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Ivan pretended to look both aghast and saddened. “And here I was, getting ready to ask them to go to the prom with me.” He shook his head. “You just never know, do you?”
Like a full-on game of doubles played across an extra-wide tennis court, meetings with Ivan always exhausted him. Didn’t the man understand that he was on his side? That he was one of the very few who actually were? “Ivan, this isn’t a joke.”
“Isn’t it?” Ivan scowled at the very thought of having to nurture a fledgling surgeon. “How am I supposed to do my work with some wet-behind-the-ears lower life-form following my every move, sucking up to me and trying to absorb everything like a nondiscriminate sponge?”
Maybe the man wasn’t aware of the way he sounded. Maybe he should have brought in a video camera so that he could play this all back for Munro and let the neurosurgeon witness firsthand just how abrasive he came across. “Now that’s what I’m talking about. You’ve got to change your attitude.”
Unblinking, cold brown eyes fixed on him. Ivan’s face remained expressionless as he asked, “Why?”
The answer, Harold thought, was very simple. He smoothed out the edges of his bow tie with his thumb and index finger. A sign to those who knew him that he was nervous. “Because people hate working with you.”
Ivan shrugged again. “Easy enough solution. Get new people.”
The man just didn’t get it, did he? For the sake of a tenuous friendship and because Munro was the best neurosurgeon he had ever known in his thirty-year career, Harold persisted. “Ivan, if you don’t change, you can’t operate.”
Something resembling a smirk crossed Ivan’s lips. But when he spoke, he was deadly serious. No quips, no sarcasm. “I don’t operate with my attitude. I operate with my skill. Everything else is secondary and unimportant.”
Some people preferred to be nonconfrontational. Sadly for him, Harold thought, the chief neurosurgeon of Blair Memorial did not number among them. Arguing appeared to be something Ivan both enjoyed and keenly relished, sharpening his wit as if it were a sword in need of constant honing. So rather than continue on a field of battle where he was hopelessly out-matched, Harold moved aside what was left of his ham-and-Swiss sandwich and pushed forward a dark blue eight-by-eleven folder.
Ivan perused the cover with a smattering of interest, but made no effort to open the folder. “If that contains a bribe, Harold, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. I only take bribes on Fridays. Today is Monday.” With a nod of his head, he indicated the calendar on the chief’s desk. “Try me again at the end of the week.”
Harold pressed his thin lips together. He could almost hear his wife’s voice in his head. Rachel had been after him for years to retire. If he’d listened five years ago, his hair might still be black instead of completely gray. Ivan, he noted, still didn’t have so much as a single gray hair.
“I’m perfectly aware what day it is, Ivan,” he replied tersely. “And no, it’s not a bribe in the folder. It’s your career.”
Ivan glanced down at it, then back at the chief. “The folder should be bigger, then.”
“Open it,” Harold instructed.
To his surprise, Ivan smiled. Patiently. As if he were humoring someone not entirely in possession of his faculties. A few more sessions like this, Harold thought, and Munro might be right.
“Is it me,” Ivan asked, “or are you getting testier in your old age?”
“Oh, it’s definitely you,” Harold told him with feeling, his meaning clear. “All you. Now open the damn folder, Ivan.”
“Well, since you asked so nicely.” Ivan set aside the last of his sandwich and carefully wiped his fingers on the stiff napkins that had been provided along with lunch. Crumpling the napkin, he tossed it on the tray and then opened the folder.
Inside was an application for residency at Blair Memorial. The obligatory two-by-two photograph was glued in the space provided in the application’s upper left-hand corner. Ivan glanced at the photograph, ignored the application and allowed the cover to fall back into place.
Raising his chin, he looked the chief of staff in the eyes. “Turn her down.”
About to take a drink of his bottled water, Harold nearly choked. He stared at Munro in openmouthed disbelief. “Excuse me?”
“Turn her down,” Ivan repeated, enunciating every word as if the man had suddenly been struck deaf and born slow.
It took Harold less than a heartbeat to find his voice. “On what basis?”
“She’s too pretty,” Ivan told him matter-of-factly. He turned his attention back to the last of his sandwich and his iced coffee.
“What?” The single word fairly vibrated with incredulity.
“Pretty,” Ivan repeated. “Attractive, comely. I believe the term ‘handsome woman’ would have been applied to her a century ago.” His eyes narrowed as he looked across the desk at the chief. “That might be more your style, anyway.”
He had to know Ivan’s reasoning here. “And since when do looks even remotely figure into the selection process?”
“A woman who looks like that—” Ivan pushed the closed folder even farther away from him “—is not going to keep her mind on her work. She’ll be too busy flirting with all the eligible doctors and would-be doctors.” He rolled his shoulders, mimicking the exaggerated movements of a femme fatale. “And they’ll all be buzzing around her like so many bees who’ve lost their way to the hive.” Wrists pointed down, he wiggled his fingers in the air to illustrate. “Want my advice.” It really wasn’t a question, merely a declaration. “Nip this in the bud before it even starts. Tell her ‘thank you but no thank you.’ Better yet—” his eyes glinted as a thought came to him “—refer her to Sloan Memorial,” he said, referring to another teaching hospital in the area. “Let them deal with her and the chaos that she’ll leave in her wake.”
Harold had leaned back in his chair, waiting the neurosurgeon out. When the silence finally came, he seized it. “Are you through?”
Ivan looked down at the paper that had held his sandwich. A dollop of the spicy mustard was all that bore witness to the pastrami extravaganza that had been his lunch. He smiled as he crumpled the paper and placed it and the paper plate onto the tray. “I guess I am.” He pushed back his chair, ready to leave.
“I didn’t mean lunch,” Harold informed him. “I meant with your tirade.”
The choice of words amused Ivan. There were obviously holes in Harold’s education. “That wasn’t a tirade, Harold. When I have a tirade, there’s much rising of hair at the back of the neck. Usually involving the necks of the people I’m tirading against. Believe me, you’ll know when I deliver a tirade.”
“I’m not considering hiring her at Blair Memorial,” Harold said evenly.
“That’s good to know.” Ivan began to rise to his feet. “Now, I’m afraid that I have to—”
His next words had Ivan sitting down again. “I’ve already hired her.”
The surprise on Ivan’s face melted away a moment after it appeared. He shook his head sadly. “Big mistake.”
Harold wasn’t through. “She is your surgical resident.”
“Bigger mistake,” Ivan declared. When Harold made no attempt to rescind his words, Ivan grew serious. And annoyed. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said?”
“I’ve listened,” Harold informed him succinctly. “And like you’ve done so many times before, I’ve chosen to ignore what I’ve heard.” He leaned forward, trying to appeal to Ivan’s charitable nature—if such a thing existed. “There’s no leeway here, Ivan. She has an excellent grade point average—”
Biting back a choice expletive, Ivan waved a hand in disgust at the words. “Oh well, an excellent grade point average, that’ll save lives.”
“And she comes highly recommended.”
“By who?” he demanded, getting to his feet again. He shoved his hands deep into his lab coat as he began to pace the length of the overcrowded office. A stack of folders piled up in one corner toppled, sliding down like gleeful children on a sled sampled the first snows of winter in the mountains. “Some online dating service?”
“By professors at John Hopkins University,” Harold countered, turning in his chair to watch Ivan stride around the room on legs that had always struck him as being too long. “Professors for whom I have the utmost respect. She’s impressed every one of them.”
Ivan’s expression was nothing short of sour. He snorted as if he’d expected nothing less. “I won’t ask how.”
“Don’t be insulting, Ivan.”
“Insulting?” Ivan echoed. “You call this insulting? I haven’t even begun to be insulting.”
One of the reasons Harold Bennett had risen to his present position of chief of staff of one of the best hospitals in the Southwest was that he kept both his head and his temper during times of crisis. To see him angry was as rare as viewing the tail end of Halley’s comet. It was visible, but not very often.
But at the moment his expression was serious, closely bordering on angry. “If you do anything to make her leave, anything that will make her time here at Blair anything but informative and well-spent, I promise you, Ivan, there will be consequences. Consequences that you won’t like.”
Ivan looked at him, utterly unaffected by the prediction. “In other words, there’ll be no change from now.”
CHAPTER 3
“Do your worst, Harold.” Ivan drew himself up to his full six-three height, which was quite a bit taller than his chief of staff. His imposing personality made him seem even taller. “I can’t be expected to do my job while babysitting your latest project. And why is she your latest project?” he asked suddenly, skillfully turning the tables as he mounted his offensive. The best defense was a strong offense did not just apply to football, but to life, as well. Ivan continued to fire questions at him, just quickly enough so that Harold couldn’t answer. “Did you lose a bet? Is she your goddaughter? Or perhaps Rachel’s grandniece?”
Harold pursed his lips. When it came to Ivan, he hated admitting anything. The neurosurgeon always managed to turn the information into a rapier that he skillfully wielded.
“Not that it has any bearing on this,” the chief of staff began grudgingly.
Ivan’s well-shaped eyebrows rose as if to coax the rest from him. “Yes?”
Harold knew that somehow, some way, Ivan would discover this on his own. It blunted the edge if he admitted it first. “I know the young woman’s uncle.”
Crossing his arms before his chest, Ivan leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb. “Aha.”
“No ‘aha,’” Harold replied tersely. “That just happens to be an extraneous fact, one I know you with your unrelenting capacity to dig and burrow would unearth on your own in short order. I just want you to know that it doesn’t mean anything.” He saw the smirk on Ivan’s lips and felt compelled to defend his decision further. “I want only the best people working here at Blair.” He did his best to sound formidable and knew in his heart he fell short of the mark. “Which is why I’ve gone to bat for you so many times. If I hadn’t, you and I both know that your head would have been on a pike somewhere near the entrance of the hospital years ago.”
“Very medieval imagery, Harold. I had no idea you had it in you,” Ivan congratulated him, then paused at the threshold, the integrity that was his foundation keeping him from his exit. “So, in other words, I owe you.”
Harold snorted. “In any words you owe me.”
Ivan blew out a breath, a condemned man resigning himself to his firing squad. “And there’s no other way to repay the debt? Shine your shoes, take you to Disneyland? Wear a hair shirt for a week?”
Harold smiled, anticipating a truce. “The hair shirt has possibilities, but we can explore that at another time. I told the board that you were taking an active part in training our residents—”
Ivan allowed himself a smug moment. “In other words, you, Dr. Harold Bennett, chief of staff, our standard bearer of the truth, lied.”
Harold’s faded gray eyebrows drew together in one tufted, ragged line. “I don’t lie, Ivan. And in order for you to remain in the board’s good graces, you are going to have to at least appear to be involved with the residents.”
A fate, Ivan thought, only slightly less worse than death. Or maybe it was a tie. “Couldn’t I just drink hemlock?”
Harold spread his hands out. They were wide hands, capable hands, but not the hands of a skilled surgeon. He’d always envied Ivan that. But then, he was not at the top of people’s hate list, either. People liked him. In the long run, that balanced things out.
“Fresh out, Ivan. Now—” sitting up, he straightened the files on his desk and moved the tray aside “—you have the rest of the day to bemoan your fate. Report to my office tomorrow morning at eight.”
The dour look on Ivan’s face, the one that sent residents and attendings scrambling for high ground, returned. “I always thought I’d be shot at sunrise, not eight.”
Harold laughed. “Don’t put ideas in my head, Ivan. Tomorrow, eight.”
“Eight.” Ivan sighed mightily and then nodded, his slightly unruly mop of deep chestnut hair underscoring the motion almost independently. “Well, not that this hasn’t been fun, but I have a surgery to scrub in for.” He paused one last time to level a steely gaze at Harold. It was obvious that his seas were choppy. “If Mr. Dombrowski never dances again, it’s on your head.”
It was hard to tell whether or not Ivan meant it. The man did not possess what passed for a typical sense of humor. Maybe it was time to start thinking about retiring, Harold thought as the door to his office closed, with Ivan on the other side.
To reassure himself that he had done the right thing, Harold pulled over the dark blue folder and reviewed the pages in it again. He looked down at the picture in the file. The young blonde was smiling.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the image. “But he really is as good as he thinks he is. And you’ll learn a great deal. Once you get over hating me.”
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Ivan briefly entertained the thought of picking up the phone and calling in sick. The idea died. Not out of some misplaced nobility on his part, nor did he revisit his resistance and find it suddenly appalling. What he found appalling was the idea of a resident living in his shadow and calling it hers. He didn’t call in to postpone the inevitable because he didn’t know how. Didn’t know who to call because in the twelve years he’d been with Blair Memorial, he had never done it.
Sick or well, he had always shown up at the hospital. Even on the worst of days, he mustered on. Day in, day out. Ivan took no note of the months or even the seasons. Had Blair’s chief administrative assistant, a young woman aptly named Debi by her intuitive parents and afflicted with a case of terminal perkiness, not felt compelled to decorate the hospital halls, he wouldn’t have known what month it was. The woman felt some sort of obligation to celebrate every holiday known to God, man and the eternally vigilant greeting card people.
If the woman had left well enough alone, he wouldn’t have even known when holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas came around. Except for his older brother John, who he hadn’t heard from in years, he had no family. No one to drag him off for the purpose of spending the holidays with them. Because of that, each day seemed identical to the one that had come before. Some days necessitated short-sleeved shirts, others generated a need for sweaters, but by and large, the days Ivan experienced were all the same except for the weather.
Ivan switched on the TV just before he prepared to leave the apartment he’d been living in for the last twelve years. Living in Southern California, he was accustomed to periodically hearing the dire predictions of “the big one” coming, the earthquake of the magnitude that would destroy life and civilization as they all knew it.
He should only be so lucky today, he mused.
Buttoning his shirt and tucking it into his slacks, Ivan paused to listen as a very blond woman with flawless skin, what looked to be surgically enhanced lips and hypnotically blue eyes, summarized the day’s current local news.
Same old, same old, he thought.
“C’mon,” he murmured under his breath, talking to her as if she could hear. “If the big one’s coming, now would be a good day for it to get here.”
But the woman seemed entirely oblivious to the idea of earthquakes or any disturbances that might be called upon to rescue him. Contrarily, she appeared quite content to pour her heart into a story about how the department stores were bearing up to the after-Christmas slump in sales.
Ivan gave it a few minutes, waited to hear something promising, then shook his head as the story dragged on forever.
If more people were like him, he thought, the department stores would find themselves in a permanent slump. As a rule, shopping had never tempted him. He bought only what he needed and he needed very little. A few serviceable shirts and slacks with an equal number of socks and underwear to go with them were practically all he ever required.
His one weakness, his only hobby, was Philharmonic concerts. He attended them religiously, going all over the western map, arranging his schedule and people’s operations, whenever possible, around concert dates. Music was the very core of his existence, the only time he ever felt mellow, although he would have opted to be burned at the stake rather than admit that to a living soul.
He preferred to be viewed as a godless, soulless, unrelenting holy terror who inspired admiration, respect and fear in his fellow surgeons, not necessarily in that order. As for the hospital’s fresh crop of residents, in Ivan’s view, they hardly existed, ranking only slightly higher than the rodents that could be found on the food chain.
And, though the thought really bothered him, he was going to have to put up with one for the sake of continuing to do that which gave his life purpose and meaning.
Grunting, he switched off the television set and then tossed aside the remote. It bounced off his sofa, falling on the floor beneath the glass-topped coffee table. He left it there.
“No earthquakes,” he muttered, disgruntled. That meant that he was going to have to find a way to get this resident to request a transfer. And quickly.
He smiled as he left the house. No problem. By the time he was finished with this resident, she would think pairing up with Satan was an improvement.
CHAPTER 4
She sternly told herself that she wasn’t going to be nervous.
In all honesty, she hadn’t thought she would be because ordinarily, she wasn’t. Life, which had tossed its curveballs and its change-ups at her when she least expected them, had trained her to be prepared for anything. An ordinary case of first-day nerves did not figure into it.
Having gone through all that she had in her thirty-four years, Bailey DelMonico liked to think of herself as fearless.
For the most part, especially in the eyes of her family, she was.
And she should be now, she told herself. With a stifled sigh, she discarded the plaid garment she’d just tried on and returned to her first choice, a subdued pencil skirt. Black to match the chief of neurosurgery’s heart. Or so she’d been led to believe. Her two housemates, Jennifer and Adam, first-year residents at Blair Memorial, same as her, had sworn to it more than once.
Could be all talk, she reasoned, zipping up the skirt. Besides, no matter what this neurosurgeon’s reputation was—justified or not—she was fairly certain that he wouldn’t consume her for breakfast.
Bailey smiled to herself. She had already faced someone like that. Several “someones” like that, actually, if she were keeping count. Reformed cannibals. Those were part of the “perks” of having missionary parents who were famous for being the first to tread where angels feared to go.
Those angels, her father was fond of scoffing, were an overly cautious breed. And then he’d follow his comment up with his booming laugh. A laugh that somehow always made everything seem so much better. A laugh that was full of warmth and hope. And love.
Bailey pulled her honey-blond hair back and stuck in a few strategic pins to hold it up. It made her look older. Constantly mistaken for someone in her early twenties, she had a feeling she needed all the help she could get to be taken seriously.
