His gaze traveled over her face, settled on her lips. He remembered. And wanted to kiss her even now.
She studied his handsome face, the crow’s-feet near his eyes that seemed more deeply etched than she recalled, the fatigue weighing down his expression, the bleakness in his eyes that had disappeared when they’d made love. Desperately she wished she could read his mind, know his thoughts, understand what was driving his recent behavior.
“Adam, why didn’t you wake me before you left the other morning?”
If she’d shocked him by refusing to fight with him, her blunt question shocked him more. She saw something akin to remorse flicker across his face, but before he answered the unit secretary buzzed her to the room of a patient whose IV machine alarm was sounding. She replaced her beeper and turned to ask Adam if they could grab a bite together and talk when she went on break.
He wasn’t there.
Glancing down the hallway, she watched him nod at something Kelly said and disappear with her best friend into a patient’s room.
Liz bit into her lower lip. What was going on? Nothing made sense. Adam’s actions said one thing, his eyes another.
Her beeper buzzed in her pocket again and with another quick glance toward the room Adam had disappeared into she went to reset Mrs Sanchez’s IV.
Kelly at his side, Adam greeted his patient, then paused beside her bed.
How much longer could he do this?
The truth was, he was only delaying the inevitable, but he hadn’t been able to utter the words to tell Liz it was over the other night.
He cursed his own weakness, wishing he could blame that, too, on his MS, but he couldn’t.
“She’s running a low-grade temperature, but all her other vitals are normal.” Kelly cut into Adam’s self-derision.
How could he have fussed at Liz for daydreaming and then done the same minutes later?
“Dr Cline?” Kelly said again.
He shook off his melancholy and checked his patient, assessing her closely for signs of infection to go along with the temperature. Not finding any, he gave Kelly discharge orders with instructions for the patient to contact his office immediately if her temperature spiked or any new problems developed.
With dread he left the hospital room and prepared to face Liz. Since Kelly, walking beside him and chatting away, said Mrs Arnold was the only one of his patients she had been assigned, the other two must be under Liz’s care.
Immediately, he spotted her waiting outside Mrs Arnold’s room.
Kelly shot Liz a knowing smile, which Liz nervously returned before meeting Adam’s gaze. Kelly elbowed him, then headed toward the nurses’ station.
Adam refused to name the emotion pulsing through him at the sight of Liz, standing in the hallway, looking unsure whether to slap him or kiss him.
She was hurt, confused. He could see it on her face, in her golden brown eyes. She deserved so much better than what he was giving her.
“Liz,” he started, then paused. He couldn’t flat out say they were finished in the middle of the hospital hallway, but he couldn’t give her reason to think they’d work through this either.
“Mrs Sanchez is ready to be discharged, but I’m not so sure about Robert Keele,” Liz said in a professional tone, her spine straight. However, her gaze couldn’t be mistaken for anything other than personal. She wanted to know what was going on and wouldn’t sidestep the issues any longer.
He needed to put some distance between them.
“Whether or not Mrs Sanchez is ready to be discharged is for me to decide. Not you.”
Liz’s eyes widened. She gave him a doe-caught-in-the-headlights stare. A doe who had just been fatally struck by the hunter she’d mistakenly trusted. Him.
He could do this. No matter that his insides wrenched. No matter that his heart felt like it might explode. No matter that he’d rather die than hurt her this way.
She pinned him with her stare. “Have I done something to upset you? I know I’ve been distracted with Gramps’s death. If I’ve said or done something wrong, I’m sorry.”
He cursed the disease running through his body, the disease that made reassuring Liz wrong.
“I’ve got several patients to see and need to get back to my office for afternoon clinic. We’ll talk later.” He turned, kept his back as stiff as hers had been, and entered Robert Keele’s room.
Determined to focus on his patient rather than the stunned woman he’d left in the hallway, he greeted the man he’d done a hernia repair on earlier that morning. “How’s your pain this afternoon?”
“I hurt, but I expected to,” the fifty-three-year-old said, scooting up onto his pillow, wincing in the process.
“Be careful,” his wife warned from the uncomfortable-looking chair pushed up next to the hospital bed. “You don’t want to pop anything open.”
“Definitely not,” Adam agreed, although he’d done a good job with Robert’s procedure and the site wouldn’t easily “pop open”. He pulled back the thin white blanket so he could check the repair site.
Liz entered the room, but Adam refused to look her way, refused to acknowledge her presence despite every single cell in his body crying out for him to look at her, hold her, love her. He continued to examine Mr Keele and was pleased with what he found.
“I last changed his dressing about thirty minutes ago,” Liz said from beside Adam. Her voice was almost emotionless, cluing him in to the fact that she fought tears.
He knew every little nuance about this woman. That she’d learned long ago to keep a tight rein on her emotions when in public, but that tonight her tears would flow. Because of him.
He bit back an apology.
He owed her one. This was his fault. If he had any decency at all he’d tell her it was over and let her get on with her life.
Liz ducked behind the nurses’ station and grabbed a stack of papers without looking to see what they were.
“Liz?”
She didn’t meet Kelly’s eyes.
“Is something wrong?”
She couldn’t answer.
“Liz?” Her friend’s concern heightened her voice.
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m just tired.” And I want to throw up.
How could the man she’d loved for months act as if she was an inconvenience he wished would go away?
“I don’t believe you,” Kelly said, her hands on her hips and a determined gleam in her voice. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Could
