for a mention in the paper? “Joe Reilly,” he offered blandly.
She looked him over. “Yeah, I know.” She turned back to Nell. “Anyway, I need some cortisone samples for the kid in Exam Six. He has a rash in places you don’t want to think about.”
Nell moved toward the door. “I’ll get them for you.”
“That’s okay. I’ll just—”
“I really should get them myself,” Nell said.
In the field, Joe had developed an ear for a story and an instinct for survival. And something in her tone caught his attention as surely as the sound of a pistol being cocked.
Billie Parker shrugged. “Whatever. When you find the time. Exam Six.” She started to walk out.
“I’ll come with you,” Nell said. She turned to Joe, her clear blue eyes questioning. A conscientious frown pleated her forehead. He had to stop himself from smoothing it with his thumb. “I have to get back to my patients. Did I give you what you need?”
Not by a long shot, sweetheart, he thought.
But he couldn’t ask for what he needed. Not from anyone, and not from her.
He forced a grin. “Are you offering to play doctor, Dolan?”
Her head snapped back as if he’d slapped her. “Not unless you’re volunteering to turn your head and cough,” she said icily and stalked out.
Chapter 4
It was amazing what kind of crap a writer could produce when he was up against a deadline and had absolutely no feeling for his subject.
Joe scowled at the half page of text displayed on his computer screen. The cursor blinked impatiently at the bottom. Write. Now. Right now. Write.
He swore and reached for a cigarette. Every morning he counted them out, three cigarettes, his day’s allowance, and placed them carefully in a box in his breast pocket.
The box was empty. The cigarettes were gone.
Joe checked the ashtray on his desk to make sure. Yep, sometime between typing his byline and that last, remarkably bad paragraph citing statistics on America’s uninsured, he’d smoked his last cigarette. Exhausted his supply. Reached the end of his resources and his rope.
Maybe he should give up and turn in the piece his editor expected. Some slop with Nell Dolan as an angel of mercy dispensing hope and drugs to the city’s grateful poor. Nurse Practitioner Barbie, with long blond hair and a removable white lab coat.
She would hate that. Joe almost smiled.
But thinking about Nell, undressing Nell, only made him more frustrated in a different way. Physically frustrated. Sexually frustrated.
He reached again for his cigarettes. Hell. Crushing the empty box in his hand, he lofted it across the living room toward the wastebasket.
He missed. Loser.
In his front hall, the doorbell rasped like the final buzzer at a Bulls’ game.
Joe hobbled across the bare hardwood floor to the door and peered through the security glass at the side. Two men, one in uniform, occupied his front stoop.
Joe yanked open the door. “What the hell are you doing here?”
His middle brother Will walked in without asking. “Ma was worried when you bailed on dinner.”
Mike followed, thrusting a round Tupperware container into Joe’s hands. “She sent us with leftovers. Got any beer?”
His family. He loved them, admired them, let them down… And right now, he wanted them to go away.
“No.”
No alcohol. It was something else he was learning to deny himself.
Mike snorted. “God, now I’m worried about you, too. What about coffee?”
“Instant. And you’ll have to make it yourself.”
“Okay. In the pantry, right?” Without waiting for an answer, Mike snatched back the covered dish and carried it through to the kitchen. A cupboard door banged. A drawer slammed.
With a curse, Joe limped after him.
“You’re not walking too good,” Will observed behind him. “You hurt your ankle again?”
Joe gritted his teeth. He supposed it was too much to hope Will wouldn’t notice. “Nope. Just overdid it the past couple days.”
“Is that why you blew off dinner?”
“No. I told Ma. I have a deadline.”
“You still have to eat,” Will said.
Joe regarded his brother with loathing. “You sound exactly like Ma, you know that?”
Will grinned at him, five feet ten inches of compact, confident Chicago firefighter. “Say that when you’re on both feet, paperboy, and I’ll take you down.”
It was the kind of threat he used to make before the accident. Even with his brother’s qualifier—when you’re on both feet—the taunt improved Joe’s mood.
The microwave pinged from the kitchen.
“Dinner’s ready,” Mike called.
The scent of Mary Reilly’s lamb and onions permeated the hall. The house was small, with one bedroom on the ground floor and a couple of others upstairs that Joe had barely seen. Eight months ago, when he bought the place, the layout had been the house’s key selling point. He still couldn’t negotiate the stairs easily.
Stumping into the kitchen, Joe dug a spoon from the drawer. Will filled a kettle with water. Mike rescued the plastic container of stew from the microwave and slid it across the table.
Joe lowered himself cautiously onto a chair, cupping the Tupperware in one hand. The smell reminded him of decades of Sunday dinners eaten off his mother’s lace tablecloth in his parents’ dining room. The solid weight of the container in his hand was warm and comforting.
“Thanks,” he said gruffly.
Will lifted one shoulder in a shrug. No big deal.
“Mom made us come,” said Mike. “She and Pop are worried you’re not getting out enough.”
“Oh, like you do,” Joe retorted. “You still live in their basement.”
“I like saving money.”
“You like Ma doing your laundry,” Joe said.
“Yeah, well, a year ago she was emptying your bedpan and bringing your meals on a tray,” Mike said. “So I don’t want to hear it.”
An awkward silence fell.
Mike
