lawyer talk.”
“I thought Fred was finished with all that in your study.”
“You know lawyers, they never stop.” He could see that Ella wanted details, so he embellished a little, elaborating on what had actually been on his mind earlier. “He wanted me to draw up a will, now that I’m head of the family.”
Ella drew in a breath, as if that could protect her from what she was thinking. She shook her head vehemently. “You’re not going anywhere for a very long time, big brother.” Peter was eleven years older than she was, which made him half brother, half father as far as she was concerned. And she intended to hang on to both halves. “I absolutely forbid it.”
Peter laughed, amused. “I’ll let Fred know.”
Ella tucked her arm through his. “You do that,” she agreed. “Meanwhile, let’s go out to dinner. My treat.”
He glanced at his watch. It was getting late. “Aren’t you on call?”
She’d drawn the graveyard shift. “Not for another few hours.”
He smiled fondly at Ella. He’d decided to open the envelope after she went home. But there was no hurry. The envelope wasn’t going anywhere. “Then you’re on. And I warn you, I have expensive taste.”
“Sky’s the limit,” she declared with a nonchalant wave of her hand. “As long as the sky’s hovering somewhere in the ten dollar neighborhood,” she added, her eyes twinkling.
He laughed. “I’ll get the coats, Rockefeller.”
“NHC is sending a man to negotiate with us at the end of the month,” Bethany announced without preamble as she walked into the small, cluttered office within an office where Peter retreated when he wasn’t either making hospital rounds or seeing patients in either the exam room or the E.R.
It was barely eight o’clock in the morning. His patients didn’t start coming in until nine-thirty and he had yet to make his rounds of the three that he currently had staying at the hospital.
Looking up from the medical journal he was reading, Peter frowned ever so slightly. He was going to have to remember to lock his doors until his hours began officially. Not even Eva, his nurse/receptionist was here yet.
He looked at the redhead for a long moment. “Don’t you have someplace else to be?”
Determined to break through his resistance, Bethany gave him a very complacent smile. “Not anyplace more important.”
So much for catching up on his reading before making his rounds, Peter thought. Putting a bookmark into the medical magazine, he let the pages flip closed and rose to his feet. “Well, you might not have anywhere else you need to be, but I do.”
She shifted to block his way. Other people at the hospital might think of Peter Wilder as a kind, gentle man, but at the moment, she thought of him as a stubborn jackass. A sexy jackass, but a jackass none the less. “That’s what you said yesterday in the cafeteria.”
He looked undaunted. “And it’s still true. I’m not a hundred percent certain what it is that some of the other members of the board of directors do with their time, but mine is better spent doing what I was meant to do—doctoring.”
It wasn’t exactly true. He knew that four of the members were doctors, just like he was. Senior members of the staff, they had full agendas to follow even when they weren’t seated around the table, reviewing tedious budgets and constricting overall policy. He knew she was an efficiency expert, whatever that actually meant.
“I have hospital rounds to make,” he told her, heading for the same door that she had breached a minute ago. “So, unless you want to spend the greater part of the next hour standing in the hospital corridor, waiting for me to finish seeing my patients, I suggest you get back to whatever it is you’re supposed to be doing.”
And with that, Peter made his second escape from the woman in as many days.
“What do you know about Bethany Holloway?”
Finished with his rounds, his office hours still more than half an hour away, Peter decided to swing by the chief administrator’s office to get a little information that might ultimately help him outsmart the attractive board member.
Henry Weisfield looked up from a travel brochure he’d been wistfully perusing and pushed his bifocals up his long, straight nose to look at the doctor he still thought of as “James Wilder’s boy.”
He smiled, letting his mind wander for a second. “That if I were thirty years younger, I’d be actively pursuing her. Why?” Henry slid his thin frame forward on his chair, his gray eyes momentarily bright with questions. “Are you interested?”
You would think that by the time a man hit forty, people would stop trying to pair him up with someone. Peter had been badly disappointed with that route once, and had more important things to do than spend time risking a part of his being that modern medicine had not come up with a way to heal.
“Only in so far as wanting to know where she comes from and why she’s here,” he answered after a beat.
Leaning back again, Henry told him what he knew. “The woman has not one but two business degrees. Graduated with top honors from Princeton and is a real go-getter. Wallace is very taken with her,” he added.
Peter thought of the way the chairman had fawned over Bethany yesterday. “I’m sure that’s a hit with Wallace’s wife.”
“Your father thought she had potential, too,” Henry remembered.
Not if he’d known that the woman would back a takeover by one of the larger HMO companies, Peter thought. “If she’s so brilliant, why isn’t she sitting on the board of some big-name organization? Why has she graced us with her presence here?”
“Good question.” Henry nodded more to himself than to him. “My best guess is that it has something to do with not wanting to be a little fish in a big pond.”
That made sense, he supposed. Peter wandered over to the window and looked down the four stories to the back parking lot. It was beginning to fill up. Employees were reporting for the morning shift; visitors were beginning to make their pilgrimages to see friends and loved ones in hospital rooms and outpatients were coming in for tests they most likely didn’t want to take.
They were doing fine just as they were, Peter thought. They didn’t need some bloated conglomerate coming in, telling them what to do.
Fisting his hands, he leaned his knuckles against the windowsill. “So she’s taken over our pond and is trying to make a name for herself here, is that it?”
Henry thought before answering. “Sounds about right.” And then he chuckled to himself. “I hear that you walked out on her in mid-sentence at the board meeting yesterday.”
Peter turned around to look at him. “I had patients waiting.”
Henry’s smile told him he knew better. “No, you didn’t. I checked your schedule. You left a full half hour before your first appointment.”
Peter thought that was rather an odd thing for Henry to do, but then Henry had always
