Marie Ferrarella

by A Doctor's Secret

  Still, Jesse made her laugh. More, he made her smile. Not just one of those fleeting smiles where the corners of her mouth quirked, but one of those deep, penetrating smiles that went clear down to the bone and made you glad to be alive.

  In her case, it made her glad that she had decided to meet him for dinner instead of bowing out at the last minute, using her old standby excuse: I’m on call—and they called.

  Half an hour into dinner, Tania caught herself actually thinking about shutting off her cell phone and wishing that she could. As far as she could remember, it was the first time that had happened.

  “I read about you in the paper,” she said as the waiter cleared away the few crumbs that were all that was left of a sinfully delicious appetizer.

  Jesse winced at the mention of the coverage. “Please, the less said about that, the better.”

  His response aroused her curiosity. In her experience, most people tried to get into the limelight, not avoid it.

  “Why?” She nodded a silent thanks to the waiter who now began to serve the main course. “I thought everyone liked getting their fifteen minutes of fame.”

  “Not me,” Jesse said with feeling. The less attention he had drawn to him, the better. He’d already been the recipient of enough attention to last him a lifetime. More. “I’m perfectly satisfied to donate my fifteen minutes to someone else. As far as I’m concerned, they can have thirty.”

  Despite her best efforts not to, Tania found herself intrigued. Jesse looked as if he really meant what he said.

  Chapter 5

  Tania waited until the waiter retreated again before asking her question. “Are you just shy, or is it that you’re harboring the soul of a hermit?”

  “Neither.” He turned his attention to the main course, discovering that he was pretty hungry. “I’d just rather not have the attention.”

  The signs were posted, she mused. This was where she was supposed to back off, to artfully change the subject to something light. Knowing things about other people eroded the barriers, theirs and hers.

  But he’d made her curious. And besides, for the time being she had no desire to lapse into inane statements that fell in the category of “How ’bout those Yankees?”

  So, even as she picked up her knife and fork, she fixed Jesse with her most penetrating, interested gaze and prodded a little.

  “But why?” she asked him. “There has to be a reason why—” She added what she thought of as the clincher, “And you might want to get it off your chest.”

  No doubt she was thinking about confession being good for the soul. “It’s nothing like that.”

  “Like what?” she asked innocently, silently urging him on.

  To confess, he had to have done something wrong, and he hadn’t, Jesse thought. Except pay attention to the wrong woman. It had made him gun-shy for a while. Until yesterday.

  She was waiting, so he elaborated. “I’m not someone who jumped bail in another state, or a delinquent dad who’s fallen so far behind in his child support payments that there’s a warrant out for his arrest.”

  “Good to know.” She didn’t bother to add that he didn’t seem like the type. She wasn’t all that great a judge of character. Tania took a sip of her Long Island Iced Tea and then placed it back on the table. “You’re also not shy because shy people don’t spring into action. They hope someone else will do the springing so their conscience won’t haunt them.” Tania paused, waiting. But Jesse didn’t take the bait.

  She leaned in a little closer, creating a small, private world for the two of them. “Now you have me really curious. C’mon, get it off your chest. They say it’s good to face your fears.” She parroted what the therapist had said to her during her first—and only—session. The therapist was a friend of Natalya’s and had a very gentle, soothing manner. But gentle, soothing manner or not, she just didn’t have the desire to bare her soul to a stranger.

  But Jesse didn’t need to know that.

  “True,” he agreed. “But only if voicing them leads to conquering them. In my case, I could stand on a rooftop and conduct a thirty-minute monologue, it still wouldn’t change the situation.” He appeared rather complacent about the matter when he said, “I’ve already done everything that I could.”

  She couldn’t make the pieces fit, couldn’t second-guess what he was referring to.

  “Okay, you’re not leaving here until you spill your insides to me, Jesse Steele. I was just teasing before, but if there’s one thing I can’t stand,” she told him honestly, “it’s not knowing the outcome of something.” She’d been like that as far back as she could remember. “That’s why I finish every mystery I start reading, watch every horrible movie to its conclusion. I need to know things, even things of no interest, and I thrive on answers. You now have one of those in your possession.” Her eyes teased him. “So give.”

  He laughed, not quite knowing if she was serious or not. “You’re really making more out of it than it deserves.”

  “I’m not,” Tania countered as bits of her salmon fillet continued to disappear from her plate, making their way into her mouth, “you are.” She paused to level her gaze at him, issuing a royal decree. “So talk.”

  He was within his rights to tell her it was none of her business, because it wasn’t. But he didn’t want to say something like that to her. Didn’t want to shut her out. So he took a long sip of his drink and began. “I made the mistake of dating a woman who worked for the same firm that I did.”

  The information was vaguely disturbing. There was no reason why it should be. After all, someone who looked like Steele wasn’t destined to live life as a monk. And yet it bothered her, which made no sense to her.

  Of course the man dated women before he asked you out. What did you expect? That he lived in a monastery before he was brought in strapped to that gurney? Monks just do not have muscles like that.

  She deliberately kept her thoughts from registering on her face. Tania raised her glass to her lips before she nonchalantly asked, “A fellow architect?”

  Jesse shook his head. “She is—was,” he corrected himself, the very action giving him discomfort because despite everything, he did feel bad that she’d lost her job, “an administrative assistant.”

  Tania picked up on the one telling, all-important word. “‘Was’?”

  Jesse nodded. His appetite was slipping away. He forced himself to eat a little more. He wasn’t the type to take home leftovers wrapped in aluminum that had taken on the shape of a swan. “The company let her go after certain behavior came to light.”

  He didn’t look comfortable, Tania thought. Was that because he retained his position while the woman he was talking about had lost hers? Empathy engulfed her, coming out of nowhere.

  She tried to lighten the moment. “They didn’t approve of her making love with you in the supply closet?”

  That was the ironic part, he’d never made love to Ellen at all. She’d spun her fantasies out of air and imagination, nothing more. “That wasn’t the behavior they disapproved of.”

  Tania’s eyes widened. “So she did make love in the supply closet with you. I’d thought it was understood that quick trysts in small, windowless enclosures were the sole domain of hospitals.”

  Not that she ever had done that, but she’d accidentally walked in on one of the nurses in more than a simple amorous clinch with an attending. Not hers, thank God, because that might have been the end of her career. Attendings didn’t like being laughed at and she still wasn’t able to look at the man without picturing him with his scrubs and his underwear around his ankles.

  It would have been difficult taking orders from a man like that.

  “No closets,” he assured her. The topic, because it considered him, made Jesse uncomfortable. But there was no getting away from it now. He’d started it, he had to finish it. “Just a difference of opinion.”

  She wasn’t sure she followed this. Tania looked at him quizzically. How did a difference of opinion lea
d to an employee being fired?

  “About?”

  He studied the last few drops in his glass. Amber, they caught the light and shimmered beneath it. “Whether or not there was a relationship between us. She thought there was one, I didn’t.”

  “I take it she didn’t like your version of things.”

  The laugh that escaped his lips had no humor in it. “Not in the least.”

  Well, now he had her hooked. “So what happened?” She wanted to know. “Did you find a rabbit in one of your pots?”

  He counted himself lucky that it hadn’t gone that route. But for a while there, he’d held his breath. “No, but I would come home to find her cooking dinner for me.” It happened twice before he lost his patience and put an end to it.

  Tania stared at him. “You gave her the key to your apartment?”

  There had to have been some sort of relationship for that to have happened, she thought. Maybe he wasn’t as innocent of blame as he seemed. Maybe he had led the woman on.

  But his next answer negated that line of thinking. “No. Apparently she picked the lock.”

  “Resourceful.”

  Jesse frowned. “That makes her sound like a Girl Scout. Believe me, she wasn’t.” She was mentally damaged. Incapable of taking no for an answer. He sincerely hoped that she was getting the treatment she so badly needed.

  His response begged for a question. “What was she?”

  “As near as I can figure, a sociopath.” There was no other label he could apply. Other than crazy. “I tried to make her understand that it just wouldn’t work out between us, but it was like my words were just bouncing off her head and disappearing into the atmosphere. She acted as if everything was just fine. As if she belonged in my apartment. It took me forever to make her leave. The second time I found her there, she refused to go, said we belonged together for all eternity.

  “When I tried to physically put her outside my apartment, she started screaming at me, pinching, kicking, biting. The neighbors called the police—” his mouth curved in an ironic smile “—who promptly proceeded to arrest me for abusing her. Ellen cheered them on. But when one of the policemen started to put handcuffs on me, she suddenly had an about-face and flew into a rage. She started pummeling the guy with her fists.” His mouth curved a little more. “That was when they realized that maybe I wasn’t the one at fault here.”

  “You think?”

  Tania’s sarcastic remark momentarily hung in the air between them. She felt as if she’d just crossed over a bridge and while she wasn’t exactly close to Jesse, she was at least a little closer than she had been a moment ago. They’d both endured things at the hands of another that they shouldn’t have.

  Although the damage that she’d sustained as opposed to him were worlds apart, at least Jesse understood what it meant to be at the mercy of someone else.

  “So then what happened?” she asked.

  “They arrested her for assaulting an officer. I had no trouble taking out a restraining order against her. I don’t know how—” because this was something he hadn’t shared “—but someone at the firm got wind of the restraining order and what had caused me to take one out in the first place. Ellen was summarily dismissed before the end of the workday.”

  He’d felt genuinely bad about that. Ellen had told him she hadn’t had much in the way of savings. Because he felt responsible, he’d been tempted to send her money to help tide her over. But when he mentioned it in a conversation with one of the senior partners, Alfred Bryce, the man immediately read him the riot act, warning him that Ellen would only misconstrue the gesture, thinking he’d committed to her, after all.

  In his heart, Jesse knew that Bryce was right, but his conscience still bothered him.

  “Ellen,” Tania echoed, plucking the woman’s name out of the array of information.

  He nodded. He hadn’t said her name out loud for six months now. That was how long he hadn’t seen her. It was beginning to look as if he was finally home free, that Ellen seemed to have moved on. “That was her name. Ellen Sederholm.”

  The name made her envision someone petite and mousy, but that was probably unfair, Tania thought. “And where is ‘Ellen Sederholm’ these days?”

  He’d heard via the grapevine that she’d moved, but he wasn’t about to attempt to find out if she had. He could only hope that it was out of state.

  “Not within five hundred feet of me is all I know or care about,” he told her.

  And then it all suddenly came together for her. “And that’s why you didn’t want your face on the five o’clock news—because you’re afraid that it might set Ellen off again.”

  The way she said it, it didn’t sound like a question but an assumption. He answered it anyway, even though it sounded a little egotistical.

  “Something like that.” Jesse’s lips twisted into a small smile. “My mother taught me not to take foolish risks.”

  Obviously the man only reflected on that when it served his purposes. “And your tackling a fleeing, armed robber was, what, a smart risk?” She laughed, then added, in case he was about to claim that it hadn’t really been that risky, “I saw the video someone got of you in action on their cell phone.” There was no such thing as privacy left in the world, she thought. Someone was always filming you, invading your life in hopes of being able to sell what they captured to the news media and the highest bidder. “Looked pretty risky to me.”

  At the time he hadn’t paused to weigh his options, he’d just reacted. Still, he shrugged. “Calculated risks are okay.”

  Tania just wasn’t buying it. Mr. Epstein had been right. Jesse was a hero, the kind her father had always approved of. “And you had time for these calculations—when?”

  She had him there, Jesse thought. “Are you sure you’re a doctor and not a lawyer?”

  Tania pressed her lips together, suppressing a laugh. He had no idea how funny his suggestion was. Her father would have gone into anaphylactic shock if she’d told him that she wanted to become a lawyer.

  “I’m sure. My father would have never let me become a lawyer,” she said with a fond laugh. She could just hear her father’s voice, enumerating the many faults of lawyers. “Depending on the time of day you ask him, he thinks they’re just a little above or a little below snakes on the food chain.”

  “Sounds like a man who has opinions,” Jesse commented diplomatically as the waiter returned to discreetly refill his glass. “You take after him?” It was a question he already felt he knew the answer to.

  “To an extent.” Tania played with the stem of her own glass. The waiter raised one eyebrow in a silent query, but she shook her head. One was her limit. Never again was she going to relinquish her control to a hazy world just because she liked the taste of a particular drink. “Not that he would admit it. He thinks I’m stubborn and he’s just being steadfast.”

  In truth, she and her father had had few arguments. Josef liked to indulge his girls. Mama, on the other hand, had been known to lock horns with everyone but Sasha. Sasha was too easygoing to be drawn into an argument.

  Amused, Jesse asked, “And what is it that you’re stubborn about?”

  “Not always taking his advice.”

  Her father had wanted her to all but become a nun after the incident. He hadn’t actually said so in so many words, but every time she went out, his face became a mass of concern. And then there was always an endless barrage of questions.

  Granted, he was worried about her, and she was, too. But determination trumped worry and she was determined not to let Jeff’s actions brand her.

  At least, not any more than they already had.

  She refused to become a hermit. But then, on every outing, fear always turned up somewhere within the course of the evening and shut her down. More than anything, she wanted to break the cycle. She wanted to be whole again.

  “Tell me more about your father,” Jesse coaxed.

  She wondered if he was just making conversation or if he was
hungry to picture a father, any father, because his own had been taken from him at a young age.

  So she gave him details. “He was born in Poland. Warsaw,” she added. “That’s where he met my mother. And where he married her. They decided to come to this country when she became pregnant with Sasha. They both wanted their children to have the opportunities they hadn’t had.

  “They settled in Queens and Dad became a cop. That was where my sisters and I grew up. My parents still live in the first house they ever owned.”