from the inner office. The blonde crossed the room to stand at Ripley’s shoulder and watch Cage walk away.
“Yeah,” Ripley agreed. “Wow, what a jerk.”
Tansy’s lips curved slightly and she glanced at Ripley. “That’s not quite what I meant. That’s who rescued you from Ida Mae’s husband?” They watched as Cage crouched down and began copying serial numbers off the linear accelerator in Treatment Room One.
A foul, whiskey-laden breath on the side of her neck. Hard, grabbing fingers. A sweep of glittering glass. Panic. Warm black eyes and cool waterfalls. Ripley shivered and rubbed her arms where goose bumps came to life at the thought. “Yes, but that doesn’t make him any less dangerous to R-ONC. You heard him at the meeting. He’s on a witch hunt.”
They watched him bend over to peer at the electrical hookups. With a fleeting spark of her usual manner, Tansy murmured, “I wouldn’t mind being the witch he’s hunting for, if you know what I mean.” She leveled a telling glance at her friend. “But I get the feeling he’s already picked her out.”
“Did you just call me a witch?” Ripley deflected the quick jolt with sarcasm, but Tansy’s knowing look told her the sparks flying in the little office hadn’t been her imagination.
What a time for her libido to wake up. What a poor choice for it to make.
“Just calling it how I see it, Dr. Davis.” Then Tansy sobered. “I’m just glad he was there for you yesterday. When I imagine what might have happened…”
“Let’s not think about it right now, okay?” Ripley patted her friend’s arm and tried to summon a reassuring smile. “It’s over.”
Then she remembered Harris’s words in the atrium, and thought of her desk chair that morning. The closed files. The subtle disarray. And she wondered.
Was it really over? Or was it just beginning?
FINGERS POUNDING on the keyboard of the linear accelerator, Cage congratulated himself on learning three things in the first two minutes he’d been in the Radiation Oncology department. One, Ripley Davis didn’t want him auditing R-ONC. Two, she didn’t want him to know about the papers on her desk. And three, she was so goddamn beautiful she made his chest ache.
The first two were no surprise. The third was shocking. Cage had thought all the softer emotions had been burned out of him long ago with a single pencil-thin beam of radiation and a tidal wave of guilt.
“I keep the programs updated.” Her voice at his shoulder was a jolt he refused to show, but the buzz of her nearness sliced through him and set up a greedy alarm in his brain.
“So I see.” And it was true. She’d upgraded the software every time another glitch in the treatment equipment had come to light. “Too bad it takes people dying for Radcorp to debug these death traps.” He slapped the shielding of the linear accelerator with a scowl.
She sucked in a breath on what he thought might have been a growl. “I think those stories are exaggerated, don’t you, Mr. Cage? And let’s not forget the hundreds of thousands of patients who are helped each year by radiation treatment.”
“But it’s okay to forget about the people who died because Radcorp and a group of R-ONCs at Albany Memorial ignored the reports and kept treating patients with a broken accelerator?” Cage’s fingers were beginning to hurt from punching the keys so hard. He paused, clenched his fists and blew out a breath. “Never mind. The programs look fine and your fixes are up to date. Where are your disposal logs?”
“I get it.” Ripley’s voice sharpened and the air between them snapped. “You dislike R-ONCs in general. And here I thought it was me you didn’t like. Because let me tell you, Cage, I’m grateful for your help yesterday, but—”
Whatever she’d planned to tell him was lost in a flurry of noise and color from the outer office.
“Dr. Rip, Dr. Rip!” With lots of “vroom-vroom” noises and imaginary squealing tires, a purple-haired girl flew toward the treatment room, pushing a small boy in a hospital-issue wheelchair. They skidded to a halt and the girl’s hair slid off her head and landed on the floor.
Ripley and the kids took one look at the purple road-kill and started laughing.
Cage took one look at the girl’s naked pink scalp and the fine blue veins beneath, and shuddered.
“Livvy, what are you doing here? I thought you were between treatments. Is everything okay?” Ripley hugged the girl and bent to pick up the purple wig. “Hey, Milo. What’s up?” She didn’t touch the boy, who sagged back as though exhausted by the shared laughter. A Boston baseball cap looked ridiculously large on his bald head.
Cage’s stomach clenched on the three cups of coffee he’d poured into it that morning. One of the reasons he’d chosen Rad Safety was its distance from the actual patients. He could help them without ever seeing them. Without remembering.
“Belle called my mom and said Milo wasn’t feeling so hot.” The girl was older than she looked at first, Cage realized as she adjusted the purple wig on her slippery scalp. She was probably in her early teens, though her painful thinness and large eyes made her seem younger. “So a few of us came in for a visit. We were just talking about the game next week, weren’t we, Milo?”
The boy in the chair nodded limply. “Yep.” The word was no more than a breath, but Ripley didn’t seem to notice. Her callousness made Cage think of other doctors. Other times.
She glanced at him and explained, though he hadn’t asked. “The Tammy Fund has a box at the ballpark and they give it to a different R-ONC department after each game. The kids love it. We’ve got tickets for next week.”
Cage shrugged. “Baseball’s okay.”
He felt the damaged ligaments in his pitching arm ache. The pain was duller than the throb in his soul, but both reminded him of a man who’d cared more for his career than his family.
“Do I know you?” The soft question pulled Cage from the memory of broken promises and busted dreams, but he had no answer for the girl. Nor did he take the hand she offered when she said, “I’m Olivia Minton.”
“Cage. And no, we haven’t met.” He backed away on the pretext of flipping the green binder open and studying an unseen column of numbers.
“Don’t worry, kids. He’s rude to everyone.” Ripley glared at him and herded the children away. “Did you just stop by to say hi, or did you want something?”
“We wanted to say hi,” Livvy said staunchly at the same time Milo breathed, “We wanted some markers.”
Ripley laughed and the sound zinged through Cage. “Going to tattoo yourselves again?” She crossed to a desk drawer and pulled out a handful of pens. “Just remember, these are the permanent ones we use to mark you for radiation treatment. The ink takes weeks to fade.”
Milo cheered softly and clutched the pens in his lap like a prize. Livvy thanked Ripley and cast one long look back at Cage before she pushed Milo out the door, but Cage didn’t tell the girl where she’d seen him before.
He was five years, one court battle and a master’s degree in Health Physics away from being that man. His love of the game had faltered, leaving
