скачать книгу бесплатно
“I don’t know. Maybe he wanted to pull some insurance scam. Who knows? Do I look like a thief to you?” he demanded hotly, indicating his clothing. Tania had to admit, except for the tear in the jacket, it looked like a high-end suit. “I’m going to sue that ape in the gray suit for battery and if you don’t want to be included, you’d better uncuff me!” he growled, yanking at the handcuff that tethered him to the gurney’s railing. “You hear me?” he demanded. “I want out of here.”
“No more than we want you gone, I’m sure,” Tania replied evenly. “But we can’t have you bleeding all over the place now, can we?” she asked sweetly. Glancing at the board over the front desk to see which room had been cleared, she saw a recent erasure. “Put him in trauma bay number four.” She pointed in the general direction, since she didn’t recognize these attendants. Tania spared the third patient one last glance. “Someone’ll be along to talk to you in a minute.”
“Not soon enough for us,” one of the patrolmen complained. He shook his head wearily as he followed in his partner’s wake. “It’s the heat,” he confided to Tania as he walked by. “It makes the crazies come out.”
She smiled. “So does the rain.” Tania signaled over toward the nurses’ station. “Elaine, take the gentleman’s information in trauma bay three.”
“What about one?”
“I’ll handle that myself.”
Elaine nodded, a knowing smile on her lips. “I thought you might.” Picking up a clipboard, she walked into trauma bay three.
Armed with a fresh clipboard and the appropriate forms, Tania went to trauma room one.
The moment she walked in, she could feel the man’s restlessness. Not the patient type, she thought, amused. Well, they had that in common.
While waiting for someone to come in, Jesse had taken off his jacket in an effort not to get it any more wrinkled than it already was. He wasn’t altogether sure why he did that. There was no saving the pants and without the pants, the jacket was just an extraneous piece of clothing.
Habit was responsible for that, he supposed. Habit ingrained in him since childhood, when every dime counted and no amount was allowed to be frivolously squandered or misspent. Stretching money had been close to a religion for his parents. They’d taken a small amount and somehow managed to create a life for themselves and for him.
He twisted around when he heard someone enter the room.
And smiled when he saw who it was.
“Hi.” She extended her hand to him. “I’m Dr. Pulaski. And you are…?”
“Jesse Steele.”
Succinct, powerful. It fit him, she thought, trying not to notice how his muscles strained against his light blue shirt.
“Well, Jesse Steele, I’m afraid there’s some paperwork waiting for you at the nurses’ station, but first, let’s see the extent of your injuries.”
“It’s nothing, really,” he protested. The woman was drop-dead gorgeous and in another time and place, he would have liked to have lingered. But hospitals made him uneasy and, in any event, he definitely had somewhere else he needed to be.
“The blood on the side of your head says differently,” she replied cheerfully. With swift, competent fingers, she did her exam. “I need you to take off your watch. I think you have a cut there.”
“It’s just a scratch.”
“Potato, po-ta-to, I still have to see it.” He took off his watch and set it aside on the nearby counter, then held his wrist up for her to see. “Okay, that’s a scratch,” she asserted. “You win that round. However—” she indicated his head “—that definitely needs attending to. Which means I get to play doctor.”
She smiled brightly as she crossed toward the sink. “So—” she turned on the faucet and quickly washed her hands “—I hear that you’re a hero.”
“Not really,” he answered with a mild shrug. Heroes were people who laid their lives on the line every day. Cops, firefighters, soldiers. Not him. “I was just in the right place at the right time. Or…” His lips gave way to a hint of a smile. “Taking it from the thief’s point of view, in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Do you always do that?” she asked, looking at him as she slipped on a pair of plastic gloves. “Look at everything from both sides?”
Crossing back to him, she gingerly examined the gash at his temple more closely.
He tried not to wince. She could feel him tensing ever so slightly despite her light touch.
“Occupational habit,” he replied through clenched teeth.
Taking a cotton swab, she disinfected the wound. He took in a bracing breath. “You’re a psychiatrist? By the way, you can breathe now.”
He exhaled, then laughed at her guess. “No, I’m an architect. I’m used to looking at everything from every side,” he added before she could ask for more of an explanation.
“Never thought of it that way,” she confessed.
It was good to keep a patient distracted, especially when she was about to run a needle and suture through his scalp. The best way to do that was to keep him talking about something else.
A quick examination showed her that the bruises were superficial, but the gash at his temple was definitely going to require a few stitches.
“Well, aside from a couple of tender spots that are going to turn into blacks and blues—and purples—before the end of the day,” she warned him, “you do have a gash on your right temple. I’m afraid I’m going to have to take a couple of stitches.” He looked as if he was going to demur, so she quickly added, “But don’t worry, they won’t be noticeable. You’ll be just as handsome as ever once it heals.”
“I don’t need stitches, it’s just a cut.” He shrugged it off. “So, I guess that’s it,” he said, beginning to get off the examination table.
She put her hands on his upper torso to keep him from going any farther. For a little thing, he noted, she possessed an awful lot of strength.
“No, it’s not a cut. That thing on the inside of your wrist is a cut. That—” she pointed to his temple “—is a full-fledged gash that needs help in closing up. That’s where I come in,” she added cheerfully. “You’re not worried about a little needle, are you?”
“No, I’m worried about a big meeting.” He blew out a breath, annoyed now. If he’d stayed in the taxi, he wouldn’t have gotten into this altercation. But then, he reminded himself, the old man would have lost his sack of diamonds. “The one I was going to when this happened.”
“Important?” Tania pulled over the suture tray and, taking a stool on rollers, made herself comfortable beside the gurney. “The meeting,” she added in case he’d lost the thread of the conversation.
Right now, her patient was eyeing the surgical tray like a person who would have preferred to have been miles away from where he was.
“To me.” He watched as she prepared to sew him up. From where he sat, the needle and suture was one and the same entity. He’d never been fond of needles. Jesse sat perfectly still as she numbed the area. “I was supposed to do a presentation. That was why I was cutting across the Diamond District,” he added. Then explained, “Because the traffic wasn’t moving and I needed to be there in a hurry.”
She nodded, her eyes on her work. “Lucky for that man that you did.” When he stopped talking, Tania momentarily raised her eyes to his face. Amusement curved her mouth. “I could write you a note, say you were saving a nice old man from a big bully,” she teased. “It’d be on the hospital letterhead if that helps.”
“No, I already called them to say I’d be late. They weren’t happy about it, but they understood.”
Her eyes were back on the gash just beneath his hairline. He had nice hair, Tania caught herself thinking. Something stirred within her and she banked it down. There’d be no more wild rides, she told herself sternly. They always led nowhere.
“Sound like nice bosses.”
“They are. For the most part,” he qualified in case she thought he had it too easy. Nothing could have been further from the truth. “What they are is fair.”
“So,” she said in a soothing voice, taking the first tiny stitch, “tell me exactly what you did to become a hero.”
Chapter 2
Tania heard the man on the gurney draw in his breath as she pierced the skin just above his temple. He sat as rigid as a soldier in formation.
Not bad, she thought. She’d had big, brawny patients who had passed out the very moment she’d brought needle to skin.
“It’s nothing, really,” Jesse said in response to her question as she slowly drew the needle through. He was aware of a vague pinching sensation and knew he was in for a much bigger headache later, when the topical anesthetic wore off.
Tania smiled to herself. Modesty was always a nice quality. It was also very rare in men who looked as good as Jesse Steele did. There was something about women throwing themselves at their feet that gave handsome men heads that barely fit through regulation-size doorways.
She kept her eyes on her work. “The man in trauma room three seems to think you’re the closest thing he’d seen to a guardian angel. And the man in trauma bay four thinks you’re the devil incarnate, so my guess is that you must have done something.”
He was probably going to have to give a statement and maybe show up in court, as well, if it came to that. No good deed went unpunished, Jesse thought.
Still, he did feel good about having saved the old man’s diamonds. “I tackled him.”
The doctor arched an eyebrow. He found it very sexy. “Excuse me?”
“The guy with the police escort,” he clarified. “I tackled him.”
“Why?” she asked.
His response had been immediate. There hadn’t been even a moment’s hesitation. “Because the old man yelled ‘stop thief,’” he told her and then, before she asked, he added, “and the guy in the suit was the only one running away from him.”
She could see why the old man had sounded so grateful. “That was pretty brave of you,” she acknowledged. “Most people would have looked the other way or pretended not to hear.”
He couldn’t do that, couldn’t look away or count the cracks in the sidewalk when someone needed help. He hadn’t been raised that way, wouldn’t have been able to live with himself if he’d just walked on. “I don’t like thieves.”
“Most of us don’t,” she agreed, humor curving her lips. And then she paused for a second to scrutinize him. There was more to this man than just looks, she decided. “Sounds like it’s personal.” Because her father had been and her new brother-in-law still was involved with the police force, she guessed, “Is someone in your family in law enforcement?”
He had meant to stop with just the first word, but somehow the rest just slipped out. She was extremely easy to talk to. “No. Someone in my family was robbed.”
Something about the way her patient said it made her look at him again, her needle poised for a third tiny stitch. “Who?”
“My parents.”
Tania felt her heart tighten in empathy. “What happened?”
Her patient blew out a breath and was quiet for so long, she thought he’d decided not to answer. Which was his right. She was prying.
But just as she completed the last stitch, he said, “My parents ran a small mom-and-pop-type grocery store in Brooklyn. We lived right above it. One night some thug came in and robbed them. When he tried to steal my mother’s wedding ring, my father pushed him away. The thug shot him point-blank and ran. My mother got to keep her wedding ring, the thug got seventy-three dollars in cash, and my father died.” His voice was stony. He could still remember hearing the shot and wondering what it was. He was home that night, struggling with his math homework and planning on asking his father for help. He never did do his math homework that night.
Tania cut the black thread and felt numb. When he mentioned his parents, she could envision her own, Magda and Josef, being in that situation. Granted, her father was a retired police detective, but, judging from the way Jesse’s jaw had tightened, the underlying emotional ties were the same.
She lightly placed her hand on his arm. “I’m very sorry.”
He nodded, trying to put distance between himself and the memory of that night. The memory of flying down the stairs and bursting into the store, only to see his father on the floor, not breathing, blood everywhere. His mother sobbing. Funny how it still cut so deep, even after all these years.
Jesse cleared his throat. He could feel the passage growing smaller, threatening to choke him. “Yeah, well, that happened a long time ago. I was thirteen at the time.”
Sympathy filled her. “Must have been rough, growing up without a father.”
She didn’t know what she would have done without hers. Especially after the incident. It was her father who’d broken through the stone wall she’d built up around herself rock by rock. Her father who’d held her hand throughout the ordeal and who’d given her the courage to stand up for herself. Without him gently, firmly urging her on, trying mightily to control his own anger, she didn’t know if she would have pressed charges, much less been willing to go to court to tell her story yet one more time. Each time she recited it, it got worse for her, not better.
But the latter never turned out to be necessary. She was spared the courtroom ordeal. Jeff Downey confessed at the last minute and the case was settled out of court with a plea bargain. He was sent upstate and got ten years. Less with good behavior. He was paroled six months ago. Which meant he was out there somewhere. She tried very hard not to think about that.
She’d always suspected that her father had had something to do with Jeff’s confession and his accepting the plea bargain, that somehow, Josef had managed to put pressure on the boy she’d once thought was the answer to her prayers instead of being the source of recurring nightmares. Her father had denied doing anything out of the ordinary when she asked.
But she knew her father, knew how he felt about all of them. How he felt about her being violated. There was nothing more important to Josef Pulaski than his wife and his daughters.
Although logically, she knew that not everyone had parents like hers, in her heart she always envisioned her parents whenever people mentioned their own. It was always sad to find out the opposite was true. Those were the times when she felt really lucky.
“It was,” Jesse agreed. His father had been a stern man, but fair. They were just beginning to get along when Jason Steele was murdered. “But I got through it.”
Interested, Tania asked, “What about your mom? How did she handle it?”
“She sold the store, bought a flower shop instead. Most people don’t rob flower shops.” He remembered how he begged her not to buy another store and how she’d tried to reassure him with statistics about flower shops. He still went there every day after school—to guard his mother until she closed up. “And she managed.” He paused, wondering how the blond-haired doctor with the killer legs and the sweet smile had so effortlessly gotten so much information out of him. “Is this part of the treatment?”
“Sorry, my attending always says I get too close to my patients.” Which wasn’t strictly true, Tania added silently. She asked questions, but she didn’t get close. Getting close involved vulnerability. She hadn’t gotten close to anyone since the incident. Not even to the men she’d gone out with since then. She didn’t know how.
He eyed her for a second, as if he was trying to make up his mind about something. “Do you?” he asked. “Get too close?”
She didn’t answer him directly. She gave him a reply she felt worked in this case.
“I find patients trust you more if you take an interest in them. And I am interested in them,” she assured him. “If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be in this field.” Smiling, she mentioned the first job she could think of that had to do with solitude. One she’d actually considered, except that solitude meant that she would be alone with her thoughts, and that she couldn’t do. “I’d be a forest ranger.”
“A forest ranger,” he repeated, amused. “That would have been the medical world’s loss.”
Tania laughed softly. “Well, I see your encounter with the thief didn’t knock the charm out of you.” Pushing back the surgical tray, she stripped off the rubber gloves and deposited them into the trash bin. “We’re done here,” she announced, then took a prescription pad out of her lab coat pocket and hastily wrote something down.
“There might be pain,” she warned him, tearing off the paper. “You can get this filled at your local pharmacy, or use the hospital’s pharmacy.” She gave him directions since he was probably unfamiliar with it. “It’s down in the basement, to right of the elevator bank when you get off.”
Jesse took the prescription she held out to him and glanced at it. His eyebrows drew together in consternation. He was looking at scribble. “You sure it says something?”
Tania grinned. Her mother, she-of-the-perfect-handwriting, used to get on her case all the time. “It does look like someone dipped a chicken in ink and had it walk across the paper, doesn’t it? That was my first inkling that I was going to be a doctor. I have awful handwriting.”
Jesse folded the paper and put it into his wallet. “Not awful…” he said with less than total conviction, letting his voice trail off.
Before she could say anything, someone behind her asked in a jovial voice, “So, how is the hero?”
They both looked over to the trauma room’s entrance. The man whose diamonds he’d recovered stood in the doorway, beaming at him. There was a butterfly bandage on his cheek but other than that, he seemed none the worse for wear.
Tania pushed her stool back, then rose to her feet. “Good as new,” she declared, then turned back to Jesse. “Now comes the really hard part.” Her mouth quirked. “Filling out the insurance forms.” She turned to lead the way out. “You can do that at the outpatient desk.”
Isaac stepped into the room. He raised both hands, as if to beat the notion back. “No need. It’s on me. I’ll pay it,” he told Jesse eagerly.
Jesse slid off the table, picking up his jacket. “That’s all right,” he told the older man. “My company has health insurance. They’ll take care of it.”
Isaac gave him a once-over, taking in the torn trouser leg and the stains. “Then a new suit,” he declared with feeling. “I owe you a new suit.”
For just a second, there was a mental tug of war. But in the end, pride prevented Jesse from taking the man up on his offer. The suit he had on had set him back a good five hundred dollars because he knew appearances were everything.
But he was his own man. He always had been. That meant he paid his own way and was indebted to no one.
“No,” he assured the old man, “you really don’t owe me anything.”
This could go on all afternoon, Tania thought. She gently placed a hand to each man’s arm and motioned them out of the room. “I’m afraid that you two need to settle this outside.” She smiled brightly at Isaac. “We need the room.”
