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“Well, that’s great,” Mike said finally, heartily. “You’re lucky,” he told Nell. “Joe’s a great writer. He won an AP award for his series on the looting of Baghdad, you know.”
She hadn’t known.
“Nell isn’t interested in my résumé,” Joe said.
But Mike continued as if his brother hadn’t spoken. “After he got hurt, he laced up his boot and kept right on reporting.”
Nell felt a flutter of concern. “You were injured?”
“It wasn’t a war wound,” Joe said. “I fell.”
“Some looters pushed him down a hospital stairwell,” Mike explained. Nell sucked in a distressed breath. “That didn’t stop Joe, though.”
Joe thrust his hands into his pockets. “Yes, it did. It just took me a while to wise up to it.”
“He was in the hospital for a couple of weeks when he got back,” Mike confided. “Getting his ankle patched up.”
A couple of weeks? For a broken ankle?
Nell glanced at Joe. He was clearly not enjoying this turn of the conversation.
“Sounds serious,” she said.
“Tedious,” Joe corrected. “I’m fine now.”
“You will be when you get that other surgery,” his brother said.
“I’m fine,” Joe said again, flatly.
A long, loaded look passed between the two men.
Mike snorted. “Yeah. Fine. That’s why you’re in Chicago writing PR copy for a cut-rate health clinic instead of overseas covering the action.”
Nell stiffened at the good-natured insult.
Joe’s face didn’t reveal any reaction at all.
“O-kay,” Tom said. “We’re about done here. I’ll just have a few words with Ed in the pharmacy and let you folks get back to—”
Writing PR copy for a cut-rate health clinic.
“—your business,” Tom finished. “Mike?”
“Gotcha.” He said goodbye to his brother, winked at Nell and sauntered after his partner.
“Are you all right?” Nell asked.
Joe’s mouth twisted. “Weren’t you listening? I’m fine.”
That wasn’t what his brother had implied, but Nell figured this was a poor time to point that out.
“What happened?” she asked.
“My baby brother just shot his mouth off.”
“I didn’t mean here. I meant over there.”
Joe rocked back and stared down his nose at her. “I thought I was here so you could give me a story.”
Nell’s heart beat faster. “I will. You go first.”
“Everything I have to say I wrote for the paper.”
She put her hands on her hips. “Are you really going to make me dig up back issues from a year ago?”
But instead of grinning, Joe shook his head. “Why should you care?”
She was surprised enough to tell the truth. “Because you were hurt, I guess. Because it’s my job to observe and to care, and I didn’t even notice.”
He smiled then, and the sight of all those even, white teeth against his movie-star stubble weakened her knees. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”
She blinked. “What?”
“I get tired of being treated like the walking wounded all the time.” He looked directly into her eyes. “I don’t want you to see me as one of your patients, Nell.”
Her breath clogged. The moment stretched between them, fine and strong as suturing thread.
Until he snapped it by saying, “Unless you’d have sex with me out of pity. I’m okay with that.”
Disappointment made her cross. “Are there any circumstances in which you are not okay with sex?”
He considered, then shrugged. “Nope. Can’t think of any.”
Nell drew herself up. His crudeness could be a deliberate attempt to set some distance between them.
Or he could be a jerk. And she was an idiot for imagining that he was something else, that he felt any corresponding connection with her.
“I’ll give you that clinic tour now,” she said.
That was a close call, Joe thought as he tagged behind Nell to the acute-care room. Her shapeless white lab coat swayed with her walk.
Sex was one thing. Sex was good. Sex dulled the pain for a while.
But the exchange in the hall had forced him to face that Nell Dolan was not a woman he could simply have sex with. She was perceptive and funny and caring as hell.
She wouldn’t accept a relationship that was all about sex. She wouldn’t let a relationship be all about her. She would want—God help them both—to know about him. And eventually, all the get-to-know-you stuff that usually kicked off a relationship would lead her to figure out that he was hanging on to a job he hated by the edge of his fingernails. And she would demand to know why.
The thought made him shudder.
Better for them both, safer for them both, if he churned out his story and dragged his sorry ass out of here.
“Why do you need all this equipment?” he asked, interrupting her. “Wouldn’t your patients who need these kinds of tests be better off going to the hospital in the first place?”
Instead of taking offense, Nell considered his question seriously. “Some of them. But our goal is to identify and treat illnesses before a patient requires a trip to the emergency room. Many of them are afraid to go to the hospital. And most of them can’t afford it. Our clinic is actually cost-effective for the community. For every dollar in donations, we can return seven dollars in health care. I have statistics showing…”
Her face was animated. Her eyes were bright with conviction. And every word wiped out his hopes of taking her to bed.
Nell was a do-gooder, a fearless meddler, a tireless fixer-upper. What had she said? It’s my job to observe and to care. If they got involved, she would want to help him. She would demand to know why he wouldn’t help himself.
And he wasn’t going there. Not with his doctors. Not with his family. And not with a woman he wanted to take to bed.
Are there any circumstances in which you are not okay with sex?
Yes. When it threatened to become more than sex and jeopardized the barriers he’d set around his soul to survive.
Nell was still talking about clinic costs with the endearing earnestness of Mother Teresa and the convincing delivery of a used-car salesman. “It’s all about preventive care. A routine patient visit can cost a hundred and fifty dollars at a private doctor’s office. Using volunteer doctors, we can provide the same services for one-fifth the cost. And that includes a lab test,” she added triumphantly. “If you extrapolate—”
“Hey, Nell.” The big black nurse stuck her head in the door. Her hair, shaved short and dyed red, glowed like the fuzz on a tennis ball. “Let me have your keys a second.”
Nell’s hand moved easily to her pocket. And then she stopped. “Where’s Ed?”
“At lunch. You’ve been so busy you lost track of time.” The nurse flicked a glance in Joe’s direction. “Billie Parker,” she introduced herself.
Joe was skeptical. Did she really need keys? Or was she angling for a mention in the paper? “Joe Reilly,” he offered blandly.
She looked him over. “Yeah, I know.” She turned back to Nell. “Anyway, I need some cortisone samples for the kid in Exam Six. He has a rash in places you don’t want to think about.”
Nell moved toward the door. “I’ll get them for you.”
“That’s okay. I’ll just—”
“I really should get them myself,” Nell said.
In the field, Joe had developed an ear for a story and an instinct for survival. And something in her tone caught his attention as surely as the sound of a pistol being cocked.
Billie Parker shrugged. “Whatever. When you find the time. Exam Six.” She started to walk out.
“I’ll come with you,” Nell said. She turned to Joe, her clear blue eyes questioning. A conscientious frown pleated her forehead. He had to stop himself from smoothing it with his thumb. “I have to get back to my patients. Did I give you what you need?”
Not by a long shot, sweetheart, he thought.
But he couldn’t ask for what he needed. Not from anyone, and not from her.
He forced a grin. “Are you offering to play doctor, Dolan?”
Her head snapped back as if he’d slapped her. “Not unless you’re volunteering to turn your head and cough,” she said icily and stalked out.
Chapter 4
It was amazing what kind of crap a writer could produce when he was up against a deadline and had absolutely no feeling for his subject.
Joe scowled at the half page of text displayed on his computer screen. The cursor blinked impatiently at the bottom. Write. Now. Right now. Write.
He swore and reached for a cigarette. Every morning he counted them out, three cigarettes, his day’s allowance, and placed them carefully in a box in his breast pocket.
The box was empty. The cigarettes were gone.
Joe checked the ashtray on his desk to make sure. Yep, sometime between typing his byline and that last, remarkably bad paragraph citing statistics on America’s uninsured, he’d smoked his last cigarette. Exhausted his supply. Reached the end of his resources and his rope.
Maybe he should give up and turn in the piece his editor expected. Some slop with Nell Dolan as an angel of mercy dispensing hope and drugs to the city’s grateful poor. Nurse Practitioner Barbie, with long blond hair and a removable white lab coat.
She would hate that. Joe almost smiled.
But thinking about Nell, undressing Nell, only made him more frustrated in a different way. Physically frustrated. Sexually frustrated.
He reached again for his cigarettes. Hell. Crushing the empty box in his hand, he lofted it across the living room toward the wastebasket.
He missed. Loser.
In his front hall, the doorbell rasped like the final buzzer at a Bulls’ game.
Joe hobbled across the bare hardwood floor to the door and peered through the security glass at the side. Two men, one in uniform, occupied his front stoop.
Joe yanked open the door. “What the hell are you doing here?”
His middle brother Will walked in without asking. “Ma was worried when you bailed on dinner.”
Mike followed, thrusting a round Tupperware container into Joe’s hands. “She sent us with leftovers. Got any beer?”
His family. He loved them, admired them, let them down… And right now, he wanted them to go away.
“No.”
No alcohol. It was something else he was learning to deny himself.
Mike snorted. “God, now I’m worried about you, too. What about coffee?”
“Instant. And you’ll have to make it yourself.”
“Okay. In the pantry, right?” Without waiting for an answer, Mike snatched back the covered dish and carried it through to the kitchen. A cupboard door banged. A drawer slammed.
With a curse, Joe limped after him.
“You’re not walking too good,” Will observed behind him. “You hurt your ankle again?”
Joe gritted his teeth. He supposed it was too much to hope Will wouldn’t notice. “Nope. Just overdid it the past couple days.”
“Is that why you blew off dinner?”
