“Where’s your bodyguard?” Reese asked. “Isn’t this where he bursts in, whisks you behind the door and slams it in my face?”
“His job is to protect me from kidnappers, not people I choose to be with,” London told him. “I still have some say in my life.” She walked into the elegant apartment, flipping on the lights. Reese followed her in. “I made it clear that he’s to perform his ‘duties’ tonight at a distance. Besides—” turning around, she watched him close the door “—I told him I’d be safe with you around.”
Reese wasn’t altogether sure about that.
He picked up a strand of her hair. The softness unsettled him. Aroused him. “And what’s to keep you safe from me?”
She raised her eyes to his in a clear invitation. “Who says I want to be safe from you…?”
M.D. Most Wanted
MARIE FERRARELLA
Books by Marie Ferrarella in Miniseries
ChildFinders, Inc.
A Hero for All Seasons IM #932
A Forever Kind of Hero IM #943
Hero in the Nick of Time IM #956
Hero for Hire IM #1042
An Uncommon Hero Silhouette Books
A Hero in Her Eyes IM #1059
Heart of a Hero IM #1105
Baby’s Choice
Caution: Baby Ahead SR #1007
Mother on the Wing SR #1026
Baby Times Two SR #1037
Baby of the Month Club
Baby’s First Christmas SE #997
Happy New Year—Baby! IM #686
The 7lb., 2oz. Valentine Yours Truly
Husband: Optional SD #988
Do You Take This Child? SR #1145
Detective Dad World’s Most Eligible Bachelors
The Once and Future Father IM #1017
In the Family Way Silhouette Books
Baby Talk Silhouette Books
An Abundance of Babies SE #1422
Like Mother, Like Daughter
One Plus One Makes Marriage SR #1328
Never Too Late for Love SR #1351
The Bachelors of Blair Memorial
In Graywolf’s Hands IM #1155
M.D. Most Wanted IM #1167
Two Halves of a Whole
The Baby Came C.O.D. SR #1264
Desperately Seeking Twin Yours Truly
Those Sinclairs
Holding Out for a Hero IM #496
Heroes Great and Small IM #501
Christmas Every Day IM #538
Caitlin’s Guardian Angel IM #661
The Cutlers of the Shady Lady Ranch
(Yours Truly titles)
Fiona and the Sexy Stranger
Cowboys Are for Loving
Will and the Headstrong Female
The Law and Ginny Marlow
A Match for Morgan
A Triple Threat to Bachelorhood SR #1564
*The Reeds
Callaghan’s Way IM #601
Serena McKee’s Back in Town IM #808
*McClellans & Marinos
Man Trouble SR #815
The Taming of the Teen SR #839
Babies on His Mind SR #920
The Baby Beneath the Mistletoe SR #1408
*The Alaskans
Wife in the Mail SE #1217
Stand-In Mom SE #1294
Found: His Perfect Wife SE #1310
The M.D. Meets His Match SE #1401
Lily and the Lawman SE #1467
*The Pendletons
Baby in the Middle SE #892
Husband: Some Assembly Required SE #931
MARIE FERRARELLA
earned a master’s degree in Shakespearean comedy, and, perhaps as a result, her writing is distinguished by humor and natural dialogue. This RITA® Award-winning author’s goal is to entertain and to make people laugh and feel good. She has written over one hundred books for Silhouette, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide and have been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, Japanese and Korean.
To
Dr. John G. Miller,
who answers all my questions,
and
is the perfect example of everything
a doctor should be
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 1
There were some days that Reese Bendenetti felt as if he just hit the floor running.
This was one of those days.
He’d been up, dressed and driving before he was fully awake. Normally punctual, Reese was running behind, thanks to an asthmatic alarm clock that had chosen this morning to make a sound more like a cough than a ring when it went off. The sound had barely registered in his consciousness, and he’d fallen back to sleep only to jerk awake more than half an hour later.
When it came to getting up, Reese had been cutting time to the bone as it was, setting the clock to give him just enough leeway to shower, shave and have breakfast—provided he moved at a pace that could easily be mistaken for the fast-forward speed on a VCR.
That had been before his fateful early-morning encounter with the “little alarm clock that couldn’t.” Consequently, the shower had lasted all of two minutes, his hair had still been wet when he’d gotten behind the wheel of his ’94 ’Vette—the single indulgence he allowed himself—and his face was fated to remain untouched by a razor until he could find some time at the hospital in between rounds, emergency room patients and whatever else the gods chose to throw at him this morning.
Eating was something he couldn’t think about until he came within coin-tossing distance of a vending machine at the aforementioned hospital, Blair Memorial.
Reese knew he only had himself to blame. No one had made him become a doctor, no one had told him to go into general surgery or to specialize in internal medicine. Those had been his own choices. His mother, bless her, would have been satisfied if he’d become a part-time sanitation engineer. As long as he was happy—that was her only criterion. Rachel Bendenetti never placed any demands on him, only on herself.
But healing was the only thing that did make him happy. It was in healing others that Reese felt as if he were healing himself, renewing himself. Building a better Reese Bendenetti.
He never quite understood why, he just knew that making someone else’s life a little better, a little easier, always managed to do the same for him.
That was why whenever Lukas Graywolf, a cardiac surgeon, returned to the reservation where he’d been born and raised, Reese always volunteered to go along with him and provide services to people who would otherwise not be able to afford them. The way he saw it, the rewards were priceless. It had never been about money for Reese.
He’d been enamored with medicine ever since he’d applied his first Band-Aid. Almost twenty-five years later he could still remember the circumstances. After calling him a name, Janet Cummings had turned and begun to run away, only to trip on the sidewalk. She’d scraped her knee badly and it had bled. Without hesitating, he’d run into the ground-floor apartment he and his mother were living in at the time, gotten a Band-Aid and peroxide out of the medicine cabinet—the way he’d seen his mother do—and run back outside to come to Janet’s aid.
He never stopped to think that she deserved it because she’d been nasty to him, all he could think of was to stop the bleeding. Watching him, Janet had stopped crying. When he was
finished, she’d shyly kissed his cheek.
Reese remembered lighting up like a Christmas tree inside. Janet had been six at the time. He’d been almost seven.
It was a feeling that he wanted to have again, and he did. Each time he worked on a patient.
Working on Tomas Morales’s perforated ulcer was a little more complex than applying peroxide and a Band-Aid to a scraped knee, but the feeling of satisfaction was still the same.
Taking off his mask, he tossed it into the hamper and sighed, bone weary. The operation had taken longer than he’d expected. As he ran a hand through his hair, holding the green cap he’d just removed in his other hand, his stomach growled. Fiercely.
“I heard that all the way over here,” Alix DuCane cracked. She was standing by the sink, putting lotion on her freshly scrubbed hands. The gloves she’d just taken off chaffed her flesh. If she wasn’t careful, she thought, she was going to wind up with skin like a lizard.
As if in response, his stomach growled again. One of the orderlies chuckled to himself.
Reese shrugged, tossing the paper towel he’d just used to dry his hands into the wastebasket.
“That’s what happens when all you’ve had for breakfast is a small candy bar.” It’d been stale at that, he thought. Hazards of war.
Having removed her own surgical cap, Alix shook out her short, curly blond hair as she crossed to him. “It was at least a granola bar, I hope.”
Reese grinned and shook his head. “Nope. Chocolate bar. Pure sugar in a sticky wrapper. I think the candy in the vending machine down the hall is melting.”
She tended to agree, having hit the machine more than once for an energy surge in the past week. Alix frowned in mock disapproval. “Shame on you, Dr. Bendenetti. What kind of an example are you setting for your patients? You’re supposed to know better.”
His shrug was careless, loose-limbed. The movement hinted that there was an ache there somewhere, waiting to emerge and make him uncomfortable. He needed a new mattress, he thought. And the time in which to purchase it.
But first things first. “Know where I can get a reliable alarm clock?”
Alix smiled to herself. She knew of several women on staff at the hospital, including two physicians, who would have been more than happy to volunteer to wake Reese up personally, any hour of the day or night. So long as they could occupy the space beside him in the bed right before then.
There was no denying it, Alix thought, looking at her friend with an impartial eye. Reese Bendenetti was one desirable hunk, made more so by the fact that he seemed to be completely unaware of his own attributes. To her knowledge, he rarely socialized. When he did, it was to catch a beer or take a cup of coffee with a group from the hospital. Never one-on-one, except with her, and theirs was a purely platonic friendship. They had a history together, going back to medical school. He’d known her when she was still married to Jeff. Before the boating accident that had taken him away from her.
Alix knew firsthand what a solid friend Reese could be. It seemed to her that it was one of life’s wastes that Reese didn’t have anyone in his life who could truly appreciate the kind of man he was.
Sometimes, she mused, dedication could be too much of a good thing.
But there was still time. Reese was young. And you never knew what life had in store for you just around the next corner.
“Is that what happened this morning?” she asked as they walked out of the room connecting two of the operating rooms. He raised a brow at her question. “I happened to see you peeling into the parking lot.”
Reese smiled ruefully. Driving too fast was a vice of his, and he was trying very hard to curb it.
But this morning there’d been a reason to squeeze through yellow lights that were about to turn red. He absolutely hated being late for anything, most of all his work at the hospital.
“My alarm suddenly decided to turn mute,” he confessed. “I woke up fifteen minutes before I was supposed to be here.”
She’d been to his apartment on several occasions and knew he lived more than fifteen minutes away from Blair Memorial.
“You can really fly when you want to, can’t you?” His stomach growled again. Rotating her shoulders, Alix smiled. “Join me in the cafeteria if you feel like it. I’m having a late breakfast myself. Julie was up all night, cutting a tooth to the sound of the Irish Rovers singing ‘Danny Boy.’” She’d played the CD over and over again in hopes of putting Julie to sleep. As it was she’d spent half the night pacing the floor with the eighteen-month-old. “In the meantime I’ll see if I can scrounge up a rooster for you.”
“You do that.” But instead of following her, Reese began heading down the corridor toward the back of the hospital. “I’ll see you downstairs in a few minutes,” he promised. “There’re some people in the E.R. waiting room I have to talk to first.”
She nodded. There was protocol to follow. She knew how that was.
Her own stint on the other side of the operating arena had been a negative experience. Reese had been there with her, to hold her hand when the surgeon told her that everything humanly possible had been done, but that Jeff had still expired. Expired. As if he’d been a coupon that hadn’t been redeemed in time, or a driver’s license that had been allowed to lapse. Each time she’d had to face a grieving family since—which mercifully was not often—she remembered her own feelings and tempered her words accordingly. Neither she nor Reese believed in distancing themselves from their patients. That’s what made them such good friends.
“I’ll save a bran muffin for you,” she called out to Reese.
He made a face. Bran muffins were just about the only things he didn’t care for. Knowing that, Alix laughed as she disappeared.
Reese continued down the hall to the emergency waiting room area. This was the part he liked best. Coming out and giving the waiting family good news instead of iffy phrases. Tomas Morales had been to his office late last week. Choosing his words carefully, Reese had cautioned the man that playing the waiting game with his condition was not advisable. Morales hadn’t wanted to go under the knife, and while Reese understood the man’s fear, he also understood the consequences of waiting and had wanted to make the man painfully aware of them.
Painful being the key word here, he thought, because Morales had been in agony when he was brought into the hospital. His oldest daughter, Jennifer, and his wife had driven him to the emergency room.
This morning, as Reese had run into the hospital, he’d come through the electronic doors just in time to hear himself being paged.
And the rest, he mused, was history.
Mother and daughter stood up in unison the moment he walked into the waiting area. Mrs. Morales looked painfully drawn. There was more than a little fear in her dark eyes. Her daughter was trying to look more positive, but it was clear that both women were frightened of what he had to tell them.
Reese didn’t believe in being dramatic or drawing the spotlight to himself, the way he knew some surgeons did. He put them out of their misery even before he reached them.
“He’s going to be just fine, Mrs. Morales, Jennifer.” He nodded at the younger woman. Jennifer quickly translated for her mother. But it wasn’t necessary. The older woman understood what the look in her husband’s doctor’s eyes meant.
She grasped his hand between both of hers. Hers were icy cold. The woman kissed the hand that had held the scalpel that had saved her husband’s life before Reese had a chance to stop her.
“Gracias,” Ava Morales cried, her eyes filling with tears. Then haltingly she said, “Thank you, thank you.”
Embarrassed, but greatly pleased to be able to bring the two women good news, Reese gave Jennifer the layman’s description of what had happened and paused after each sentence while she relayed the words to her mother. He ended by telling them that they would be able to see Mr. Morales in his room in about two hours, after he was brought up from the recovery room.
“Maybe you and your mother can
go down to the cafeteria and get something to eat in the meantime,” he suggested. “It’s really not bad food, even for a hospital.”
Jennifer nodded, her eyes shining with unspoken gratitude. Quickly she translated his words to her mother.
As he began to walk away, he heard the older woman say something to her daughter. He gathered from the intonation that it was a question.
“Please, Dr. Bendenetti, where’s the chapel? My mother wants to say a prayer.”
“He’s out of danger,” Reese assured her. Of course, there was always a small chance that things might take a turn for the worse, but the odds were negligible, and he saw no reason to put the women through that kind of added torture.
“The prayer is for you,” Mrs. Morales told him halting. “For thank-you.”
Surprised, he looked at her. And then he smiled. The woman understood far more than he thought.
Reese nodded his approval. “Can’t ever have too many of those,” he agreed. Standing beside Mrs. Morales, he pointed down the corridor. “The chapel’s to the left of the front admitting desk. Just follow the arrows to the front. You can’t miss it.”
Thanking him again, the two women left.
And now, Reese thought as he walked out of the waiting room, it was time to tend to his own needs. His stomach was becoming almost aggressively audible. He was just grateful that it hadn’t roared while he was talking to the Morales women.
He took a shortcut through the emergency area itself. As he passed the doors that faced the rear parking lot where all the ambulances pulled in, they flew open. Two paramedics he knew by sight came rushing in, pushing a gurney between them.
Instinct and conditioning had Reese taking the situation in before he was even aware that he had turned his head.
There was a woman on the gurney. The first thing he noticed was her long blond hair. It was fanned out about her like a golden blanket and gave almost a surreal quality to the turmoil surrounding her. She was young, well-dressed and conscious. And it was quite obvious that she was in a great deal of pain. There was blood everywhere.
So much for finding time for his stomach.
M.D. Most Wanted Page 1
