by Isla Bennet
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright © 2013 Isla Bennet
Originally released as a Kindle Serial, May 2013
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781477848142
ISBN-10: 1477848142
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013910330
To the Guys
Table of Contents
EPISODE ONE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
EPISODE TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
EPISODE THREE
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
EPISODE FOUR
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
EPISODE FIVE
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
EPISODE SIX
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EPISODE SEVEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
EPISODE EIGHT
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
EPISODE NINE
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
EPISODE TEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EPISODE ONE
CHAPTER ONE
Côte d’Ivoire
“DAMN IT! Not again.”
Peyton Turner bounded up the medic bus’s steps at his colleague’s frustrated shout. Emergency vehicle sirens wailed in the distance as he rushed to the rear of the vehicle, now cluttered with overturned tables and equipment and ravaged boxes that had housed medicine. He could scarcely hear his own voice as he hollered, “Vandalism or theft?”
Slamming shut the portable medical locker that housed the supply stock that wasn’t scattered at his feet, Malcolm Pettis grunted, “Both. At least fifty syringes missing—”
“Like last time,” their nurse practitioner, Faye Southbury, said, craning her neck to view the damage over Peyton’s shoulder.
“Except this time they got Vicodin and morphine, too.”
“Shit.” Peyton peered out the bus’s windows at the sunny afternoon, knowing full well whoever had looted the mobile clinic was long gone. The streets were crowded yet seemed deserted at the same time. No one could imagine what working in a disaster area was like until they’d lived it—and even then it was unreal.
He’d arrived in March, and the shock of the five-magnitude earthquake hadn’t begun to subside. The air was thick with ruin. For almost six months he’d lived among the rubble with people who’d been forced to put together again lives that had been ripped from beneath them. Even living and breathing the daily devastation with them, he didn’t truly know what it was to lose it all.
People were in panic, were weary and desperate. Twice Peyton had been mugged on the street, the second attack leaving him trapped in an abandoned building with a knife wound in the flesh of his thigh. Once, a man had thrust an infant with untreated pneumonia into his arms and run away. A trio of young women had tried to offer him sex in exchange for food.
This was the second time their bus had been targeted. The stolen supplies would no doubt be sold or abused for temporary escape. Even still, things could be worse.
“I’ll call out to Balti,” Faye said, referring to their base in Maryland where Peyton and Malcolm had been on staff at Johns Hopkins before departing to Côte d’Ivoire. They, along with Faye and an orthopedic surgeon from the University of Maryland Medical Center, had arrived together. They were scheduled to return to the United States in October. From there it would be only a matter of time before Peyton set out on the next mission to another country in need of aid.
Since the earthquake in February a steady stream of medical workers had come and gone—none leaving quite the same as they’d been before coming here. Relief efforts hadn’t yet peaked. It would be a long time before this part of the world recovered—if it ever did.
“A new shipment won’t be available until the twentieth, but here’s the information for a contact out of West Virginia. His team’s in San Pedro,” Faye told him after she’d made the call and reported the incident. She handed him a notepad, then yanked a rubber band from her wrist and used it to secure her sun-streaked hair into a ponytail. “And Turner? You look like hell.”
“Just the look I’m going for,” he said, shooting her a grim smile as she swatted at a mosquito on her way to the driver’s seat.
Between dealing with the vehicle’s two slashed tires and trudging through the ruined village’s streets to deliver food, clean water and medical care, Peyton hadn’t time to think about his appearance. His trousers were grimy from the roads. His overshirt was missing buttons, the two sides hanging open wide. The once-white tee shirt he wore beneath was soiled with dirt and grease and plastered to his body with perspiration. During the first few weeks he’d been lucky to shave once a day. Now he’d grown comfortable with the dark mustache and beard that lent his face a harder, fiercer guise.
He knelt, grabbed an upturned box and started gathering the strewn meds. Malcolm crouched to assist him, inquiring, “How’re the wheels?”
“Passable.” Peyton couldn’t suppress the urge to wince at the memory of gouged rubber and the fact that two tires needed replacing—and they had only one spare. The patch job on the tire with the lesser damage should hold up until they could manage a decent repair, which wouldn’t be until after their next shift at the nearby schoolhouse that now doubled as a temporary clinic.
“Get us closer to the clinic, Faye.” Malcolm jerked his chin toward Peyton’s duffel, where he’d stashed his pager before tackling the tire work. The device emitted a sharp-pitched alert sound in three-beep intervals. “Gonna get that, man?”
Peyton was already on his feet and unzipping the duffel. A quick glance at the pager had him muttering an oath that prompted his colleagues to exchange a look of mutual curiosity.
A Texas number. The same one that had begun calling his cell phone just weeks after he’d changed the number for the umpteenth time since he’d accepted a position at Johns Hopkins. First his location then his contact numbers had been leaked. He was being hunted—and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do to outrun the person who’d found him despite his every attempt to stay lost.
The device beeped in his hand. He stuffed it in its case and attached it to his belt, then said to Faye, “You planning on driving this thing, or should I?”
“I can handle it.” Faye directed a raised brow at Malcolm, then faced forward and turned the engine. In seconds the bus was on the road, passing collapsed buildings and heaps of debris. Beyond the wreckage lay beauty: a warm, sandy shoreline and miles of glistening water.
“Not my business, but you might want to quit ducking and dodging whoever’s trying to get ahold of you.” Malcolm reached for his own duffel and rooted around for a fresh tee shirt.
“Absolutely right. It’s not your business.” But he was o
n point about Peyton avoiding the place that had been his only home until he’d left town at twenty-one. He was somewhat settled in Baltimore, currently committed to a Doctors Without Borders assignment that he couldn’t drop. He was pinned, and with flight no longer a viable option, he needed to fight. And that meant returning his grandfather’s phone call.
At the site, Malcolm and Faye hauled their gear into the squat building teeming with medics and patients and volunteers. Peyton did what he could to secure the bus and then helped a trio of African physicians set up cots as makeshift exam tables and administer vaccines, struggling to hear through the commotion of activity and heavy French accents in a land where he was a foreigner.
Hours later, his break time had come and gone, and he was finishing sutures on a young boy who’d sustained a deep laceration while climbing through a broken window of what had once been his family’s home. The child’s aunt sat nearby sniffling into a balled-up tissue. Faye, who spoke fluent French and was able to translate the woman’s anguished words for Peyton, said the clapboard structure had fallen like a house of cards.
“Tout s’est envolé,” the boy wailed, tears shimmering on his cocoa-brown face as Peyton taped the gauze to the sterilized and sutured wound.
“Tell him … tell him I’m sorry,” Peyton said to Faye, who stood at his side. He knew enough French to tell the boy himself but “Everything’s gone” echoed in his mind and he couldn’t form the words.
Faye did as asked, and laid a gentle hand on the boy’s shoulder, murmuring what Peyton could surmise was a joke, based on the boy’s sudden giggle.
Seeing him smile through his tears, through the unforgiving reality that his home was in shambles and all he had were the borrowed clothes on his back, gave Peyton pause.
This was bravery—a child no more than ten years old but strong enough to fight against tears when he had every reason to cry.
He hadn’t willingly given it up.
Suddenly the air that had for hours been thick with heat and panic and urgency threatened to choke Peyton. “Okay now. D’accord,” he said with a calmness he didn’t feel. He set aside the rolls of gauze and tape, then rose from the chair and leaned close to Faye. “I’ll wash up and get this little guy a cold juice box. And the aunt could use one, too.”
Her gaze met his and the concern that bloomed in her eyes was unmistakable. “Take a few minutes for yourself. I’ll handle—”
“You handle a hell of a lot as it is, Southbury,” he countered, not bothering to add a smile she wouldn’t believe anyway. “Thank you, but I can manage to scavenge for two juice boxes.”
“Yeah, yeah. Maybe snag one for yourself—and take a break, will you?”
To underscore her point, his pager beeped. He couldn’t ignore it even as he scrubbed his hands clean, delivered the juice and conveyed after-care instructions to the child and his aunt with the help of Faye’s translation.
The sun was beginning its descent in the west when he finally returned to the bus and retrieved his disposable cell phone and pager. Over the years he’d become good at shooting down the urge to call home. He couldn’t say what his grandfather wanted to hear, and the way the old man saw things was clear: Don’t you call here again, unless you’re ready to say you’re coming home.
Nathaniel Turner had been the one to locate him two summers ago at Johns Hopkins, and with all the resources made available to one of the wealthiest men in the state of Texas, Peyton was mildly surprised that it had taken his grandfather that long to confront him.
The reunion—if anyone could call it that—hadn’t lasted more than twenty minutes. Nathaniel had swaggered into the hospital and demanded that Peyton quit pussyfooting around and return to Night Sky, a town small enough to suffocate you if you let it. Peyton had told him no. He’d grown into a man, damn it, his own man. And he was done letting others give him a road map to live by.
He had left his old life behind, and that summer when he’d been a newly minted emergency-room surgeon on staff in Maryland and recently returned from a mission in the Delhi slums, he hadn’t been interested in reclaiming it.
The “everything” that his young patient was mourning the loss of was what Peyton had walked away—and stayed away—from.
His fingers tightened around the cell phone before he exhaled harshly and dialed. The Turner family butler answered immediately and Peyton could picture the man in his severely starched and pressed suit with his wavy strawberry-blond hair combed into place. For the longest time folks in town had gotten in their digs behind Nathaniel’s back, saying he must’ve figured no one in the entire state was good enough to mop his floors and answer his doors if he’d had to import somebody from Louisiana. “Put me through to Grandpa, would you, Jasper?”
“Where are you?” Nathaniel’s roaring West Texas drawl rang in Peyton’s ears and would’ve been enough to slap him silly with anxiety if he hadn’t already braced himself for it.
“Not too far from San Pedro.”
“San Pedro? Ivory Coast? Wh-what about Johns Hopkins? Just when I tracked you down you disappeared again, damn it. What is this, having an old man follow you across the world? What are you out to prove?”
Peyton shoved a hand through his hair, feeling the ends brush against his ears and neck and realizing he was far overdue for a haircut. “Grandpa, it was never about proving anything.” At least, not to anyone but himself. “And I made it clear I didn’t want you to follow me.”
“Now I need to make something clear. I want the truth out of you, boy. Are you on the Ivory Coast now?”
“What, the person at the hospital who sold out my pager number didn’t give you my exact coordinates?”
“I’m asking the questions!”
Nathaniel’s anger was expected. He’d raised Peyton from a boy, put him through college and given him every luxury until Peyton had become old enough to claim his trust fund. He’d also financed the medical mentorship in New Zealand that Peyton had walked away from when he’d been a twenty-one-year-old college graduate and itching to be anywhere but Texas under his grandfather’s thumb and at his alcoholic mother’s fingertips. Instead of following his grandfather’s plan for him, Peyton had joined a group of disaster-relief medics and left Night Sky. At first he’d tried to keep some line of communication open with Nathaniel through postcards and letters here and there, but after being hit with resentment and demands to quit being foolish, he’d opted to try his damnedest to remain one step ahead of his grandfather, out of his reach. He’d had to do it, even if Nathaniel and everyone in his hometown thought him an ungrateful bastard. Even if the woman who’d once been his friend and closer to him than family hated him for it. Maybe now she understood what he’d figured out then, when he’d let her go—she deserved all the goddamn happily-ever-afters this world had to offer, and he never could’ve given her that.
Going underground had been his escape, the only way out of his mother’s reach, and the one way to become a surgeon worth a damn and not a rich boy who’d bought a medical degree with old money and a family name that came at a high cost.
Beneath the anger in his grandfather’s tone was desperation—and it made Peyton press the phone closer to his ear. “I’m where I say I am, sitting on my team’s bus. It was looted today. It-it’s happened before.” There was no other answer on the line than the steady sound of his grandfather’s slightly labored breathing. “I’ve spent the past six months sleeping on this bus or in tents or in shelters. I was stabbed.”
“Stabbed?”
“I’m fine, Grandpa, but … I’m starting to realize what I left behind.” He hadn’t put what he was feeling into thought before the words had been spoken.
And he could hear Nathaniel now. “Then come home to the States. There’s a position with your name on it in Los Angeles. You’ll do well there. You’ll move into the family condo, befriend the people I tell you to … live the life I planned for you.”
“Pretty words, son,” Nathaniel said instead. “But over th
ere you’re not close—nowhere near close—to knowing what you walked away from. I won’t chase you anymore.”
“Why the change?” Peyton asked, not caring that he sounded wary and even belligerent. It was better than giving in to the gut-twisting concern that surfaced at the defeat in his grandfather’s voice.
“Frankly, I can’t chase anybody anywhere anymore.” A pause, then, “Stroke, last year, and no, now’s not the time to talk about it. And hell, I spent sixty years building an empire. I earned the right to have what I want brought to me.”
“You want me to come home. Where? To Los Angeles and the Turner condo?” So I can soak up the Hollywood high life and let the work I want to do take a backseat?
“Night Sky’s always been the place to put things in perspective. If you want to see me, you’ll come here.” Nathaniel sighed, the sound rough and slightly haggard. “I’m rewriting my will—soon. You’ll want to be here when I do.”
Peyton frowned. Nathaniel had made noise about giving him a place in Turner Menswear, but Peyton had assumed those plans were nixed the day he announced his interest in medicine. He couldn’t possibly still be considering … .
“Finish doing what you have to over there, then come home. If you can’t do that …” His grandfather left the threat open but Peyton felt the heaviness of it just the same.
Nathaniel disconnected the call, giving Peyton something concrete and almost insurmountable to think about: returning to Night Sky.
Night Sky, Texas
“IT DOESN’T WORK.”
