displeasure or dread. “What room is he in?”
“Three-fifty-four.”
“How are his vitals?”
“Better than they should be. I took them myself. Blood pressure’s a little high, though.”
A rueful smile touched Alex’s mouth. “Now there’s a surprise. I’ll take care of him,” she promised, feeling her guard go up even as she stood there. She hated confrontations. Especially when her reserves were low. And they were now. She’d managed exactly five hours of sleep between Harrington’s compound femur and an impacted radius and ulna. Some idiot had actually tried to catch a safe his accomplice had dropped from a second-story window.
“I also need to see Brent Chalmers and Maria Lombardi. And Dr. Castleman’s and Dr. McGraw’s patients, too,” she added, pulling a slip of paper from her pocket on which she’d written their patients’ names. Castleman and McGraw were the other two doctors in the orthopedic clinic that Alex had joined two years ago. Whoever was on weekend call from the clinic checked on all the clinic’s patients.
“I’ll pull their charts for you right now,” Kay assured her. “I know you’re anxious to get out of here today. I heard you and Dr. Hall talking in the cafeteria yesterday,” she explained when Alex, clearly puzzled by her comment, glanced back at her. “You were telling her how you hoped things would be quiet this weekend because the Chalmers boy will be staying with you while he goes through his therapy and you need to clean your guest room.
“I know it’s none of my business,” she continued, her keen hazel eyes softening, “and I won’t say a word about what you’re doing if you don’t want me to, but I think it’s really nice the way you take in some of these kids. That Brent’s a sweet boy,” she pronounced, speaking of a shy sixteen-year-old Alex had operated on two weeks ago. “He deserves a break.”
The sharp ping of a patient call light echoed over the clatter of a lunch cart being wheeled by and a page for an orderly to report to Three G.
“I can’t say the same for that man, though,” she muttered, noting on the panel behind her that the light for room three-fifty-four was lit.
Alex didn’t bother telling Kay not to repeat what she’d overheard in the cafeteria. Her plans for Brent were hardly confidential and if Kay had overheard her talking with Kelly, her obstetrician friend who’d talked her into taking her last houseguest, someone else had probably overheard, too. But finding time to put sheets on the guest bed wasn’t the only reason Alex hoped the rest of the weekend passed quietly. She and Tyler had plans with friends for an early dinner that evening. And tomorrow, she needed to take him to the mall for new shoes.
“Give me a minute with Mr. Harrington,” Alex said, wanting the nurse to hold off answering the light as she headed for his room herself. She wasn’t going to be any more rested when she finished her rounds, so she might as well face the showdown now.
The image of a long hot bath flashed, unbidden, into her consciousness.
Practically groaning at the delicious thought of it, she paused outside his door, indulging herself a full two seconds before drawing a breath that pulled her five feet, five inches into the perfect posture she’d learned from Miss Lowe’s School of Tap and Classical Ballet. Releasing it the way she’d learned in Lamaze class, knowing a person could get through anything if she just kept breathing, she walked into the room.
Her first thought was that the man had no concept of the word rest. The ceiling-mounted television was on, the volume muted. Stock quotes ran in a continuous ribbon beneath a talking head.
Her patient wasn’t watching the television, though. The head of his bed was partially raised and the upper half of his body was hidden by an open newspaper.
Walking past the empty bed by the door, her glance skimmed from the metal external fixation device stabilizing the breaks in his elevated leg, over a long expanse of sheet and settled on the headlines of the Wall Street Journal.
He didn’t move, but it was apparent he knew someone was there. Presumably, the nurse he’d rung for.
“I just need the blinds adjusted. If you don’t mind,” he expanded with far more civility than she’d expected. “It’s too bright in here to focus.”
His deep voice still held a rasp from the airway, but there was strength to it now and the smoky undertones sounded as if they belonged there.
“You can’t focus because you’re barely twelve hours out of surgery and your eyes are still affected by the sedatives. Give it time.”
Her tone was conversational, her manner deliberately relaxed as she walked over to the window and dimmed the buttery glow of the mid-June sun filling the room. She itched to get outside in all that warmth and brightness. Cloudless days were a rarity in Honeygrove. “How are you feeling this morning?”
She’d heard the faint crackle of newsprint as he slowly lowered the paper, but her focus wasn’t on his face as she turned from the window. It was on the round metal rods above his knee that formed a double H on either side of his leg and the four pins that went through it. At least, that was what had her attention until his silence drew her glance and she met his impossibly blue eyes.
Last night, she remembered thinking the color breathtaking. The observation had been purely factual, rather like the way a person would describe velvet as soft and rock as hard. Now, she actually felt her breath stall in her lungs. The phenomenon was disconcerting enough. What made it downright unnerving was the unabashed way he held her glance before his own moved slowly, boldly over her face.
The man was cut, broken and battered. He looked every bit as tired as he undoubtedly felt, and he needed a shave. His dark hair was rumpled and the burgundy bruise along his high cheekbone had bloomed to contrast sharply with the stark white bandage and his faint pallor. Yet, even looking as if he’d come out on the losing end of a bar fight and stripped of any trapping that might indicate status or power, the aura of masculine command surrounding him was unmistakable.
So was the sensual tug low in her stomach before his glance settled on the embroidered Alexandra Larson, M.D. on her pristine white lab coat.
It didn’t matter that she’d seen him before. Until the moment his eyes locked on hers, he’d been more procedure than patient, more media myth than man. Before that moment, too, she hadn’t been the subject of his attention. Being the sole subject of it now, unnerved by the fact that she hadn’t moved, Alex forcibly reminded herself he was on her turf and held out her hand.
“I’m Dr. Larson,” she said, jerking her professional composure into a subdued smile. “When we met last night, you were pretty groggy. I’m your surgeon.”
She rather expected him to go a little chauvinistic on her. With his reputation and considering what she’d heard of his attitude so far, a little alpha-male behavior wouldn’t have surprised her at all. Or so she was thinking when his hand engulfed hers and the heat singing up her arm made her feel more female than physician.
“I remember your voice.” His glance narrowed as it fell to their clasped hands. A hint of memory glimmered in his expression, as if he might have recalled the feel of her hand in his, too. “I’m sorry, but I don’t remember what we talked about.”
Feeling strangely disadvantaged, Alex pulled back, letting her hand slide from his firm grip. “Mostly we discussed whether or not you were in any shape to make a phone call,” she
