From House Calls To Husband

by Christine Flynn

  “Just let me hold you.”

  Letter to Reader

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Books by Christine Flynn

  About the Author

  The Pledge

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Copyright

  “Just let me hold you.”

  Nothing else he could have said just then would have blunted the edge of panic so effectively. Whether he wanted to hold her for himself or for her, she didn’t know. But either way, the motion of Mike’s hand kept Katie where she was. With slow, easy strokes he traced a path from her neck to her thigh, the movement seeming as soothing to him as it was to her.

  She knew exactly what he was doing. He knew as well as she did that once they moved from each other’s arms, nothing would be quite the same. But as long as they stayed where they were, they could postpone the moment they would have to face what they’d done. More than willing to avoid the moment for as long as possible, she curled into the protection of his arms, and let herself think only of how she’d always wanted to be exactly where she was....

  Christine Flynn is

  “...one of the genre’s master storytellers.”

  Romantic Times magazine

  Dear Reader,

  Autumn inspires visions of the great outdoors, but Special Edition lures you back inside with six vibrant romances!

  Many of the top-selling mainstream authors today launched their careers writing series romance. Some special authors have achieved remarkable success in the mainstream with both hardcovers and paperbacks, yet continue to support the genre and the readers they love. New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts is just such an author, and this month we’re delighted to bring you The Winning Hand, the eighth book in her popular series THE MACGREGORS.

  In Father-to-Be by Laurie Paige, October’s tender THAT’S MY BABY! title, an impulsive night of passion changes a rugged rancher’s life forever. And if you enjoy sweeping medical dramas, we prescribe From House Calls to Husband by Christine Flynn, part of PRESCRIPTION: MARRIAGE. This riveting new series by three Silhouette authors highlights nurses who vow never to marry a doctor. Look for the second installment of the series next month.

  Silhouette’s new five-book cross-line continuity series, FOLLOW THAT BABY, introduces the Wentworth oil tycoon family and their search for a missing heir. The series begins in Special Edition this month with The Rancher and the Amnesiac Bride by Joan Elliott Pickart, then crosses into Romance (11/98), Desire (12/98), Yours Truly (1/99) and concludes in Intimate Moments (2/99).

  Also, check out Partners in Marriage by Allison Hayes, in which a vulnerable schoolteacher invades a Lakota man’s house—and his heart! Finally, October’s WOMAN TO WATCH is talented newcomer Jean Brashear, who unfolds a provocative tale of revenge—and romance—in The Bodyguard’s Bride.

  I hope you enjoy all of the stories this month!

  Sincerely,

  Karen Taylor Richman

  Senior Editor

  Please address questions and book requests to:

  Silhouette Reader Service

  U.S.: 3010 Walden Ave., P.O. Box 1325, Buffalo, NY 14269

  Canadian: P.O. Box 609, Fort Erie, Ont L2A 5X3

  CHRISTINE FLYNN

  FROM HOUSE CALLS TO HUSBAND

  Published by Silhouette books

  America’s Publisher of Contemporary Romance

  For our daughter, Dawn Flynn, R.N., with tons of love and thanks for all the information, encouragement and advice

  Books by Christine Flynn

  Silhouette Special Edition

  Remember the Dreams #254

  Silence the Shadows #465

  Renegade #566

  Walk upon the Wind #612

  Out of the Mist #657

  The Healing Touch #693

  Beyond the Night #747

  Luke’s Child #788

  Lonely Knight #826

  Daughter of the Bride #889

  When Morning Comes #922

  Jake’s Mountain #945

  A Father’s Wish #962

  *Logan’s Bride #995

  *The Rebel’s Bride #1034

  *The Black Sheep’s Bride #1053

  Her Child’s Father #1151

  Hannah and the Hellion #1184

  From House Calls to Husband #1203

  * The Whitaker Brides

  Silhouette Desire

  When Snow Meets Fire #254

  The Myth and the Magic #296

  A Place To Belong #352

  Meet Me at Midnight #377

  Silhouette Romance

  Stolen Promise #435

  Courtney’s Conspiracy #623

  Silhouette Intimate Moments

  Daughter of the Dawn #537

  Silhouette Books

  36 Hours

  Father and Child Reunion

  CHRISTINE FLYNN

  admits to being interested in just about everything, which is why she considers herself fortunate to have turned her interest in writing into a career. She feels that a writer gets to explore it all and, to her, exploring relationships—especially the intense, bittersweet or even lighthearted relationships between men and women—is fascinating.

  The Pledge

  Graduation day

  We, the undersigned, having barely survived four years of nursing school and preparing to go forth and find a job, do hereby vow to meet at Granetti’s at least once a week, not do anything drastic to our hair without consulting each other first and never, ever-no matter how rich, how cute, how funny, how smart-marry a doctor.

  Chapter One

  It was only two weeks into January and Katie Sheppard had already broken four of her five New Year’s resolutions. She’d yet to clean a single closet. She hadn’t registered for the yoga class that was supposed to reduce stress and expand her mind. And last night, while blubbering her way through her favorite movie, she’d blown her diet with an entire pint of Häagen-Dazs. Now, instead of cutting back on the hours she volunteered at a free women’s clinic—resolution number four—she’d actually agreed to help expand its program. If the day didn’t end soon, she had the feeling number five would also bite the dust. In a way, she supposed it already had.

  When asked to take on more than I can comfortably handle, I will learn to say no, and mean it.

  Right, she mentally muttered, pulling open the heavy stairwell door leading to her unit. If she’d sounded any more convincing talking to the clinic’s director, whom she’d bumped into in the hospital’s cafeteria, she would have wound up running the whole bloody program.

  Her female friends were more generous, but her friend Mike was right—her backbone was made of mush.

  “Dr. Brennan was looking for you a few minutes ago, Katie. Did you see him?”

  Speak of the devil.

  Deciding she’d have to finish beating herself up later, Katie did an about-face as she passed the telemetry unit’s nurses’ station with its long white counters and banks of cardiac monitors. A hot pink stethoscope hung around her neck, the bell and earpieces dangling against the top of her light blue scrubs. Wincing as she loosened a strand of frustratingly curly, wheat-colored hair caught under the neon-colored tubing, she sidestepped an orderly and headed for the middle-age model of efficiency seated behind the high counter.

  Alice Ives, the unit’s secretary and everyone’s self-appointed mom, had barely glanced up when
she’d spoken. The woman’s attention was riveted to the photos one of the other cardiac nurses had brought in of her family’s Christmas vacation in Hawaii. Katie had taken her turn drooling over them between patient assessments, morning rounds and a staff meeting.

  “Did he say what he wanted?”

  “Only that it could wait. He’s doing a procedure in 307 if you want to catch him. By the way,” she added, still flipping through photos, “he didn’t seem too happy about whatever it was.”

  Confusion settled in Katie’s dark brown eyes. If Mike said it could wait, then what he wanted probably had nothing to do with a case. Where his patients were concerned, he invariably wanted answers five minutes ago.

  “I won’t interrupt him,” Katie said, wondering if something had gone wrong with his research study—the one he’d roped her into helping him with. “But if he finishes in the next few minutes, I’ll be down with the new admit.”

  Reaching over the counter, she slid her clipboard from where she’d left it before she’d gone on the break she wished she hadn’t taken, and paused long enough to see which picture had Alice so transfixed.

  It was the one of a palm tree silhouetted against an orange and magenta sky. A lovers’ sunset, she thought, feeling a little wistful herself. “Living vicariously is the pits, isn’t it?”

  The older woman sighed like a preteen with a crush on a rock star. “I’d kill to go to those islands,” she admitted, touching the image of the palm tree. “With two kids in college and another starting next year, the only sand Larry and I will see for the next ten years will be on the beach at Lincoln City. And it won’t stop raining there until July.”

  “The Oregon coast certainly isn’t known for sun,” Katie agreed, thinking of the beach an hour and a half drive through the mountains from Honeygrove. “But we do have all that gorgeous, rugged shoreline.”

  Alice peered over the top of the purple-rimmed half glasses that matched her grape-colored pantsuit. “You sound like you’re describing a man. That’s what you should be checking out, too, you know? Men. Not scenery. You’re never going to get the family you want if you don’t start looking a little harder.”

  A tolerant smile curved Katie’s mouth. “How did we get from discussing your desire to go to Hawaii to my lack of a man?”

  “It’s that association thing. You know, the one where someone says something that reminds you of something else? But as long as we are talking about it, is there anything new and exciting you’ve been keeping from me?”

  “I don’t have time for ‘new and exciting,”’ Katie muttered, thinking she’d have even less time for herself now, thanks to her starchless spine.

  Alice made a disapproving sound. “Time is all you will have if you don’t get out there and circulate, girl. Maybe you should go somewhere exotic,” she suggested, her confidential tone barely audible over the muffled clatter of lunch trays being collected and a page coming over the loudspeaker. Behind her, a technician continuously scanned the monitors, green lines spiking over gray screens. “You’re thirty years old. Single. And your only dependent is a cat. If I were in your position,” she confided, punching at a blinking light on the console as the phone continued to ring, “I’d be gone in the time it took me to pack a book and a bathing suit.

  “Three-G, Alice speaking,” she answered, arching her penciled eyebrow at Katie in subtle challenge.

  “Hey, Katie.” The tech at the monitors kept her focus on one of the screens. “The patient in 316 has had ten beats of V tach. You want to check it out?”

  Alice’s outspoken observations sounded suspiciously like those Katie heard more and more lately from her own mother. But thoughts of turning into an old maid vanished along with images of muscular males and mai tais. The telemetry unit of Honeygrove Memorial Hospital handled heart patients who weren’t sick enough for the Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, but too sick for the medical floors. Three-sixteen was Eva Horton, a spry seventy-four-year-old who’d suffered a heart attack while out for her morning walk. Her indomitable spirit had survived open-heart surgery and enough drugs to drop an elephant. If her heart stayed in the arrhythmia of ventricular tachycardia, however, she wouldn’t survive much longer.

  Maneuvering around a tall, stainless steel meal cart, Katie aimed for the break between a stuffed laundry cart and a gurney coming down the crowded hall. When she had assessed Eva twenty minutes ago, the woman had been totally stable, her vitals good, her potassium level fine.

  Rounding the corner into the room, still working to pinpoint what was going wrong, she deliberately slowed her stride. The young aide preparing to give Eva her bath walked out of the bathroom as Katie ran a practiced eye over the face of the thin, silver-haired woman propped up in the bed.

  “How are you doing?” Katie asked, picking up the woman’s wrinkled hand. Professional as she was, she had a definite soft spot for this widow who’d confided that she simply didn’t have time to have a bad heart. She had grandchildren to spoil, a foursome in bridge she couldn’t let down and a shower to grout. At the moment, however, the once-energetic woman’s skin was pale and clammy, perspiration misted her upper lip, and the edges of her mouth had a distinct blue outline.

  “I feel funny.” Eva swallowed, pressing her hand to her chest when Katie released it. “A bit short of breath.”

  She had been off oxygen since yesterday. Reaching for it even as the woman spoke, Katie turned on the airflow, but she didn’t get the cannula in place. In the time it took to blink, the woman’s eyes rolled back behind her goldrimmed bifocals, and her head sagged forward like a rag doll’s.

  The thin clear oxygen line swung against the wall of outlets and ports like the pendulum of a clock as Katie snatched up the phone by the bed.

  The nurses’ aide, a statuesque brunette barely over twenty and new on the floor that week, stood clutching the washbasin she’d just filled. Her already pale skin suddenly looked as ashen as the patient’s.

  “Get her flat,” Katie ordered, wondering what the girl was waiting for. With the phone cradled against her shoulder, Katie lowered the side rails. “And get a backboard under her.” Her mind racing, she whipped the patient’s glasses off and started ripping off the gown. “Code Blue. Three-G. Room 316,” she said into the phone, and threw the pillow in the general direction of a chair.

  The phone still rocked in its cradle when she grabbed the backboard the aide pulled from the foot of the bed and shoved it under the unconscious woman. From beyond the room, a bell-like chime sounded an instant before an amazingly tranquil voice came over the intercom. “Code blue. Three-G. Room 316. Code blue. Three-G. Room 316.”

  The code was repeated a third time, but Katie scarcely heard it. At that very second elsewhere in the hospital, she knew that nurses, technicians and doctors were bolting for the stairways. Any person available answered a code, no one taking the chance that others would take care of it. Within the minute, there could be twenty people in the room, each prepared to handle a part of what one person couldn’t effectively do alone.

  Except for the aide. She hadn’t moved.

  Katie tipped back her patient’s head to get a straight airway. “Don’t just stand there,” she insisted, her own heart pounding. “Get a mask. You breathe. I’ll compress. Come on!”

  The young aide shook her hands as if ridding them of water, her eyes flashing fear and panic. “I’ve never done this for real before. Only in class.”

  “Then pretend it isn’t for real if it helps! Just do it!”

  Had a patient’s life not hung in the balance, the empathy Katie could rarely suppress would have tempered her response. It was the aide’s first code and she was freaking. Having slid into a dead faint the first time she’d witnessed surgery, Katie could hardly be critical. But she had no time to feel frustrated, and even less time to waste. The patient had no pulse.

  “Where’s that cart?” she called, a little frantic herself as she crossed her hands on the older woman’s ominously still chest and began rapid
compressions. “I need help here.”

  “You got it.”

  It vaguely occurred to Katie that Mike must have finished whatever he’d been working on. Six feet two inches of what her irascible buddy Dana called a black-haired, blue-eyed studmuffin barreled through the wide doorway with an open white lab coat over his dress shirt, slacks and tie. With one sweeping glance, he noted the brunette fumbling with a breathing mask, assessed the situation on the bed and slipped into action.

  “I’ve got her, Katie. You breathe.”

  The deep timbre of Mike’s voice had been described as everything from the low rumble of distant thunder to the slow burn of good brandy. Half of the female staff claimed his voice alone was enough to accelerate a woman’s heart rate. Katie was more interested in his hands. The instant they slipped under hers to take over the compressions, reassurance registered through the adrenaline rush that got everyone through a code. She’d trust Mike with her own life. He’d already saved it a couple of times. He’d saved her rear anyway. But she’d only been a kid at the time.

  “I’m on three, four...”

  “Five,” Mike said, taking over the count while Katie breathed air into the woman’s lungs.

  The code cart rolled through the door with two nurses, a tech and an electrical cord trailing behind it. As sometimes happened, someone had simply grabbed the cart and ran without unplugging the defibrillator first. The code cart was actually a big red toolbox on wheels, and Cindy, a redheaded RN with a million freckles, hit the charge switch on the defibrillator anchored to the top. A second later, the paddles were ready and she frantically tore away the plastic lock on the cart’s base to open the drawers and trays of meds and supplies.