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“Please join me inside,” Richard invited, “for a tour of the new facility.”
The press was calling out questions. People were pushing forward. Flushed with the intoxicating power of success, Dr. Richard Strong passed out NoWait samples, accepted congratulations, gave thoughtful, intelligent answers to the press. Only he knew how often in his mind he had fielded those very questions.
They loved him. He could see it. He could feel it. He needed it.
Dr. Richard Strong would have been quite dismayed to learn there were two people in his audience not the least taken with him.
One, a curvy, attractive, middle-aged woman with shoulder-length blond hair had to hug herself against the chill she felt as she saw the crowds pushing toward the man she had once been married to, the father of her son.
“I know who you really are, Richard Strokudnowski,” she whispered.
The other person who was not totally enamored with Dr. Richard Strong had happened by the ribbon-cutting ceremony by pure chance. He had been on his way to the main hospital building to see his ailing grandmother, and his way had been blocked by the crowd.
Resigning himself to the delay, he had listened with customary skepticism. But it was with growing alarm that he took in the looks on the faces in the crowd.
They were buying this nonsense. Well, why wouldn’t they? The man was the new Chief of Staff of a branch of a medical institution with an impeccable reputation.
Narrowing his eyes on the man at the center of the crush of attention, Detective Daniel O’Callahan folded his arms over the broadness of his chest.
“I know a snake-oil salesman when I see one,” he muttered out loud.
The observation earned him dirty looks from several of the pudgy people around him. Still, Daniel made a quick mental note that the good doctor needed to be watched.
Which would take time, the commodity Daniel had the least of. He sighed and put Dr. Richard Strong on a back burner. But he knew he wasn’t about to forget him.
One
“E xcuse me,” Maggie Sullivan said, trying to get by the couple who were blocking the main staircase into Portland General Hospital.
Sheesh, she thought to herself, weren’t they just a little old for that? She glanced at them from behind a silky curtain of blond hair. She could feel herself blushing.
The woman was perhaps forty, coiffed, bejeweled and dignified in every way—except that she had her tongue tangled with that of a silver-haired man who was pressed so tightly against her that a piece of paper couldn’t have been inserted between them.
To make matters worse, Maggie was sure she recognized the woman from the seminar that she and her best friend, Kristen, were taking at the recently opened Healthy Living Clinic. The New You: Bold and Beautiful was being given by Dr. Richard Strong himself, which made it twice as appealing.
Maggie did not think the performance she was reluctantly witnessing was what Dr. Strong meant when he’d finished the seminar by giving them a homework assignment. He’d said, “Be bold. Do something totally out of character this week.”
For Maggie that had meant eyeing up the bold and flirty red summer dress in the front window of Classy Lass, a haute couture shop way out of her price range.
“Excuse me,” she said again, a trifle more forcefully.
The couple moved marginally, without unfastening their lips. Maggie slid by them, giving them a look of firm disapproval that she was pretty sure neither one of them saw.
Maggie, she told herself, don’t be so judgmental. She did not know the story behind the obvious passion of that kiss. Maybe one of them was being admitted for a life-threatening illness or a complicated surgery. It would be okay to kiss like that if you thought you were saying goodbye forever. Wouldn’t it?
At the top of the stairs, she paused and looked back on the situation, prepared to reevaluate it in this softer light.
The pins had fallen out of the woman’s hair, and her silk jacket was halfway off her shoulder. She was running her knee up the man’s thigh.
Maggie turned away from the scene so fast she bumped into the door. Dazed, she held her bruised nose, opened the door and hurried through it. Her face felt as if it was on fire. And, in truth, it wasn’t just because she’d embarrassed herself by slamming full-force into a glass door. Nor was it entirely because of seeing the couple behaving so brazenly in public.
There was a tingle in the pit of her stomach that felt like hunger, only more intense. She felt as if she needed something, but with a type of need that was frightening, the kind of need she imagined a junkie must feel, or a gambling addict, or a person with the shakes reaching for a drink.
And she, Maggie Sullivan, was just not that kind of girl. In fact, she prided herself on the amount of control she had, on how responsible she was, how reliable.
But the truth was, this feeling had been enveloping her at odd moments for days. It had nearly overwhelmed her when she saw a young couple holding hands, when she overheard a whispered “I love you” in the hospital cafeteria, when she saw a man and a woman pushing a stroller. On those occasions, Maggie would feel an emptiness so vast, a yearning so strong, she felt as though the emotions could overtake her entire well-ordered life.
“I’m twenty-seven,” she murmured. “Biological clock.”
Unfortunately not a single soul had warned her that the ticking of a biological clock could seem much more like the ticking of a time bomb—as if it could explode without warning, leaving nothing but wreckage where a neat and tidy little life had once been.
Maybe biological clocks were something she needed to talk to Dr. Strong about at the next meeting of the B&B Club, as she and Kristen had dubbed the Bold and Beautiful series. B&B was the first in a full schedule of wellness seminars that Dr. Strong would be personally hosting.
Since she was still rubbing her nose from her last moment of inattention, Maggie really should have known better than to crane her neck for just one little last glance back. The couple was still on the steps. The man was gnawing on the woman’s neck, and she was bent backward over his arm as if they were executing a very complicated dance maneuver. Maggie’s head spun, as if she would die to feel that way, so enamored with another person that she could forget all the rules, enter a world of just two and never mind who was watching.
“Look out!”
Maggie whirled. Her mouth opened in shocked surprise, but no sound came out. A wheelchair was careening toward her at full tilt. A man was in it, his powerful shoulders drawn forward, his arm muscles gloriously knotted from the effort of propelling himself forward at such an atrocious speed.
She was aware of images—astonishing green eyes narrowed in ferocious concentration, thick dark-brown hair flying back, coppery unblemished skin beaded with sweat—and then Maggie awakened to the reality that she was about to be run down. She threw herself to one side to avoid being flattened.
Unfortunately the wheelchair veered crazily at exactly the same moment and in exactly the same direction. Maggie was lifted off her feet, the blow cushioned somewhat by bands of steel wrapping around her and pulling her hard into the wall of an extraordinary chest.
For a suspended moment it seemed as if a fall might be averted, but the wheelchair tilted, lolled, tried to right itself, listed crazily again and then capsized, dumping Maggie on the floor and the wheelchair’s inhabitant right on top of her.
The bands of steel—which she recognized were a deliciously masculine set of arms—remained wrapped protectively around her. She was remarkably unhurt, pinned below a strange man.
He was big and he was gorgeous. From her position, sprawled below the muscle-hardened length of his body, Maggie stared up at him, amazed. She ordered herself to sputter indignantly, but no sound came from her mouth.
Instead, she studied his eyes and decided she had never seen eyes that shade before, the exact color of those mysterious Mount Hood National Forest lakes that gleamed in smoky jade. The man’s eyes were lit with equal parts of mischief and pure seduction, and fringed with a sinful and sooty abundance of black lashes.
Maggie used being stunned as a result of the collision to continue to stare at him. Her gaze drifted hazily down his features, ticking them off—thick, dark hair, arched eyebrows, beautiful nose except for a savage scar across the bridge, high cheekbones, strong chin. The cheeks and chin were darkly whisker-roughened. It was the face of a man who would have been far better suited to guide a pirate ship than a wheelchair.
But pity never entered her mind because his lips, full and firm, suddenly formed themselves into a sardonic grin that revealed teeth so brilliant and white and sexy that she felt the breath was being drawn from her body. This close she could even see the smile was not perfect—a chip was missing from the right front tooth—but it did not detract from the powerful male potency of that smile even one little bit.
Slowly, her awareness of the pure and roguish appeal of his face was diluted by another awareness. Their bodies were pressed as closely together as were those of that couple she had just judged on the front steps. And she was just as reluctant to pull away.
He was all hard edges and formidable masculinity, and Maggie could feel herself melting into him. She could feel the steel-band strength of the muscled arms that had tightened around her, protecting her from the worst of the fall. To her dazed mind, he felt good, heated and strong, the exact drug that unnamed yearning in her had craved. His scent enveloped her, tangy and tantalizing, the scent of wild, high places, forests and mountains, and all things untamed.
“Sorry,” he said, but the lazy grin said he wasn’t the least bit sorry, that he was quite content to be lying on the shiny tile floor of the main foyer of Portland General Hospital pressed intimately into the curves of a complete stranger.
“Oh!” Maggie said, coming to her senses abruptly. She could feel her skirt—marginally too tight, despite her faithful use of Dr. Strong’s miracle NoWait ointment—binding the top of her thighs. She tugged frantically at it, not unaware that the lazy amusement burning in his eyes deepened as she wriggled beneath him.
She was, however unintentionally, putting on a better show than the couple outside. At least that couple probably knew each other.
“Anything I can help you with, ma’am?” he drawled.
“Oh!” Maggie said. “How impertinent!”
She rolled out from under him and onto her knees. The skirt was indeed stuck. She should have never taken Dr. Strong’s advice to use only half doses of NoWait oil.
“You are already nearly the perfect size, my dear,” he had explained to her, his sincere brown eyes making her feel as if she was the most beautiful woman in the world. “Apply a half dose of the oil behind your ears for its nutritional value.”
If she’d taken the full dose, her skirt wouldn’t be bunched up around her hips and refusing to move.
Her attacker’s grin had evolved into a deep chuckle. If he wasn’t wheelchair-bound, she would probably hit him for that chuckle, and for the frank and insolent way he was evaluating parts of her legs that, to date, had only been shown at the beach.
“Impertinent,” he repeated slowly, as if he was trying on a new label to see if he liked it. She suspected he did.
She frowned disapprovingly at him.
“Are you okay?” he asked, propping himself up on one elbow. His eyebrows arched wickedly as if he had taken a front-row seat at the peep show.
“No, I am not okay,” she said through clenched teeth. “I am exposing myself to half the hospital!”
He suddenly seemed to get it that she was not finding this situation nearly as amusing as he was. He shoved himself upward and then leaped lightly to his feet. He held an arm down to her.
She stared at him, astonished, as if he was a biblical character who had folded up his cot and walked.
“You aren’t handicapped!” She ignored his arm and rocked back from her kneeling position to sitting, hoping that changing position would help her untangle the skirt where it bound her legs. The skirt, however, was determined to thwart her. When she got home tonight, she was rubbing a whole bottle of NoWait behind her ears!
He folded arms over a chest she now saw was massive. He had on a blue hospital gown that bound the muscles of his arms as surely as her skirt was binding her thighs, his result being far more attractive than hers. Underneath the gown, thank God, he had on a faded pair of blue jeans. He watched her undignified struggles with infuriating male interest.
“It’s against the law to pretend to be handicapped,” she told him, though she had no idea if it was or not.
“Handicapped?” He followed her glance to the overturned wheelchair. “Oh, that.”
He watched her for a moment longer, then, apparently unable to stand it, moved quickly behind her and without her permission put his hands under her armpits and set her on her feet.
For some ridiculous reason an underarm deodorant jingle went through her head. She hoped, furiously, ridiculously, she wasn’t damp under her arms.
“You were driving like a maniac,” she said, yanking herself away from him to hide her discomfort at how it had felt to be lifted by him, so easily, as if she were a feather, as if the NoWait could gather dust in her bathroom cabinet forever.
“And you weren’t watching where you were going,” he said, coming back around to face her, looking down at her, smiling with an easy confidence and charm that might have made her swoon if he wasn’t so damned aggravating.
She glared at him. She bet that smile had been opening doors—and other things—for him his entire life.
How dare he be so incredibly sexy, and so darned sure of it?
“Are you saying this was my fault?” she demanded.
“Fifty-fifty?” he suggested with aggravating calm.
“Oh!”
“Mr. August!”
He turned toward the voice. Maggie turned, too. Hillary Wagner, a nurse Maggie knew slightly from her own work as a social worker at Children’s Connection, an adoption agency and fertility clinic that was affiliated with this hospital, was coming toward them, looking very much like a battleship under full steam.
Apparently here was a woman who was immune to the considerable charm radiating off Mr. August. “What on earth have you been up to now?”
“Remember the nurse from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?” he asked Maggie in an undertone.
Maggie sent him a look. Was he an escapee from the psych ward, then?
Hillary took in the upturned wheelchair, and her tiny gray eyes swept Maggie’s disheveled appearance.
“Mr. August, you’ve been racing the wheelchairs again!” she deduced, her tone ripe with righteous anger. “And this time you’ve managed to cause an accident, haven’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and hung his head boyishly, but not before giving Maggie a sideways wink.
“Mr. August, really! You cannot be racing wheelchairs down the hallways. Who were you racing with? Don’t tell me it was Billy Harmon.”
“Okay. You won’t hear it from me.”
“Don’t be flip, Mr. August. He’s a very ill boy. Which way did he go?”
“I think I caught a glimpse of him wheeling off that way in a big hurry when I had my, er, collision. Frankly, he looked better than I’ve ever seen him look, not the least ill.”
“You are not a doctor, despite that horrible prank you pulled, visiting all the poor ladies in maternity.”
“Isn’t impersonating a doctor illegal?” Maggie asked.
“It certainly is!” Hillary concurred.
But he ignored Hillary and turned to Maggie, not the least chastened. “What are you—a lawyer? I wasn’t impersonating a doctor. I found a discarded lab jacket and a clipboard. People jumped to their own conclusions.”
“You are a hazard,” Hillary bit out.
“Why, thank you.”
“It wasn’t a compliment! Billy is sick, Mr. August, and even if he wasn’t, wheelchair racing is not allowed. Do you understand?”
“Aye, aye, mon capatain, strictly forboden.” He managed to murder both the French and German languages.
Maggie wanted to be appalled by him. She wanted to look at him with the very same ferocious and completely uncharmed stare that Hillary was leveling at him.
Unfortunately, he made her want to laugh. But it felt to Maggie as if her very life—or at least her professional one—depended on hiding that fact.
Hillary drew herself to her full height. “I could have you discharged,” she said shrilly.
“Make my day,” he said, unperturbed by her anger. “I’ve been trying to get out of this place for a week.”
“Oh!” she said. She turned to Maggie. “Are you all right? Maggie, isn’t it? From Children’s Connection? Oh dear, your skirt is—”
“Very attractive,” Mr. August said.
The skirt continued to be bound up in some horrible way that was defying Maggie’s every attempt to get it back where it belonged.
