With the M.D....at the Altar?

by Jessica Andersen

  But he’d long ago learned that beneath differences in politics, religion and superstition, human beings all had the same basic biology. And that was what he had come to cure.

  “The monastery it is,” he said, not wanting to waste any more time discussing it…or thinking about the woman standing opposite him. “Let’s get started.”

  The sooner he figured out what was going on in Raven’s Cliff, the sooner he could fix it and get out of town before he did something really stupid…like try to pick up the pieces of a relationship he’d deliberately sabotaged two years earlier.

  ROX TOOK HER OWN CAR to the monastery because she needed the space, and needed to know that she could leave at any time—assuming her patients didn’t require her attention, of course. She hadn’t ever—and wouldn’t ever—put personal issues ahead of her patients’ safety.

  She had a feeling she might be tempted over the next few days, though. Somehow she’d forgotten how potent Luke could be in close quarters. Or maybe he’d grown even more so over the two years they’d been apart.

  The Luke she remembered had been handsome and charismatic, a born leader who could make even the most resentful medicine man grateful for his help, and who could convince even the most insecure patients they were going to live. And he was still all of those things now…with the addition of a darker undercurrent she didn’t remember, one that hinted of shadows and sadness and more complexity than he’d had before.

  Worse, that dark sexiness only made him more compelling.

  All of which meant she could be in some serious trouble, she thought as she drove the winding road leading to the monastery in the rainy darkness. Behind her was a convoy composed of the CDC team and a crew of a dozen off-duty cops, fishermen and other healthy locals Captain Swanson had talked into volunteering to get the monastery ready for patients.

  Trees crowded close on either side of the road, bending down beneath the gusting wind, making her feel trapped in the dark tunnel of their branches. Or more accurately, it was the man in the black SUV directly behind her that made her feel trapped.

  Why had Luke come?

  If the fates had sent him as a test, she’d already failed. She was supposed to be over him, damn it. Instead, she couldn’t stop thinking about the look he’d sent her as they’d left the police station—part speculation, part heat, as though she wasn’t the only one suddenly suffering sexual flashbacks.

  Then again, why wouldn’t he think of her that way? They’d been good together. Hell, they’d been better than good. The months they’d spent partnered through the Humanitarian Relief Foundation had been pretty much a blur of clinic hours and sex, both of which had been incredibly satisfying until their little differences had become bigger ones, and he’d taken the easy way out, leaving her with plenty of money to get home once she’d recovered from her fever, along with a breezy note about a dream job with the CDC. The note had contained nothing about them, nothing about the future he’d promised her.

  “Which is exactly why I’m keeping my hands and all other body parts to myself this time,” she said aloud as she pulled up to a pair of heavy wrought-iron gates set into a high brick wall. “Been there, done that, bought the heartache.”

  And if she told herself that a few million more times, she might even stop thinking about how wide his shoulders stretched beneath the CDC windbreaker. He’d gained a few pounds since she’d seen him last, and damn, they looked good on him.

  “Stop it,” she finally told herself. “There are far more important things to worry about right now.”

  Then again, the threat of the Violents and the deadly disease gripping her town was probably why she was fixating on Luke. Guy problems were normal. What was happening in Raven’s Cliff was far from normal. It was almost as though the town truly was suffering under an evil curse.

  “So deal with the disease,” she told herself, because that was the only thing she could hope to fix. “We work it one step at a time. First step—move in to the haunted monastery.”

  Trying not to talk herself into being even more creeped out than she already was, she got out of her car and used the keys Mayor Wells had given her to release a heavy padlock. The gate resisted at first, then gave way with a groan and swung inward. Aware of the others watching her from their idling cars, she blocked the gates open, climbed back in her car and drove along the narrow stone driveway leading to the monastery.

  When her headlights picked out the main building, she saw that it was just as dark and creepy as she remembered, if not more so.

  The stone building towered three stories high and stretched nearly the length of a football field on either side of the main entrance. The structure was made of heavy granite blocks, with marble pillars and peeling white-painted wood trim covered in a thick layer of moss and ivy. A series of narrow windows were nearly hidden beneath the dense greenery, glinting like the eyes of a predator peering through underbrush.

  Built back in the town’s heyday by the founding family, the Sterlings, the monastery had been a glorious place through the 1800s and early 1900s. Like the town itself, though, it had seen better days. Now the marble was cracked and crumbling, and the air blowing in through the vents of Rox’s car carried the scent of decay.

  “I wish I’d never mentioned this place,” she said, trying to ignore the faint shiver working its way down the back of her neck. “We could’ve made do at the clinic.”

  Then again, that would’ve meant being in very close quarters with Luke. Maybe the monastery wasn’t such a bad idea after all. At least she’d be able to put a few doors between them, giving her some space. Some privacy.

  She avoided the road leading to the parking lot off to the side of the huge stone building, and instead pulled up right in front of the wide stone stairs leading to the main entrance.

  All the better for a quick getaway if I need one, she thought wryly, but deep down inside she knew that even though the idea of escape might be sorely tempting, she wasn’t going anywhere. This was her home. These were her people. If there was anything she could do to heal and protect them, then she’d do it, even if it meant spending the next few days—or longer—with Luke.

  Speak of the devil, he was already out of his car and jogging up the main stairs, lighting the way with a heavy metal flashlight she knew from years past could double as both illumination and self-defense.

  When she joined him, he flicked the cone of light in her direction. “No ghosts yet.”

  “I didn’t say I thought it was haunted,” she said. “But wait until you get a load of the interior. If there was ever a place that deserved its own horror flick, this is it. Around here it’s a rite of passage for kids to sneak into the monastery and spend the night.” It was also a prime make-out spot, but she didn’t want to go there.

  She tried a couple of keys, found the right one and got the front door unlocked. It opened with a theatrical creak that had a few of the volunteers shifting from foot to foot and looking at each other as if unsure this was such a good idea.

  “Let’s get the electricity on first,” Luke ordered, taking charge of the situation. He gestured to one of his male teammates. “Thom, you can find the central panel, right? The mayor said we’d have juice if we hit the main breaker.”

  Thom, a tall, lean biochemist with a crooked nose, nodded and clicked on his own heavy flashlight. “I’m on it.”

  Within a few minutes, a scattering of lights came on, illuminating the entryway and glowing farther into the sprawling stone building.

  Like the outside, the once grand inside of the stone monastery had fallen into disrepair, with splashes of graffiti painted on many of the walls, and the charred remains of a campfire sitting smack in the middle of the entranceway.

  Luke looked around, his gaze lighting on the religious motifs carved into the lintels over each door, then picking out the three main archways leading from the entrance. He glanced at Rox and raised an eyebrow. “Suggestions?”

  “Our best bet is to close off
the east wing,” she said, pointing to their right. “That’s where the most vandalism has taken place, and according to local legend, it’s also where things tend to go ‘bump’ in the night.”

  He nodded. “Not the best place to stick patients who are already mentally compromised. We do that and we’re just asking for problems.”

  “Among other things.” Rox pointed straight ahead. “We’ll want to keep the kitchen wing open. Besides food, that’ll be our best bet for setting up lab space. We can put the patient and sleeping rooms in the west wing.” She jerked her thumb left, toward a locked door that had so far defied the vandals’ efforts to break in. “I was in there on a field trip once, and I’m pretty sure I remember there being decent-looking rooms with sturdy doors. No doubt Captain Swanson can hook us up if we need to change out the locks or anything.”

  “This place is cool,” Thom said, emerging from the shadows of the east wing and making them all jump slightly. He had a smudge of dust on the shoulder of his drying CDC raincoat, but his eyes were lit with an adventurer’s curiosity that sent a faint pang through Rox. He continued, “Somebody should use it for a school or something.”

  “They tried,” one of the off-duty cops said. “Since the seventies, it’s been used as a boarding school, a summer camp for smart kids, a corporate retreat and a wellness center. None of them lasted long.”

  “That’s ’cause it’s haunted,” one of the fishermen said. “We shouldn’t be here.”

  There was a general mutter of agreement and more shifting of feet, but before Rox could jump in with her “now let’s be rational” speech, Luke raised his voice and said, “I don’t know much about ghosts. What I do know is that you have a medical emergency here, and it’s my job to get it under control. So here’s the plan. Thom, you take half of the volunteers and see what needs to be done to get the north wing functional as both a kitchen and a field lab.” He gestured to his shorter, bearded teammate. “Bug here will take the rest of you into the west wing to get the rooms set up. Rox, I want you and May to head back to your clinic and prep the patients for transport. I’ll stay here and troubleshoot. We’ll have this place ready to go by dawn.”

  If anyone else had said something like that, Roxanne would’ve laughed, but she’d seen Luke create a workable triage and quarantine area out of even less, so she had no doubt he could transform a falling-down monastery to suit their needs in under five hours.

  She nodded to May, a pretty brunette who had introduced herself as the team’s clinical specialist. “We can take my car,” Rox said. “You need anything from the SUV?”

  May shook her head. “I’m good to go.”

  But before Rox could turn away, Luke called her back. “Wait.” He held out a .22 she hadn’t known he was carrying. “Take this. There could be more out there like your friend Aztec.”

  The memory brought a shiver, and she reached out to accept the small gun without protest. As she did so, her fingertips grazed his palm.

  The touch brought a spear of unexpected, unwanted heat that had her drawing away from him, had her voice going husky when she said, “Thanks.”

  He nodded, eyes suddenly dark and hooded. “Be careful.”

  She left before she said—or did—something she’d regret, like ask him why he’d left her two years earlier, or why he’d come back to her now. They both knew there were other teams that could’ve taken the Raven’s Cliff assignment.

  The question was, why hadn’t he let them?

  “RUMOR HAS IT you’ve got the CDC on your doorstep,” a mechanized voice said the moment Mayor Wells answered the ringing phone.

  “Do you have any idea what time it is? And why the hell are you calling on this line?” Sitting on the edge of his king-size bed, Wells gripped the handset so hard the plastic creaked in protest. “Beatrice might’ve answered.”

  In reality, it would’ve taken far more than a ringing phone to disturb his wife. She’d been using tranquilizers heavily ever since the previous month, when their daughter Camille had fallen from the rocky cliffs into the sea during her wedding—her wedding, for God’s sake.

  Her body hadn’t been recovered yet, and both the mayor and his wife were stuck in a state of seesawing hope: they hoped that her body would wash up so they could bury her properly, while praying she didn’t, because as long as her body hadn’t been found they could pretend she might still be alive.

  Wells envied Beatrice the oblivion she’d found in the tranqs, but he didn’t have the luxury of succumbing to grief because he had a town to run. Despite his best efforts, the whispers about the Captain’s Curse had been growing louder over the past few months, even before the outbreak.

  And now this.

  “The doctors won’t be an issue,” he assured the man on the other end of the phone, who he knew only as a string of numbers from a Swiss bank account that made regular deposits into his own. “They won’t be looking anywhere near your chemical purchases. You have my word on it.”

  The mayor was sweating lightly, though.

  “Make sure they don’t.” The line went dead.

  Wells sat for a minute, holding the handset to his ear, staring out the window into the black, rainy night. Then he stood and went to the wall safe where he kept an unregistered gun locked and loaded. He pulled out the weapon, checked the safety and tucked the firearm into the inner pocket of his briefcase.

  Just in case.

  Chapter Three

  By midmorning, Luke’s team and the volunteers had not only managed to clean and sanitize the kitchen and thirty small residential rooms in the west wing of the monastery, they’d also moved the patients from the clinic and police station into their new quarters.

  The three Violents—Aztec Wheeler, boat mechanic Doug Allen and Jake Welstrom, a father of four whose symptoms had been identified during one of the house-to-house sweeps, thankfully before he hurt his family or himself—were locked in stone-walled rooms with barred windows, located at the back of the west wing.

  The eight other patients—including Rox’s clinic assistants, Jeff and Wendy Durby, as well as all four members of the Prentiss family plus librarian Cheryl Proctor and gas station attendant Henry Wylde—were housed in the middle of the west wing, in well-ventilated rooms under lighter precautions.

  The doctors had staked out rooms close to the entryway, giving them equal access to the patient rooms and the kitchen, which would serve as both mess and lab. There, the members of the CDC team were working on processing the first set of blood and urine samples for analysis.

  The outbreak response was up and running, and Rox knew she should be incredibly grateful. Instead, as she stood in the middle of the entryway watching the organized chaos that would hopefully put her town on the road to recovery, she felt a pang of resentment.

  She’d barely been keeping ahead of the symptomatic treatments on her own, never mind being able to investigate the sickness or its cause, but there was a part of her that didn’t want the others involved. She kept feeling as though she should’ve been able to handle this by herself, in her own clinic.

  “Bug has the first set of blood samples spinning down,” Luke said, appearing in the archway leading to the kitchen wing. “We should have some preliminary results in fifteen minutes or so, and that’ll give us a starting point for figuring this thing out.”

  He’d changed out of the dust-smeared clothes he’d been wearing the last time she’d seen him, into jeans and one of the long-sleeved button-down shirts they’d both favored on assignment. Made of a high-tech nylon composite, the garments looked like cotton, but wicked away sweat and heat, and were nearly indestructible.

  The sight of the shirt—and the fact that she’d long ago donated hers to Goodwill because she would never need them again—sent a little jab beneath Rox’s heart.

  Luke made a wide gesture to encompass the monastery, which was slightly less creepy in the light of day. “What do you think?”

  “I think you made good on your promise to get this do
ne by morning,” she said, and her thoughts of a moment before made her voice sharper than she’d intended, lending accusation to the words.

  “As opposed to other promises I didn’t make good on, you mean?” Boots ringing on the stone floor, he moved to face her, expression resigned and maybe a bit impatient. “Go ahead. Ask me why I left you the way I did.”

  In other words, he was willing to talk about it if she wanted to fight. He might even be willing to say he was sorry for the way he’d left, though not for the actual act of leaving. But she could tell from his expression that it was going to be the same sort of circular argument they’d excelled at during the last few weeks before she got sick, the ones that never ended with a winner or a loser, just the incompatibility of two people who had great sex but wanted different things out of life.

  She’d been looking to slow down and scale back to something more intimate at a time when his career had been poised to take off. Part of her had known the end was coming for them even before he’d left, but she had never expected—and could never forgive—how he’d abandoned her in a field hospital, sick and alone.

  “I don’t need to ask,” she said calmly. “You left because the CDC put out an emergency call. Fine, I get that. But if you’ve got a guilty conscience because you weren’t man enough to tell me goodbye to my face, you’re just going to have to live with it. You earned it.”

  They locked eyes for a long moment. Finally, he nodded. “Fair enough.”

  “Fair enough,” she echoed. In a deliberate effort to shift the subject back to where it belonged she said, “Have you had a chance to check out my patient notes?”

  He nodded, both to her question and, she suspected, to her change of topic. “They’re pretty good, given the circumstances.”

  She didn’t bother to defend her scribblings because she figured “pretty good” was an accurate assessment. By the time she’d figured out she had a major problem on her hands, the patients had been coming in so quickly and their symptoms had been so severe that she’d been hard-pressed to do more than scrawl a few details on each chart.