Red Hot Lovers: 18 Contemporary Romance Books of Love, Passion, and Sexy Heroes by Your Favorite Top-Selling Authors

by Milly Taiden

  Tina spoke up, her voice unexpectedly soft. “Darion, I’ll find a way to see Cynthia, okay? I’ll figure it out.”

  The way the social worker shot daggers at her told me that her job was probably tied to Tina’s obedience on this matter.

  “I don’t have any way to contact you,” I said.

  She smiled, which couldn’t have been easy under the circumstances. “But I know how to contact you.”

  The two women crossed the broad atrium toward the exit. For all I knew, Tina didn’t even care. She could breeze out of here and never look back. And I would have to deal with the fallout for my sister.

  I had no choice but to trust her. I had to hope she’d do the right thing.

  ***

  Chapter Eleven: Tina

  I collapsed on the sofa in Corabelle’s apartment. I officially could not afford it anymore, although I guess I had a month until I wasn’t able to pay. Sabrina assured me once we made it to the parking lot without further incident that I would receive my last paycheck in the mail within a week as long as I stayed away.

  I reached into the box on the floor and lifted out Albert’s mermaid. I handled it carefully to avoid disturbing the soft clay. The girl who was me looked serious and sad. I wasn’t sure how I would find him to say good-bye. I couldn’t get on his ward even as staff.

  “Maybe Albert can predict the future,” I said aloud, setting the mermaid on the coffee table. “Sad was just around the corner.”

  And in the past. Loads of it. I was nowhere near the emotional upheaval that led to my scars, but every upset always brought my mind back to it, as though it were the measuring stick to gauge my current level of unhappiness.

  I let myself drift to my happy spot, that bittersweet memory I called up whenever life got hard. Me and Peanut, curled up together on a hospital bed.

  We had been alone, just me and the baby. Somewhere in this quiet space, after the doctor took off his monitor and said it was time, and when I noticed that he no longer moved anymore, we became a family.

  I wasn’t close to my parents. I was a late-in-life baby, a surprise that came fifteen years after my older brother. He was out of the house, graduated and gone, before I was old enough to really know him.

  What my parents called the generation gap, I called the Grand Canyon. I had nothing in common with the people who raised me. Once I had my own opinions about things, I was nothing but a confusing, ill-mannered hellion. I didn’t belong to them, and they didn’t belong to me.

  But not Peanut. He had been mine. From that moment I found out I was pregnant until the nurses took him away to be cremated, he was mine.

  I flopped back on the cushions to stare at the water-stained ceiling.

  At this point, I couldn’t imagine having a life stable enough for a kid. But I lived vicariously through Corabelle and three-year-old Manuelito. I liked watching the boy if I got the chance. I could probably do it more now. He and I could be wacked-out maniacs together.

  Eventually I would have to find another job.

  I got up and started pacing Corabelle’s apartment.

  Most of my stuff was still in storage. I hadn’t been able to afford to ship it here. I brought as many suitcases as I could get away with on the bus to San Diego when I moved here for the hospital job. I figured once I got a few paychecks under my belt, I could have the rest trucked over.

  But not now. I couldn’t live much more cheaply than I was. Corabelle’s apartment was about as low as it got without living someplace seriously sketchy. And I’d avoided deposits or transfer fees by subleasing from her.

  She lived here on a coffee-shop wage, so I probably could too. I kept things simple. Fancy didn’t suit me. It would be all right.

  I dug my phone out of the box and sent Corabelle and Jenny a text. So, is Cool Beans hiring?

  Corabelle was probably in class. No telling with Jenny. She was skipping half her courses these days to hang out with her eccentric sugar daddy.

  But the phone buzzed within seconds.

  From Corabelle: What happened?

  From Jenny: Glad you’re home. I’m coming right now.

  I tapped off a quick note saying I’d been escorted from the hospital like a common criminal.

  Within fifteen minutes, Jenny was barging through the door, her pink hair streaming behind her like cotton candy unraveling from a cone.

  She yanked a giant pair of designer sunglasses from her face. “What the hell is wrong with those hospital people?” she asked. “I thought they signed some hypocritical oath to take care of people!”

  I could only stare at her. Jenny had always been a little larger than life. Crazy colored clothes. Wild hair. An attitude to match. But today. Wow. Shiny black knee boots stood high on five-inch platforms. A teeny black vinyl skirt flared out below a matching jacket. A black and white striped sweater pulled it together. With all that lack of color, her hair stood out like neon paint on newspaper.

  “Never mind,” Jenny said. “We’ll catch up after the delivery guys are gone.” She stood in the open doorway. “In here, boys!”

  I came up behind her. “What is going on?”

  “Frankie bought me another sofa. Like my apartment had one more foot of space!” She waved at two men standing by a truck.

  Frankie was the movie director Jenny had hooked up with a few weeks ago. She dumped her poor teaching-assistant boyfriend in an instant and jumped straight into endless nights of B-list parties. Her picture had been in a tabloid last week, and she was still gushing about it.

  “You’re having the sofa brought here?” I asked.

  Jenny whirled around. “Corabelle has room. Besides, she’ll take her stuff, and then this place will be empty. And this beauty will be all yours!”

  She stepped aside as the two men brought in a sofa that I instantly nicknamed “The Pink Monster.”

  It had a rounded back that curved into the arms. Two fat cushions looked bouncy enough to launch you to the ceiling.

  And it was fluffy.

  Like a stuffed animal.

  Or a bathroom rug.

  Or a shag carpet from the 1970s.

  Only now it was in my living room.

  “Jenny, what the hell is this?”

  She pointed for the men to set it down at an angle from Corabelle’s sofa and jumped onto it, striking a pose as though a magazine photographer would be snapping her for the cover of Where Trash Meets Money magazine.

  The two guys headed out. I ran my hand along the fuzzy surface. “You’re really leaving it here?”

  “It’s all yours, baby,” Jenny said.

  I moved past it to sit on a sofa that didn’t look like a set piece for Strawberry Shortcake. “Why don’t you just tell him to stop buying you this stuff?”

  Jenny flipped over on her stomach. “Have you lost your mind? These have been the best weeks of my LIFE!”

  “Is he at least handsome and sexy?” I asked. Jenny hadn’t brought Frankie around to meet her friends.

  “Oh, no. He’s short and balding and really into licking,” Jenny said. “Not that I mind that.” She rolled onto her back again, like she couldn’t get enough of the fur. “And temporary. I get that. I’m not looking to be Mrs. Short and Balding.”

  “You sure you know what you’re getting into?”

  Jenny sat up and began unzipping the boots. “I’m a plaything. I might as well have fun with it. I know where I stand.” She dropped the first boot with a sigh of relief. “Besides, you know how I feel about sex with strangers.”

  “It’s good for your complexion,” I said. “Or is it your metabolism?”

  Jenny chucked the second boot to the floor. “It’s good for what ails ya,” she said. “Unless you catch something that isn’t cured with a round of antibiotics.”

  I shook my head. I wasn’t any better. One-and-done. This was something Jenny and I could agree on.

  She propped her feet in little green socks on the coffee table. “So, what happened in the Land of Hot Docs? You
got canned before I got a chance to be examined by any of your coworkers.”

  I pulled my elastic bands from my skirt pocket and twisted my hair back into pigtails. “Turns out the paperwork mattered a lot. They want someone with an art degree AND a therapist license.”

  “Gawd. They should have known that before they brought you here.” Jenny smoothed down the vinyl skirt. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Find some other work. No reason to go back to that college town. And definitely not going home.” I shuddered. “I’ll manage.”

  “I’ve been skipping shifts at Cool Beans, or I’d recommend you. But Corabelle can. That girl doesn’t make a mistake.”

  The walls seemed to echo her words as we both realized that Corabelle had probably had the biggest life screw ups of us all. Punched a professor and got arrested. Then kicked out of her last college. Stripped of her scholarships.

  Jenny seemed to know the direction both of our thoughts had gone. “Well, NOW she doesn’t,” she corrected. “Straight arrow, that girl.”

  “I’ll take a look around,” I said. “There’s bound to be something.”

  “Christmas is coming,” Jenny said. “Everybody starts hiring.”

  “Some of the people at the hospital are going to be very upset that I left so suddenly,” I said.

  Jenny leaned forward. “Would any of them be that doctor who asked you out for coffee?”

  “He never showed up, remember?”

  “Corabelle said he talked to you yesterday.”

  I pulled the plant from the box and set it on the coffee table. “He and I sort of had…a moment.”

  Jenny scooted to the end of the pink sofa, closer to me. “What kind of moment?”

  “He got upset that I was talking to one of his patients in her room.” I could still see Darion’s angry scowl as he dragged me through the halls. “And we ended up in this empty surgery room.”

  “Oh my God. Did you bone him?”

  I had to laugh. “No, I didn’t bone him.” I plucked a dead leaf from the ivy.

  “But something happened, or you wouldn’t be bringing it up.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe we got a little…involved.”

  Jenny transferred from the fuzzy sofa to the old one to sit next to me. “You can’t leave out the details!”

  “None of our clothes came off.” I crossed my arms over my belly. I could still feel the doctor’s hands on me.

  “Not like that’s necessary,” Jenny said. She picked up the mermaid and turned it over. “Where did this come from?”

  “One of my patients made it.” I resisted the urge to ask her to set it back down. The clay was so soft.

  But she handled it carefully. “It’s beautiful.”

  “I know. I wish I could get back in there and say good-bye to some of them. I can’t believe they just escorted me out.”

  Jenny placed the mermaid back on the coffee table. “That’s not right. What’s the hot doctor going to say?”

  “He saw me leaving. There’s nothing we can do. I’m just not qualified.”

  Jenny flopped back on the sofa. “Uggh. That just sucks.” She lifted her wrist to examine a diamond-encrusted watch, probably another gift from her director. “It’s five o’clock somewhere. Let’s find something to drink.”

  ***

  Chapter Twelve: Dr. Darion

  I tried not to be distracted as I went on patient rounds. Everyone deserved my full attention. But I kept pausing between the rooms, picturing Tina with her box of belongings. I couldn’t believe I didn’t have something to do with this, despite what they said.

  About an hour after my run-in with Tina, I spotted the custodian, Charles, mopping an empty room. I stepped inside and closed the door.

  “Did you mention me and Tina to anyone?” I asked, trying to keep my voice casual. “Because she just got fired.”

  Charles leaned on his mop. “Not to nobody,” he said. “But her boss lady got the axe too.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Why would they be firing people randomly?”

  “Just sayin’ what I heard.”

  I could believe that Charles, virtually invisible to people as he cleaned floors in his blue uniform, might hear things others didn’t. He’d probably seen hundreds of doctors and nurses come and go. Administrators too.

  Charles straightened his ball cap. “Your Miss Tina has a lot of champions. I think she’ll be back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Charles resumed his mopping. “Just saying that money talks around here. And there’s some money going to be flappin’ like a squawking bird when the word gets out that she’s gone.”

  I had to get back to my rounds. If Charles was right, then something would happen. But that man was as vague as a fortune cookie. I couldn’t risk it. I knew who I had to talk to.

  *

  My father’s office was a twenty-minute drive from St. Anthony’s Hospital, and he wasn’t expecting me.

  I did take the precaution of calling his secretary to make sure he was in, but otherwise I felt it better to not announce my intent to see him in advance.

  As I pulled into the parking garage, I girded myself for the visit. We did not have a good relationship. I rarely saw him, even on holidays, as he refused to allow me to bring Cynthia around him.

  My main goal today, the same as any time we met, was to avoid an argument. He had made some terrible choices, and they had cost my mother and my sister dearly. But he wielded a lot of power, and sometimes I needed him for that.

  He wasn’t someone to make your enemy, although I had tried my darnedest in the years after he left my mother and refused to acknowledge Cynthia as his.

  The California Board of Medicine was housed eight hours away in Sacramento, but being on the board didn’t require being there. My father, and his father before him, had a lot of political influence that got them appointed to the right places.

  My face reflected in the mirrored walls of the elevator looked stressed and haggard. It was hard to imagine that earlier that day I had been in the surgical suite with Tina. The last day as emotional as this had been the one when my sister was born and my father had refused to come, insisting the child wasn’t his.

  He hadn’t attended my mother’s funeral either.

  I had to strike these things from my mind, or the resentment would cause an emotional backlash that might hurt me while dealing with the issue at hand. Someone needed to exert some pressure on the hospital director regarding Tina’s job, and my father was the man to do it.

  I had two ways to play it. I could start with self-righteous indignation over my patients’ suffering, but he’d see through that quickly. Still, applying a gloss of professional interest would grease the later conversation, which would be a lie built on truth.

  My father’s weakness was his intense desire to continue a long family tradition of physicians. I was his only son. He wanted to see me comfortably set up with family and kids, whom he could also bully into becoming doctors.

  So, to save Tina’s job, she would have to be exalted to the position of future mother of his grandchildren. She would never even know this behind-the-scenes action was taken on her behalf.

  My father’s secretary, Martha, had been with him since I was a boy, first answering phones at the clinic where he practiced. Even when he left us for Oxford, the move that split our family apart, she had remained with him.

  “Darion, so good to see you,” she said. “Let me buzz your father.”

  “Thank you.”

  I didn’t sit down, but stood by the windows overlooking San Diego. Winter had settled in, gray and dull. But California had its fans for a reason. Temperate weather. Beaches. I pictured Tina in other places in the city, sitting beneath the trees in Balboa Park, walking along the path by the lighthouse on Point Loma.

  Good grief. I barely knew her. I remembered her angry tirade when I spoke to her yesterday. She’d probably just as soon whack me with a roll of art paper as go out on a date.r />
  But then there was the way she’d stood on tiptoe, leaning toward me like it was a dare. And how she responded, as though we were two swimmers caught in a current.

  “You can go see him now,” Martha said. “He cut his conference call short.”

  I nodded curtly at her. She beamed like I was still the tyke who dug through her bottom drawer for the butterscotch candies she kept for me. She was a lovely woman who had aged well, spinsterly in a handsome way. I often wondered if there was something going on between her and my father, but even after his divorce from my mother, she never seemed to be anything more than an employee.

  I turned the gold knob to my father’s office. He stood up from behind the polished mahogany desk and held out his hand for a solid shake. “To what do I owe this unexpected surprise?”

  “Just wanted your opinion on an issue at St. Anthony’s.”

  He settled back into his oversized leather chair and gestured for me to sit as well. “How is the new position suiting you?”

  “Good. I see pediatric patients as well as the second-onset adults who were treated as children.”

  “That’s a very good subspecialty. Not a lot of literature exists on the long-term genotoxic effects of chemotherapeutic intervention in children. You could really make your mark there.”

  His smile was genuine, a rare thing. I could see something of Cynthia in it, which is what always riled me when he insisted she was not his. It was obvious to anyone who looked, despite the paternity test.

  “It’s a growing population.” I decided to indulge him in his fantasy that I would achieve some medical breakthrough that would give the family name a place in history.

  “Has there been some resistance to your handling both adult and pediatric cases?”

  “Some. But I’ve been approved for the alternate track to pediatrics.”

  Another proud smile. I wanted to wipe it off his face. I hadn’t repeated all that work just to show off. He wasn’t aware that Cynthia was so ill, and that I needed the credentials to remain involved in her care. I wasn’t certified in pediatrics, but my oncology work had gotten me into St. Anthony’s specialized wing to manage both, even if Mayo had turned me down.