GUILTY SECRETS

by Virginia Kantra

  Better for them both, safer for them both, if he churned out his story and dragged his sorry ass out of here.

  "Why do you need all this equipment?" he asked, interrupting her. "Wouldn't your patients who need these kinds of tests be better off going to the hospital in the first place?"

  Instead of taking offense, Nell considered his question seriously. "Some of them. But our goal is to identify and treat illnesses before a patient requires a trip to the emergency room. Many of them are afraid to go to the hospital. And most of them can't afford it. Our clinic is actually cost-effective for the community. For every dollar in donations, we can return seven dollars in health care. I have statistics showing…"

  Her face was animated. Her eyes were bright with conviction. And every word wiped out his hopes of taking her to bed.

  Nell was a do-gooder, a fearless meddler, a tireless fixer-upper. What had she said? It's my job to observe and to care. If they got involved, she would want to help him. She would demand to know why he wouldn't help himself.

  And he wasn't going there. Not with his doctors. Not with his family. And not with a woman he wanted to take to bed.

  Are there any circumstances in which you are not okay with sex?

  Yes. When it threatened to become more than sex and jeopardized the barriers he'd set around his soul to survive.

  Nell was still talking about clinic costs with the endearing earnestness of Mother Teresa and the convincing delivery of a used-car salesman. "It's all about preventive care. A routine patient visit can cost a hundred and fifty dollars at a private doctor's office. Using volunteer doctors, we can provide the same services for one-fifth the cost. And that includes a lab test," she added triumphantly. "If you extrapolate—"

  "Hey, Nell." The big black nurse stuck her head in the door. Her hair, shaved short and dyed red, glowed like the fuzz on a tennis ball. "Let me have your keys a second."

  Nell's hand moved easily to her pocket. And then she stopped. "Where's Ed?"

  "At lunch. You've been so busy you lost track of time." The nurse flicked a glance in Joe's direction. "Billie Parker," she introduced herself.

  Joe was skeptical. Did she really need keys? Or was she angling for a mention in the paper? "Joe Reilly," he offered blandly.

  She looked him over. "Yeah, I know." She turned back to Nell. "Anyway, I need some cortisone samples for the kid in Exam Six. He has a rash in places you don't want to think about."

  Nell moved toward the door. "I'll get them for you."

  "That's okay. I'll just—"

  "I really should get them myself," Nell said.

  In the field, Joe had developed an ear for a story and an instinct for survival. And something in her tone caught his attention as surely as the sound of a pistol being cocked.

  Billie Parker shrugged. "Whatever. When you find the time. Exam Six." She started to walk out.

  "I'll come with you," Nell said. She turned to Joe, her clear blue eyes questioning. A conscientious frown pleated her forehead. He had to stop himself from smoothing it with his thumb. "I have to get back to my patients. Did I give you what you need?"

  Not by a long shot, sweetheart, he thought.

  But he couldn't ask for what he needed. Not from anyone, and not from her.

  He forced a grin. "Are you offering to play doctor, Dolan?"

  Her head snapped back as if he'd slapped her. "Not unless you're volunteering to turn your head and cough," she said icily and stalked out.

  * * *

  Chapter 4

  « ^ »

  It was amazing what kind of crap a writer could produce when he was up against a deadline and had absolutely no feeling for his subject.

  Joe scowled at the half page of text displayed on his computer screen. The cursor blinked impatiently at the bottom. Write. Now. Right now. Write.

  He swore and reached for a cigarette. Every morning he counted them out, three cigarettes, his day's allowance, and placed them carefully in a box in his breast pocket.

  The box was empty. The cigarettes were gone.

  Joe checked the ashtray on his desk to make sure. Yep, sometime between typing his byline and that last, remarkably bad paragraph citing statistics on America's uninsured, he'd smoked his last cigarette. Exhausted his supply. Reached the end of his resources and his rope.

  Maybe he should give up and turn in the piece his editor expected. Some slop with Nell Dolan as an angel of mercy dispensing hope and drugs to the city's grateful poor. Nurse Practitioner Barbie, with long blond hair and a removable white lab coat.

  She would hate that. Joe almost smiled.

  But thinking about Nell, undressing Nell, only made him more frustrated in a different way. Physically frustrated. Sexually frustrated.

  He reached again for his cigarettes. Hell. Crushing the empty box in his hand, he lofted it across the living room toward the wastebasket.

  He missed. Loser.

  In his front hall, the doorbell rasped like the final buzzer at a Bulls' game.

  Joe hobbled across the bare hardwood floor to the door and peered through the security glass at the side. Two men, one in uniform, occupied his front stoop.

  Joe yanked open the door. "What the hell are you doing here?"

  His middle brother Will walked in without asking. "Ma was worried when you bailed on dinner."

  Mike followed, thrusting a round Tupperware container into Joe's hands. "She sent us with leftovers. Got any beer?"

  His family. He loved them, admired them, let them down… And right now, he wanted them to go away.

  "No."

  No alcohol. It was something else he was learning to deny himself.

  Mike snorted. "God, now I'm worried about you, too. What about coffee?"

  "Instant. And you'll have to make it yourself."

  "Okay. In the pantry, right?" Without waiting for an answer, Mike snatched back the covered dish and carried it through to the kitchen. A cupboard door banged. A drawer slammed.

  With a curse, Joe limped after him.

  "You're not walking too good," Will observed behind him. "You hurt your ankle again?"

  Joe gritted his teeth. He supposed it was too much to hope Will wouldn't notice. "Nope. Just overdid it the past couple days."

  "Is that why you blew off dinner?"

  "No. I told Ma. I have a deadline."

  "You still have to eat," Will said.

  Joe regarded his brother with loathing. "You sound exactly like Ma, you know that?"

  Will grinned at him, five feet ten inches of compact, confident Chicago firefighter. "Say that when you're on both feet, paperboy, and I'll take you down."

  It was the kind of threat he used to make before the accident. Even with his brother's qualifier—when you're on both feet—the taunt improved Joe's mood.

  The microwave pinged from the kitchen.

  "Dinner's ready," Mike called.

  The scent of Mary Reilly's lamb and onions permeated the hall. The house was small, with one bedroom on the ground floor and a couple of others upstairs that Joe had barely seen. Eight months ago, when he bought the place, the layout had been the house's key selling point. He still couldn't negotiate the stairs easily.

  Stumping into the kitchen, Joe dug a spoon from the drawer. Will filled a kettle with water. Mike rescued the plastic container of stew from the microwave and slid it across the table.

  Joe lowered himself cautiously onto a chair, cupping the Tupperware in one hand. The smell reminded him of decades of Sunday dinners eaten off his mother's lace tablecloth in his parents' dining room. The solid weight of the container in his hand was warm and comforting.

  "Thanks," he said gruffly.

  Will lifted one shoulder in a shrug. No big deal.

  "Mom made us come," said Mike. "She and Pop are worried you're not getting out enough."

  "Oh, like you do," Joe retorted. "You still live in their basement."

  "I like saving money."

  "You like Ma doing your laundry," Joe sai
d.

  "Yeah, well, a year ago she was emptying your bedpan and bringing your meals on a tray," Mike said. "So I don't want to hear it."

  An awkward silence fell.

  Mike meant well, Joe reminded himself desperately. He always meant well.

  But neither of his brothers understood how Joe's crash-and-burn return from Iraq had crippled him. He prayed they never did. To lie at the mercy of his doctors, to wake crying in pain, to rely on pills to function and his family for the most basic human needs had been a devastating comedown.

  He was the oldest, the leader, the one who did well in school. The foreign correspondent, the world adventurer.

  Now he was back to eating his mother's leftovers and fretting over writing a feature on a hole-in-the-wall clinic.

  Will's chair scraped back. He grabbed the whistling kettle and poured boiling water into two mugs. "Want some?" he asked Joe, lifting the kettle.

  He wanted a drink. He wanted his life back.

  He cleared his throat. "Sure. Thanks."

  Will snagged another mug from the cupboard and added instant crystals.

  "Don't worry about Mom," he said, stirring the coffee. "I told her you weren't getting out because you were finally settling down."

  Joe pushed his half-eaten stew away. "And she believed that?"

  "She didn't," Mike said, helping himself to one of the mugs and bringing another over to Joe. "But then I told her you were seeing somebody."

  Joe didn't "see" women. He had sex with them, to fill the time and dull the pain.

  "Yeah?" he asked, almost amused. "Who did you tell her I was—"

  Oh, no.

  Mike wouldn't. He couldn't.

  He had. He was trying not to wriggle like a puppy who'd missed the paper, but it was clear he knew he'd made a mess.

  "Nell Dolan," Joe said flatly, answering his own question.

  "She was the only one I could think of," Mike said.

  "A blond nurse with an Irish surname," Will put in, a gleam in his eyes. "She's perfect. Mom was thrilled."

  Nell was perfect, Joe acknowledged. That was her problem. Or rather, it was his.

  She would fit too well into his family and into his parents' expectations for their disabled son. She had the idealism and commitment they admired and he had lost. Oh top of that, she was Irish. Catholic. A caretaker.

  She could take care of him.

  The thought was as bitter as his brother's coffee and much harder to swallow.

  Joe forced himself to take a sip and turned the conversation. "What were you doing there today, anyway? At the clinic."

  "Your girlfriend called us in," Mike said. "Somebody's lifting narcotics from the clinic pharmacy."

  Joe felt the tickle of interest like a spider on the back of his neck. "Is it serious?"

  "Not yet." Mike waggled his eyebrows. "It wouldn't hurt you to keep an eye on things, though."

  It could, Joe thought. He didn't want to get involved with Nell or with her clinic. He was going to turn in his fifteen-hundred words and be done with them both.

  But as he sat waiting for his brothers to finish their coffee and leave, he couldn't stop thinking this could be the hook, the angle his story needed.

  The hell with it.

  Frustration bubbled and seethed inside him. Despite the time he'd lost with his brothers' visit, despite his aching ankle and looming deadline, he needed to get out of the house tonight.

  He needed a meeting.

  The banging woke her.

  Nell's head jerked up. She blinked, disoriented, at the scattered pages of the grant proposal spotlit by her desk lamp. She had to finish it tonight. She had to—

  Bang. Bang. Bang. Like a garbage can bouncing down a fire escape.

  —open the door.

  Nell hauled herself to her feet. Her eyes were gritty. Her mouth was fuzzy. Her brain wasn't working at all. If she had any kind of sense, she'd be home at this time of night. If she had any kind of life…

  Someone was at the clinic door, pounding hard enough to threaten the glass. Her heart tripped. Trying to get her attention? Or trying to get in?

  The panic button was up front, under the registration desk. It hadn't been used in… Nell couldn't remember the last time it had been used.

  She hurried down the hall, switching on lights along the way. The Ark Street Free Clinic wasn't the county E.R. Her practice specialized in preventive medicine and family care. Not belligerent drunks or whacked-out junkies or gangbangers who had to be strapped to their gurneys to stop them from finishing in the hospital what they'd started on the streets.

  Bang. Bang.

  Pulse racing, Nell flipped the entrance lights. A pale face leaped at her from the darkness beyond the glass. Her heart rocketed to her throat.

  Joe Reilly?

  Dazed, Nell stood with her hand still on the switch plate and her feet rooted to the linoleum. What was he doing here?

  He rattled the door in its frame.

  Shaken from her surprise, Nell jumped forward to slide back the bolts.

  "What is it?" she asked. "What do you want?"

  And it better be good, her tone announced. She was tired. And she still hadn't forgiven him for his "play doctor" crack.

  "Not me," he said immediately. "Her."

  He turned and reached down to the bundle of rags huddled in the shadow of the building. The bundle gasped and struck his arms away.

  Not rags. A woman. A girl, really, her dark eyes huge in her thin face, her hair covered by a plain scarf, her body draped in shawls.

  Nell took a step forward. "Help me get her inside."

  "I can't," Joe said tersely.

  She spared him a brief, assessing glance. "Your ankle?"

  "No. She's Muslim. Unless her life is in danger, it's not permitted for me to touch her."

  His sensitivity surprised Nell. But she was already bending down, offering her arm to the young woman. "How did you get her here?" she asked over her shoulder.

  Joe looked grim. "I convinced her her life was in danger." The girl cried out. And Nell saw what the shadows and the shawls had hidden until now.

  "She's pregnant," she said stupidly, staring at the girl's rigid, distended abdomen.

  Great diagnosis, Dolan.

  "Not for long," said Joe. "She's in labor."

  Holy Mary, Mother of God.

  Adrenaline rushed through Nell, jolting her fully awake. She wasn't set up for a birth. She hadn't helped deliver a baby since her OB rotation in nursing school.

  "Right. All right." Nell supported the girl to her feet with a strong arm around her shoulders. "Come on, sweetie, let's get you inside. I can have an ambulance here in ten minutes."

  "Not good enough," Joe said. "She could have the baby here in five."

  Had she really thought this dolt was sensitive?

  "Let's try to be a little more reassuring, okay? She can hear you." Nell turned back to the girl, who had the sweet, exotic prettiness of a Princess Jasmine doll. "What's your name, honey?"

  Joe stretched his arm past them to open the door. He smelled like warm male and coffee. Nell would have killed for a cup.

  "Her name is Laila Massoud. And she doesn't speak English."

  Oh. Oh, dear.

  Nell held Laila as another contraction wracked her swollen body. How many minutes since the last one? "Then how do you know her name?"

  "I picked up a little Farsi in Afghanistan."

  Nell didn't have time to be impressed. She steered the girl down the hall toward the acute-care room. The poor kid was shaking so hard she could barely stand. How had she managed to walk here?

  "Ask her how far along she is."

  Joe gave her a disbelieving look. "I'd say pretty far along."

  "Not the labor," Nell snapped. "The pregnancy. How advanced is her pregnancy?"

  Joe said something to the girl, pausing once as if searching for words.

  Laila's brown eyes were wide and unfocused as her body contended with the momentous t
ask of birth. But she answered him readily, even holding up her fingers to make sure he understood.

  "She thinks thirty-eight weeks," Joe translated. "She's not sure."

  Thirty-eight weeks. That meant her baby was full term, its lungs developed enough to cope outside the womb. Assuming the girl could count.

  Nell eased Laila up a step so she could perch on the end of the exam table.

  "Raise the head," Nell ordered Joe. "Does she have a doctor?"

  He hurried to comply. He was limping, Nell noted with the clarity of crisis, clumsier than she'd ever seen him. But he did as she asked, fumbling with the table's controls to adjust its angle.

  With one arm around the girl, Nell yanked on the side rail of the bed. Joe saw what she was doing and raised the rail on the other side.

  "No doctor," he said. "Her husband is a business student at Illinois Circle

  campus. They don't have insurance."

  Nell was lowering the girl onto her side when her abdomen—her whole body—went rigid. Her nails dug into Nell's supporting arm.

  Two minutes, Nell noted with a glance at her watch. She expelled a worried breath. "Where is her husband?"

  "He works nights stocking shelves at the Jewel around the corner. Laila was on her way to find him when—"

  "Call him," Nell ordered. As soon as the contraction ended, she dashed to the sink to scrub. "There's a phone book under the front desk. And call an ambulance. I have to do an exam."

  Joe escaped as she pulled on latex gloves.

  With murmurs and gestures, Nell coaxed the laboring woman onto her back with her knees bent and spread apart. Blood and fluid soaked her skirt. Nell lifted the wet material out of the way as Laila moaned and writhed. Her vaginal opening bulged.

  Nell caught her breath. Okay, baby was on the way. Head first, which was good. And fast. Not so good.

  She flipped the skirt back down as Joe hobbled into the room.

  "I called 911," he announced. "They're sending an ambulance. And I left a message with the father's supervisor."

  Laila wailed, an indistinguishable stream of words.

  "It's all right, sweetie." Nell stroked her leg, calculating the distance to the supply cart. She needed blankets. Towels. A suction bulb. Cord and scissors.

  Joe's face was white. "I have to leave."