by Lexy Timms
Forever Desired
A Chance at Forever Series #2
By Lexy Timms
Copyright 2017 by Lexy Timms
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to an actual person, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
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Copyright 2017 by Lexy Timms
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A Chance at Forever Series
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Forever Desired
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Forever Desired Blurb #2
“There were no words. If she thought she’d loved him before, she discovered her heart had no boundaries after all.”
He came into her jungle. Now the tables have turned and it’s her turn to conquer his.
L.A. is an intimidating city for even the most seasoned of travelers. To Dr. Melanie Bell, after several years of living in the jungles of Belize the City of Angels seems to have been created by the devil himself. Her new boyfriend, Dr. Brant Layton, is of no earthly help right now. He’s so caught up in the politics at work, that you’d have to be a celebrity to get his attention. And Mel is no celebrity.
What she is, though, is a woman on a mission: Change the life of one badly scarred little girl—and somehow increase the funding of the clinic that has come to be her whole world.
It should be easy, right?
L.A. is the city where dreams are supposed to come true…except sometimes they come at a terrible price. Does one sacrifice love for career? Integrity for passion? The decisions Mel and Brant make next will impact hundreds of lives…and might cost them everything that matters.
Contents
A Chance at Forever Series
FIND LEXY TIMMS:
Forever Desired Blurb #2
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
FOREVER TOGETHER BLURB #3
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Chapter 1
“Dr. Mel?”
Why was the world shaking? It wasn’t supposed to shake. Earthquake? No, that didn’t seem right.
“Dr. Mel?”
No…not the world. Her arm. Someone was shaking her arm.
Hard.
Melissa Bell pulled her head off the soggy seat. Drooling? She’d been drooling? When did I fall asleep? She wiped at the corner of her mouth, soaking the sleeve of her sweater in spittle and embarrassment. Eyes didn’t want to open, but did. Gritty. Painful. Everything was still. Too still now that her arm wasn’t being shaken anymore. Oh, crap.
The plane had landed.
We must have…? The thought wouldn’t coalesce any more than Maria would. Too bleary-eyed to make sense of the world, Mel sat up and tried to focus. Maria’s angelic face swam into view. The girl looked pale, white bandages standing out in stark relief along the one side of her face.
“We landed, Doctor,” Maria said, eyes darting to the window as if unsure the ground was still out there and that they were upon it. She seemed breathless. “It was…scary.”
Scary. The child had been through hell and never even referred to the day that took her father and her face as ‘scary.’ Oh shit, what have I just slept through? “Oh, Maria.” Mel jolted upright and reached for the girl, folding her into a tight hug. “I’m so sorry I slept through it. Were you scared?”
“Not like I was the first time. But that was a smaller plane in…Florida?” Her voice was muffled. Brave though her slender shoulders still trembled.
Great job, Mel. You had one job and you’ve landed the poor child in a state of pure terror.
Mel took a breath and nodded, Definitely awake now. Disappointment in oneself had a way of shaking out the cobwebs. She set the girl back in her seat, offering her a proud smile alongside her nod. “Yes, that was Florida. At least this time, when we’re off the plane we’re off, and we don’t have to get another on one.”
Maria ducked her head, her smile shy. Self-conscious still. “Dr. Mel, I think that is what those…? I think…how you say…” She shook her head. “Azafata.” She pointed somewhere behind Mel’s head. “Everyone is off but us.”
Azafata. Her Spanish was good, but this one had her at a loss. But she had a sneaking suspicion. Sure enough, an entire entourage of flight attendants were hovering in the aisle, looking like the two passengers from Belize were the only thing standing between them and a night off. Mel flushed and jumped to her feet, scrambling for her overnight case in the overhead compartment and bringing it down on her head. Hard. “Wow, I must’ve really been sleeping…wow. Look at that. Everyone is off already.” She gave a bright smile to the uniformed masses, watching unsmiling, and not exactly offering to help.
“Sí,” Maria nodded emphatically. The bandages on the left side of her face had loosened and were beginning to slip. “I let you sleep as long as I could, but the…azafata? They were looking at us very hard.”
They still were. Mel groped for the bag between the seats, still seeing stars. Maria stretched beside her, balancing on one foot to reach her own case before stepping out into the aisle, ready to go. Mel resisted the urge to apologize to the staring throng. “You’re ready then? Got everything?”
Maria looked at her for a moment. “Doctor, I have been ready.”
Mel tried to smother her chuckle, with mixed results. “Let’s get going, then.” She walked down the rows of seats between a gauntlet of stares and snap judgements. Somehow she returned the forced smiles of the flight crew who had spent the journey eyeing Maria’s loose bandages with some trepidation. Not hostile exactly, but this particular trip hadn’t been with the friendliest of skies.
As in Florida, it was the noise that assaulted the senses once you deplaned. In LAX, she expected maybe a little worse.
Both were large airports, after all.
She could handle this.
Only it was worse, a lot worse. People were everywhere: they walked, they rode, they came to abrupt stops and re-read the same gate pass they’d re-read on the last three gates—the gates they’d screeched to a halt at only moments before. All with a hurried sort of busyness that pulsated with a frantic energy that had been noticeably missing on the other end of the country.
Florida had been an airport for vacationers heading to Walt Disney World. LAX was a shark tank about to erupt into a feeding frenzy.
There were carts and trollies and wheelchairs, all driven by people who cared little for the content in their care. Even in the terminal, horns sounded when luggage carts and people carts wended their way through the crowds that gathered in front of coffee shops and magazine stores, like so many wildebeests at a watering hole. Not that Belize had wildebeests, but the word was somehow stuck in her head.
I’m a doctor. I have graduated from medical school, for bloody sake. I’ve done residency in some of the worst areas of inner cities. I carved a clinic from a jungle, saved lives, lived with snakes, faced down dangerous men…I can handle LAX.
They were comforting thoughts, but she was having a lot of trouble believing them.
She stopped finally in the main concourse and turned in a slow circle, eyes searching a crowd that wouldn’t stay put long enough to find what she was looking for. “Where’s Brant?”
“Dr. Mel?”
“I’m sorry, Maria; I didn’t know I was saying that out loud. I’m looking for Brant. Dr. Layton.”
“Is there trouble?” Maria’s eyes grew huge in her tiny face, wet with unshed tears.
The poor thing’s terrified. Pull yourself together, Doc, and take care of your patient. Mel straightened her shoulders, adding some iron to her spine. “No honey, not trouble. Just…just…”
Okay, maybe not iron. Iron wouldn’t sag so quickly.
“You are scared to see him again?”
Mel stared at Maria. Little girls weren’t supposed to make such grown-up pronouncements. Flustered, she went to adjust the bandages again. She’d straightened them at the gate, in the plane, in Florida…if she was honest, she was probably the reason they were slipping off in the first place—too much re-adjustment.
Maria was such a pretty girl, with bright and wide, guileless eyes. A ready smile. Extremely polite and friendly. The skin on the left side of her face was ruined. The puckering, the scarring, left her deformed. Ironically, it was her innocence and beauty that had caused her to lose this all when she fell in the house fire her father had started. She had run back into the house to save him where he lay, passed out on the couch.
“Don’t be silly.” Mel restrained herself from tampering with the bandages further. They weren’t strictly necessary; the wounds had healed as best as they were going to, but they were in place for the girl’s privacy. The marks were ghastly and people would stare less at bandages. “I’m not scared at all.” Mel’s hands went to Maria’s collar and continued their business there.
“Dr. Mel.” Maria looked up at her dubiously. “You don’t need to be afraid. Remember landing in Florida? If you can do that without fear, you don’t have any fear.”
Mel laughed and hugged her. Maria’s thousand-watt smile shone through again. “I suppose you’re right,” Mel said, feeling the tension ease from her own shoulders. “After that we can’t fear anything ever again, can we?”
“No,” Maria said. “And you were asleep for the landing here. So why are you scared?”
Mel looked the girl. She was 13, not really a child anymore, but not quite an adult yet either. On the other hand, Mel didn’t actually have anyone to talk to and it was eating away at her.
“It’s been six months, Maria,” she said as the stream of people and baggage parted around her. “It was only supposed to be six weeks. What if…what if he’s changed his mind?”
“You mean if he changed his mind about me…” Maria brushed her fingertips across the bandaged cheek. “Or you?” Maria took her hand.
Mel squeezed the proffered hand. “No, Maria, he’s not going to change his mind about working on you. He gave us his word, didn’t he?”
“Sí, he did.” Maria looked Mel in the eye. “And he gave his word to you, too. Why should I believe if you don’t?”
Mel took a deep breath. Hard to argue that. “All right, all right, I’ll stop fussing. But remember, you’re still a kid! You keep forgetting that!”
Maria smiled brightly “I will try to remember.” She frowned a minute. “Maybe he’s where the suitcases are? You said we have to get them when we land.”
Mel glanced up at the signs to get her bearings. To the right. They needed to go…somewhere…to the right. She took a deep breath and grabbed Maria’s hand, not about to lose her in the vastness of the airport. “You know,” she said thoughtfully as they skirted around a family of seven, harried mother charging after children while the father stared blithely at his cell phone, “for a kid who’s never left her village, you know an awful lot about airports.”
“I know jungles,” Maria said with a shrug, and fell into step alongside her.
Chapter 2
Bags were collected. Everything set in place. At LAX. At the proper pickup point. She’d even double-checked that last detail, struggling with the ridiculous smart phone she’d been given to use on the trip by Doctors International to find his last email to make sure she had it right.
Still no Brant.
“Dr. Mel?”
“Yes, Maria?”
“Is that you?” Maria was pointing to a scruffy individual in a t-shirt that read ‘I’m with stupid’ and an arrow that pointed up to his chin. He looked to be twenty-nothing, and brought back memories of med school with the scruffy look that came from surviving off ramen for weeks on end and forgetting to bathe. The guy held a piece of cardboard about the size of a pizza box with ‘MEL BELL’ scrawled on it in black marker.
You’ve got to be kidding me… Mel walked over to him as reluctantly as if she was going to have root canal without Novocain. “Are you looking for Dr. Melissa Bell?” She’d quelled drug lords with that voice.
“I suppose…?” He looked down at the carboard, which was indeed a reused pizza box. It apparently held no answers, so he turned back to her and shrugged helplessly. “You Mel Bell?” When she didn’t answer, he shrugged and tried again. “You a doctor?”
“I am.”
“Cool.” His smile relaxed. It occurred to her suddenly that pot was legal in California. She studied his eyes as he pitched the pizza box at a nearby trash can and missed. “Then, yeah, I’m looking for Doc Bell.”
“Al righty then…” Mel downshifted and spoke with smaller words, growing more uncertain by the minute. Puffy eyes could be fatigue. They didn’t necessarily mean he was high. “Do you know who sent you here?”
“Yeah!” The kid looked thrilled at the question. Apparently it was one he could answer. “Yeah, it was a doctor—hey! Just like you!”
“And that doctor’s name?” Mel stole a glance at her charge. Maria’s eyes were wide as saucers.
“Uh…” His eyes darted to the pizza box on the floor by his foot. If he was looking for help, it wasn’t likely to be coming from petrified mozzarella. He rocked from one foot to the other, faced screwed up in concentration, and seemed to pull the memory up from the roots by sheer force of will. “Latex! Brand Latex. Anyway, are you him?”
He indicated the used pizza box where the word ‘Mel’ was mingled with what appeared to be a large grease stain.
“Yeah,” Mel sighed, changing her assessment from ‘high’ to ‘idiot.’ “I’m him.”
“Awesome, dude!” The boy grinned again; all was right with the world. “I was supposed to tell you that he…uh…” at this point he had to pull a wadded page from the back pocket of his jeans which tore as he uncrumpled it to read. “I’m in surgery so I’m taking you to his house.” He looked up for
a moment. “I guess that means, he’s in surgery, so I’m taking you to his house.”
“Thank you for clarifying that.” Mel was caught tightly between an urge to laugh and an urge to run away. The laughter, she suspected, might have been a bit hysterical.
He bent over and flipped the cardboard box at the trash can a second time, this time sinking it, and gave a half shrug. “This way then.”
Mel stood still for a moment and reached to get her bag. Maria leaned over and, in a stage whisper loud enough to be heard at the gate they’d left half hour ago, said, “Is he one of the drug users I hear about in L.A.?”
“Some people don’t need drugs, Maria,” Mel said, wondering for the umpteenth time when the dratted kid had grown up. “I hope.”
Silently, the two women dragged their baggage through the last of the terminal and into the bright heat of an L.A. afternoon.
* * *
The back seat of the Toyota was incredibly small. Mel and Maria clung to each other as the young driver slammed onto yet another freeway. This one was eight lanes of traffic—each way. Only for a few miles, then the right two dropped off and one more showed up on the left. Three separate taxi cabs apparently challenged their driver for lead stallion of the freeway herd, and he rose to the challenge each time.
“Dr. Mel,” Maria said after pulling herself off the doctor as they both leaned against the door, “I take it back. The landing in Florida…it was not so bad a thing, I think.”
“Don’t worry, Maria,” Mel said through gritted teeth. “I’m sure Brant wouldn’t send anyone for us that he didn’t think…” Whatever Brant did or didn’t think was lost in a silent scream as their driver slammed the brakes and wedged the little car into another lane between two semis.
Melissa’s suitcase, strapped in the seatbelt next to the driver, lurched and landed on the man’s shoulder. He apparently didn’t notice.