Good thing his hands were full.
Swallowing against his mouth’s sudden dryness, he held out the takeout bag. “You need to eat. I would have picked up a prime rib but biting into beef with a swollen jaw isn’t fun.”
She hesitated and then reached for the bag with her unhurt arm. “Thanks.” She looked inside to the plastic container. “Goodness, that’s a lot of soup.” She crossed to the open kitchen and set the bag on the breakfast bar.
Watching her walk away—if he wasn’t careful, the sway of those hips would hypnotize him like a pendulum—he answered, “I figured I’d better pick up enough for two.”
She whipped around, wincing as if the abrupt movement must hurt her. Or maybe it was his question, and the truth, that brought the real pain. “I told you last night, it’s just me.” Wide and frightened, her unhurt eye met his.
“Is it?” He started toward her, stopping when his rubber sole came down on something more substantial than slivered glass. He lifted his foot and his gaze caught on the object in question: a gold cufflink. Like the scotch, it was expensive—and a dead giveaway. He bent and picked it up, taking note of the monogram, AW, before straightening. “You don’t live here alone.” This time it wasn’t a question.
“Whether I do or not, it’s none of your business.” She shoved away from the counter and came toward him. Reaching him, she held out her hand.
He handed the cufflink over. “When your roommate lands you in the ER, my ER, it kind of is.”
She slipped the male jewelry inside her sling. A bruise, yet another one, had begun blooming atop her bared and otherwise milky shoulder. Resisting the insane impulse to close the gap between them and press his lips to the wicked mark, he focused back on her face.
Looking up at him, she asked, “Do you follow all your patients so closely?”
“Not all, only the ones whose accident stories don’t hold water.” Hers had more holes than the suspected Mafia hit who, riddled with bullets, had DOA’d the month before. “Or who run off before I discharge them.”
“How much do I owe you for the prescription? I’m afraid I don’t keep much cash lying about.”
“Consider it on the house.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his card.
She stared at it as though it was a spider. “Your card? Seriously?” She looked at him askance.
He felt his face burn. She obviously thought he was hitting on her. Under other circumstances, non-medical circumstances, she might not be far off. “With the website and phone number of a women’s shelter written on the back.”
Her shoulders dropped as though someone had dumped invisible weights on them. “I know what you’re thinking … what this must look like, but it was just a silly spat that got out of hand.”
“I’ll say.” And by the way, who under the age of sixty used words like “spat” anymore?
She shook her head. “Drew loves me, and I … love him. He’s really a marvelous man. It’s just that he’s been under so much stress at work.”
Drew, a common nickname for Andrew—the “A” in the “AW,” it had to be! So that was the sadistic son of a bitch’s name. Filing it away for the future, he said, “Spare me the excuses. I’m under stress at work. Most people I know are under stress at work, either logging in crazy hours or holding down multiple jobs to make ends meet, and yet they find ways to deal with it that don’t involve knocking around their women.”
“I’m not anyone’s woman.” The remark was made with another lifting of that stubborn little chin, a chin that despite its swollen state would fit neatly in his hand.
He locked his eyes on hers. “Aren’t you?”
She swallowed, hard, sending a ripple down the length of her throat, which was just long and elegant enough to be considered swan-like. A throat that begged a man to lay his hand on her nape, not in violence but as a prelude to drawing her into his kiss.
“Doctor Sandler, please … ”
Her voice trailed off, but not before it pulled him out of the fantasy and back to the present—winter 2014, doctor-patient, all strictly above board. Sure, he was human. He was allowed to feel concern for her, clinical concern, nothing more—because feeling anything more, even an iota more, would buy him more trouble than he could handle right now, possibly ever.
“You must believe me, it’s never … happened before. It won’t happen again. It—”
“Stop!”
He recognized a lie when he heard one—and the one she was feeding him, and herself, was supersized, what his ma and Aunt Edna and those of their era called a whopper. He had no intention of swallowing it or even pretending to. He reached out and took her hand. Small surprise, her fingertips felt frozen, her palm clammy. He pressed the paper into her palm and gently furled her fingers into a fist, the slightness of her small, slender hand—of her—making him feel protective, even tender. Rubbed raw.
Lifting his eyes to hers, he said, “Do us both a favor and keep it. Put it in your shoe, so in case you ever need it—”
“I won’t.”
“Good, I hope you don’t, but just in case you do.”
“Very well, thank you.”
For whatever reason, her thanks, sincere-sounding, embarrassed him. He shrugged it off. “Head trauma can be unpredictable. If you need medical advice or someone to talk to or … whatever, call me. My pager number is on there, too.”
She hesitated. “Will that be all, or is there something more you wish to lecture me on, some other inappropriately personal remarks you wish to make?”
“Just one.”
She lifted her face to his, waiting, and Marc suddenly felt as if he were diving headfirst into the deep end of the pool, that first surreal rush when you lift your face to the surface and remember that it’s okay to breathe again.
“Whoever he is, whatever it takes to get out from under him, this life, do it. Ditch him.”
She shook her head, vehement and stubbornly loyal. “You don’t know him.”
“Maybe not,” Marc conceded, “but I know this much—he doesn’t deserve you.”
She lifted her face to his, pinning him with her stare, the unhurt eye large and luminous, dark and angry. “It should take you exactly four seconds to cross from here to that door. I’ll give you two.”
As dismissals went, hers was kickass, especially considering the circumstances. Honestly, he couldn’t help but admire her moxie, misdirected though it was. “Suit yourself,” he said and started to say more, stopping himself when he saw her stare pointedly to the door at his back. That look left him little choice but to make his exit or risk trashing his life, or at least his career.
It wasn’t until much later, when he was back at the hospital working on his third cup of coffee and about to start his shift, that it struck him.
Her signature sendoff was taken verbatim from an old movie.
Chapter Two
“True friends are families which you can select.”—Audrey Hepburn
Two Weeks Later
“And then this rat of a doctor—and not only ratty but overbearing—showed up at my door refusing to leave until I let him in. Apparently he was miffed that I dared to leave his ER without his permission. Can you imagine? All in all, it was a great deal of drama for a tiny tumble down the stairs.” Honey paused, gauging her “audience.”
The other members of her FATE group stared back at her, rapt—worried. Liz, their founder, formerly the porn star known as Spice, now a self-employed graphic designer raising her son as a single mother in the aftermath of breast cancer. Peter, a recovering alcoholic who’d left prostitution to pursue his passion for interior decoration and now worked as a window dresser for Ralph Lauren. Sober for several years, he’d married his Irish husband, Pol, in a fairytale ceremony at Alger House, a historic West Village venue. Missing was Sarah, best known as the international adult film sensation, Sugar
. A newly minted bestselling author and wife of society scion Cole Canning, she was at home counting down the days to delivering their first child. What could these intrepid souls possibly know about fear, not only of the next fist to come flying, but also of failing to measure up?
“I thought it was an elevator building?”
The question came from Brian, the former adult film videographer who now clocked in at his other dream job as a mechanic for classic cars. The same Brian they all teased for his habitual single-word sentences, his taciturn brevity set aside in rare exceptions such as now.
Honey hesitated. She tried for the sort of trilling, devil-may-care laugh her idol, Audrey, would almost certainly have summoned. “Really, darlings, elevators do break down.”
Peter leaned toward her. “It sounds to me like this doctor was concerned about you.” He reached for her hand, her “good” one, his earnest blue eyes delving into hers. “We’re all concerned about you, sweetie.”
More silence and charged looks and then Liz stepped in. “That guy you brought as your date to Pete’s wedding—”
Honey had been strung tight as piano wire since she crossed Liz’s threshold twenty or so minutes earlier, and the well-intentioned grilling was sufficient to send her springing to her feet. “I’m not sure I care for what you’re implying.”
Liz’s eyes widened as if … as if Honey had slapped her, something Honey had never done and would never do, and yet lately, or rather after this last time, she’d begun wondering … what would it feel like to wield all that power, to harness all that fear?
“Honey, I’m not implying anything. I’m asking you outright. Are you okay? Because if you need anything, any kind of help—”
“Don’t be absurd, darling. I’m marvelous, never better.”
Scanning their circle, she acknowledged that she’d been a fool to come, an even bigger fool to imagine she could brazen things out beneath these eagle eyes. Not that her group mates had left her with much of a choice. When first Peter and later Liz had called yet again, each threatening to come over to Forty-One Park and carry her out bodily if she missed even one more meeting, she’d caved. Feeling naked without her liquid eyeliner and false eyelashes, still she’d showed up that Monday, grateful that the pillbox hat from the sweet little secondhand shop in Gramercy retained its netted face veil. Though she looked much improved from two weeks before, it was her friends’ first time seeing her. Predictably they’d freaked. Warmed as she was by their concern, seeing their horrified faces carried her back to that awful night. As much as she disliked drugs—the painkillers the snoop doctor had dropped off were still untouched in their bottle—if there was a pill she could take to forget that night, a sort of pharmaceutical Men in Black clicker, she would reach for it without reservation.
What was the use in replaying the past, especially as Drew had returned not a week later but on her first night home, more sincerely sorry than she’d ever seen him? Lifting her gently into his arms and laying her carefully onto the bedspread, he’d actually cried. Later, he texted an excuse to Katharine about having to pull an all-nighter and stayed with Honey into the next morning, waiting on her hand-and-foot, heating up the Mendy’s chicken soup lying fallow in its plastic container in her refrigerator and serving it in the pretty bowls she especially liked. Other than the bottle of Moët they shared—beginning with his teary-eyed toast to turning over new leaves and embarking on new beginnings—he hadn’t drunk anything. The bottles of Laphroaig and Macallan and Glenfiddich had remained safely capped on the cocktail cart. Peace had prevailed. He was so bent on pleasing her that he even suggested watching a movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, her favorite. Cradling her champagne flute in her “good” hand, watching the beloved film while Drew gently cuddled her and did his level best to look interested, Honey had almost believed it was the old days—almost.
The old days—how far away they now seemed. She’d just turned twenty-one, the adored mistress of a dashing and devoted lover who swore that if she’d only be patient, someday soon he’d leave Katharine and make her, Honey, his wife—only “someday” never arrived. Despite his insistence that they kept separate bedrooms, Katharine had become pregnant with a second child. Josh, their firstborn, had had a bad bout of the chicken pox. Then Drew was simply too swamped at work to “get into anything right now.” A divorce would devastate him financially, especially in the current downward spiraling economy. Why should he hand over fifty percent of his net worth to someone who, beyond pushing out two babies, had sat on her ass for the past seven years? Surely Honey saw how his hands were tied? Surely she understood that her perpetually bare ring finger didn’t mean he loved her any less? What was marriage anyway but a piece of paper and a whole lot of headaches? Couldn’t she see how lucky they were to be free of it all—the routines and ruts, the lackluster sex and confines of convention?
Honey had protested, cajoled, and even threatened to leave him, but she had nowhere to go and no one to go to, and they both knew it. Slowly, gradually she’d surrendered the fight, surrendered altogether, and slipped into acceptance that her lot in life was to spend birthdays and holidays alone.
Unbidden, another face intruded—one from which hazel eyes stared knowingly out from a strong-featured face, not smoothly shaven as Drew’s always was, even on weekends, but darkened by more than a day’s growth of beard. Dr. Marcus Sandler—and yes, she hadn’t forgotten his name, not after his oh-so-memorable visit.
Sure, he was good-looking—okay, very good-looking—and smart—okay, very smart—but living in Manhattan she’d met her fair share of handsome, intelligent men, had even had a few of them as clients, though her bookings had run to the fifty-and-over set. Beyond being annoying and sanctimonious and nosey, why had Marc Sandler made such an impression on her?
Probably because he’d gone out of his way for her. Despite her earlier remarks, he wasn’t a rat, not really. With his earnest eyes and misplaced insistence, he was an anti-rat, a postmodern Prince Charming, the sort of straight-up guy who’d likely head for the hills if he so much as suspected all the truly ratty, not to mention stupid, things she’d done.
Had she really left Omaha and come all the way to New York only to end up with an alcoholic, a mean drunk, just like her stepfather, Sam? It seemed that history, and family patterns, repeated, no matter how many miles you put between yourself and your past. Given how things had turned out, she might as well have saved herself the trouble and stayed put, gotten a job bagging groceries at the Piggly Wiggly, joined a bowling league, married a mechanic, and otherwise lived her mother’s life. Who knew, she might actually have been better off.
The weight of her many misjudgments and mistakes suddenly descended, an icy avalanche from which she couldn’t see any way to dig out. Feeling buried, overwhelmed, she got up to go. “Everyone, I’m so dreadfully sorry. Please forgive me. I’m being beastly. I suppose I’m not quite as recovered as I’d thought.” She looked to Liz. “This was splendid, really lovely. I’ll just be going now, but I will see everyone next week. Ta.”
I’ll see everyone next week. Reaching for her purse, Honey owned the promise was yet another lie.
*
The annual hospital gala, the dog-and-pony show put on for board members and high-end donors, had Marc feeling as though he’d landed in an alternative universe, one in which he was very much an alien. Pulling at his cuffs, he tried telling himself he should feel honored to be asked to attend as a representative of Emergency Medicine. He was honored and yet … Jesus, how he hated all of it: the bite-sized morsels of finger food that whetted an appetite without satisfying it, the socialites with their stiff smiles and even stiffer helmet-head hairstyles, the obligatory pianist pounding out show tunes. Most of all, he hated having to dress up, on a weeknight, no less.
He owned two ties and a single suit, all bought from Men’s Wearhouse and usually only brought out for weddings, baptisms, and the occasional family fu
neral. But even in his “Sunday best,” he was woefully underdressed for this black-tie crowd. Not for the first time, he slid a finger beneath his shirt collar. Used to living in hospital scrubs at work and T-shirts and jeans on days off, he felt as though he was wearing a noose.
He certainly felt trapped and out of his depth. Hospital bigwigs, including the administrator and chief of staff, circulated the room glad-handing and courting high-end donors. Bellevue might be the country’s oldest public hospital, but like every such medical facility, it relied on community support to keep running, never more so than in a recession. The closing of the venerable St. Vincent’s in the West Village still hung over them all like a ghost, a grim reminder that prestige and a legacy of stellar care and community service were no longer any guarantees of survivability. To survive, flourish, an institution needed big bucks.
Wearing a penguin suit that was probably custom tailored, Dr. Denison sidled up to him, gin and tonic in hand. “Having a good time?”
“Yes, sir,” Marc dutifully replied.
The senior physician cracked a laugh. “Better work on that poker face.”
“Sir?”
“At least try and look like you’re having a good time. These fundraisers are a necessary evil, in this economy more so than ever.”
“I know that, sir. I’m sorry. I guess I’m not much of a schmoozer.”
“Then you’d better work on faking it. You could take some pointers from Vandeveer.”
Honey Page 3