"There was something neither Ryan nor Tanner could tell me."
"What was that?" she asked, absentmindedly withdrawing her hand to flick a piece of thread into the trash sack taped to his nightstand.
"Why you became a doctor. And why you chose orthopedics? I figured I should know since I'll be under your care for a few more months."
If she suspected any other reason for his interest, there was nothing in her expression to betray it. She didn't even look surprised that he was staying. "I wondered when you were going to mention that."
"Sounds like you've been talking to my brothers, too."
"Ronni and Kelly."
"It seems we have our own personal grapevine."
"Seems so," she agreed, mirroring his faint smile.
"So, why orthopedics? What made you choose that over everything else?"
"It fascinated me," she said, suddenly looking as relaxed as he'd seen her in days. "I remember sitting down with an encyclopedia when I was a girl, trying to figure out how a bird I'd found was put together so I could set its wing. My dad helped me. A lot," she added, her mouth curving. "But when the bird actually healed and flew away, I decided I wanted to be able to do that for people, too."
"Put them together when they were broken?"
"Something like that."
"How old were you?"
"Twelve."
The memory was more than just a story she related to satisfy the curious. Chase was sure of that. There was a softness about her smile, and a light in her lovely brown eyes that spoke of something he rarely ever saw. He was seeing affection, he realized. The kind of feeling a child has for a parent she respects.
He couldn't imagine the man who'd raised him doing anything like her father had done. Walter Harrington would have regarded a request such as hers as totally frivolous and demanded to know why he was pestering him with something so insignificant.
The thought should have chafed more than it did. Focused on the healing warmth of her smile, he realized he wasn't really thinking of what had been. He was wondering more what life would be like for a child with a father like hers. He knew nothing of children, but his brothers had them. They were crazy about their kids, too. Maybe even patient the way her father had been.
She tipped her head, the smile lingering. "What made you change your mind about staying?"
"I'd never made up my mind," he corrected, as her pager went off again. "One of the perks of doing what I do for a living is that I can do it from just about anywhere." He nodded toward the window. "There's some property out there that could use developing. And Ryan can use some help pulling together the rest of the funding for that wing. I have a few friends who might see a pediatric wing as a good cause. Especially since it's tax deductible."
He didn't have to stay in Honeygrove to supply that kind of help. He could make those calls from anywhere. She knew he knew it, too.
"I imagine you could also use some time to get to know your brothers."
She wasn't sure what it was, the way he held her glance or the way it finally faltered, but she knew his brothers were the main reason he wanted to stay. He just didn't want to admit they mattered that much.
She also suspected that he didn't want to hear how generous it was of him to offer to help.
"So how does it look down there?" he asked, pointedly changing the subject.
He'd nodded toward the railroad track of stitches crossing his lower thigh. Another set of sutures angled upward beyond the pins holding bone in place. It was the sort of injury that hurt to look at. Especially with the barbaric-looking device holding him together.
"A lot better than I would have expected it to at this stage. You've surprised me," she admitted graciously. "It usually doesn't look this good for another week."
"I could have told you nothing slows me down for very long."
"You haven't had to. I've been getting that message."
"Dr. Larson?" A pretty young nurse's aide with a high, sunny-blond pony tail poked her head around the doorway. "I'm sorry to interrupt, but your office has been trying to page you to call your neighbor. When you didn't answer they told her to try here."
"My neighbor?"
"Mrs. Mason. She's on the phone at the desk."
The Masons had the married son with the Cobra sports car that Tyler was always talking about. Alex knew them well enough to wave to them and to pick up their newspaper when they went away on weekends, but she couldn't imagine why Gladys would be calling her at the hospital.
"Would you please ask her what she wants?"
"She already said." The aide's round face screwed up in an expression reminiscent of Tyler faced with a plate of broccoli. "I know it sounds weird, but she said there's water coming out of your garage and running down the street."
"It's no wonder you don't know how to relax," Chase muttered.
Giving Chase a droll glance that had him arching his eyebrow, she turned on her heel and headed out to take the call. She knew perfectly well how to relax. Give her thirty minutes in a hot bath and she'd be pure putty. She just hadn't had the chance to truly unwind lately. And this particular week was just more hectic than most because she had Brent to get up and moving in the mornings.
Overlooking the fact that she always had others she needed to worry about in her life, she took the call that confirmed there was, indeed, water flowing from her garage. But as far as Alex was concerned, there were crises and there were crises.
In the overall scheme of things, a little water hardly constituted a catastrophe. The interruption was an inconvenience, to be sure, but she figured that if water was coming from the garage, the water heater must have broken or cracked or whatever it was old water heaters did. She'd just go home and turn off the water, and tonight she could mop it up from the garage and call Tanner about where she should buy a replacement and who she could hire to install it. As long as she had a plumber there, he could fix her drippy washing machine too. She'd been meaning all week to get it fixed, anyway.
Ten minutes later, she hit the automatic garage-door opener as she pulled into the drive and felt minor annoyance turn to something that felt suspiciously like dread. The water heater sat a few feet from the door leading into the house. But the water wasn't coming from it. It was leaking from beneath the door which led straight into the utility room.
The pipe leading to the washing machine had burst. Probably not long after she'd left for work.
It wasn't just a little water, either. And it wasn't only in the utility room and garage. The door from the utility room to the kitchen was open and water had flowed freely into the dining room. The living room. The hall. The bedrooms.
It had soaked every square inch of carpeting, been drawn a foot up the walls, into the drapes, and had seeped into furniture and closets.
As she stood in her stocking feet on her warping hardwood floor, trying to coax down the cat clinging to the top of the fridge, her only thought was she didn't dare let herself think beyond what immediately needed to be done.
She needed to call her insurance person. She had to finish rounds, dictate chart notes, pick up the kids, come back and pack up whatever clothes and things they'd need for the next … what. Week?
She remembered telling Tyler they'd go to the video store on the way home to rent something about fast cars, since that was his latest thing, but that had just dropped to the bottom of the list.
Guilt joined the knot of other less-definable sensations twisting her stomach. She hated disappointing her little boy. But as she left a message on her insurance agent's voice-mail, and another at Ronni's office to please call as soon as she could, her priority was finding them a place to spend the night. She could leave the goldfish and gerbil for now, but the cat would have to go with them.
By six o'clock Alex had made arrangements with Ronni for her and her brood to stay in their guest house for the night. The tiny house was far too small to contain an active pre-schooler, the Larson pets, Alex and a teenage boy, so Ronni
had offered to put Brent up in the main house that evening.
The imposition was huge, but tomorrow, Alex would come up with something else. One day at a time. It was how she'd lived her life for the past five years.
She was thinking more in terms of one hour at a time when Ryan called her at her office just as she hung up from checking on the patient in ICU who had her far more worried than she'd let on to his family.
"Of course you're welcome to use the guest house, Alex," he said, after he'd told her that his wife had just told him what had happened. "But I have a solution that'll be a lot less hassle for you.
"I just left Chase," he hurried on. A riffling sound filtered through the line, making it sound as if he were gathering up papers. "The house he's renting is huge, and since you're not discharging him for a few more days, you can stay there. That will give you time to make more long-term arrangements while your house is being repaired and you won't have to farm out the boy. I'm running late, so I've got go, but you can pick up the key from Chase."
"Ryan. Wait a minute." Her mind raced as she toed around under her desk for her shoe. "It's very nice of you to—"
"Hey, it's nothing," he interrupted, obviously thinking she was thanking him. Which she was. Or would. Or had planned to do, right along with declining the arrangement. "Good luck."
The phrase served as a sentiment and a goodbye. Before she could do much more than draw a breath, he'd hung up.
That breath leaked out like a slowly deflating tire as she reached across her neat oak desk with its mauve blotter and replaced the receiver. It wasn't at all unusual for Ryan Malone to do what he'd just done. He was known for taking charge and taking over, a trait that tended to get the job done with a minimum of fuss since his diplomatic skills were usually excellent. At the moment, however, his solution for her and her charges simply left her feeling railroaded.
She couldn't accept the arrangement. She wouldn't even consider it. Since Ryan wasn't available, she'd just have to deliver a polite refusal to Chase after she rounded on her last patient.
Having found her shoe, she slipped it on, and snagged her jacket from the brass coat tree by an overstuffed peach tweed guest chair. It didn't make a lot of sense that Ryan's call should have left her feeling more agitated than anything else that had gone wrong in the past two hours, but it did. Probably, she figured, because his well-intentioned effort to help had just added one more thing for her to do in a day that was already pushing its quota.
Occupied with that thought, she slipped on her jacket and promptly grimaced when the sleeve dragged over the cat scratches stinging the inside of her arm.
Tom hadn't gone willingly into his carrier. He hated the thing. Not that Alex could blame him. The only time he was ever in it was when she took him to the vet, an experience he hardly relished. But he'd fought even more than usual today. She swore that every time she'd tried to stuff him through the door, he'd stiffened and spread every appendage he had so he wouldn't fit through it.
He was in the carrier now. She'd set it between a tall potted palm and her bookcase because she thought he'd feel more secure in the cozy spot, and he was looking pathetically through the wire window on the molded plastic box. If he was trying to make her feel bad, he was succeeding. But at least he wasn't pacing and meowing anymore. That had been harder to watch.
It had come too close to reminding her of how Chase had to feel—except the image that had come to mind when she'd thought of him was more of a panther pacing his cage.
The fact that Chase kept slipping to the forefront of her thoughts when there was so much else on her mind wasn't a good sign at all.
"I really appreciate the offer. It's very generous of you," she said to the man silently watching her from his raised bed. "But I can't stay there."
The overhead lights caught hints of silver in Chase's dark hair. She barely noticed the bruising or the Steri-strips on the gash high on the ridge of his cheekbone. She was far more conscious of the unnerving habit he had of seeing right through her.
"I'm not being generous. I'm being practical. You need a place to stay and there's a perfectly good house sitting there empty. And it's not that you can't," he blandly informed her. "It's that you don't want to."
Having clarified their positions, he eyed her with the same cool aplomb he undoubtedly employed at the negotiating table. "Why not?"
She hadn't expected him to force her hand. When he'd set aside the newspaper he'd been reading when she'd walked in, she'd thought for sure he would shrug off her refusal. After all, her little problem shouldn't matter to him one way or another.
"For one thing," she returned, latching onto the first argument that came to mind, "you're my patient. It wouldn't be professional."
"So I'm your patient. I'm also the brother of friends of yours. There's nothing unprofessional about you staying out there. No more so than having a patient live with you. Which you already do," he pointed out, clearly referring to Brent.
She stood even with his knees, a foot from the edge of the mattress and the white thermal blanket spilling over it. His tone was utterly reasonable, his argument logical. It was the knowing look in his expression that kept her arms crossed over her lab coat to keep her hands away from the pearl.
"I won't even be there," he murmured, making it clear he knew exactly what lay at the heart of her objection.
She was about to tell him she realized that when he turned away to pick up something from the tray-table on the opposite side of the bed. Eyeing her tightly crossed arms when he turned back, he reached toward her and slipped his fingers around her exposed wrist. As he did, his knuckles brushed the soft undercurve of her breast.
Soft flesh yielded to hard bone. At the intimate contact, his glance jerked to hers, something electric charging the air and jolting inward where he touched. Her breath hitched. An instant later, the line of his jaw tightened along with his grip on her wrist and he tugged her toward him.
"Let go," he muttered, and pulled her hand free.
Alex winced as the motion rubbed the scratches.
Whatever he'd been about to do was forgotten. His dark eyebrows shot together as he eased her hand over and pushed up the cuff of her jacket.
Three needle-fine crimson lines slashed the pale skin of her forearm and wrist.
"What did you do?"
"I didn't do anything. Tom just didn't want to go for a ride."
"Tom?"
"The cat."
"That's original," he muttered. "Did you put anything on this?"
"Of course … not," she concluded lamely. "I will. I just haven't had time."
She'd thought he'd let go. Instead, with her hand resting in his, he touched his finger to the edge of a particularly angry-looking welt. There was incredible strength in that long elegant hand, but it was the gentleness that caught her breath in her lungs. His touch was light, more sensation than actual contact.
Her pulse scrambling, she saw his scowl intensify. It was almost as if he were imagining how the small injury would sting as he paralleled the scratch across the fine blue veins inside her wrist.
When he reached the heartbeat echoed there, she realized that he'd held her frozen with nothing more than a touch.
She couldn't begin to imagine what sort of mastery he'd have over her if he ever pulled her into his arms.
"The way I see it," he said, his voice sounding a little rougher than it had moments ago, "you helped me with Ryan and Tanner, so I owe you one." His eyes steady on hers, he dropped a key in her palm and folded her fingers over it. "I don't like owing people. Now we're even.
"Don't," he warned, the instant she opened her mouth. "You can't come up with a single reason that's going to convince me you won't be wasting time by not moving in there."
There was no denying that the man expected to get his way. He was accustomed to it, after all, and she'd seen little evidence to prove that he didn't get pretty much what he wanted, whether it was good for him or not. She'd caved in a time or
two herself.
Having fought hard to pull her life out of the tailspin it had once been in, she envied the control that came to him so easily. But she had more than just herself to consider. And she couldn't fault his logic no matter how hard she tried.
With the boys and the cat waiting to be picked up, and with them and a gerbil to feed and clothes to gather, she had no business worrying about the crazy things he did to her heart rate.
As if he knew her concession was coming, he picked up a slip of paper from the tray-table.
"You'll need this. It's the security code," he said, handing her the folded white square. "There isn't a garage-door opener. I guess Pembroke took off with it and the estate hasn't bought a replacement yet. I'll be using a limo service to get back and forth to therapy, so I told them not to bother on my account. Just leave your car in the driveway." He settled back against the pillow. "Do you know how to get there?"
"I know it's on the west side." That was the part of town with the views. "But I don't have the address."
"Thirty-six Ridge Commons. There's a map in my briefcase if you need one. Gwen will be in and out," he continued, moving on to wrap up details now that the agreement had been reached. "She's set up the office for me and put my clothes in the master bedroom. Take any of the other rooms you want."
"Is she staying there?"
"She's in a hotel, but she's going back to Seattle in a couple of days. I'll fly her down when I need her back here."
Slipping the things Chase had given her into her pocket, Alex felt the tug of a frown. "Why aren't you doing that? Staying in a hotel, I mean? I understand the new hotel on the river has a couple of beautiful suites. You'd have room and maid service right there."
"Not enough space. I can handle a hotel for a week, but not for three months. I'd feel like I was in a cage."
The picture of the panther flashed through her mind. Dark, predatory. All that leashed energy restlessly prowling the perimeter of his confines.
DR. MOM AND THE MILLIONAIRE Page 10