his shirt and tucking it into his slacks, Ivan paused to listen as a very blond woman with flawless skin, what looked to be surgically enhanced lips and hypnotically blue eyes, summarized the day’s current local news.
Same old, same old, he thought.
“C’mon,” he murmured under his breath, talking to her as if she could hear. “If the big one’s coming, now would be a good day for it to get here.”
But the woman seemed entirely oblivious to the idea of earthquakes or any disturbances that might be called upon to rescue him. Contrarily, she appeared quite content to pour her heart into a story about how the department stores were bearing up to the after-Christmas slump in sales.
Ivan gave it a few minutes, waited to hear something promising, then shook his head as the story dragged on forever.
If more people were like him, he thought, the department stores would find themselves in a permanent slump. As a rule, shopping had never tempted him. He bought only what he needed and he needed very little. A few serviceable shirts and slacks with an equal number of socks and underwear to go with them were practically all he ever required.
His one weakness, his only hobby, was Philharmonic concerts. He attended them religiously, going all over the western map, arranging his schedule and people’s operations, whenever possible, around concert dates. Music was the very core of his existence, the only time he ever felt mellow, although he would have opted to be burned at the stake rather than admit that to a living soul.
He preferred to be viewed as a godless, soulless, unrelenting holy terror who inspired admiration, respect and fear in his fellow surgeons, not necessarily in that order. As for the hospital’s fresh crop of residents, in Ivan’s view, they hardly existed, ranking only slightly higher than the rodents that could be found on the food chain.
And, though the thought really bothered him, he was going to have to put up with one for the sake of continuing to do that which gave his life purpose and meaning.
Grunting, he switched off the television set and then tossed aside the remote. It bounced off his sofa, falling on the floor beneath the glass-topped coffee table. He left it there.
“No earthquakes,” he muttered, disgruntled. That meant that he was going to have to find a way to get this resident to request a transfer. And quickly.
He smiled as he left the house. No problem. By the time he was finished with this resident, she would think pairing up with Satan was an improvement.
CHAPTER 4
She sternly told herself that she wasn’t going to be nervous.
In all honesty, she hadn’t thought she would be because ordinarily, she wasn’t. Life, which had tossed its curveballs and its change-ups at her when she least expected them, had trained her to be prepared for anything. An ordinary case of first-day nerves did not figure into it.
Having gone through all that she had in her thirty-four years, Bailey DelMonico liked to think of herself as fearless.
For the most part, especially in the eyes of her family, she was.
And she should be now, she told herself. With a stifled sigh, she discarded the plaid garment she’d just tried on and returned to her first choice, a subdued pencil skirt. Black to match the chief of neurosurgery’s heart. Or so she’d been led to believe. Her two housemates, Jennifer and Adam, first-year residents at Blair Memorial, same as her, had sworn to it more than once.
Could be all talk, she reasoned, zipping up the skirt. Besides, no matter what this neurosurgeon’s reputation was—justified or not—she was fairly certain that he wouldn’t consume her for breakfast.
Bailey smiled to herself. She had already faced someone like that. Several “someones” like that, actually, if she were keeping count. Reformed cannibals. Those were part of the “perks” of having missionary parents who were famous for being the first to tread where angels feared to go.
Those angels, her father was fond of scoffing, were an overly cautious breed. And then he’d follow his comment up with his booming laugh. A laugh that somehow always made everything seem so much better. A laugh that was full of warmth and hope. And love.
Bailey pulled her honey-blond hair back and stuck in a few strategic pins to hold it up. It made her look older. Constantly mistaken for someone in her early twenties, she had a feeling she needed all the help she could get to be taken seriously.
God, but she wished she could hear her father’s laugh now. But she had left all that behind her. Her parents, their mission and her other life.
Her second other life, as well, she thought cryptically. Technically, she was about to embark on her third life. The first had involved being the daughter of two prominent, dedicated missionaries. She’d been halfway toward fulfilling her parents’ fondest dream and becoming a missionary herself before she realized that was not what she wanted. Her “second life” began when she’d decided, after a visit back to the States to check out colleges, to rebel against “all that goodness” that surrounded her. In her third year at Stanford, during spring break, she ran off and got married to the son of a professor. At the time, she’d thought that was what she wanted.
And it was. For about two months.
Slowly, she discovered, much to her surprise, that “all that goodness” she was fleeing was actually packaged inside of her. Not in such a way that she felt compelled, as her parents, Grace and Miles, were to spread the word of God and medicines in the darkest parts of the world. Her take on “goodness” was to help the sick and make them well. She wanted to become a doctor, a surgeon. The best surgeon she could be.
That was where she and her husband, Jeff, differed. She wanted to be a surgeon, he wanted her to be his wife and nothing else. He’d laughed and told her that taking care of him and his needs would always be more than a full-time job for her.
It took very little for her to realize that he was serious, that “carefree” was perilously close to “irresponsible” and that “dropdead gorgeous” only went so far in the scheme of things and was a very poor trade-off for respect. There was nothing about Jeff she could respect and he in turn seemed to have none for no one, least of all her.
What she’d foolishly believed was the greatest love of all time was merely a case of intense infatuation. She was more in love with the idea of love than she was with Jeff. She just hadn’t been smart enough at the time to know the difference. Jeff had been a feast for the eyes, beautiful in every sense of the word, but only outwardly. Inwardly, he lacked even the simplest of attributes that went into comprising her parents and her older brother, Simon.
Accustomed to selfless people, selfishness, especially of the magnitude that Jeff eventually displayed, was something Bailey found she just couldn’t get used to or accept. So, eighteen months after she said “I do,” she said “I don’t” and the marriage she’d thought would last forever was terminated.
Her parents waited for her return with open arms. And for a while, it was all right. But from the very beginning, she was restless. Restless because she’d discovered that there was another road she wanted to follow. One she was certain she was capable of traveling to the very end. One she swore to herself she wasn’t choosing just on a whim. She was a different person than she’d been six years earlier.
In their work, her parents were predominantly concerned with healing the soul,
