Secret Agent Affair

by Marie Ferrarella

  “No.”

  Okay, he wasn’t here for a follow-up, but he was here. She jumped to the next logical conclusion for his appearance here. He’d come looking for her.

  The thought sent a shiver down her spine. She was half wary and, yes, half thrilled. The man before her was a classic “bad boy,” the kind every mother worried about and every pubescent girl dreamed about.

  “How did you know that I worked at Patience Memorial?”

  “I didn’t,” he said flatly.

  Talk about irony. Somewhere in the back of his head Humphrey Bogart’s line from Casablanca—“Of all the gin joints in all the world, she had to walk into mine”—ran through his brain.

  Except that he had been the one to walk into hers. Given his methodical nature, how hadn’t he thought to check that out? More importantly, was her being here going to be a problem?

  He had no way of telling. For some reason, his usual keen senses and gut feelings weren’t coming through.

  She should have known better than to think he’d come looking for her. What was the matter with her, anyway? What was she, twelve? No, she was curious. Marja asked, “Well, if you didn’t come in for follow-up care, what are you doing here? Visiting someone?”

  Kane supposed that he could have just said yes, but that would have led to complications in case their paths crossed again. He couldn’t risk being caught in a lie.

  So he shook his head and said, “No. I’m here about a job.”

  “Oh.” Well, that was a positive thing, Marja thought. Maybe everything he’d said to her that night was true. That he was temporarily down on his luck. “I could put in a word for you, if you like.”

  The woman was beaming at him. It was like being caught in a sun storm. Why was she so enthusiastic about his finding a job? He knew he should just tell her that it was already a done deal, that the slinky blonde in HR had hired him, but Marja made him curious.

  “Oh?” he asked. “And what kind of word would that be? Doesn’t bleed excessively when shot?” he suggested. He was experiencing amusement, which didn’t happen very often in his line of work, or his life for that matter.

  She never even blinked. “Something a little less vivid,” she promised.

  She didn’t know why, but the fact that he hadn’t made things up as he went along that night, enthused her. Her gut feeling about him hadn’t been wrong. Marja was determined to vouch for him.

  “Which position?” she pressed. “So that I can get it right.”

  He stared at her. She was serious. The woman was willing to go to bat for him without really even knowing the first thing about him.

  “Why would you do that?” he asked out loud.

  “Because you need a job,” she answered as if it was the simplest thing in the world. “Because you didn’t ransack my apartment when you could have.” Her smile widened and he had trouble not being drawn into its aura. “And because you lectured me about letting strange men in.”

  “And that’s why.”

  “That’s why.”

  Kane shook his head. He supposed her reasoning made sense. Kind of.

  “You don’t have to bother,” he told her. She opened her mouth and he could see that she was getting up a full head of steam to argue with him. He cut her off at the pass. “I already got the job.”

  He watched, fascinated as her mouth formed a perfect circle.

  “Oh. Then congratulations.” And then, just when he was certain she couldn’t catch him off guard again, the woman with the neat cross-stitch said something that completely surprised him. “Want to celebrate with a cup of coffee? I’ve got a few minutes before I have to get back, and there’s a great little outdoor café halfway down the block.”

  Few things caught him off guard. He’d been known to handle any dire situation. Several if the occasion called for it. But this was a little thing and little things, personal things, were what startled him.

  And he was certainly unprepared for the likes of Dr. Marja Pulaski.

  Chapter 5

  Just as Kane was about to tell her that he needed to be somewhere else, the loudspeakers crackled to life.

  “Paging Dr. Pulaski.”

  Saved by the disembodied voice, he thought. This way, he didn’t have to make up an excuse. There was always the slight chance that it might trip him up later. He’d always found keeping things simple was better.

  But when he looked down at the diminutive physician, she appeared to only be partially listening to the page. “Isn’t that you?”

  Instead of answering, she held up a silencing index finger, waiting. And then it came. “Paging Dr. Sasha Pulaski. You’re wanted in Obstetrics.”

  Marja could only wonder how comforting that had to be to some expectant mother, seeing her sister coming into the delivery room. All eight-and-a-half-months-pregnant of her. These days the staff was taking bets each time Sasha entered the delivery room on whose baby Sasha would wind up delivering first, her patient’s baby or her own.

  Lowering her finger, Marja smiled at him. “Nope. Not me. They’re looking for my big sister.” Emphasis on “big” she thought with a fond smile.

  “And she’s also a doctor?” he asked, just to be sure.

  There was no missing the pride in Marja’s voice when she answered. “Yes.”

  Judging from her expression, there was obviously no sibling rivalry between the two, Kane thought. The way there had been between his father and his uncle. Even at six, he’d been made very aware of it. The really odd thing was, once his father was gone, it actually seemed to get worse. He could remember his uncle ranting and raving, his rage growing, about all the times his father had cheated or duped him out of one thing or another. The more that Uncle Gideon drank—and he drank from the moment he walked in at night—the worse it got. And he was always on the receiving end of his uncle’s ire.

  Kane looked at the woman standing before him. “Here?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She nodded, grinning. It always seemed to take people by surprise the first time they discovered that there were five of them and that they were all doctors, associated with the same hospital. “We’re all here.”

  All. He took that to indicate that there were more than just two involved. “How many in ‘we’?”

  Marja paused before finally answering. “Five.”

  “Five siblings?”

  Kane couldn’t imagine one family voluntarily having more than a couple of kids, unless, of course, there was money in it, like the third foster family he’d found himself with. The Skylars periodically juggled five, seven foster kids at a time. Ellen Skylar was decent enough, doing what she could to make the experience bearable, but Fred Skylar was in it purely for the money. Money he took for his own, shortchanging the children whose care he was entrusted with, cheating them out of even the most basic of things like food and clothing so that he could have the things he wanted but couldn’t afford.

  “Five sisters,” Marja clarified, sinking her hands deep into the pockets of her white lab coat.

  As she did so, she shifted her weight to the balls of her feet, leaning slightly forward. He half expected her to start bouncing. It struck Kane that she seemed to be the embodiment of barely harnessed energy.

  “All doctors.” It wasn’t really a question the way it came out, but he was having trouble with the concept. How did five doctors emerge from one family?

  Amused by what she took to be his confusion, Marja nodded. “All doctors.”

  And they got along well enough and were deemed good enough by the powers-that-be at Patience Memorial, a hospital he’d learned a great deal about in a very short amount of time. Most important of which was that the hospital was considered one of the best all-around hospitals in the country.

  “Here,” he repeated.

  They seemed to be going around in circles. At any other time, she wouldn’t care. But right now, it was eating up her free time.

  “Yes, here. Are you sensing a pattern, Kane?” she asked.

/>   “Your parents must be rolling in money to afford to put five of you through medical school.”

  The cost of things was always his first thought, maybe because when he was growing up, he’d never known more than a dollar or two in his pocket. There was never enough money for anything. His very first memory was hunger, followed closely by fear. He conquered the latter, knowing that not being afraid was his only strength against the adults who were in charge of him. And he learned to ignore the former. It was all part of survival.

  The image of her parents rolling in money made her laugh. She only wished it was true. For their sake, not her own.

  “Not hardly.” Marja glanced down at her watch. The seconds were ticking away. She threaded her arm through his, taking hold of it as if they were old friends rather than strangers. “C’mon, let’s go get that coffee and I’ll fill you in on the entire saga of the Pulaskis—and then you can tell me yours.”

  He wasn’t looking to find out any more about this talkative woman and he certainly wasn’t about to tell her anything about his own family. Nothing had been put in place for him to tell. A family back story hadn’t been considered necessary by his handler before he’d gone undercover.

  “Mine?”

  She tugged on his arm a little because he’d stopped walking. She was leading him to the side exit, which was closer to the coffee shop. “Your saga, your background, your family.”

  He made a quick decision, shedding layers in his mind. “That’ll be real short. There isn’t any.”

  The electronic doors lethargically parted for them.

  “No background?” she asked incredulously. “You sprang up, whole, the night I met you? Like Athena out of Zeus’ head?”

  He had no idea what she was talking about, other than she was referring to some Greek, or maybe it was a Roman, god. Gods didn’t interest him. Kane reasoned that he and the gods were even there. He figured he didn’t interest them, either.

  “No,” he said, following her out of the building as she maintained her light but firm grip on his arm. “No family.”

  Marja stopped walking. When she turned to look at him, he saw instant compassion spring into her eyes. Could she just do that, turn it on and off at will? Were her emotions that close to the surface?

  What else was close to the surface?

  The question teased him before he banked it down.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Marja told him, her grip turning into a soft, light touch against his arm.

  “Don’t be.” He bit the phrase off.

  Clearly sentiment of any kind made him uncomfortable, she thought. Especially when he felt he was the recipient of pity. She could tell by the defensive tone he used.

  “That wasn’t pity,” she told him. “That was sympathy. Or maybe a little fear, too.”

  “Fear?”

  She nodded, resuming her rather vigorous pace. “I couldn’t image life without my family. I carp about them,” she admitted, “being the youngest and all, but the world would have been a much colder place if I hadn’t grown up with four older sisters to look out for me and Josef and Magda Pulaski to fuss over me as they gave me their rules and watched over me.”

  Kane just shrugged carelessly in response. It was a defensive gesture, she decided.

  “And as for my family being rich, I only wish—because that would have made it easier on my parents. They both came from Poland. Escaped from Poland would be a better word for it,” she corrected. “It was still under the U.S.S.R.’s thumb when they managed to smuggle themselves out. They were determined that their children would grow up to be anything they wanted to be—because they would grow up free.” It was, she knew, her father’s favorite word. Free. “My dad eventually got on the police force. In between having babies, Mama took any job that would have her so that we could have a better life than she and my father’d had.” To bring her point home, she added with affectionate pride, “Mama cleaned offices in Rockefeller Center for a while.”

  “And you all became doctors.” It was still rather hard to fathom.

  “We all became doctors,” she confirmed. And each of them had gone into a different field of medicine.

  “How?” he asked. The price of a regular college education was high these days. Medical school was all but prohibitive. Multiplying that times five bordered on fantasy.

  “Loans, hard work,” she enumerated. “My dad held down a couple of jobs more than once. My mother did what she could. Cleaning, cooking for other people.” It was the latter that had finally taken off. Thanks to her father’s constant encouragement, Mama was set to open up her own restaurant. They were almost as excited about that as they were about Sasha’s baby. Almost. “And the second each of my older sisters would graduate, she’d work to repay her own loans and to donate money to the next sister in line.”

  Coming to a crosswalk, he glanced to see if there was any traffic. Marja had made the survey for him and now dragged him across the street.

  He shook his head. “Hell of a program.”

  He’d get no argument from her, she thought. “Yes, it is. But more important than that, there’s nothing like knowing that there are people who have your back, no matter what.”

  Growing up, she’d been resentful at times when her family stuck its collective nose into her business. But she’d come to realize that they had all done it out of love. Resentment turned into appreciation.

  Not that she intended to say anything out loud just yet. She did want a measure of privacy. And her sisters shouldn’t think they’d won the war. As for her parents, well, she figured that after four other daughters, all headstrong in their own fashion, her parents knew that she loved and appreciated them, even if she had sometimes acted otherwise.

  Still holding on to his arm, Marja brought Kane into a small, fairly occupied coffee shop. There were five people ahead of them, all from the hospital, all dressed in scrubs of some sort, blue for medical staff, green for housekeeping.

  A quick glance around the area told her that they were the only two there, other than the people behind the counter, in civilian clothes—if she didn’t count her lab coat.

  “You were an orphan?” she asked him without any preamble.

  He didn’t like talking about his past, didn’t like even thinking about it. Kane stared at the back of the man’s head in front of him. “Pretty much.”

  Marja rolled his answer over in her head. It was far from definitive. Did that mean he had a parent or parents who gave him up because they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—provide for him? Or did he mean that he’d lost his parents at an older age and didn’t really consider himself an orphan? The temptation to ask him outright was very strong—she’d always been one who wanted to know things, everything about any given situation or person.

  As far back as she could remember, she’d hated secrets, hated being kept in the dark. But in this case, asking when he chose not to elaborate would have been tantamount to being insensitive. And she had a feeling that if she pressed, he’d tell her nothing at all. Or worse, make things up.

  So instead she nodded, a look of genuine compassion for what she imagined he’d gone through entering her eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  Compassion, pity, it didn’t matter. He didn’t want it. Needing either made a man weak or vulnerable, and he could afford neither. “Don’t be,” he told her crisply. “I survived.”

  “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger?” she guessed. He seemed like the type who’d advocate a mantra like that.

  He moved his shoulders in a vague shrug. “Something like that.” They were next in line. He glanced at her and nodded toward the counter as he raised his voice to be heard above the whirr of two machines busy mixing special orders. “What would you like?”

  The answer that rose to her lips was automatic. “To make you smile.”

  Her reply—and the look in her eyes—took him aback. That was twice she’d caught him off guard, he thought, and that didn’t even take into account the fact that h
e hadn’t expected to run into her here.

  “Make him smile later. He’s talking about your order,” the tall man behind the counter said. It was obvious that he was extremely harried.

  Because she frequented the shop religiously, she was accustomed to the server’s less than friendly manner. For her part, she flashed him a smile. “Sorry. Mocha cappuccino.”

  The server shifted small brown eyes in Kane’s direction. “You?”

  Kane had never been one to follow fads. He kept up on things only insofar as they affected his work. For the most part, he liked the basics and saw no reason to change. “Coffee. Black.”

  The server, Sylvester, according to his name tag, waited. When nothing further followed, Sylvester looked disdainfully at him. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it,” Kane replied in a monotone.

  The disdain increased, backed up with a sneer.

  “Don’t they have vending machines where you are?”

  Millie, the woman who owned this particular franchise, was over at the far end of the counter, arranging the latest batch of biscotti cookies she’d just taken from the oven. Ears like a bat, she honed in on the conversation.

  “Sylvester, stop harassing the customers,” she ordered. Millie was a heavy-set, jovial-looking woman with a beatific smile that she now flashed as she came forward. “Ignore my son,” she told Kane. “He’s a coffee snob.” Her smile widened, displaying a set of perfectly matched, brilliantly white dentures. “Customer’s always right,” she added, parroting a century’s old sentiment that was, for better or worse, carved into the hearts of business owners throughout the country.

  Moving her son aside, she took over filling the order. Done, she placed the two large containers on the counter. “That’ll be twelve-fifty,” she informed Kane cheerfully.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Marja saw Kane take out his wallet as she reached for her own. She had hers out faster.