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He’d been there. She hadn’t.
He didn’t say as much, but that was the message she got as challenge slipped once more into those disturbingly blue eyes.
“Good enough,” she told him, wondering why he couldn’t have piled up his car when someone else had been on call. “Get some rest.”
She stepped into the wide hall, feeling more as if she’d escaped the room rather than merely left it. She’d dealt with demanding type-As, the chauvinism prevalent among some of her male colleagues and her son’s terrible twos. All of which, she felt, qualified her as something of an expert when it came to handling difficult men.
But a woman didn’t handle Chase Harrington. She worked around him. Still, she hadn’t lost her cool when he’d lost his patience. Or when he’d so cavalierly informed her of how she could handle his leg and his medication. And she thought she’d done a commendable job of ignoring the way his glance kept moving to her mouth as she spoke. All he’d done was make her forget to ask if he had any more questions about his condition, which was something she rarely failed to do with a patient.
Irritated with herself for letting him get to her, refusing to go back and let him do it again, she headed for her next patient intent, for the moment, on putting the man from her mind.
Her intentions were honorable. But Brent Chalmers axed them within ten seconds of her walking into his card-and-mylar-balloon-filled room. The gangly blond teenager with the shy smile had heard that Chase was there.
He’d never actually heard of Chase before. Until a few weeks ago when his throwing arm had been mangled in a thresher, the boy’s life had centered around sports, a car he was saving to buy and the little farming community of Sylo a hundred miles away. If he’d ever read the business section of a newspaper, it was only because he’d been required to write a report on it for class. He’d just overheard the nurses whispering about some rich guy who’d climbed Mt. McKinley and his ears had perked up.
Brent was usually serious and quiet, and whenever he saw Alex he worried aloud about his ability to ever use his arm. Today, though, as she examined his nicely healing wounds all he wanted to talk about was how awesome it must feel to reach the top of the world.
“Man,” he mused. “Can you imagine the shape he must be in to do something like that?”
The question was rhetorical, but she could easily have answered it. Even as she marveled at the boy’s excitement, a mental picture of a beautifully muscled male intent on conquering a mighty mountain flashed in her mind. She couldn’t begin to imagine the determination, the endurance, the sheer strength of will such a challenge required. But Chase apparently went after what he wanted, claimed it, then moved on.
The thought disturbed her, almost as much as the odd jolt she’d felt when she’d first met his eyes.
What disturbed her more was that he’d distracted her from her patient.
“Do you, Dr. Larson?” Brent asked, shaking his stick-straight blond hair out of his eyes.
“I’m sorry.” Pulling the top of his gown back up over the muscles developing in his bony shoulders, she blinked at his narrow, expectant face. “Do I what?”
“Think you could ask him how long he had to train before he made his climb. And maybe you could ask how long it took. I mean, that would be so cool. Climbing like that, I mean. Wouldn’t it?”
“Actually, I can think of about eight hundred things I’d rather do than struggle for oxygen while I freeze my backside over a mile-high drop-off.” Smiling easily at his unbridled interest, she nodded to the nurse to replace his elastic bandage and sling. “Tell you what. Now wouldn’t be a good time, but if you’d like, I’ll ask Mr. Harrington if he feels up to having company tomorrow. If he does, you can talk to him about the mountain yourself before I release you on Monday.”
The mix of emotions flushing his face was fascinating. “Oh, don’t do that,” he begged. “I couldn’t talk to him. I mean not, like, to his face,” he explained, sounding as if she’d just suggested a personal audience with the Pope. “But, thanks. Yeah, really.” The onslaught of discomfort gave way to a smile. “I’m getting out of here?”
“You sure are. There’s something I haven’t told you, though. I haven’t had a chance to redo the room you’ll be staying in since I bought my house. It’s sort of pink.” Wendy, the pregnant teenager who’d lived with her until she’d delivered and moved out last month, had called it rose. It reminded Alex more of antacid. “And you have to share a bathroom with my four-year-old.”
His expression suddenly shifted, concern moving into features sharpening with the first angles of budding manhood. “I don’t mind, ma’am,” he murmured, his voice cracking. “I’m used to my little brothers and sisters.”
She hadn’t meant for him to go shy on her. But that’s how Brent usually was. It had only been the prospect of the extraordinary that had breached the adolescent self-consciousness and quiet manners she normally saw.
“I know you are,” she told him, rather wishing she could see that enthusiasm again. He was such a neat kid. And his family was salt of the earth. She’d met all four of his brothers and sisters. They and his parents had held vigil while she and a team of vascular surgeons had reconstructed his arm. Their prayers and his doctors’ skills had brought him this far, but it would take months of daily physical therapy for him to regain use of the limb. The problem was his parents’ insurance. It wouldn’t cover a live-in rehab facility and his family’s circumstances and distance from town made outpatient treatment impossible.
Alex had figured that two more weeks of intensive therapy would give him enough of a start to continue on his own at home. His beleaguered parents had been thrilled, and embarrassingly grateful, when she’d offered to have him stay with her during that time. Since she was used to having someone borrow her spare room, she told them, it wouldn’t be an inconvenience at all.
Alex left Brent a few moments later to move on to her next patient. But as she headed for elderly Maria and her shiny new knee, she couldn’t help wondering if Chase had ever known what it was like to truly need something and not be able to get it.
She was thinking about him again. Irritated with herself for not being able to get him out of her mind, she started down the hall, deliberately humming a repetitive tune from one of Tyler’s tapes. Once that melody got started in her head, she knew it would take forever to get it out. It drove her positively nuts. But she figured even that was better than wondering what it was that drove the compound femur in three-fifty-four.
Chapter Three
The mind-numbing melody had been replaced by the theme from Tarzan by the time Alex and Tyler arrived at Granetti’s for dinner at six o’clock that evening. Parking her sedate silver Saturn in her spot at the hospital, since the restaurant they were going to was across the street, she explained to her son for the third time that she wasn’t going to work, that they were going to dinner and, no, they couldn’t go to Pizza Pete’s.
“But I want pizza.”
“You can have pizza here. Or spaghetti,” she told him, which reminded her to grab a handful of wet-wipes from the glove box to stuff into her purse. “You like spaghetti better, anyway.”
Alex stifled a sigh as she watched her little boy scrunch his nose. The tiny golden freckles scattered over it seemed to merge as he considered her observation. Sometime in the last twenty-four hours, his baby-fine blond hair had managed to grow to below his eyebrows. He now needed a haircut as badly as he needed new tennies.
She supposed she should see if Brent wanted a haircut, too. The boy was beginning to look like a sheep dog.
Tyler’s frown suddenly changed quality. She could practically see the mental gears shifting behind his dark brown eyes as he unbuckled his seat belt and opened his door.
“How fast will a Viper go?”
“A viper?” she repeated, doing a little mental shifting of her own. She had no idea how he’d gone from pizza to reptiles. “I don’t know, honey. Is that the kind of snake that goes sideways?”
“It’s not a snake.” he informed her, as if she should have somehow known that. “It’s a car.”
“It is?”
“Yeah. And they go really fast. Does it go as fast as a Cobra?”
That, she knew, was definitely a car. Her next door neighbor’s son-in-law drove one. Tyler loved that thing. Especially when its tires squealed.
“It sure sounds like it should.” Checking her purse to make sure she had her pager, she looped the strap over her shoulder while Tyler scrambled out. She truly had no idea how his mind worked. The challenge was simply to keep up with him.
“Can we get a video with a Viper in it?” Tyler hollered, running around the back of the car.
Absently straightening the skirt of her sleeveless shift as she stood, Alex patiently told her forty-pound bundle of energy she didn’t know if they made Viper videos, then tucked the back of Tyler’s favorite T-shirt—a blue one sporting a green lizard—into the waistband of his cargo pants before she reached for his hand.
He was still talking as they crossed the street, informing her now that Tom, their cat, could watch the video with him, which somehow reminded him that he’d forgotten to feed his gerbil. With the low sun slanting its warm rays against her face and her precious, precocious little boy chattering away beside her, she should have been enjoying the moment.
Instead, she was trying to figure out what it was about Chase Harrington that disturbed her most. The way she’d seemed to absorb his agitation or the fact that she couldn’t seem to get him out of her mind.
The afternoon had been blessedly uneventful—if she discounted the fact that she’d discovered a new leak in her washing machine. After she’d finished rounds, she’d picked up Tyler at the hospital day-care center and headed for home. The guest room now had fresh sheets, the washing of which had revealed the leak, there was milk in her refrigerator and she and Tyler were on their way to a relatively quiet, uninterrupted dinner with her two closest friends and their families. There was no reason for her to be thinking of Chase now. She wouldn’t have to deal with him again until tomorrow.
Grasping that thought, she pushed open Granetti’s brass-trimmed door. The homey Irish-Italian pub-cum-restaurant was a comfortable, neighborhood sort of place that felt like a home away from home. On this particular evening, the atmosphere was even more welcoming.
Under the lattice-and-faux-grape-leaf-covered-ceiling and the Guinness beers signs on the back wall, a wide swath of black paper shouted Happy XXXII, Alex in bilious green. Neon-pink balloons hovered over the chairs.
Below the banner, tables had been pushed into a long line to accommodate the thirty-odd people who greeted her with a deafening “Surprise!” when she walked in holding Tyler’s hand.
“Wow! It’s a party, Mom!”
Stunned, Alex let his hand slide from hers. Before she could blink, her wide-eyed little boy had darted for the dark-haired preschooler dashing toward him. When he reached Griffin, his “very best” friend, they slugged each other and grinned.
“It’s about time you caught up with us. I hate it when you’re younger.” Kelly Hall wrapped Alex in a quick hug. Her honey-blond hair was plaited in its usual French braid and her hazel eyes were laughing. “Happy belated birthday.”
“We’d planned to do this yesterday, but you got called in.” Ronni Powers-Malone, Ryan Malone’s new wife and a good friend, moved in with a hug of her own. “Hi, Alex. Happy Birthday.”
“I can’t believe this.” Feeling her smile spread, Alex hugged her friends back and took in the banner once more. “I feel like I’m a superbowl.”
“The Roman numerals were the guys’ idea. Ronni and I would have preferred to give you a quiet dinner with a gorgeous male at Le Petit Cinq,” Kelly confided. “But we knew you were on call and it wouldn’t be worth the arm-twisting to get you to go if you’d just get called away anyhow. It was either this or Pizza Pete’s.”
Petite and pregnant, pediatrician Ronni tugged her toward the tables. “We figured this was better, since it was closer to the hospital.”
“And they have garlic-cheese bread. Ronni’s been craving it,” Kelly explained. “We’re also fresh out of gorgeous males. We got the last of ’em.”
“The lady has impeccable taste.” The hug this time came with the scent of aftershave. Tanner Malone, Kelly’s dark-haired, impressively built fiancé flashed a hint of his dynamite smile. “Hey there, Alex.”
“Hey yourself, Tanner.” Beyond them, the music of laughter and conversation underscored the strains of an Irish ballad. Wonderful aromas scented the air. “Where’s the baby?”
Alex fully expected Tanner to tease her, to express some sort of feigned exasperation over having fought his way through the crowd to get to her only to have her ask about his child. Instead, looking unusually subdued, he simply murmured, “She’s over there with Ryan and the nurses.”
Despite his oddly reticent manner, pride lit his eyes as he nodded toward the people collectively cooing over his adorable infant daughter. Alex and Tanner had a lot in common. He’d been a single parent himself, until Kelly had rescued him, and he was intimately familiar with trying to manage parental responsibility and a demanding career. He owned the construction company building the hospital’s new wing.
The thought of asking him if he could recommend anyone to fix her washing-machine leak was cancelled by the greetings of her colleagues from the clinic and the hospital as she was coaxed farther into the room. Ryan motioned to her from the knot of women cooing over the newest addition to the Malone clan, then pointed down to indicate that Tyler was with him and his kids and gave her an okay sign to let her know she didn’t have to worry about him.
A little overwhelmed by what her friends had done for her, and what wonderful friends she had, she waved back. Anyone looking at Ryan and Tanner could tell they were related. Both brothers had thick, dark hair, and the same chiseled jaw. But their eyes were what truly gave them away. Rimmed with dark lashes, they were the bluest shade of blue Alex had ever seen. A woman didn’t forget a man with eyes like that.
Rather like she couldn’t forget the patient in room three-fifty-four.
“Whatever it is you’re frowning about, forget it for now,” Ronni insisted, handing her a frosty glass of iced tea. She clicked her own glass of the same against the rim. “I’ve seen enough long faces today.”
“Me, too.” Kelly lifted her wine before glancing sympathetically toward her fiancé. The concern in her expression was too apparent to hide, though her attempt was commendable. “This is a party.”
If there was anything Alex could spot, it was strain. Now that the shock of surprise had worn off, she could see it clearly in her friends’ faces.
“What’s going on?” she asked, her glance bouncing between the petite redhead and the tall blonde. “I thought Tanner seemed a little quiet tonight. Is everything all right?”
Kelly and Ronni exchanged a glance. As if reaching some tacit agreement, they shifted closer, locking the circle so their voices wouldn’t carry.
“Do you remember that phone call Ryan received during our engagement party?” Kelly asked Alex, her voice low. “From the man who said he was their brother, Andrew Malone?”
“Of course I do. We were talking about who had the most unique engagement surprise, remember? You two with that phone call, or Ryan and Ronni with that huge anonymous cashier’s check for the new wing.”
“We never have figured out where that came from,” Ronni muttered. “But that was a good thing. This turned out awful. They were supposed to meet him last night,” she said, in a near-whisper. “But he never showed up. You can’t believe how disappointed Ryan is.”
“Tanner, too. He’s trying to hide it, but I know it’s eating at him. On the way over, he said he wished the guy had never called in the first place. If he lost his nerve, the least he could have done was phone. As it is,” Kelly continued, sounding as protective as she did irritated, “neither one of them heard from him until this morning. Then, he just left messages on their answering machines that he’d been delayed and said he’d be in touch later.”
Alex’s brow pinched as she watched both women look toward the men again, but she wanted to dismiss the thought that flashed in her brain almost as quickly as it formed. It had to be pure coincidence that Tanner’s eyes were so nearly the same blue as her patient’s. And it had to be coincidence that the rather stubborn line of his jaw had been carved at that same hard angle. Even if the world didn’t know that Chase Harrington was…well, Chase Harrington, he wasn’t built anything like Tanner. The younger Malone had the muscular physique of a man accustomed to physical labor. Chase was a little taller, according to his chart, anyway, and he had the lean, hard body of a runner. His hair wasn’t black like Tanner’s, either. It was more a rich, deep sable. If he looked like anyone, it was…Ryan.
“I don’t remember,” Alex prefaced, not sure she’d ever known the answer to what she was about to ask. “Where was this brother from?”
“Seattle,” they both said an instant before the clink of a spoon on a water glass had everyone quieting for a toast.
Alex tried to let it go.
She couldn’t.
For the next hour, while her friends and associates mingled and laughed and passed platters of pasta and eggplant parmesan, the suspicion that had lodged in her mind nagged with the relentlessness of a toothache.
She could overlook the physical similarities. There were a lot of men with dark, to-die-for looks and wickedly beautiful azure eyes who weren’t related to the Malones. She’d bet half the black Irish in Ireland fell into that category. But Chase had missed a meeting last night, too. One that had been so important to him that he’d come out of anesthesia wanting nothing other than to call the people he was supposed to see.
I need them to know I didn’t stand them up.
If it hadn’t been her own party, she’d have excused herself the moment she recalled the almost desperate undertones in her patient’s voice. Ryan and Tanner were her friends and if there was any chance that Chase Harrington was the man they’d been waiting for, she needed to do what she could to let them know their brother hadn’t simply decided not to show. But her friends had gone to a lot of trouble for her, so she made herself wait until the cake they’d brought had been cut and everyone was busy visiting again before she caved in and turned to Ronni.
“There’s something I need to check with a patient. Will you keep an eye on Tyler for me for a few minutes?”
Knowing Alex was on call, familiar herself with such interruptions, her friend didn’t even hesitate. “Sure. If you get hung up, just let me know and we’ll take him home with us.”
“I shouldn’t be that long,” Alex assured her, then slipped out to run across the street to ask a few questions of her patient.
At eight o’clock on a Saturday evening, the long corridors of the hospital were almost eerily quiet. The business of treatments and therapies and diagnostics that created traffic jams of gurneys and wheelchairs and lab carts was over for the day. Dinner trays had been cleared and sent in their huge stainless-steel carts back to the hospital kitchen.
The only sounds were from the television sets in a couple of the rooms and the muffled conversations of visitors bearing mylar Get Well balloons and tidy bouquets of flowers.
There were no visitors in Chase Harrington’s room. No balloons. And bouquet was too plebeian a term for the half-dozen fabulous arrangements filling the widow ledge and the tray table belonging to the other, empty, bed.
The head of Chase’s bed was raised higher than it had been that morning. He lay back against the pillow with his head turned from the door, his braced leg extended and his uninjured one bent at the knee to make a tent of his blankets. With a business card in his hand, he tapped a slow beat against the raised siderail while he stared out the window at the construction lights glowing in the dark.
When he didn’t notice her in the doorway, she glanced at the florist’s card on the arrangement nearest the door.
The exotic creation of red ginger, bird of paradise and anthurium was sent “with best wishes for a speedy recovery” from the board of Claussen Aerodynamics.
“We just closed a deal,” he said, talking to her reflection in the window. “I’m sure they were relieved all the i’s were dotted before I wound up here.”
“Maybe they just mean what the card says. That they hope you’re better soon.”
He turned toward her, his level expression telling her he didn’t believe that for half a second. The sentiment was business. An obligation. Nothing more.
“It’s a beautiful arrangement, anyway,” she told him.
“It’s a write-off. They all are.”
His cynicism was unmistakable. So was his displeasure with whatever it was he’d been thinking about as he gave the business card an impatient flip onto the document-covered tray-table beside his bed. She’d never seen him upright, let alone moving under his own steam. But the image of a tornado chained in place sprang to mind as she quietly closed the door. She had no trouble picturing him pacing as he worked, his mind racing, his beautifully honed body rarely still. All that leashed energy and power bent on conquering…everything.
She couldn’t help wondering if he regarded women as conquests, too.
She immediately banished the thought, along with the hint of warning that came with it. His sex life was none of her business. It was entirely possible that he would regard any part of his personal life as none of her business, too. But if she was right about who he was, there was far more going on with him than she had suspected, and the reasons for his agitation could be far more profound than she’d thought.
The soft fabric of her dress whispered faintly as she moved toward the glow of the reading light cocooning the bed. She hadn’t had time to consider how truly unsettling it would be for a person to face siblings he’d never met. Or to ponder the circumstance that had allowed such a relationship to go unknown for so long.
As she’d hurried through the hospital, she’d been more aware of the faint stirrings of guilt. She’d always prided herself on paying attention to her patients so she wouldn’t miss something that could impair their progress. With Chase, she’d simply adopted every one else’s opinion of him as a difficult man and ignored the first stirrings of sympathy she’d felt for him.
“I see you got what you wanted. Are you working now?”
