Gage noticed the direction of her gaze as he was rinsing his hands. “Don’t worry, I can still handle gauze and adhesive tape. Just can’t cut a straight line with a scalpel.”
“That’s why you’re not a surgeon anymore?”
He whipped another hand towel off the rack. “That’s right.”
She hesitated. “What happened?”
He nodded toward her legs. “You want to get those stockings off?”
“Oh. Yeah.” Turning her back to him, Emma leaned over, lifted the hem of the yellow leather skirt and studied the baffling little clasps that connected the stockings to the garter belt.
From behind her he sighed. “I got knifed by a crack-head at St. Vincent Infirmary in Little Rock. He went for my throat, and like the genius I am, I shielded it with my hand.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “When was this?”
“Little over three years ago. My residency had ended about a year before, along with my marriage, and my career had just started taking off.”
She turned around in time to see him wad the damp towel into a ball and hurl it into the corner.
So he was divorced. That wasn’t surprising. Gage Foster was far too good a catch to have remained single into his mid-thirties. “How long were you married?” she asked.
“Two months.”
“Two months?”
“Yeah, I came home early one day and…” With a bitter smile, he said, “I’m sure you can fill in the rest—it’s a pretty trite old story. The guy was one of my fishing buddies. It’d been going on for a couple of years. Turned out he wasn’t Natalie’s first extracurricular playmate. We lived together eight years before we got married, and I found out she’d been cheating on and off almost that whole time. She tried to blame it on me not being home enough, on account of the long hours I had to put in at the hospital, but I was in med school when she met me, so she knew the score goin’ in.”
“That had to have been…” Emma shook her head, imagining it. “God, you must have been devastated.”
Gage shrugged in a show of indifference that she didn’t buy for a second. “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
His wife’s betrayal may or may not have made him stronger, but it did appear to have convinced him that “the vast majority of humankind is inherently dishonest.” His cynicism and obsession with honesty was beginning to make sense.
Returning her attention to the stockings, Emma started fiddling with one of the clasps, wishing she’d paid more attention when her mother had attached it. She prodded it, yanked on it... she even tried to tear the stocking, all to no avail.
Gage came to stand in front of her. “Need some help?”
“No.” Emma let go of the skirt and backed up until she felt the vanity behind her.
“Don’t be shy.” He dropped to one knee and reached up under her skirt with both hands. “I’m a doctor.”
“I—I thought you were an ex-doctor,” she stammered, as he felt around on her right thigh for the connection. His hands were hot from being washed, his fingertips slightly rough. When they brushed her bare thigh above the stocking, she had to bite her lip to keep from gasping.
“Maybe,” he said with a devilish smile as he deftly flicked the little clip open, “but I still haven’t forgotten how to play doctor.” He reached around to the back—Emma held her breath—and undid that one just as easily.
She licked her dry lips and strove for a nonchalant tone. “I’m surprised you know how to do that.”
“I’m surprised you don’t.” He glided the stocking slowly downward, gathering it up as it went, igniting a shivery path of sensation. “Is this the first time you’ve worn these?”
“Yes.” But it obviously wasn’t the first time he’d removed them from a woman. Emma wondered about his past. According to the Incision bio, he was thirty-five years old and lived all by himself in that big log house in the middle of an Arkansas pine forest, with only his dogs and horses for company. Which meant he was single, but a man like Gage Foster—part cowboy, part doctor, part bestselling author—could hardly lack for female companionship.
He paused at the knee, carefully peeling the ripped and bloodied silk stocking away from the raw flesh there. “Does this hurt?”
“A little.”
He looked up at her, his eyes stunningly blue in the shiny white bathroom. “I’ll be careful. I’ll try not to hurt you.”
She swallowed. “Thanks.”
He retrieved his reading glasses from his shirt pocket with one hand, flipped them open and settled them on his face. Peering closely at her knee, he stripped the stocking away from the wound with an exceedingly gentle touch, his brow furrowed in concentration. His large hands were precise in their movements, even the bad one, of which he could only effectively use three fingers; the long muscles of his forearms shifted as he worked.
“There you go.” He slid the stocking off her leg and tossed it in the trash.
“Do you miss being a surgeon?”
His jaw clenched. “To say I miss it would be a grave understatement. It felt like a calling to me, what I was born to do.” Snaking his hands swiftly under her skirt again—flick, flick—he lowered the other stocking, once more taking great pains over her knee. The second stocking joined the first in the trash, and then he laid a folded bath towel on the lid of the toilet and invited her to sit.
She did, tugging on her skirt in a vain attempt to keep it from riding up quite so high; she felt half-naked, even though it was just her legs that were exposed. He tucked the bath mat under her bare feet so she wouldn’t have to rest them on the cold tiled floor, which struck her as a thoughtful gesture.
Compelled to find out more about him despite his ambivalence, she said, “If you liked practicing medicine so much, how come you didn’t just change your specialty to something that didn’t require such great manual dexterity?”
“It wasn’t medicine I liked, it was surgery.” He washed his hands again; she could almost see him in his scrubs and mask, getting ready to operate. “I’m not sure I’ve got the people skills it would take to be a really good physician—I mean, someone who has to actually talk to patients and relate to them.”
Emma could well believe that, given his opinion of the human race as inherently lacking in integrity. “What about teaching? Did you think about that?”
“Of course. Three different medical schools offered me professorships, and I considered it, but again, dealing with all those students... I just couldn’t see it. And after what I’d been through in med school...” He shook his head grimly, then soaped up a washcloth. “I’m gonna start by cleaning those knees. You’ve got some grit from the track embedded in there.”
“What about med school?” she persisted as he squatted down and began gently stroking her right knee with the washcloth.
“Does that sting?”
“No,” she lied. “What about med school?”
“What about it?”
“You were going to tell me what you’d been through in med school.”
“No I wasn’t.” He rinsed the knee he’d cleaned and moved to the other one. “I just mentioned it, is all.”
“Tease.”
He glanced up at her, smiling crookedly. “Sweetheart, when I tease you, you’ll know it.” He bent his head to his work again; she leaned over to watch him as he painstakingly dislodged the little bits of dirt that had gotten ground into her knee.
He smelled good. His natural smell—she could tell it hadn’t come out of a bottle—was the smell they tried to recreate when they made men’s colognes, clean and woodsy and masculine. She leaned closer. And warm, and just a tiny bit spicy.
“Med school,” he said without looking up, “was when it truly started to dawn on me that most folks are basically unscrupulous and self-serving. It was a real eye-opener for me the first time a professor I was assisting took my research and published it as his own. Everyone I told about it just shrugged.”
“I’ve h
eard about that kind of thing,” Emma said. She’d read about it, too, recently. When was that?
“It happened again, with another professor, guy named Snyder,” Gage said, as he picked up a towel and patted both knees dry. “Except he actually took a paper I’d written and put his name on it. I blew him in—reported the plagiarism to the administration—but they treated me like a pariah for my disloyalty. Let him off with a warning. I asked around, and I wasn’t the only one this had happened to—not just with Snyder, but with others.”
“That’s terrible.”
Gage soaked a gauze pad with soapy water and dabbed the wound on her right knee. “Dr. Snyder’s still a very respected figure at that school. And for all I know, he’s still ripping off his students’ work, calling it his own.”
“Why? I mean, why doesn’t he just...” She shrugged.
“Write his own papers? That takes time, effort and a clear mind, unmuddled by the various and sundry tranquilizers and barbiturates he used to scam out of the pharmacy.”
“He took drugs?” Emma asked, the pieces falling into place.
Gage moved to her left knee. “Drug use was epidemic at that school, by both the teaching staff and the students. Amphetamines were the most popular. All kinds of narcotics were being used.”
“You wrote about all this in Incision,” she said. “Only you changed the names.”
“And the circumstances,” he said, “just enough so I couldn’t get slapped with any lawsuits.”
“It’s all in there, though. That scene in the first chapter, where Dr. Whoozits, the bad guy—”
Gage laughed as he dampened a fresh gauze pad and used it to rinse off the soap. “‘Dr. Whoozits, the bad guy’? So much for in-depth characterization.”
“The one who ends up killing all those people. He shoots up right before he goes into the operating room. And then, in chapter two, he’s accused of plagiarism—”
“Yeah, only Snyder never committed murder... that I know of.” Gage tore open a new gauze pad, squeezed antibiotic ointment onto it, and pressed it gently over her right knee.
Closing her eyes, she murmured, “Mmm, that feels good.” When she opened them, she found him looking at her, his smile belying the intensity of his gaze.
“I aim to please.” He taped the pad down, then prepared another one.
The silence felt too close, too charged, especially with him kneeling in front of her, ministering to her this way. “So,” Emma said, “you tapped your med-school experiences when you set out to write Incision?”
“Actually, I wrote it during med school. Or rather, started it then.” He smoothed the second pad down and tore off some tape. “It was my way of dealing with things, the frustration of being surrounded by all this corruption and having no way to fight it. Once my residency was underway, I set it aside. What little free time I had, I wanted to spend with Natalie so she wouldn’t feel too neglected. Looking back, I can’t believe what a sap I was. Anyway, I didn’t touch the book for what—eight or nine years.”
“What prompted you to finish it?”
Gage shrugged his wide shoulders as he pressed the tape into place. “Got my hand cut up and couldn’t operate. I was at home, recuperating, and the book seemed like a good way to kill time while I tried to figure out what to do with the rest of my life. I never planned on trying to publish it, though. If Gracie hadn’t found it, it’d still be—”
“Gracie?” Absurd disappointment burned in Emma’s stomach. Ah. So there was a Gracie.
“Picture a Mack truck in a housedress.”
“All right...” Not quite what she would have envisioned as Gage Foster’s type.
“My housekeeper.” Rising slowly, he removed his glasses and tucked them back in his shirt pocket.
Emma smiled. “Ah.”
He recapped the antibiotic tube. “Anyway, I was almost done with the book when I walked into my study one day and found her sitting at the desk in front of my laptop, which I’d left open. She was about six chapters into it. She started hollerin’ at me when I told her I was just writing it for something to do. Said I should send it to one of those big New York publishers. Finally I promised her I would, just to get her off my back. I expected to get one of those form rejection notes and wave it under her nose and maybe then she’d leave me alone.”
“Instead,” Emma said, “you got a record advance for a first novel. At least, that’s what I heard.”
“You heard right.” He leaned against the vanity and crossed his arms, shaking his head. “Which only goes to show where people’s priorities are. It would have taken me years of practicing surgery to make what I did on that one advance.”
“So?”
“So I just think the world’s a pretty screwed-up place if I get rewarded better for makin’ up an idiotic tale about evil Dr. Whoozits than for savin’ people’s lives.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. I don’t think—”
A knock came at the door. “Room service.”
Gage held out his hand to help Emma to her feet. “You can finish telling me how wrongheaded I am while we eat.”
As soon as the room-service guy left—after setting their burgers and fries and coleslaw out on a little linen-covered table, as if it were haute cuisine—Gage opened the bottle of Jack Daniels, poured some into a glass and handed it to her. “A little Dr. Daniels’s Ladies Tonic—for medicinal purposes, of course.”
“Uh...”
“Think of it as liquid Valium. You’ve had a rough day.” He poured himself a little, then sat at the table, motioning for her to sit opposite him, which she did.
Emma sniffed the amber liquid and winced. She couldn’t stand the taste of alcohol; once a year, she tried a little wine at Thanksgiving dinner, and that was always enough to keep her away from the stuff. Of course, Gage would assume Zara Sutcliffe drank; it was part of your job description if you were the Life of the Party.
“You don’t have to drink it,” he said, eyeing her curiously. “I’m not trying to force it on you, I just thought maybe it would relax you.”
Relax her? That might not be such a bad idea, given the state of her nerves, and the fact that she still had to spend the night with this man, in the very same room. Raising the glass to her mouth, she closed her eyes, held her breath and took a generous gulp.
“There you go.” He lifted the lid from a small silver bowl. “Coleslaw?”
Emma’s eyes burned with tears of shock; her nostrils flared, her throat convulsed. She nodded spastically as she strained to force the contents of her mouth into her throat.
“Fries?”
More frantic nodding as she swallowed, the whiskey scouring a red-hot trail all the way into her stomach. She sucked in a breath, which snagged in her throat, precipitating a coughing fit.
Gage paused in the act of scooping French fries onto his plate. “You all right there?”
She nodded again as she continued coughing.
“You swallow the wrong way?” He rose and circled the little table.
Nod nod nod, cough cough cough. She was in hell. This was hell. The train did get her, she’d died, and now she was going to have to spend eternity with Gage Foster, suffering one humiliation after another as she pretended to be Zara.
He squatted down next to her, one big hand rubbing her back in circles, the other resting on her thigh. Her bare thigh. “Just relax,” he gently urged.
Oh, yeah.
“Take slow breaths. That’s right.”
Gradually the coughing subsided. “I’m okay,” she croaked. “Thank you.”
“Here.” Gaining his feet, he poured some ice water from a pitcher into a glass and handed it to her. “Drink this.”
She did. “That’s better. Thanks.”
He sat down and took a big bite out of his hamburger, inspecting it closely as he chewed. Apparently satisfied with its level of grayness, he said, “It looks fine.”
She lifted the top half of the bun and inspected the charred lump of
meat. “It looks burned.”
“It’s just done.” He picked up some fries with his fingers and shoved them into his mouth.
“It’s cremated. And you’re wrong about your book. It is not idiotic.”
He swallowed another bite of burger. “I was hoping you’d decided to drop that line of conversation.”
“Why?” She speared a French fry with her fork. “You don’t like people telling you what a brilliant writer you are?”
“I was a brilliant surgeon. What I am now is a guy gettin’ paid obscene amounts of money for makin’ shit up as he goes along. There are Americans living on the streets. I just read that eight hundred million people around the world don’t have enough to eat, and they’re paying a hack writer that kind of whipout? It isn’t right.”
“If the money bothers you so much,” she said, gesturing with her fork as he chowed down on his burger, “give it to charity.”
“I do,” he said. “Most of it, anyway.”
“Oh.” To cover her surprise, she lifted her glass and drained it before registering that it was the Jack Daniels, not the water. Her eyes bugged out as the whiskey went down, but through an effort of will she kept from choking; or maybe her throat was still in a state of shock from its previous dose of Ladies Tonic. “That’s very generous of you,” she rasped.
“It’s not just the money,” he said, tilting the bottle over her glass automatically, like an attentive host at a dinner party. “It’s the whole idea of writing pulp fiction for a living. That’s a heck of a way for a grown man to earn his keep, if you ask me. I mean, any clown with a computer can do it, so long as he’s relatively literate.”
“That’s ridiculous. Telling a good story takes talent and hard work and... and heart. No one can just sit down and write one, I don’t care what you say—not a story like Incision, anyway. I remember I went to bed with it, thinking I’d read the first couple of chapters before I fell asleep, but it kept me awake half the night.”
“Yeah?” A hot spark lit his eyes for just a moment; a slow, masculine smile pulled at one corner of his mouth.
Good to Be Bad (Double Dare Book 1) Page 7
