was the expert when it came to skin conditions, but Clay knew enough to bet this was exactly what she thought it might be. Melanoma. The deadliest form of skin cancer. And the most likely to have spread. Whether it had metastasized to his bones and caused the femur to break was something they wouldn’t be able to determine without more tests. Regardless, both conditions needed immediate treatment. The break was the most urgent, but the size of the growth on his other leg was also worrisome.
He glanced up at her and gave a nod. “He does have a lesion.” He added a quick description, leaving out the actual word.
“I need to see it to be sure.”
Mr. Phillips started to reach for the sheet again, but Clay stopped him with a hand to the shoulder. He glanced back up at Tessa. “Could you leave us alone for a moment?”
Even with her red hair pulled back in a clip and twin smudges of exhaustion beneath her deep green eyes, Tessa was beautiful. Probably even more so now than she’d been back in medical school. There was an iron determination that hadn’t been there when they’d been together. Or maybe it had been and he’d simply been too busy—and too entranced by her porcelain skin and vibrant personality—to notice.
But he saw it now, and so he added, “Please? Trust me on this.”
Without another word, she ducked beneath the fabric of the privacy screen rather than pulling it to the side.
He turned back to his patient. “Mr. Phillips, Dr. Camara is a professional.”
“Still. My wife has been the only woman to see me naked in all these years.”
“You’ve never had a female doctor?”
The man shook his head. The pain had to be excruciating, but evidently the thought of having Tessa see him was even more uncomfortable than his injuries. Clay could always call in another dermatologist—a male one—and risk bringing Tessa’s wrath down on his head. But that wasn’t fair, either. Tessa was a doctor, and to send her away just because she was a woman made something stick in the lower regions of his gut. So he came up with another solution instead.
“How about if we do this? We’ll keep your hospital gown where it is, and I’ll cover you with the sheet like this.” Clay arranged the folds so that it draped over his waist and created a little “U” of exposed skin. Only the skin lesion was visible. Nothing else. They’d have to examine the rest of him to see if there were any other suspicious areas but they could do that while he was under anesthesia for his leg, if tests showed he was strong enough to even have the operation.
The head of the bed had been cranked up so that Mr. Phillips could see what Clay was doing, and the man visibly relaxed. “I guess that would be okay. But don’t let her pull it any farther.”
Clay gave him a grave nod. “You have my word.”
“Well, okay, then.”
“Tessa? Could you step back in here?”
The man turned his head sharply. “I have a daughter named Tessa.”
“Well, see there? That must be a sign.”
Tessa came over to stand by the bed. “Did I hear you right? You have a Tessa at home?”
“Well, not at home. She’ll be forty-nine next week. Lives in Montana with her husband and three horses.”
“Do you have any other family members you want us to call?”
Even as she spoke, her eyes were already on the skin lesion, and Clay could see her mentally sizing it up in her head.
“My wife’s been gone for ten years and my two kids—Tessa and Jeremy—live a long way away.”
Clay’s gut tightened. Maybe Mr. Phillips should think about moving closer to them. But that wasn’t up to him. It was up to his family. “Did you give the front desk a way to reach either of them?”
“Yes.”
Tessa rounded the exam table until she stood across from Clay, although she didn’t look directly at him. Instead, she kept her gaze on their patient. “Thank you for letting me see the spot. We’ll need to take that off, maybe even while Dr. Matthews fixes your leg. Would that be all right?”
“I s’pose so. As long as you keep your eyes where they’re supposed to be, young lady.”
Tessa smiled. “Absolutely. I give you my word.”
The man’s head fell back onto the pillow, the pain lines deepening. “Then what d’you say we get this show on the road.”
An hour later—with an EKG and bloodwork confirming that Mr. Phillips had the constitution of an ox, even if he had the bones of the eighty-year-old man he was—Tessa shared an operating room with Clay for the very first time.
And the very last time, if she had her way. Her hands might not be shaking, but the rest of her certainly was as Clay stood across from her, working on the broken femur as she excised the skin tumor on the man’s other leg. “It’s not as deep as it could be,” she said, unable to prevent herself from talking as she worked, something she’d always done. No one had seemed to mind it in the past. And Clay didn’t seem to mind it now.
But for his part he’d been mostly silent as he worked on drilling holes for the pins that would hold the ends of the patient’s bone together and allow it to heal.
Once she’d gotten clear margins, Mr. Phillips would have to undergo a PET scan to see if the cancer had spread. The tumor was large enough to make her uneasy, but things like this had surprised her before. She could only hope for the same good outcome. She glanced up. “How does his other leg look?”
Clay paused for a minute, before meeting her gaze. “I think he’s got a good shot, if he’s careful.”
Keeping true to their word, Clay had made sure that Mr. Phillips’s private parts were covered at all times, even though the man would never know the difference. And it made something inside her warm to know that Clay cared about his patient’s dignity.
He was a good man. Even if he wasn’t the right one for her.
And he wasn’t. She’d done a lot of thinking over the past four years about her actions. Her temper—or maybe it was her pride—had gotten the best of her, and she’d ended their relationship in the worst possible way, mailing his gift back to him and basically telling him to get lost.
Yes, maybe someday she would find a way to apologize for that. She wasn’t sure when or how, but now that they were working together, surely it was a sign that Fate was giving her an opportunity to make things right. Maybe they could at least become colleagues, even if they could never be friends.
She screwed up her courage, finding it took a lot more cranks of the handle than she’d expected. But she finally took a deep breath and succeeded in opening her mouth. “Do you want to go grab something to eat once we’re finished? Unless you’ve already had dinner.”
He eyed her for a second as if not completely trusting her motives. “Where did this come from?”
“If you’d rather not…”
Okay,
