if the occasion and the dress called for it. Now every day when she showered she saw her flat chest, the scars. There wasn’t anything sexy about that. Yet she was a woman, lived, breathed and felt like a woman, but one who strapped on her chest the symbols of the fairer sex every day before she came to work. Pretending she was still who she’d used to be.
The decision had seemed so clear when she’d made it. Get rid of the tissue, the ticking time bomb on her chest. Never put herself in a position to hear the words that had devastated her mother’s life. You have breast cancer.
Because of lab tests and markers, she’d thought like a scientist, but now she had to deal with the feelings of a woman who was no longer comfortable in her body.
Then there was tall, masculine and sexy-as-hell Jackson sitting directly across from her, smiling like he had a secret.
She bet his secret was nowhere as big as hers. “You took me by surprise earlier.”
“I took myself by surprise.”
She liked knowing that the kiss had been totally spontaneous. “So, since you asked, I’m not seeing anyone. Today’s just been hard. That’s why I—”
“I understand.” His beeper went off. He checked it. “Let me know when you’re leaving later and after we pop in on Jim again I’ll walk you to your car.”
It wasn’t a question. She liked that about him, too. “Okay.”
Except later, when Jackson walked her to her car, after visiting the hospital and finding Dr. Gordon deeply asleep and looking like he floated on air, Jackson reverted to perfect-gentleman mode. No arm around her shoulder or hand-holding as they walked. Whatever magic they’d conjured earlier had worn off. He simply smiled and wished her good night, told her to get some rest, more fatherly than future boyfriend material, and disappointingly kept a buffer zone between them as she got into her car.
As she drove off, checking her rearview mirror and seeing him watch her leave, his suit jacket on a fingertip and hanging over his shoulder, looking really sexy, she wondered if he’d had time to come to his senses, too. Something—was it her?—held him back. Then, since she knew her secret backward and forward, and how it kept her from grabbing at the good stuff in life, she further wondered what his secret was.
JACKSON TOSSED HIS keys onto the entry table in his Westlake condo, thinking a beer would taste great about now, but knowing he’d given up using booze as an escape. It had cost what had been left of his marriage to get the point across.
A long and destructive battle with PTSD had led to him falling apart and quitting his position as lead surgeon at Savannah General Hospital just before they’d planned to fire him three years ago. The ongoing post-traumatic stress disorder had turned him into a stranger and strained his relationship with his teenage sons, frightening them away. It had also ensured his wife of twenty years had finally filed for divorce.
He’d lost his right lower leg in an IED accident in Afghanistan. It had been his second tour as an army reservist. He’d volunteered for it, and for that his wife had been unable to forgive him. She’d deemed it his fault that the improvised explosive device had caused him to lose his leg. He’d returned home physically and emotionally wounded, and, piled onto their already strained marriage from years of him choosing his high-maintenance education and career over nurturing their life together, she couldn’t take it.
His fault.
Their marriage had been unraveling little by little for years anyway. High-school sweethearts, she’d then followed him on to college. His grandfather used to tease him that she was majoring in marriage. Then they’d accidentally got pregnant the summer before he’d entered medical school. With their respective families being good friends, there was no way he could have let her go through the pregnancy alone. So he’d done the honorable thing and they’d got married right before he’d entered medical school.
It hadn’t been long before they’d realized they may have made a mistake, but his studies had kept him too busy to address it, and the new baby, Andrew, had taken all of her time, and, well, they’d learned how to coexist as a small family of three. In his third year of medical school she’d got pregnant again. This time he’d got angry with her for letting it happen when he’d found out she’d stopped taking birth control pills. Evaline had said she wanted kids because he was never around. And so it had gone on.
Then at the age of twenty-seven and in the second year of his surgical residency, he’d signed up for the army reserves. One weekend a month he’d trained in an army field medical unit, setting up mobile triage, learning to care for mass casualties. When he’d finished his surgical residency and had been asked to stay on at Savannah General, his wife had thought maybe things would get better. But he’d started signing on with his reserve unit for two-week humanitarian missions for victims of natural disasters at home in the States. Soon he’d branched out to other countries, and when he’d been deployed to Iraq, Evaline had threatened to leave him.
He’d made it home six weeks later in one piece, his eyes opened to the need of fellow US soldiers deployed in the Middle East, and also finally accepting the trouble his marriage was in. They seeked out marriage counseling and he’d focused on working his way up the career ladder at Savannah General, and things had seemed to get better between them. He’d stayed on in the army reserves doing his one weekend a month, catching hell from Evaline if it fell on either of his sons’ sports team events, but he hadn’t been able to pick and choose his times of service. They’d limped on, keeping a united front for their boys and their families, while the fabric of their love had worn thinner and thinner.
Then, after a brutal series of attacks on US military personnel, they’d needed army reserve doctors and he’d volunteered to be deployed to Afghanistan. He had been one week short of going home when the IED had changed everything.
His fault?
He’d come home, had hit rock bottom after that, then eventually had got help from the veterans hospital, and had spent the next year accepting he’d never be the man he’d once been and cleaning up his act. He’d been honorably discharged from the army, too. But the damage to Evaline and his sons and his reputation as a surgeon had already been done. She’d filed for divorce.
As time had passed his PTSD had settled down and he’d felt confident enough to go back to work. That was when he’d figured there wasn’t anything for him back home in Georgia anymore. His wife had divorced him. His oldest son had wanted nothing to do with him. So since his youngest son would be attending Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, he’d sought employment in the area, hoping to at least mend that relationship. St. Francis of the Valley Hospital had been willing to give him a chance as a staff surgeon. With less responsibility, not being the head of a department but just a staff guy for a change, not having to deal with his ex-wife and her ongoing complaints anymore and enjoying the eternal spring weather of Southern California, his stress level had reached a new low.
Until today, when he’d had to tell his friend Jim Gordon some pretty rotten news—that he had metastatic cancer—and they both knew there’d be one hell of a battle ahead. Then, in a moment of weakness, seeing the distress Charlotte Johnson had been in, he’d let his gut take over and he’d moved in to comfort her. But it hadn’t worked out that way, because he’d played with fire. He knew he’d thought about her far, far differently than any other colleague. That he’d been drawn into her dark and alluring beauty while sitting across from her, looking at patient slides, for
