Doctor Seduction

by Beverly Bird

  “Good morning, Doctor.”

  He scowled at her as he took the patient’s chart from her hands. “So that’s how we’re going to play this, hmm?” he asked in an undertone.

  Cait hesitated. It was as though they’d never spoken downstairs. Maybe he was going crazy, too. Or maybe she had imagined that whole encounter.

  The very real possibility of that had her stomach rolling.

  “It was a one-time thing,” she said, just to be sure.

  “That it was.”

  She turned away from him quickly to ease down the sheets on the little girl’s bed because she wasn’t at all sure what her expression would reveal at his response. Then she watched him gently palpate the child’s abdomen, and her mind spun away.

  Those hands…

  Cait had a sudden, shattering image of them on her own skin, closing over her breasts, his breath hot where his face had been buried at her throat. She’d thought she’d been dying. Not because of anything Hines had done or might still do, but because for the first time in her life, she’d known what it was to be touched, really touched. And she had craved it, had needed it with something so strong it had vibrated inside her.

  Why had she done it?

  Because he’d been funny and kind and gallant in that room, neither outrageous nor as arrogant as she’d come to believe during the years she’d worked with him. Because she’d been terrified that God would give her no more days after that one, and because there was something huge in life she was going to miss if she didn’t make love with that man right then, right there. Because he was devastatingly good-looking with those sometimes stormy, sometimes laughing eyes and the little cleft in his chin. For once in her life she’d wanted to do something wild and daring and exhilarating. She’d done it because she’d needed him.

  “Nurse Matthews?”

  Cait snapped back. “I’m sorry. What?”

  “Would you like to pay attention here?”

  “I was.” Her breath still felt short. But he’d already looked away from her, toward the interns who had gathered behind them.

  “Okay, guys, this is what you’re not supposed to do when you’re with a patient—phase out on something personal,” he said to them.

  Cait felt her face heat with embarrassment. “I didn’t…”

  He shot her a sardonic look, the kind that only he could muster. He went on with his examination of the child.

  “Coming?” he asked her as the others began leaving the room.

  Cait refused to meet his eyes. “I’ll be right behind you.”

  “Make it snappy.”

  Out of nowhere, Cait felt anger bubble up in her. She gave him a sharp, little salute before she realized she was going to do it. She was fiercely glad when he looked startled.

  They landed in Gilbert’s room next. The boy was back in bed, his color high. “Well,” she said quietly, “he appears none the worse for wear.”

  “Questioning me again, Nurse?”

  “Who, me? I wouldn’t dream of it, my being your subordinate and all.”

  Satisfaction was something hot and sharp under the skin that wasn’t entirely unpleasant, she discovered when he seemed unable to respond. She liked it.

  He gave her his shoulder, picked up Gilbert’s chart and addressed the interns again. That was when she saw Jared Cross hovering in the doorway. Cait stepped quickly aside when the psychiatrist motioned to her.

  “You wanted to see me?” he asked.

  She hadn’t expected him to get her note so quickly, or to act on it so promptly. “Yes.”

  “I’ve got about twenty minutes until my first appointment. Do you have time now?”

  Cait glanced back at Sam. He seemed oblivious to her now. She cleared her throat loudly, but he didn’t glance her way.

  To hell with him, then. “Okay,” Cait said.

  She matched Dr. Cross stride for stride down the corridor to his office at the end of the floor. To his credit, she thought he was mincing his steps a bit, allowing her to keep up. He was a good foot taller than her own five foot two. He was also a gentleman, of sorts. When they reached his door, he pushed it open and seemed to suggest she step through first when suddenly he made a move of his own. They hit shoulders in the threshold. Or at least, Cait thought, her shoulder nailed his upper arm.

  “Sorry,” she said quickly. Then, in his office, she hesitated. “I, uh, wanted to see you in a professional capacity.” She felt her face flame.

  Dr. Cross went to his desk and sat, lacing his fingers together and catching them behind his head. Rumor had it that he had found himself a pretty heiress and was happily besotted these days. Cait thought it showed. He seemed more relaxed than she had ever seen him.

  Maybe that was what happened to a person when sex turned out right, she thought.

  “I gathered that,” he answered. “Have a seat.”

  “I don’t have a lot of time.” But she took the chair across from him. She desperately needed his help, but now that she was here, she faltered. This sort of thing was never supposed to have happened to her. “I don’t know where to start,” she murmured.

  Cross brought his hands down. “Want me to do it for you?”

  She blinked at him. “How can you? You don’t even know why I want to see you.”

  “Try this on for size. You’re having a hell of a time getting back to the woman you were before the rest of Hines’s hostages escaped through the vent in that storage room, before he returned in time to keep you and Sam Walters from doing the same thing.”

  “I…yes.”

  “Now, suddenly, you’ll be going about your business and—wham!—blazing fury seems to come at you from out of nowhere.”

  Cait sat up straight. “You’re good.”

  He grinned and she liked him better for it. “I memorize well and I read all the books.”

  “What books?”

  “On post-traumatic stress disorder.”

  She sat up straighter. “I don’t have a disorder.”

  “Tell me what’s been happening to you lately.”

  With the simple question, she felt something begin to shake inside her. Cait sank back in her chair again. “It’s not just Hines. He was crazy, a horrible person, but he’s gone.”

  Cross nodded. “He’s in jail. Which, theoretically, should make you feel safe again. But you don’t.”

  Cait shuddered. “People like him don’t happen to people like me, at least not twice in the same lifetime. And he’s incarcerated.”

  “He was supposed to have been incarcerated once before.”

  It was true, Cait thought weakly. Hines had disrupted the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new maternity wing, then tried to kidnap the son of Crystal Bennett, the hospital fund-raiser. Already wanted for other crimes, he’d been remanded to the maximum-security prison in Lubbock. Somewhere between Mission Creek and Lubbock he’d escaped to follow the hatred in his heart right back to the hospital. He’d uprooted her life, not to mention those of several other people. But she and Sam had been the only ones held hostage in a room beneath his house. And then—

  No, she couldn’t think of that again.

  “Caitlyn?” Cross prodded.

  She jumped. “I’m sorry. What?”

  “You were saying?”

  She felt herself flush. “I was about to say that I seem to be doing a lot of that lately—fading in and out. That’s what I meant. Hines is over, behind me. But I’m different.”

  “Flashbacks?” he asked. “Do you experience flashbacks to your time in that underground room?”

  She felt Sam’s hands on her breasts again. The heat that slid up over her skin, from her chest to her throat to her face, was excruciating. “Yes,” she said quietly.

  Cross was watching her closely, but he said nothing.

  “I think the worst part is that I’m…I’ve become paranoid,” she whispered, the final scalding admission. The word made her sound so…crazy.

  “Checking your locks three, four, fi
ve times?”

  “That’s it.” She swallowed dryly. “And I keep feeling like someone is…I don’t know. Watching me. Following me.”

  Cross sat forward and put his elbows on his desk. “Describe your childhood to me in five easy sentences.”

  Cait’s eyes went big. “What kind of a shrink are you? I thought that sort of thing was supposed to take weeks. ‘Tell me about your parents…. Did you wet the bed?”’

  He laughed. “I’m a shrink who has a few more minutes with you today and who wants you to schedule another appointment. But in the meantime I’d like to point something out to you, and I might be able to do it if you answer my question in a nutshell.”

  Cait took in air and shrugged. She felt fragile. “Okay. When I was two, my mother left me with her aunt so she could find a decent job in a larger city. She didn’t come back.”

  “What about your father?”

  Cait lifted one shoulder again carefully. “Who knows?”

  “Where he was?”

  “Who he was.”

  “Ah. Okay, what happened then?”

  “My great-aunt died when I was four and from then until I was eighteen I pretty much bounced from foster home to foster home.” She touched her hands to her cheeks. “I am so terribly embarrassed about the way I’ve been acting lately. Why does any of this matter?”

  “I just wanted to nail down the fact that you had a shaky childhood.”

  “But it didn’t affect me.”

  “Sure it did. Your childhood is directly responsible for the type of adult you’ve become. For every action, there’s a reaction, and that goes for the human psyche, too. The reaction doesn’t necessarily have to be negative. Maybe you never had a problem with your past before—until Branson Hines grabbed you.”

  Cait brought her chin up. “I put myself through college, then nursing school. I’m here. I did fine.”

  He nodded.

  “Those foster parents were kind enough. No one was ever cruel to me!” She shouted it and was instantly mortified. “Oh, heavens.”

  “What?”

  “That. That’s what I mean! I’m volatile. I’m…I’m out of control.”

  Cross grinned. “I like that word. Control. Great nutshell word.”

  “Why?” she pleaded.

  “Because that was what you’ve had your whole life—or at least from the time you left that last foster home and went to college. And now—” he snapped his fingers “—it’s gone. Hines took from you something you’ve fought hard to never have to relinquish again.”

  “Control,” Cait whispered.

  Cross nodded. “Rumor has it that you run a pretty tight ship here at work. What about at home?”

  She paid her rent months in advance just in case anything untoward should happen and she was suddenly unable to find the money. The apartment was hers, the first place she could really call home, and she would not lose it. “I…yes. I guess.”

  “You had no control over things when Hines took you,” Cross went on. He laid his palms flat on the desk. “He proved that all your efforts in that area have been for naught. That could shake a person like you to the core. Anyway, here’s the deal. You did the right thing in coming back to work today. But I’d recommend that you confront the site of your trauma, too, and all the people associated with it.”

  “The room where it started?” She didn’t want to go there.

  “And Sam Walters. Though you work with him, so I imagine you’ve already dealt with him, right?”

  Sam. Cait bit her lip.

  “Was that a problem?” Cross asked. “Seeing him again?”

  “Of course not. I’ll do whatever I have to do to get back to normal.”

  “Good.” He watched her closely. “Caitlyn, is there something else you want to tell me about your abduction?”

  She jolted. “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. You tell me. Something else that might have rocked your world during that time?”

  She’d made love with Sam. “Absolutely not.”

  “People react in some startling ways when they think their time is running out.”

  “Not me.”

  “They do uncharacteristic things.”

  “I never got uncharacteristic until I got home again. That’s when all this started.”

  Cross stood. “You’ll tell me sooner or later. I do want you to make another appointment. It would probably work best if you came in on your day off. We’ll have more time together that way.”

  Cait pushed to her feet, as well. “Okay.” She was back to being polite and agreeable. For now, she thought a little wildly. Who knew how long it would last?

  “I’m sorry this happened to you, to everyone Hines touched.”

  Cait nodded. “Thank you. But he’s gone now.”

  “With my help, you’ll get the old Caitlyn back. But I seriously doubt if she’ll ever be quite the same person she was before all this happened.”

  Cait squeezed her eyes shut. She was so desperately afraid of that. “I’ve got to go.”

  She fled Cross’s office without making a second appointment, but they both knew she would be back.

  Hines can’t take me away from me! she wanted to holler. And as for Sam…well, just as he had said, it was a one-time thing. Time would pass and what they had shared would fade from her memory. And that was best. It was why she had prayed since they’d been released from that room, that he wouldn’t call her, wouldn’t try to get in touch with her. She’d seen woman after woman hang with bated breath on a man’s every whim and action and spoken word—every one of those things out of their control. She would not let that happen to her.

  Cait turned into the nurses’ station again and came nose to nose with Sam’s angry face.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he snarled.

  Two

  The world was clearly going to hell in a handbasket, Sam thought, watching Cait open and close her mouth in shock at his outburst.

  One minute everything had been perfectly normal. He’d known himself inside and out. The world around him was just predictable enough to offer comfort without driving him crazy. Then Branson Hines had crashed into his life, showing him that he wasn’t so much the hero, after all. And now that they were free of the man, this woman seemed to stubbornly resist going back to the way she was supposed to be, the way she’d always been before.

  “Excuse me,” she said, trying to step around the desk and pass him.

  “The hell I will.” He blocked her way. “You owe me an explanation.”

  “For what, pray tell?”

  “Pray tell?” Suddenly Sam grinned. That was the Caitlyn Matthews he’d always known. Then again, the old Nurse Matthews had never argued with him or contradicted him. And now, unless he missed his guess, she was actually questioning him about his annoyance.

  His blood pressure spiked again. “You walked out on me in the middle of rounds!”

  “No, I did not.”

  “You were there, then you just wandered off.”

  “I attempted to tell you I was leaving. You wouldn’t acknowledge me.”

  “Maybe you didn’t try hard enough!”

  “Would you kindly stop shouting? You’re embarrassing me.”

  “I ought to write you up for this! To hell with your pride.”

  Then she shocked him. She placed both hands on his chest and shoved. “You’re in my way.”

  “I’m—” He broke off, dumbfounded, his thoughts fragmenting. “You’re out of your mind!”

  She swiveled on one hip to glance back at him. “Could be. If I were you, I’d watch my step. There could be an ax murderer lurking inside me. You wouldn’t want to tick her off.” Then she walked away.

  “You know, after everything that happened to us last week, I don’t think that’s very funny,” he called after her.

  Sam heard his own words and almost choked. He was the practical joker of the pediatrics floor, the one to whom not much was s
acred, unless it affected a patient, the one who took a very sick boy speeding around federal land in a Maserati the day before surgery.

  Caitlyn seemed to catch the incongruity of his statement, too. She stopped again. “I know what Hines took from me, Sam,” she said, looking back. “What did he take from you?”

  He refused to be sidetracked. “A nurse, for starters. What if I had needed you ten minutes ago?”

  “As you pointed out earlier, there are plenty of others on the floor who can do my job. I’m non-essential.”

  “Damn it, I never said that.” He’d always had a good rapport with the nursing staff. After all, most of them were women.

  “You implied it, then.”

  “I was making the point that I had to come back to work. You didn’t!”

  “You’re shouting again, Sam.”

  He was going to choke her.

  Then it hit him. She’d never once called him by his first name until the time he’d buried himself inside her in that room. Even when Hines had been shuffling them along at gunpoint, she’d called him Dr. Walters. Now she’d said Sam twice in the last minute.

  Things were getting way out of hand.

  “Go back to work,” he said shortly.

  “I was trying to until you detained me.” She set off down the corridor again, her tight little hips twitching. Had they ever twitched before? He couldn’t be sure. He’d never quite gotten past her cool stuffiness until she’d whispered, “Show me how” in his ear.

  So he had. He had shown her. And now he couldn’t get her out of his mind.

  “Doctor?” One of the other nurses approached him, frowning. “Are you all right?”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Stupid question, Sam thought. But Hines had derailed him a lot less than little Miss Fancy Hips, who’d just turned into a room down the corridor.

  Sam brought his focus back to the nurse before him. Her name was Angelina Moffit. She was a brunette of staggeringly appealing proportions—the type he usually went for. He opened his mouth to tease her, then just waved a hand in abject disgust with himself. For the first time in his memory, words failed him. “Oh, to hell with it.”

  He left her and started down the hall. This, he thought, was going to end right here and now. He caught up with Jared Cross just as the psychiatrist was ushering a woman and her daughter into his office. “I need a minute with you,” he said peremptorily.