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A moment of silence passed. “That’s a lot to go through in eighteen months.”
“Too much.” She turned to him, her lips pressed in a grim line. “Or so I thought at the time.”
His smile was gone, and the look that had replaced it brought a lump to her throat. His face glowed with a warm, quiet concern.
Compassion.
“But not anymore?” he asked.
She took a deep breath, raw at having to expose herself like this to a stranger. Most people had a right to privacy. To dignity. Not so the mentally ill, or those suspected of mental illness. They were expected to drag their deepest fears, their most personal vulnerabilities out for inspection by anyone with the right abbreviations or acronyms behind their names.
She considered lying, knew it would only delay the inevitable. He would pick at her until he got the truth.
Looking down, she saw her hands were trembling and clasped them together to hide the weakness. “I spent eight months in the hospital learning to deal with my grief. I clawed my way back to normalcy day by day. Sometimes minute by minute or second by second, but I made it.” She threw her chin in the air. “My doctor there had me keep a journal. I still do it. I record my good days and bad days and why each was the way it was. As of this morning, I’d had three hundred and ten consecutive good days. Three hundred and ten.”
When she dropped her gaze again, she realized she’d fisted her hands so tightly her knuckles had gone white.
Dr. Hansen gave her a few seconds to collect herself, then asked gently, “What happened this morning?”
She hesitated. “I fell.”
He checked the file, then said in that same placid, calming tone, “You told the police you were pushed.”
“I was confused. I hit my head.” She touched the knot on her temple as if to prove it. Damn it, she shouldn’t have to prove anything to him.
But she did, if she wanted to go home, and she did want to go home, even if it meant lying. She’d told the police and the first doctor who had examined her that she’d been pushed into the road.
It hadn’t gone over well.
She ducked her chin. She would not give him reason to call her paranoid. “Maybe some snow slid off the trees and hit me in the back. The sun was warming things up pretty good.”
She lifted her head. “Or maybe I just stumbled. That’s how I ended up in the road.” Desperately, she tried to give him a reassuring grin. It wobbled and she gave up. “I did not throw myself over a cliff on purpose.”
To her surprise, he smiled back. “Good.”
She rolled her shoulder, feeling the tension easing out. He believed her. Didn’t he?
He made a few notes on her file and then raised his head. “What were you thinking about before you fell?”
“Todd’s Christmas present. My son, he’s eight. I was deciding what to get him.”
He made a sympathetic noise. “Tough age to buy for. Young enough he still wants all the good kids’ toys, but too old to admit it.”
“Exactly.” She couldn’t believe he understood. Maybe there was more to him than a pretty face. “You have kids?”
“No, but I was one once. And I know how little boys’ minds work. I am male.”
Surprising herself, she swept her eyes from his broad shoulders to his lean waist, long legs and back up again.
Definitely male.
It had been a long time since she’d noticed that about anyone.
“So what did you decide on?” He grinned at her. She couldn’t decide if he knew exactly what she’d been thinking or if he was really as innocently naive as he seemed.
“I didn’t,” she explained, heat rising to her cheeks. Focus. She needed to focus on the conversation. She had no business noticing anything about this man. He was a doctor. The doctor who held the power to declare her sane or crazy. “I was wishing my husband were there. He would know what to get.”
“How did it make you feel that he wasn’t there?”
She snorted, suddenly disappointed in Dr. Handsome. “Oh, please. Not the ‘how did it make you feel’ question. How do you think it made me feel?”
“Sad? Lonely?”
She wrinkled her nose. “Have you ever been married?”
“No.”
“Maybe if you had, you’d have some inkling of what it means to be twenty-five years old, with a four-year-old baby and to lose all the family you have, not to mention the man you love, the only man you’ve ever been with, without warning. Until then, don’t pretend to understand what I do or don’t feel about my dead husband.”
He stilled the pencil he’d been twirling between his fingers and looked her right in the eye. “Well said, and with lots of feeling. You’re very good. How many doctors have you used that shtick on?”
The accusation took her aback. Until she recognized it as the truth. “A few.”
“Did it work?”
“More times than not.”
He strolled toward her, his tongue in his cheek. “Then you’ve been seeing the wrong doctors.”
He locked his golden gaze on hers and she couldn’t look away.
“Let’s try this again,” he said, towering over her. “How were you feeling just before you fell?”
The irrational urge to run swept over her. He was too close. Physically and emotionally. He smelled like Polo cologne.
And tasted like fear. Her fear.
She was not crazy. She wouldn’t let anyone say she was.
“If you want me to say I was depressed, you can go to hell,” she said.
“Been there. Didn’t care for it.” His face remained impassive, but his eyes changed. Cool intellect gave way to a dark, hot fury that burned somewhere deep inside him. The kind of fury only someone who has suffered could feel.
“Me neither,” she said. “Depression was my hell. I almost had to die to do it, but I escaped. I won’t ever go back.”
He looked away as if he suddenly found their linked gazes too intimate. “You’re one of the lucky ones, then.”
“I am.” She touched the scars on his right forearm and he flinched as though she’d burned him. “What about you?”
“I’m working on it.” He raised his head, cupped her chin and looked into her eyes again, his own fires now banked. “I—” His fingers tightened on her face. “Damn.”
“What?”
“Did the ER doctor give you something when he treated you? Pain medication? A sedative?”
“No.”
“Your pupils are big as dinner plates.” He let her go and cursed again. “I can’t sign off on the evaluation if you’re medicated.”
She followed him when he turned his back and marched away. “I don’t need to be evaluated. I just need to go home. To my son. Please.”
He groaned like a man in pain. “I can’t. I have to talk to you when your head is clear. I can’t afford to mess this up. Director Serrat—”
“Uncle Karl?”
He stiffened, and she knew she’d made a mistake mentioning her uncle. His boss.
He picked up his jacket and shrugged into it without turning. “I’ll come back to finish the evaluation tomorrow.”
“Let me go home and I’ll come to you in Belier in the morning.”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I just can’t risk it.”
Understanding exploded with a burst of bitterness on her tongue. “Worried about my life or your career?”
“Neither,” he said stiffly. “You have a son.”
Rage rose to the surface. “I would never hurt my son. Never!”
“I’ll talk to you tomorrow.” He headed toward the door, but stopped just inside, shoulders stiff.
“Wait. Please!” Desperation propelled her across the room after him. She stopped just short of touching him, her arm extended.
“Tomorrow,” he said without turning. “Try to get some rest. I’ll be back early.”
He was gone before she could argue. Before she could plead.
Alone again, Mia propped her hips on the edge of the bed, fighting back the desperation. The humiliation.
Maybe he was right. Maybe they were all right, and she’d imagined someone else with her on the bluff. A sinister shadow behind her.
Three hundred and ten days, she thought, her eyes welling with tears. She’d had three hundred and ten good days.
And tomorrow, she’d have to start over again at one.
Chapter 3
Ty felt like a heel as he left the Eternal Emergency Care Clinic. Not because he’d admitted Mia Serrat for overnight observation when she so clearly wanted to go home—standard procedure was standard procedure, and he dared follow nothing but when the patient was Karl Serrat’s niece. There was also her son’s safety to think about.
What troubled him was the niggle of pleasure he’d felt at the knowledge that, by admitting her, he’d have to see her again in the morning.
She was a patient, for Christ’s sake. He knew better than to think of her in any other terms.
She was also a woman, though. A spirited, strong-willed, self-reliant woman.
Exactly the kind of woman he liked.
Shivering, he turned the heater on full blast in his ancient VW Beetle and pulled out onto Highway 18 toward Belier. Snow swirled furiously around his little car, falling faster now than when he’d driven in, and whipped into a frenzy by a fierce north wind. Windshield wipers and headlights hardly penetrated the miasma.
He leaned forward, peering into the blizzard to make out the road, but instead he kept seeing her defiant green eyes, the determined set to her full lips.
He shook his head at himself. Mia Serrat was completely off-limits.
She also had a history of mental illness. She’d backed off her story about being pushed off the bluff this morning without argument, but she wasn’t convinced. He could see it in her eyes. She just knew the psychiatry game well enough to know better than to sound paranoid.
The sooner she was out of his life, the better.
Still, she pulled at him on a lot of different levels. Sure, she was beautiful. But she’d also overcome a lot of tragedy. She was a survivor, Mia Serrat. No way a woman trying to pick out a Christmas present for her kid had tried to kill herself. Suicidal people didn’t make plans for a future they wouldn’t be around to see.
On his left a steep rock wall angled back from the roadway. He slowed, squinting up at what he could see of Shilling’s Bluff. On impulse he swerved to the shoulder, parked and got out for a closer look.
More than the cold made him shiver as he stared up at the rough slope. How the hell had she come down that and into a busy road without being seriously hurt?
Killed.
It would, he thought, be a good place to kill someone.
He crossed the road and found a trail in the woods to one side of the bluff. Without stopping to question why, he climbed to the top.
He knelt. Lots of footprints in the snow here. Rounded and shallow as the wind smoothed off the edges and new snow filled the impressions, but definitely more than one person’s prints. Someone could have waited. Hidden in the trees—
His cell phone chirped, nearly sending him headfirst over the edge of the cliff.
He stood and turned away from the precipice to answer. His mother’s voice screeched at him across the line.
“Ty-baby? Is that you? You sound like you’re sitting on the wing of an airplane.”
He capped one ear with his hand. “I’m outside, Ma. It’s windy.”
“Outside?” she chattered. “In this weather? You’ll catch your death. What are you doing outside?”
He looked over his shoulder at the bluff, the nothingness beyond. What the hell was he doing? Trying to prove that Mia Serrat was as stable as she seemed? That she hadn’t imagined someone pushing her?
Or trying to eliminate one of his reasons for keeping her at arm’s length?
He swore and pulled his collar up as he started back toward his car. It was friggin’ freezing out here. Sure there were lots of footprints. The sheriff’s deputies would have checked out the scene after the accident.
“I’m headed back in, Ma. What did you need?”
