It’ll give us a chance to pick a couple of pictures and get them to the marketing department in time for the opening in a few weeks.”
As soon as the waiter returned with his receipt, James pocketed it and his card and stood. Mila followed, now wondering if it wouldn’t have been better to have their coffee here. She’d wanted to get back to her own territory, but was it really wise to invite the tiger into your sanctuary?
Melodramatic, Mila.
But as she slid into the leather seat of his luxury car, she wondered if she really was being ridiculous. The closer they got to the clinic, the more her nerve endings twitched in dismay. This was a mistake. She knew it was but it was also far too late to change her mind, not without him knowing she was afraid to be alone with him.
They turned onto the road where her clinic was located just as her cell phone sounded with a weird chirp, the one she’d preprogrammed to sound if the silent alarm on her clinic was tripped.
“Oh, no.”
Just as James glanced her way, a question in his eyes, she saw her worst fears were realized. The glass door to her clinic had been smashed wide open.
James saw it too, and screeched to a halt just outside the entry. Before either of them could say a word a figure in dark clothing dashed out through the opening and sprinted down the street.
“STAY HERE!”
James gritted out the command as he threw open the door to his vehicle and dashed after the intruder. He turned the same corner as the man, only to be confronted by a spiderweb of alleys and apartment fronts. There was no sign of anyone. No witnesses. No perpetrator.
If Mila hadn’t still been in the car, he would have ventured farther to make sure the jerk wasn’t hiding in one of the dumpsters or behind one of the parked cars, but what if he had an accomplice? What if, even now, Mila had decided to go inside her clinic on her own?
“Hell.” He should have just called the police and stayed with her, but the instinct to chase down whoever it was had been too strong. And now he was at least five minutes away from the clinic.
Pivoting toward the opening of the alley, he took off the way he’d come, his gaze seeking out his car as soon as he turned the corner. And found the passenger door open, the seat empty.
“Damn it, Mila!”
The muttered words were swallowed by the flow of traffic on the busy street. Why had no one stopped to help when they’d seen someone breaking in? Maybe because this wasn’t the safest area of town.
And Mila lived here...had just gone into that dark clinic all alone.
Reaching the door, he found it still locked, so he stepped through the opening, glass crunching beneath his shoes. His instinct was to call out to her, but if someone else was lurking in the shadows, he was afraid he’d tip him off. Instead, he stopped for a second and listened.
He heard someone talking. Was it just Mila on her phone, reporting the break-in to the police? Or was someone else in there?
Picking his footsteps a little more carefully to avoid snapping more glass, he made his way through the inky interior. She hadn’t turned the lights on. Why?
He reached the narrow hallway and drew up an internal map of the clinic from his visit a week ago. The voices were coming from the right, from the direction of the exam room he remembered seeing. Pausing outside the open door, he again heard Mila’s voice, the low sound coming across as calm and soothing...as if worried about spooking a frightened animal.
It was then that it dawned on him. She wasn’t speaking English. It was Spanish. She’d trekked through the Amazon basin, so she knew both Spanish and Portuguese.
He took a deep breath and spun around the corner, a streetlamp shining outside the window making it a little easier to see.
Mila, who was crouching in the gloom, grappling with someone or something, squeaked out a warning. He braced himself for attack.
Only the fear on her face was aimed squarely at him, not whatever was next to her.
“God, James, you almost gave us a heart attack.”
He’d almost given them...? The thing next to her was evidently a who...not a what.
“What the hell is going on?”
Reaching to the right, where he remembered the light switch being, he flipped it on. Two pairs of eyes blinked up at him. His attention swiveled to the small figure huddled close to Mila.
It was a child—a young boy around three years old—not an armed intruder, like he’d feared. Which meant the man who’d run away from the building was what? A father? Boyfriend? Some kind of sexual predator...? His brows drew together in anger. Who broke into a medical clinic and dropped off a kid?
In one hand, the boy clutched a gray blanket, the satin edge frayed and missing in spots. The child’s other hand was balled into a fist that he held against his mouth.
No. Not a fist. The child was sucking his thumb, fingers curled tightly into the palm of his hand. And those hollow, tearstained eyes...
The child stared at him for a second or two longer and then whimpered, cringing closer to Mila. James forced his frown away, realizing he probably made a scary figure standing over them, the emotions churning within him clearly visible.
“Está bien. No tengas miedo.” Mila’s voice was soft and comforting, even as she sent James another scathing glare.
She was telling the child not to be afraid?
What about him? She’d almost set him flat on his ass when he’d seen her kneeling there, envisioning all kinds of terrible things.
But this child was thin. Very thin and... His gaze stopped, chest squeezing tight enough to stop him from breathing for several seconds.
His feet. The boy’s feet. They were turned inward at an unnatural angle as if they were pairing up for a duel.
Clubbed. Both of them.
His inward curse rattled his ribs and shunted the pressure that had been gathering around his midsection to his throat. The deformity should have been corrected when the child was an infant.
He knelt next to the pair, his glance meeting Mila’s. “Is this one of your patients?”
“No.” She placed a hand on the boy’s head as if protecting him. From what? James’s fury?
He wasn’t angry. Not at the child, anyway. “I thought I told you to wait in the car.”
“I was going to, but I heard crying coming from inside the clinic.” She glanced toward the door just as the sound of a siren swept through the interior of the space. “And I knew the police would arrive at any second.”
Not soon enough to stop a bullet, though, if Mila had come upon something other than a frightened child. His anger came
