Never Christmas Without You

by Nana Malone

  If her doctor’s calculations were right, they’d spend next Christmas Eve at the hospital, ushering in the latest addition to the growing Williams clan.

  A special holiday gift for all of them.

  * * * * *

  Also, check out these other enticing titles in the PLEASURE COVE series by Reese Ryan:

  PLAYING WITH DESIRE

  PLAYING WITH TEMPTATION

  Available now from Harlequin Kimani Romance!

  Keep reading for an excerpt from TEMPTED AT TWILIGHT by Jamie Pope.

  Tempted at Twilight

  by Jamie Pope

  Chapter 1

  “Have you taken leave of your senses?”

  Elias Bradley sat in the chief of surgery’s office and quietly listened as she berated him. It wasn’t the first time she had done so. He seemed to have a way of getting under his boss’s skin.

  “You’re not even cleared to be back yet, and you get into an altercation with a patient’s boyfriend?”

  Elias’s already injured hand was radiating with pain, a reminder of the scuffle he had gotten into, but he remained silent, knowing it was better not to speak until Dr. Lundy was done yelling.

  “How can I make you head of trauma if you act so impulsively?”

  Impulsive.

  It wasn’t the first time he had heard that word used to describe him. Teachers. Girlfriends. Even his own family had said it. But being impulsive wasn’t always a bad thing. His rash decisions had gotten him pretty far.

  “With all due respect, ma’am. One of the things that makes me a good trauma surgeon is the fact that I think and act very quickly. I saw a man grab a patient and try to yank her out of the hospital before she could be treated. I feel that my actions were necessary and in the end protected that patient from further harm.”

  He was impressed with how calmly he defended himself. He wanted to scream, That guy was an abusive jackass. Somebody should have kicked his ass a long time ago. But he kept that in. Sometimes he did think before he acted.

  “You punched him!” she roared. “Hard enough to break his nose, and even if I cared about his face or the potential lawsuit that might be coming, it doesn’t compare to how much I care about your hands. What good is a surgeon who cannot operate? Right now, you are a highly paid pain in my behind.”

  He had never heard the normally proper chief speak that way, but he had never seen her this enraged before, either. “I was only in the hospital to try to make myself useful. Even if I can’t operate, I can work in the ER. I can still see patients.”

  “No, you cannot. I handpicked your orthopedic surgeon and your occupational therapist. They have both reported to me that you are nowhere near able to return to surgery, that even if you weren’t a surgeon, that you would need to be on light duty. Working in the ER in the biggest, busiest hospital in Miami isn’t anyone’s idea of light duty. And taking into account your penchant for championing the abused and less fortunate, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ban you from the hospital until you are medically cleared.”

  “You’re banning me!” He’d never thought it would have come to that. At most he’d thought she would yell at him and relegate him to paperwork, which he would be fine with, because he loved being in the hospital. He loved the sights and the smells and knowing that what he did made a difference. He didn’t have much else in his life at the moment. His siblings were all very happily married and busy with their own families. There was no special woman to go home to. His life revolved around the hospital. He ate all his meals there. He slept there much of the time. Hell, all the people he socialized with worked there. He wasn’t sure what he would do with himself if he couldn’t come to work.

  “Yes, you are banned. I have put an alert out to all the security guards that if they find you here, you are to be escorted out. Your swipe card has been deactivated.”

  “You’re treating me like a criminal!”

  “No, I’m treating you like an asset that needs to be protected.” She took a calming breath. “You are probably one of the most talented young surgeons I’ve seen in years, and you are excelling in a difficult, highly specialized field. You want to take over as head of trauma, but how can I promote you if I can’t trust you to act rationally? Your hand is not even a quarter of the way healed, and you go and punch someone. Did you think about your career? Did you think about the potentially irrevocable damage you could have done to your future?”

  The truth was he hadn’t thought of it at all. He’d just acted. That big guy dragging that scared woman through the ER had made his blood boil. He wished he could say that if it happened again, he would have called security or ignored it, but he knew himself too well. Hand damage be damned. He still would’ve knocked that guy on his ass and given him a big taste of his own medicine.

  He had two sisters. He hoped some guy would do the same for them if they were ever in that situation.

  “You have nothing to say to that?”

  “Nothing that wouldn’t cause you to yell at me again.”

  She sighed and shook her head. “Go home, Dr. Bradley. In fact, leave Miami. You’ll be out of commission for quite some time. Do something you wouldn’t normally do. But considering the way you broke your hand, maybe you should sit in a room and not move for a couple of months.”

  A couple of months.

  A nauseating twinge rolled in his stomach. He didn’t think he could sit at home for a couple of months. He was immediately mad at himself again for breaking his hand. He had been doing one of those extreme mud runs with his brother and brother-in-law. He had crawled under barbed wire and had been submerged in a fifty-foot pool of mud. He had even run through fire, only to get tangled in the cargo net. He was on his way down when his foot got caught, and as he yanked it free, the runner just above him lost his balance and they both fell. The other guy had landed on top of Elias as he had put his hands out to break his fall. It was almost a twenty-foot drop.

  He had replayed the incident in his mind a thousand times that day, but there was no way he could have prevented it. No way he could have changed the outcome. He had badly broken his hand and wrist, the pain so extreme he had passed out for a moment. He had to have surgery, from which he had yet to heal. His hand had already been swollen and practically immobile before he punched the guy. He was surprised he’d even been able to make a fist. Lord knew he couldn’t do anything else with it. But that was the power of adrenaline.

  His older brother, Carlos, was a baseball superstar who had been on the disabled list for nearly a year because of a ruptured Achilles tendon. Elias had lectured him about overdoing it, demanded that Carlos rest, acted like the smug doctor he was. But when he was doling out that advice, he’d never thought he would end up in nearly the same situation.

  “Get out of my office, Dr. Bradley. You have been working nonstop since medical school. You’re a young man. Take some time to enjoy yourself.”

  He stood up and left the hospital. It wasn’t bad advice. He just didn’t know how the hell he was going to do it.

  * * *

  Cricket Warren glanced at her phone...again. Only four minutes had passed since she’d last looked, but those four minutes seemed like a hundred years to her. She was seated in the bar area of a small oceanfront restaurant on Hideaway Island, waiting for a ghost from her past to appear. Well...maybe ghost wasn’t the right word, but she wasn’t sure what to call the person she was supposed to be meeting. They certainly weren’t friends. They never had been. Just two people who happened to be born to parents who ran in the same social circle.

  “Miss? Are you sure I can’t get you something to drink?” the bartender asked her from behind the bar. “It’s still happy hour for another fifteen minutes. Drinks are half-price. Our special is pineapple margaritas. They come in a pineapple cup. Everyone seems to like them.”

&nbs
p; Cricket was tempted. She wasn’t much of a drinker, but she must look kind of sad sitting in a bar by herself, twiddling her thumbs. “Oh, I probably shouldn’t. I’m still waiting for my friend.”

  “Your friend is late,” a man said. He was sitting at the end of the bar with a domestic beer in his hand. His back had been to her most of the time she was there, his eyes glued to some sporting event on the large television over the bar, but she had definitely noticed him. She didn’t have to see his face to know he was one of those hypermasculine men whose pheromones filled the air and made otherwise sensible women turn into a pool of senseless goopy jelly. His was broad backed, tall, muscular. He sat up very straight, which Cricket’s mother would have appreciated. He wore his inky-black hair in overlong curls, which might have been considered boyish or feminine on another man, but worked on him. He was brown skinned, some beautiful shade that she couldn’t begin to describe. And just when she decided that she had better stop cataloging his features, he turned to face her.

  Well...damn.

  He might be the most gorgeous man she had ever laid eyes on, and a tiny spark of recognition went off in her brain. She had seen this man before, but she couldn’t immediately place where she would have met such an extraordinary-looking human.

  Maybe in her dreams.

  “Yes,” she said quietly, hoping he wouldn’t hear her embarrassing breathlessness. “My friend is quite late.”

  “Have a drink. They won’t get mad at you. And if they do, they aren’t the kind of friend you need.”

  She opened her mouth to speak but then hesitated.

  “I’ll buy you the drink. My sister-in-law loves those pineapple things. You should try it.”

  Cricket was twenty-nine years old. She spoke four languages fluently and had studied with the best and brightest around the world, but she’d never had a stranger offer to buy her a drink in a bar.

  Ever.

  But then again, guys never made passes at pudgy girls with two PhDs who were named after bugs.

  “Say yes,” the man said to her, the corner of his mouth curling in an appealing way.

  She swallowed hard and warned herself not to be the awkward person she was ninety-nine percent of the time. “I need to know who I’m saying yes to.”

  “Elias.” He got off his stool and walked over to her, his hand extended.

  “Cricket,” she responded absently as she took note of his hand. Normally she introduced herself as Cree, because scientists named after bugs didn’t usually garner respect, but this time she had forgotten and introduced herself by her given name.

  He had recently had surgery. There was a barely healed incision running from his wrist all the way up the palm of his hand and one along his thumb.

  “Do you inspect everyone’s hand you shake so closely?” he asked. It was then she realized that she hadn’t shaken his hand at all—she was holding it with both of hers as her thumb ran along the still-angry incision line.

  “You shouldn’t be shaking my hand. Yours is swollen. You should wave, or do that head-nod thingy that guys do.”

  “Would a wink suffice?” He took the chair next to her at the four-top.

  “Oh, no. Winks can be kind of creepy, don’t you think?”

  He smiled at her, fully this time, showing off a set of perfectly white teeth. He became even more gorgeous, if that were possible. “They could be sexy, too. I guess it depends on who is doing the winking.”

  “And on the winkee. No?”

  “I wouldn’t find it creepy if you winked at me. Is your name really Cricket?”

  “Yes. Like the bug,” she admitted with a small sigh.

  “That can’t be true.” He laughed. “Your parents must have thought it was a cute name for a girl.”

  “No, they thought I looked like a bug, so they named me Cricket. Cricket Moses Warren.”

  He slanted a brow at her. “Moses as in part-the-seas Moses?”

  “I suppose, but I think I’m named for my great-great-grandfather, who was a conductor on the Underground Railroad. His name was Moses.”

  He winked at her. “It’s nice to meet you, Cricket Moses. I am Elias James Bradley.”

  “Oh, how normal of you to be called Elias James. I suppose your parents were too unimaginative to name you after a noisy, beady-eyed bug and an ancestor of the opposite sex.”

  He grinned at her. “No, I’m named after a soap actor and my father.” He raised his hand to signal the bartender. “A pineapple margarita for my new friend, and another beer for me.”

  “Friends now, are we? I don’t even know one embarrassing thing about you, and you know two about me.”

  She wasn’t normally so chatty with strangers, especially deliciously beautiful strange men, but she was feeling kind of nervous. “You know I just had surgery on my hand and I have very limited movement in it.”

  “Is that embarrassing?”

  “Yes. I work with my hands. I can’t do my job now because of it.”

  “You work with your hands, huh? Are you an MMA fighter?”

  “No.”

  “A football player?”

  “No.”

  “A boxer? Did you hit someone so hard your hand shattered in tiny little pieces?”

  “I didn’t break my hand at work.”

  “How did you break it? Freaky sex accident?”

  “You’re weird.” He grinned.

  “I know.” She nodded, not believing she wasn’t censoring herself like she normally would. “I have been my entire life.”

  “I like it.” He looked down at his swollen hand and attempted to bend his fingers without much success. “I broke it doing a mud race. I fell from a twenty-foot landing and then had a 250-pound man land on top of me. My wrist snapped.”

  “Ouch.” She gently took his large, swollen hand in hers again and studied it. “Your hand should still be immobilized. Judging from the healing of this incision, you’re about a month post-op.”

  He frowned at her. “Are you a doctor?”

  “No,” she lied—or half lied. She was a doctor, just not a medical one, and according to her mother, her PhDs were little more than expensive pieces of paper. “I just know a little about this.”

  “Who’s this man you are meeting?” Elias asked as the bartender set down their drinks in front of them.

  “I’m not meeting a man,” she said as she studied the drink she’d allowed him to order for her. It actually came in a hollowed-out pineapple and was very interesting to look at.

  “You’re not?”

  “No.” She picked up her drink and took a sip. She found it delightful. “Why would you think I was meeting a man?”

  “Because you are a beautiful woman sitting in a bar with a nervous look on your face.”

  “You think I’m beautiful?” She grabbed his beer and slid it away from him. “How many drinks have you had?”

  She was smart. She was creative. She was great at board games, but she had never thought she was beautiful. She tried to look her best. But at most she was pleasant to look at.

  “I didn’t even have a sip of my second. I wouldn’t tell you that you were beautiful unless I thought you were. I like your hair and your mouth and your huge doe eyes.”

  She tried to ignore the fact that his compliment made her feel warm all the way down to her toes. “That’s why my parents named me Cricket. Because of my eyes. They call me Bug.”

  “Do you mind?”

  “I didn’t at first, but then everyone in school started to call me Bug, and not in the cute, endearing way my father intended.”

  He nodded. “That must have sucked.”

  “It did,” she agreed. “I bet you were popular in school.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “I’
m purely judging a book by its cover. You were a jock. You played football. All the girls loved you because you are so perfectly gorgeous.” She swept her eyes over him again, enjoying how he looked more and more by the second. “You can hold a conversation, so I’m guessing you weren’t just an athlete but participated in something like student council. You were prom and/or homecoming king. How much of that did I get right?”

  “All of it,” he said with a grin. “But you missed something.”

  “What?”

  “I sang in the choir.”

  “That is surprising. Did you join to impress girls?”

  “I liked to sing.” He shrugged. “You never told me who you were meeting.”

  “A childhood...friend?”

  “You don’t sound too sure about that.”

  “I’m not sure I like her. I don’t think she likes me, either. She always makes little digs at me. ‘I’m seeing the most incredible man. I guess you haven’t found anyone yet. I’ve been promoted at work again. Are you still doing research in that dark little lab of yours? Don’t worry, you’ll change careers when you get up the courage.’ It makes me want to spill something on one of those thousand-dollar handbags she carries around.”

  “If you don’t like her, then why do you see her?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s completely irrational, isn’t it? But we grew up together. We attended the same private school. We took violin lessons together. We even have horses stabled at the same barn.”

  “Horses?”

  “Yeah. My guy is old and overweight and his name is Seymour, and hers is this exquisite Arabian who wins prizes for his beauty.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Adonis.”

  He shook his head. “Sounds pretentious.”

  “It is and he is! He’s a mean horse. I bet he makes little catty remarks about the other horses behind their backs. My boy is sweet as pie. Beauty and speed aren’t everything in a racehorse.” She looked up at Elias, realizing that she was having a longer conversation with him than she’d had with any man that wasn’t about science for the first time in years. And he actually seemed interested in what she had to say. Most of her conversations with the opposite sex were purely intellectual, about topics that most people without PhDs couldn’t follow. And at times, they bored the heck out of her. Sometimes those men even asked her out, and rationally those men should have been stimulating to talk to. But this handsome stranger with a broken hand made her feel more comfortable than anyone else ever had. “Why are you letting me ramble on like this?”