My security forces and I are going to be watching out for you—and watching over you—for the next few months.”
Chapter 3
Cody hooked his stethoscope around his neck and scribbled an entry in the form on the clipboard. Sixty-five patients in three and a half hours. Seventeen more to go.
All that was really required today was an intake exam—temperature, blood pressure, heart rate, updated health history, etc. The small team of highly skilled corpsmen assigned to the Pegasus site could have handled those tasks easily. Cody had wanted to meet each of the test cadre members personally, however, and get their take on their physical, emotional and mental condition.
If the first sixty-five were to be believed, he thought wryly, Captain Westfall had assembled the healthiest military team in the history of the universe. Only one had a condition that required watching. Lieutenant Colonel Bill Thompson, the Air Force rep, had mild atrial fibrillation, the most common form of heart arrhythmia. It was a lifelong condition that didn’t require medication or he wouldn’t have been cleared to fly. As a result, Cody didn’t anticipate having to spend a whole lot of time here in the clinic. Good thing, since providing medical care to the folks on-site was only the secondary reason for his presence out here in the middle of the desert.
Thinking of the twists and turns his life had taken to bring him to this place and this time, he tipped his chair against the wall. Slowly, inevitably, the familiar poison of guilt and regret seeped through his veins.
How the hell had things gone so wrong? Why hadn’t he seen the train barreling along the tracks before it ran right over him? How had he managed to lose himself long before he lost Alicia?
Knowing he’d find no answers to the questions that had plagued him more than three years now, he shoved his chair back and rejoined his team in the clinic area.
“Who’s next?”
“Major Jill Bradshaw,” a white-suited corpsman replied, handing him another clipboard. “She’s in cubicle two.”
A ripple of completely unprofessional anticipation feathered along Cody’s nerves. He’d been waiting for this particular patient.
“Is Petty Officer Ingalls with her?”
“Yes, sir.”
Hospital Corpsman Second Class Beverly Ingalls was one of only two women on Cody’s medical staff. She’d assisted him in the exam of other females assigned to the Pegasus cadre. She’d assist him in this one, as well.
As he walked toward the curtained cubicle, Cody skimmed Jill Bradshaw’s chart. Her vitals looked good. Better than good. So did her physical stats. Age, thirty-one. Height, five-seven. Weight, 121. Nonsmoker. Occasional social drinker. No history of serious or debilitating diseases.
Lifting the curtain, he nodded to the woman seated on the exam table, swinging a boot impatiently. “Hello again, Major.”
“Sir.”
She ran a quick glance down the white coat he wore over his uniform and cocked her head. “No glasses?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The photo in your background file shows you in a lab coat and wire-rimmed glasses. I sort of assumed the two went together.”
“Not anymore. It got to be a pain sliding my glasses up on my forehead whenever I bent to look in a microscope so I had Lasik surgery earlier this year.” He flipped through the forms on the clipboard. “I skimmed through your medical history. On paper you look pretty healthy.”
In Cody’s considered opinion, she looked pretty darned good in the flesh, too. Her skin glowed with a rosy tint that owed more to exercise and a sensible diet than cosmetics, and her corn-silk hair had a smooth, glossy sheen that dared a man to run his hands through it. Resisting the impulse, he handed Petty Officer Ingalls the chart and dragged his stethoscope from around his neck.
“Unbutton your shirt, please.”
While the major slipped the buttons on her BDU shirt, Cody wrapped himself in a cloak of professional detachment. Or tried to. For reasons he didn’t stop and analyze at the moment, he had trouble viewing Major Jill Bradshaw with his usual impassive objectivity.
If any of the patients he screened in the past ninety minutes was going to rouse the male in him, Cody would have bet money on the flame-haired knockout. Lieutenant Commander Hargrave filled out a uniform like no one he’d ever examined before. Yet he’d experienced no more than a fleeting appreciation at her perfect symmetry of face and form. In contrast, he felt his breath hitch as Jill Bradshaw’s hair parted to give him a glimpse of soft, white nape.
Suddenly Cody stiffened. Beneath that spun-gold silk lay one of the most vicious scars he’d seen since his E.R. rotation at Raleigh’s busy Memorial Hospital. The puckered seam of flesh tracked a path from just behind her left ear to her collar before disappearing under the crewneck of her regulation brown T-shirt.
“Someone left you quite a souvenir,” Cody commented, reaching up to finger the ridged flesh.
She jerked away as if stung. A quick rake of her fingers through her hair settled the sleek cap over the scar. The reaction intrigued him as much as the wound.
“Did you get that injury in the line of duty?”
“No.”
The curt reply suggested the subject was off-limits. Cody ignored the warning. “Knife or broken glass?”
“Neither.”
She flicked him an annoyed glance, saw he wasn’t going to go away, and shrugged.
“The cut was made by the jagged edge of an aluminum beer can. The jock I was out with had been demonstrating his intellectual prowess by ripping them in half with his teeth. I tripped, fell on one, and walked away with a permanent reminder of the consequences of consorting with idiots.”
“You’re lucky you walked away at all. Another inch to the right and you would have severed your carotid artery.”
“So I’ve been told.”
There was more to the story than that, but the glint in her brown eyes said that was all Cody would get. Today, anyway. He’d find out the rest of the tale sometime in the very near future, he promised himself as he plugged in the eartips of his stethoscope.
Jill left the clinic more rattled than she wanted to admit. What was it about the man that set off her silent alarms? It wasn’t just her usual conditioned response to big, too-handsome types. Or her still-unanswered questions about why he’d stopped to contemplate the night sky. This guy got to her in a way no man had in longer than she wanted to remember.
She’d had to force herself not to react when he’d leaned over her to press the stethoscope amplifier to her back. She’d also done her damnedest to ignore his unique blend of aftershave and antiseptic, but the scent seemed to follow her when she walked out into the slowly purpling dusk.
After two weeks she was still getting acclimated to New Mexico’s spectacular sunsets. With reds and pinks and blues pinwheeling across the sky, she reviewed her plans for the evening. She’d hit the northeast sector, she decided.
