for my earlier behavior.”
The remark, with its teasing undertone, once again caught her off guard. The cool, distant doctor had me
tamorphosed into a sexy guy who had a definitely disconcerting effect on her heart.
“You don’t really seem too abject.” She matched his tone. “I like a lot of groveling before I forgive.”
“Unfortunately, groveling isn’t one of my strong suits,” he said solemnly. “But supposing I did want to grovel my way into your good graces. How would I go about it? Could I redeem myself by talking to your pals out there?”
“My pals. You make it sound so frivolous.” She suppressed a smile and an errant thought: she could fall for him, big time. Her face felt warm. “As a matter of fact, you can meet them tomorrow. I’ve scheduled a press conference at ten.”
“You’ve already set it up?” Dark blue eyes widened slightly. “How did you know I’d do it?”
“Just a hunch.” She realized she was beginning to enjoy the exchange. “Can you be there?”
“There’s nothing I’d rather do. Just tell me what you want me to say.”
“We can work on that in the morning.” She leaned her shoulders lightly against the wall, her arms at her sides. Relief, but more than that, something about Martin Connaughton had completely transformed her mood. “Back to groveling though.”
“Yes?”
“Just this morning, I seem to recall you making some sort of comment about public relations. How did you put it?” A hand cupped to her chin, she pantomimed deep thought. “I think the word you used was puffery.”
“Temporary insanity on my part,” he replied with an obvious effort to maintain a solemn expression. “I retract everything I might have said. Public relations is a calling of the highest order.”
“You know something?”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Not for an instant.” She smiled into his eyes. “So what produced the dramatic change?”
“I’ve got a project that’s very important to me.” The laughter left his face. “It’s called WISH. I’d like to talk to you about it.” He glanced around the crowded room. “Maybe we can find somewhere a little bit quieter.”
“SO THAT’S REALLY what WISH is all about,” he said after he’d given her the overview of what he was trying to do. “Drug counseling and adequate prenatal care can go a long way toward preventing tragedies like Kenesha Washington.”
Music and laughter from the hotel floated out to where they sat on a low stone wall. Above them a smattering of stars, ahead a narrow strip of beach and the dark ocean. What surprised him was how easily the words had flowed. The emotions that just that morning Dora Matsushita had urged him to unlock were right there as he explained, and he knew by Catherine’s expression that he’d touched her.
“And you’re hoping that administration will be so pleased with your glowing tribute to Western’s NICU that they’ll change their minds and decide to fund WISH after all? Is that your strategy?”
“Something along those lines.” He smiled. “As the PR expert, how does that sound to you?”
“As the practitioner of fluff and puffery you mean?”
“I already apologized for that, remember? Besides, you called me Scrooge.”
“And I apologized for that,” she replied. “Although you did seem kind of dark and gloomy this morning.” She glanced at him from under her lashes. “I figured that maybe it was typical Irish behavior. You know, all brooding and melancholy.”
He laughed. “That’s a myth. The truth about the Irish is that at any given time in history, half of them were starving. If they’d had enough to eat, they’d have been as bright and cheerful as yourself.”
“So you missed breakfast this morning? That’s your excuse?”
“There’s no excuse for me. I’m just cantankerous.”
“Yeah, I’d heard that,” she said. “A loose cannon was the way someone described you.”
Martin laughed again, well aware of his reputation at Western.
“About WISH though,” she said after a moment. “I’m kind of low on Western’s totem pole of influence, but I’ll do what I can to put in a good word.”
“Thanks.” Tempted to shift now to the personal and ask her more about her family, Martin reminded himself he was here for a purpose. And, if he’d read her correctly, she understood his concerns. In fact, her face, which seemed to register the slightest emotion, made her a fairly easy read. And if that didn’t give her away, he thought with amusement, her hands did.
“What’s the joke?” she asked. “You’re sitting there smiling to yourself.”
“I was just thinking that perhaps you had Italian somewhere in your ancestry.”
“Oh, the hands?” She grinned and her face colored slightly. “I know, everyone teases me about it. If I ever get rheumatism, I probably won’t be able to talk. There’s no Italian though. Irish on both sides.”
He said nothing, struck by an odd sense that he’d come home, that he knew this woman with her long plait of hair and blushing smile. Years away from Ireland had done little to dilute the strain of Celtic mysticism in his veins, and the feeling awed him. “Your children?” he said, finally giving in to his need to know. “How old are they?”
“Peter’s ten and Julie was six last week.” She grinned. “For her birthday cake, she wanted carrot and pineapple with chocolate frosting.”
“God.” He pulled a face. “That sounds revolting. Did she get it?”
“Yeah, I baked it myself. Birthday cakes are kind of my thing. Any cakes actually. Chocolate, apple, cheesecake, you name it. Don’t tell Ed Jordan—” she brought her face closer “—but I’d rather be home with my kids, frosting a cake, than doing public relations.”
“But then we wouldn’t be sitting here talking.”
“True.”
“How long were you married?”
“Nearly twelve years.”
“That’s a long time for a California marriage, isn’t it? I thought they all self-destructed after five years.”
She smiled. “It takes work, I guess. You both have to want it. In our case, I guess I wanted it more than he did. We had this really terrific house and sometimes I’d sit in the kitchen and the sun would be pouring through the windows, and there were cookies or something like that in the oven and the kids would be playing. I just remember feeling so happy. I mean, who needs a career? That was my career.”
“The perfect wife and mother, huh?”
“I guess not so perfect since we’re now divorced.”
“You didn’t want the divorce?”
“You could say that. When he told me he wanted to end it, I felt as though I’d been fired from the only job I’d ever wanted.” A quizzical smile on her face, she turned to look at him. “Do you have any idea why I’m telling you all this?”
“Probably because I’m asking.”
“But it’s all one-sided. What about you? Have you been married?”
“A long time ago.”
“Any kids?”
He shook his head. “So would you try it again?” he asked. “Marriage, I mean?”
“Probably not.” She frowned at her hands, folded in her lap. “It was a pretty powerless time in my life. I had no real stake in anything. Unfortunately, I couldn’t see it then. I just deferred to him without really thinking about it. Sometimes I’d decide I was tired of living under a dictatorship and complain. Then he’d do something really sweet and generous and I’d feel like a bitch.”
He laughed.
“It’s true. I don’t think I started out that way, it just happened gradually. A little compromise here, another one there.” She shrugged. “It’s an insidious thing. By the time we got divorced and I really looked at myself, I barely knew who I was anymore. I guess in a weird sort of way, I’m grateful to him for forcing the issue. It’s probably the only thing I am grateful to him for—except the children, of course.”
“And I was going to ask if it had left you embittered.”
“It shows, huh? Embittered and embattled. But wiser. I’ll never let myself be dependent on someone like that again.”
/> “But surely it doesn’t have to be all or nothing.” He wondered why it seemed important to convince her. “Marriage doesn’t have to mean giving up all your autonomy.”
She shrugged. “Maybe not. But I’m kind of gun-shy.”
A moment passed and neither of them made a move to leave. A breeze blew a wisp of hair across her face. He watched her push it away. Watched the silver charm bracelet she wore slide down her arm as she did. Leave, he told himself, but she was smiling at him and the breeze carried a whiff of her floral perfume. You’ve accomplished what you came here to do, he told himself, but the sky was sprinkled with stars and the moon was a pale crescent suspended above them. Leave. But each time he looked at her, he felt a yearning for a time when the future had seemed bright and full of promise and a small voice in his head asked, Well, why not again?
“This morning when I saw you in the lobby,” he finally said, “you reminded me of someone I used to know. Now though I can see that you’re not really like her, it’s just an expression you get.”
She watched his face. “Old girlfriend?”
“No.” He shook his head, felt her waiting for more. “No,” he said again.
Moments passed. The oleander bushes that lined the lawns trembled in the breeze.
He watched her face. She’d moved slightly so that she now sat in profile to him. Back rigid, bottom lip caught in her teeth. Vulnerable somehow. A wave of fierce protectiveness swept him, stunning him with its intensity. He wanted to put his arm around her, to pull her close, to promise that he’d prevent anything bad from ever happening to her. Sure, a voice in his head scoffed, like you promised Sharon. He glanced at his watch.
“It’s getting late.” She turned to face him. “I should probably go back in.”
Laughter floated out from the hotel, heels clattered on the flagstone pathway. Words clattered in his brain. Inside, the band started up again.
“Listen, Catherine,” he finally said. “I think you need to do something crazy.” He stood, held out his hand to her. “Let’s dance.”
The Doctor Delivers Page 6