He saw her wince, but then she rallied. “He can’t possibly have been discharged. Do his parents know about this?”
“Are you questioning me again, Nurse?”
She backed off a step. “Of course not.” Then something glinted in her eyes. That was new, too, he thought, startled. She’d always been docile to a fault.
“Yes,” she amended.
“Well, don’t. It’s none of your concern.”
“He’s my patient. Have you considered the risk of infection if you take him out of here?”
He withered her with his gaze and glanced at his watch. “That’s why he’s chock-full of antibiotics. I’ll see you for rounds in twenty minutes.”
“Where can you take Gilbert Travalini in twenty minutes?” she persisted.
To the barren roads snaking through the federal land behind the Saddlebag bar, he thought, and to a brief, small slice of heaven before, God forbid, the boy actually saw the pearly gates for real. “Don’t worry about it,” he answered. “Get to work.”
She backed off another step.
“Caitlyn—Nurse Matthews.” He corrected himself fast. Her gaze lifted to his, a little too fast, a little too searchingly. Sam felt his stomach spasm. “It was a one-time thing. You know that, right?”
This time her expression didn’t change. “Of course. I never intended for it to be anything else.”
You were a virgin, damn it! The words blared through his head, though Sam held himself back from shouting them aloud. Virgins didn’t run around suddenly unzipping their uniforms on a whim. Rigid, prissy little virgins didn’t. This virgin shouldn’t have. So why had she?
And why him?
“Please be careful,” she said suddenly. She inclined her head toward the boy. “With whatever you’re intending to do with Gilbert.”
And that, he thought, was all the importance she gave to making love with the doctor she’d worked with and driven crazy for the past four years. Sam raked a hand through his dark hair. “Come on, Gilbert,” he called. “Time to roll.”
The boy launched out of his seat with more energy than he should have possessed. They headed for the lobby doors together. Sam didn’t look back.
He didn’t see her eyes fill with tears.
Cait completely forgot that she’d dreaded stepping foot back into this hospital. She blinked hard and fast against crying, and practically dove headfirst into the corridor that led to the new maternity wing. Everything inside her screamed to get away from Sam Walters before he saw her fall apart.
“Oh, God, what have I done to my life?” Suddenly Cait’s starched spine crumbled and she leaned against the wall, hugging herself. She was shaking. Badly.
It was a one-time thing. You know that, right?
The truth was, she’d spent the past three days in a state of agonized expectancy because she hadn’t actually been sure.
She hadn’t seen him or heard from him since they’d been rescued from Branson Hines and the underground room where he’d held them hostage until Tabitha Monroe—the hospital administrator, who for some reason felt compelled to be Cait’s friend when Cait very much preferred her solitude—had taken it into her head to have all twelve orange pounds of Cait’s cat pose as a baby in a blanket in an effort to meet Hines’s ransom demands. Cait scrubbed her hands over her face as she stepped into the maternity wing. Tabitha sometimes tended toward extremes, but it had worked. Sort of.
She veered left. The new wing was like no hospital she’d ever imagined working in. The walls were done in bright, primary colors that jarred her a little in her current mood. She passed the newborns in the nursery without looking at them. Her stride hitched up as she passed the storage room where Branson Hines had cornered twelve employees a week ago, changing her life forever.
She reached the nurses’ station, then hesitated and looked around furtively.
No one was here. She’d banked on it. She knew hospital routine and right now, everyone would be gearing up for rounds, cleaning up after breakfast. She stepped behind the desk and found the large brown envelope she was looking for near the computer station. It was the one that would carry memos and other paperwork from this department to other areas of the hospital. She unwound the little string that held it closed, drove a hand into her pocket and came up with a slim, white envelope.
She’d printed Dr. Jared Cross’s name in neat block letters across the front and underlined it three times. She’d sealed it with a little blob of white wax.
“Help me, please,” she whispered, “before I lose my mind.” She dropped her envelope into the bigger one, closed it again and fled the maternity wing.
She could have just gone to his office to ask for an appointment, sparing herself all this subterfuge. For that matter, she could have sent the note via the nurses’ station in her own pediatrics unit. But she didn’t want anyone to know what she was up to. She didn’t want any of her co-workers to go stuffing their own mail inside the pediatrics envelope, recognizing her handwriting on a personal envelope to Dr. Cross.
They couldn’t know. No one could know what was happening to her. And she certainly couldn’t confide in a stranger, couldn’t go outside the hospital to another psychiatrist. The mere thought nearly crippled her with panic. Maybe she wasn’t his usual prepubescent patient, but Cait knew Jared Cross. He was the director of child psychiatry at Mission Creek Memorial, and something about him had always appealed to her. He was a little gruff, eminently practical, not given to maudlin emotion.
She would have to trust him with this. There was no one else.
Cait rode the elevator up to the pediatrics floor in the main building. She was in Chelsea Cambridge’s room when Sam walked in. This time she was ready for him.
“Good morning, Doctor.”
He scowled at her as he took the patient’s chart from her hands. “So that’s how we’re going to play this, hmm?” he asked in an undertone.
Cait hesitated. It was as though they’d never spoken downstairs. Maybe he was going crazy, too. Or maybe she had imagined that whole encounter.
The very real possibility of that had her stomach rolling.
“It was a one-time thing,” she said, just to be sure.
“That it was.”
She turned away from him quickly to ease down the sheets on the little girl’s bed because she wasn’t at all sure what her expression would reveal at his response. Then she watched him gently palpate the child’s abdomen, and her mind spun away.
Those hands…
Cait had a sudden, shattering image of them on her own skin, closing over her breasts, his breath hot where his face had been buried at her throat. She’d thought she’d been dying. Not because of anything Hines had done or might still do, but because for the first time in her life, she’d known
