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A slam like that might have sent her reeling—or spoiling for a fight. But she was beginning to read between the lines and get a handle on him. The insults were a smokescreen. No one was that nasty for no reason. “You don’t want me to like you, do you?”
His eyes narrowed, telling her how insignificant she was in the scheme of his life. “I really don’t care how you feel about anything, DelMonico.”
He believed that, she thought. But she didn’t. She’d been taught never to focus on the bad, only the good. And if an animal swiped at you, it was only because he was wounded. The challenge here was to discover what Ivan the Terrible’s wound was.
She folded her arms before her. “Well, you won’t get me to dislike you.”
Ordinarily, he would have turned and walked away without bothering to reply. But for once, curiosity got the better of him. “Not that, again, I care in the slightest, but why is that, DelMonico?”
The answer was simple. Because she wanted to be the best and in order to do that, she had to learn from the best. She had to learn from him. Everything was always better when conducted in an air of congeniality rather than hospitality.
“Because you did exactly what you said back there,” she told him. “You performed a miracle. That tumor looked like it was a miniaturized octopus with its tiny tentacles woven all in and out of gray matter, and yet you got it all.”
He’d leaned against the wall to listen to her and straightened now. “Very poetic, DelMonico. Maybe you should think about becoming a poet instead of wasting your time here.”
She wasn’t going to let him bait her. She felt too good, too psyched, to let him burst her balloons and make her plummet. “I’m not wasting my time.”
He leveled a penetrating gaze at her. “You’re sure of that?”
There wasn’t even a half second of hesitation on her part. “Yes.”
“Ballsy,” Ivan pronounced, more to himself than to her. “Maybe it won’t take you a century or two. DelMonico. Maybe it’ll just take three-quarters of one.”
She had just been given a decent compliment, Ivan the Terrible style. She viewed it as one giant step in the right direction. “I’m going to knock that figure down to something manageable,” she promised.
Ivan snorted. “You think that, DelMonico. You go right ahead and think that.”
The tone he used clearly declared that while she might want to delude herself, he knew the truth and the truth, the way he saw it, said that she would never be capable of performing the kinds of surgeries he tackled on a regular basis. He just didn’t see it being in her, no matter what she thought.
“I will,” Bailey called after him as he began to walk away. “Because I have a good teacher.” She raised her voice when he made no attempt to turn around and added, “You.”
“Ha!” was Ivan’s only response. He kept on walking until he disappeared through the opposite set of swinging doors.
Bailey turned on her heel, quickly heading around to the other side, to the locker room where her things were stored. For all the contact she’d had with the patient, she could have almost remained in the clothes she’d worn originally. The clothes she’d secretly hoped put her in a better light as far as first impressions went. She realized that she could have just as well worn a paper sack for all the difference it made to Munro, but it had been worth a try.
She grinned to herself. She’d seen her first brain surgery today. Despite the fact that Munro had relegated her to a far corner of the operating room, she had been able to witness the infinite skill with which he wielded the robotic instruments used to excise the tumor that had all but paralyzed the thirty-two-year-old patient.
She didn’t care how much the neurosurgeon ranted and raved, how much he tried to get her to throw her hands up and scream “uncle” just before she quit. There was no way she was about to do that.
“Get used to it, Ivan Munro,” she murmured under her breath as she walked into the locker room. “I’m going to stick to you like glue until I know everything that you do.”
The second she entered the lockers she began shedding surgical livery. By the time she reached the locker that had been assigned her, she was in her underwear, ready to grab her street clothes and put them on.
The trouble with that was, someone, obviously thinking they were performing a good deed, had shut her locker door and flipped the combination lock. A lock to which she didn’t know the combination.
“Damn,” she muttered when the lock resisted opening.
“Problem?”
The question came from the other side of the lockers.
CHAPTER 9
Bailey’s first inclination was to grab her discarded scrubs and cover herself up as much as possible.
The only thing wrong with that plan was that she’d tossed the scrubs into the dirty laundry receptacle and it was now approximately ten feet away from her. She sensed that a mad dash to retrieve the discarded clothing would undoubtedly amuse the chief neurosurgeon who seemed to have materialized out of thin air. She was willing to bet double her staggering medical school loan that if she did that, Munro would make some sort of humiliating, condescending comment about her pubescent reaction.
So instead of making a laughable attempt to somehow cover up the lacey pink bra and panties, and the skin that was above, between and below, Bailey raised her chin and turned around. She looked the neurosurgeon straight in the eye as if she were dressed from head to foot in a suit of impenetrable medieval armor. Only for a moment did she have the impression that he wasn’t looking at her as if she were wearing impenetrable medieval armor. But at least he wasn’t leering.
“Actually, yes,” she replied as coolly as possible under the circumstances. “There is a problem. Someone seems to have snapped my lock shut.”
She couldn’t read his expression, but in her heart she just knew he was laughing at her. “That’s why they make locks. To lock.” And then he allowed a sigh to escape, as if this was all incredibly boring to him. “Use the combination.”
“If I knew the combination, Doctor, that would be an excellent suggestion.”
This time she saw his eyes slowly pass over her body. He seemed neither impressed nor disappointed. There appeared to be no reaction at all. She couldn’t help wondering if he had spent too much time viewing people only as patients. At another time, she might have begun to speculate about his personal life, but right now, only hers, and how she was going to live this down, concerned her.
Goose bumps formed along her arms and legs in response to the lowered temperature. “Do you have any other suggestions?” she asked, her mouth growing annoyingly dry.
“Yes.” He said the single word so slowly, it seemed to drip out of his mouth.
A beat passed. Nothing followed.
“Well?” she pressed, doing her best not to sound frantic. What if someone came in and saw her like this? Then what?
“Sorry.” Ivan shook his head. “Nothing I can readily repeat out loud without offending the sisterhood.”
Then he was reacting to her near nude state. She didn’t know whether to be flattered for having gotten to the almighty Ivan or offended. Added to that, she hadn’t a clue what he was referring to.
“The what?”
“Sisterhood,” he repeated, then waved his hand as if to move the word aside. “Or whatever organization you and other females belong to that goes around bringing the male of the species up on inflated charges of harassment.”
Frustrated, Bailey turned her back on him and gave the lock another tug, a harder one this time. It had the same results as the first one did. Nothing. The lock hung there, mocking her. Just like Munro.
“Really should have committed the combination to memory,” he told her. He leaned forward just a touch, but not enough to actually come close to her. “Gnawing on it won’t help, either.”
She turned around, her anger eradicating her embarrassment. “Thank you.”
He nodded, as if the exchange was of an ordinary nature. “I assume you don’t intend to spend the rest of your days at Blair Memorial like that.” For emphasis, Ivan’s eyes slid down and then up along her torso.
She struggled hard not to shiver, even if she told herself his gaze was clinical. “No, I don’t.”
Raising her chin again, Bailey strode past him back to the laundry receptacle to retrieve the shirt and pants. She couldn’t just continue standing here, talking to him while wearing only the amount of material used to produce a minor bikini.
About to take out the two items, the sound of Munro’s voice stopped her.
“I wouldn’t recommend that.” She didn’t turn around, but she did stop and wait for him to continue. “Germs, you know. Those scrubs were in the O.R.”
He had a point, but so did she and as far as she was concerned hers trumped his. “Well, I don’t really have a choice now, do I?”
In response, she heard him laugh. Tired of being his source of amusement, the high she’d sustained watching him operate completely dissipated, Bailey swung around to face him. Superior or not, she was ready to give him a piece of her mind, the consequences be damned. Someone needed to take this man down a peg and it might as well be her last act at Blair.
But whatever words she attempted to hunt up died in her throat as she saw what the neurosurgeon held in his hands. Neatly folded scrubs, both top and bottoms. “You could put these on.” He raised one eyebrow quizzically. “Size small, right?”
“Right,” she murmured, surprised. The scrubs had not been there before. And the ones she’d obtained earlier for herself had come from the supply area. “Where did you get those?”
“Magic,” he informed her dryly. And then he nodded toward the closet behind him. “Scrubs for visiting surgeons are kept in there.”
Something else she hadn’t known. The list of things she needed to familiarize herself with was growing astronomically. And then she replayed his words in her head. “I’m not visiting.”
“Yes,” Ivan acknowledged with more than a tinge of sorrow, “I know.” He looked down at the scrubs. “If you don’t want these—” He raised the uniform blues up over his head and completely out of her reach.
“No!” she cried. Not knowing what the man was capable of, she made a lunge for the scrubs to retrieve them. Her body brushed up against his as she reached up as far as she could.
She felt the same way she had in physics class when she’d accidentally touched a live wire. Electrical current zapped through her body.
If her momentary panic amused him, he didn’t show it. Neither did he seem affected by the fleeting contact of her barely covered anatomy against his.
Instead, Ivan lowered his arm and very soberly presented the fresh scrubs to her. She snatched them up as if she didn’t trust him to surrender the clothes to her.
“I’m making afternoon rounds in five minutes,” he informed her as he turned on his heel. With that, he walked out of the locker room.
Bailey all but hopped into the blue scrubs while making her way to the door, grateful to finally put something on her body. Punching her arms through the sleeves, she caught up to him on the other side of the door.
“What about my locker?” she asked. She still had a problem.
His tone was completely disinterested. “What about it?”
She was beginning to understand why some residents used his picture as a dartboard. “I still need to open it.”
Passing the nurses’ station, he picked up a file without breaking stride. “Not now you don’t.”
“No,” she agreed. Bailey glanced down and saw that one of her laces was untied. She knew better than to stop to tie it. That was going to have to wait for a lull, too. “But later—”
“Is later,” he told her with finality, and it was obvious that as far as he was concerned, “later” had no place in the present. “It’ll take care of itself.”
Not without help, Bailey thought. She made a mental note to find either a janitor or a pair of bull cutters, preferably the former wielding the latter. She didn’t care about going home dressed in scrubs, even though it was chilly outside, but her locker, the locker she’d purposely left with an open combination lock hanging from it, also contained her purse, her keys and all of her identification. She couldn’t drive her car or get into her house without them.
She supposed, Bailey thought, shoving a loose pin back into her hair, she could hook up with either Adam or Jennifer and they could drive her home. But even if she did, that still didn’t solve the problem of getting her things out of the sealed locker.
“You’re panting, DelMonico,” Ivan observed, making a left at the end of the corridor.
No, she wasn’t, but she knew that arguing seemed pointless. “You’ve got on your seven league boots again, Doctor.”
His glance was just short of belittling as he slanted it in her direction. “I guess you’ll just have to get a pair, DelMonico.”
She nodded as if he’d just made a perfect plausible suggestion. She had a hunch he got a certain amount of pleasure rattling people and she refused to accommodate him. “Just tell me where to shop,” she replied without missing a beat.
Bailey thought she heard Munro mutter something under his breath but decided that she might be better off not knowing exactly what that was.
Christians, one. Lions, zero, she thought with a suppressed smile.
CHAPTER 10
“So, how is the great neurosurgeon doing?”
When the phone had rung a second ago, Bailey had debated between answering it and throwing it across the room. But because she was too exhausted to throw, she brought the receiver to her ear.
Hearing the voice made her miraculously sit up.
“Simon? Simon, is that you?” Even as she said his name, she brightened. Her older brother had always had that effect on her, bringing rays of hope into an otherwise gloomy atmosphere.
“None other. How’re you doing, kid?”
She could hear the smile in his voice. “Great now that I hear the sound of your voice.”
A tiny note of concern entered. “How were you before you heard the sound of my voice?” And then he became serious, ever the big brother. “They treating you all right?”
She didn’t want him worrying or thinking that she couldn’t take care of herself. She’d come a long way from that little girl who used to tag after him, shadowing his every move.
“By ‘they,’ do you mean the people at the hospital or my roommates?”
“Yes.”
Good old Simon, she thought, always touching as many bases as he can.
“My roommates are great. They’re both younger than I am, but I knew they would be.” She’d known going in that she would be the oldest resident there, but she couldn’t dwell on that. She was just grateful for the opportunity. “Part of me feels like I’m their den mother.”
“Can’t be that bad,” her brother scoffed. “You’re what—six, seven years older than they are? Maybe even less?”
“Something like that.”
“Honey, five, six, seven years, that’s nothing. You’re hardly in the den mother league. Or even the baby-sitter league,” he added.
She begged to differ. Bailey propped herself up on her elbows and moved back until she was resting against the pillows.
“You’re seven years older than I am and you always acted as if you were my second father. Still do, sometimes,” she added slyly.
“Rank has its privileges,” he told her, unfazed. “Really, Bay, are you okay? Do you need anything? Don’t be your proud, stubborn self. Tell me if you need something.”
“Batteries.”
“Batteries?” Simon repeated in disbelief. “Bailey, are you—”
She laughed, stopping him before he allowed his imagination to run away with him. “Batteries so I can keep going without crashing and embarrassing myself. I’m way beyond vitamins, coffee and energy drinks.”
“You don’t need batteries, Bay. What you need is sleep.”
