Deanna has worked hard to become an expert in her chosen field, but few believe this ‘child’ capable. Specializing in infectious diseases, she travels the world—from the States to Europe to South America—honing her skills before winding up in Africa where her skills are desperately needed.
Meeting a nurse by the name of Madison MacGregor, she finds they share an insatiable curiosity and a love of helping others, but falling in love was not what she intended. Later, when she loses Maddie to a misunderstanding, she is haunted by the one that got away…
Ten years have passed and both the doctor and nurse have moved on with their lives, but fate intervenes when they find themselves working at the same hospital. Their friendship is revived…can their love be rekindled? Will the past haunt them or bring them closer? Will the secrets that both harbor keep them from realizing a future together?
CHAPTER ONE
“Hey! Where’d you get that huge bouquet from?” Bonnie asked her with a touch of innuendo and a sly grin.
“What? What bouquet?” Madison asked with a puzzled frown, looking around as though she could see them from her desk.
“The one at the nurses’ station on the fourth. You didn’t put them there deliberately?” she asked slyly, as though to get in on ‘the secret.’ She was actually hoping to ferret out more information.
“Why would I do that?” Madison stopped writing in the patient’s chart and looked up.
“To show Tom that he isn’t the only one interested? Payback for that bad date?”
Madison grinned ruefully at the ill-conceived idea of anyone being able to date Tom Masters. The arrogant asshole had told her equal rights meant he expected her to pay for her half of the expensive date he had taken her on. She shook her head. Had he sent flowers to make up for it? “I didn’t see them,” she told her friend, truthfully.
“Well, Sheila told me that they couldn’t fit them on or in your locker so they decided everyone could enjoy them. There is no card though,” Bonnie confided, and that confirmed that she had looked.
Madison rolled her eyes. Having friends among the staff could be a little bit of a pain in the ass. She had to be careful as she was their superior. She finished up the chart she was looking at, closed it, and filed it as she got up from the desk. “Guess I’ll go have a look,” she told her impatiently curious friend.
“Mind if I tag along?” Bonnie asked, falling into step beside her.
“Don’t you have patients?” Madison asked, looking down at the shorter woman and stopping to give her a stern look. Friend or no friend, the patients came first.
Bonnie sighed and turned away, hoping that Madison would share who the flowers were from. She was certain they weren’t from Tom—he was too self-absorbed to think of anyone…especially someone like Madison. She looked back to see Madison escaping into the stairwell instead of taking the elevator. She admired the clean lines of her nurse’s uniform, the sterile whites instead of the scrubs that everyone else wore. It made her stand out, but then as a nursing supervisor she needed to. Her looks alone would have had her stand out. It wasn’t that she was really that attractive, she just kind of grew on you. As you got to know her, you realized she was beautiful, but not in an obvious way. It was her personality that made her beautiful.
Madison went up to the fourth floor nurses’ station and was astonished at the bouquet sitting there. Alyson assured her they were for her and she stared in consternation at the many Birds of Paradise along with the long grasses in the bouquet. It was simple and yet striking at the same time. The quantity of them was staggering.
“Ah, so who are these from?” Alyson asked, trying to dig for information. The other nurses and a few of the doctors were all gossiping. “Are they from Tom?” she slyly slipped in. Rumors and innuendo fueled the gossip mill, in between caring for patients.
Madison looked up from the massive bouquet and shook her head, first to clear it from her own surmising of who the bouquet was from, and second to refute the question. Tom wouldn’t pay for something so outrageous. He’d make a penny scream before he let it go. “No, not from Tom,” she assured the triage nurse.
“Oh, is there someone else…already?”
Madison looked at Alyson again. “No, there is no one else, but it’s not from Tom,” she said with absolute conviction. She also didn’t want that guy getting credit where credit wasn’t due, and Tom definitely didn’t need the credit.
“Are you taking the bouquet now?”
“I’ll come back after my shift for it.” She was already wondering if it would fit in her Prius. Those stems were kind of long…perhaps on the floor. It was going to look gorgeous in her small living room on the dining room table.
She was asked about the flowers all during the rest of her shift, repeatedly denying they were from Tom. The fact that she didn’t have anyone else to name and her answers being vague might have kept the gossip going. She wasn’t happy when it spilled over into the operating room when she was trying to concentrate on her patients and her job.
“So, Madison. I saw that bush you got, sitting on the fourth floor nurses’ station,” Doctor Traff commented, smiling behind his mask to show he was teasing. The twinkle in his dark green eyes might have given it away too.
“Yesss,” Madison said tightly from behind her own surgical mask, glancing up from the tray for only an instant.
“Clamp,” he requested, and saw that she was right on the money, ready and waiting. She often anticipated what he needed and that made her a good nurse. She also followed up on the patients as much as any of the doctors. Many of the doctors liked working with her—she went above and beyond, and was extremely conscientious—and it was appreciated.
“So, who sent them?” he asked, making conversation as he worked.
Madison looked down into the gut briefly and returned her eyes to her tray. They didn’t need more hands in there, much less eyes, and her job was to keep the tools of the trade available to the doctors. She just wanted the conversation to stop. Her nurses had been asking all day. “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. She was never so relieved as when the patient began to pump blood and the surgeon’s idle conversation was cut off. He could now concentrate on saving a life instead of Madison’s love life, or lack thereof.
“So, who do you think they are from?” Larry, another nurse, asked as they washed up after the surgery.
Madison rolled her eyes. The idle gossip wasn’t going to stop. She was sick of it already and retreated into silence as she quickly changed. She glanced at the cleaning crew in the operating room and then checked off a few things on the chart before leaving.
Madison had a few more things to check, things she knew other nurses wouldn’t check unless she followed up, but then she was thorough at her job. She changed into street clothes, not about to be seen in her nurse’s uniform, and ended up on the fourth floor trying to carry the huge bouquet. There was no way she could easily walk it all the way down from the fourth floor, especially in the stairwell, so she pressed the button for the elevator. She saw many admiring glances and assumed they were for the enormous bouquet. It was really lovely, but she was embarrassed. Perhaps she should have left it at work, maybe divided it up and given it to a few patients. She wondered who it was from.
“Did you get in a fight?” Beth asked as she saw her maneuver onto the elevator with the bouquet, trying not to poke anyone in the eye with one of the sharp, pointy flowers or the long-bladed grasses.
“No,” she replied simply, tired of the questions the flowers had engendered today.
“Are you seeing someone new?” Beth was determined to get more information.
“Nope,” she grinned, hoping the doors would open again before further questions could occur to the woman.
The elevator stopped on the second level and a couple of people edged on, trying to fit in around the flowers. They eyed them warily…Bird of Paradise flowers could be used to maim, even unintentionally.
When Madison saw tha
t one of the people who had gotten on the elevator was Tom, she seriously thought about using the flowers as a weapon. It would poke him quite nicely in the eye, one of which he was using to look at her suspiciously. She hadn’t cheated. They had gone on one date only and that one had been a disaster. How dare he look at her like that! If she moved like so, it would accidentally poke him in the butt, but her humor wouldn’t let her do the actual deed as the elevator settled on the first floor. He glanced at her and the flowers one more time before leaving the small box they were all in.
“You better go first,” Beth offered generously. She had seen the look on Tom’s face and couldn’t wait to spread some rumors about it.
The flowers didn’t fit well in her small Prius even if they were on the floor of the vehicle. They did, however, take up the whole dining room table and bring joy to her as she gazed at them over the wine she allowed herself after a full day’s work. Who were they from though? That was the question she—and apparently many of the people she worked with—wanted answered. They were exotic and they were all over southern California, but this was a unique bouquet. Who had sent it to her?
Idly, she sat spinning the stem of her wine glass and gazing at the present she had received. She was trying not to read too much into it, but she couldn’t help thinking about the who, the what, and the why. Her introspection was cut off as the children came into the house.
“Mom!” Chloe yelled with a smile. “Dad got us a puppy!” she said importantly as she came over for a hug.
Madison managed not to roll her eyes at Scott, taking her idea and going with it. It wasn’t the first time…it wouldn’t be the last.
“It’s a shaggy beast,” Conor said importantly, with all the dignity of an eight-year-old as he headed into the kitchen for a snack.
“A shaggy beast?” Madison nearly laughed as Scott came in and dropped off both children’s backpacks.
“Hard day?” he asked as he saw her drain the remains of her wine. Then he saw the monstrous bouquet on her dining room table and turned to raise an eyebrow.
“No, not at all,” she assured him, ignoring his questioning look. “A dog?”
“Yeah, we went to the pound after school. Just to look,” he assured her. “Next thing I knew we had this shaggy, flea-bitten varmint.”
She laughed, knowing the powers of persuasion her children possessed. “I’m sure you will adjust.”
“It’s going to cost me a fortune,” he whined, trying to get her to see his side of things.
Madison was amused further. He had heard her suggestion that it was time for the children to have some responsibility and get a pet. He further wanted to be the hero and now had to deal with it.
“We went to Petco and apparently the dog needs one of everything,” he lamented.
“Well, now you’ve done it,” she assured him.
“Done what?” he asked, confused.
“You can’t get rid of it now,” she pointed out, knowing he wouldn’t hesitate to take it back to the pound.
“Daddy, you won’t get rid of Fluffy will you?” Chloe asked, sounding amazingly like her father with her whine.
“Of course not, honey,” he assured her. “Now you go and play.” He watched affectionately as she went off to the room that she shared with her brother in the tiny house.
Madison shook her head, knowing he’d backed himself into a corner and would expect her to get him out of it somehow. It really made more sense for her to have a dog in her small two-bedroom house with a yard than him in his small apartment, but she wouldn’t rescue him, not this time. So many other times she had indeed gotten him out of his need to show off for the kids, but enough was enough.
“Here are your keys,” he said as he handed over the keys to her minivan. She reluctantly handed him the keys to his Prius, preferring the smaller and more dependable vehicle to drive.
Madison was relieved when Scott left and she was alone with the kids. She needed her quiet time and sharing custody with him wasn’t always easy. It was why she no longer wished to be married to him. He had needed so much of her time that it was like raising a third kid. She wanted a lover, not another responsibility. She wanted a partner, not someone who wanted to be taken care of, not someone who expected it. She sighed thinking about Scott and then her latest fiasco, Tom. Why the heck couldn’t she meet someone nice who ‘tripped her trigger’ and could be a true partner? Someone who was adventurous and loving? Someone who didn’t want something from her she wasn’t prepared to give? She sighed again as she straightened one of the flowers and wondered who had sent her the absolutely outrageous bouquet.
CHAPTER TWO
Madison had been working steadily for several weeks with just her normal Sunday and Monday days off. It meant that Scott took the kids every Saturday and she got to run errands and get things done on Monday when businesses were open and the kids weren’t with her. She had every Sunday with the kids and they frequently went to the beach, hiking, or did something else together. They enjoyed each other and while they occasionally missed doing things as a family, at least Scott and she were cordial and could get along for the most part. He was still trying to puzzle out why she had divorced him last year. She just couldn’t cope anymore, didn’t want to try, and wasn’t willing to put up with him anymore. She needed to be happy with herself and while she wasn’t yet, at least she was happy with the kids.
She was working so much she hadn’t caught up on the gossip of who was dating whom, the new arrivals, who was leaving the hospital to work elsewhere, and other happenings. She was, however, generating gossip because she had been getting a bouquet of some type every week. Every. Single. Week. This last week she had gotten six African violets of different types and varieties. She hadn’t known there were different kinds. She’d seen them at the store, thought they were beautiful, but never purchased one for herself. Now she had six in her windows at home and she loved them. Whoever was sending these things had put a lot of thought into it and she wondered who it was. She was enjoying the mystery of it, but didn’t like the gossip it generated.
This week it was a couple of Proteas. She had never even seen these flowers here. The last time she saw them was in…Africa. It was at that moment that she realized each of the bouquets, each of the plants she had received, all had Africa in common. Was someone playing some sort of trick on her? Few, if any, realized she had worked with the Red Cross in Africa a decade ago. Why would someone do something like this? Now she was feeling kind of uneasy.
Because she had been working so hard, she hadn’t paid attention to the gossip, not that she normally did. Today she heard her coworkers at lunch talking about the new doctor, a Doctor Kearney who had been romanced into coming to work here at their hospital. Apparently he was hard to get hold of and had been highly sought after from various facilities all over the world. An infectious disease specialist, he had worked in the jungles. When someone mentioned Africa, Madison began to rack her brain trying to remember if she had met a Doctor Kearney there in her time, but couldn’t recall anyone by that name. It was troubling to her.
“Apparently she told Doctor Stanoslovsky to get the hell out of her surgery,” Bette was saying as she finished her yogurt at lunch.
Madison clued in as she had found herself daydreaming about Africa, something that seemed to be on her mind a lot recently. “Who told Stan-the-man that?” she asked, laughing. The man was a pompous know-it-all and they called him Stan-the-man behind his back as Stanoslovsky was such a mouthful.
“Doctor Kearney,” she said exasperated. “Weren’t you listening?”
The others chuckled at her and Madison flushed. “Yes, I was listening, but you said her…I thought Doctor Kearney was a man….”
Shaking her head, Bonnie chimed in. “No, no, no, Doctor Kearney is a woman,” she clarified. “Pay attention,” she teased.
Trying to catch up, Madison shook her head, her red curls bouncing, laughing at her friends and coworkers. “Okay, okay. I’ve been out of
it,” she admitted.
“Haven’t you met Doctor Kearney yet?” Bette asked, curious.
She shook her head again as she grabbed a bite. Swallowing she answered, “No, haven’t seen her,” she admitted.
“Oh, she’s nice. Very down to earth. She’s been all over the world. Amazing!” Bette gushed.
“She’s really attractive too, in a hard kind of way,” Sheila piped up and then blushed. Everyone knew Sheila was bisexual.
A few felt the need to tease her about that and proceeded to do so for the next few minutes.
“How is she in surgery, and why did she kick Stan-the-man out of surgery?” Madison finally interrupted the teasing to ask.
“She’s innovative, and that’s what he got on his high horse about. Apparently her technique was something he hadn’t seen before. When he kept trying to second-guess her, she kicked his arrogant ass out. Doctor Foster backed her up as it was her surgery and she was doing a terrific job.” Bette was pleased as all get out that he had been put in his place. Some doctors treated the nurses horribly and he was one of them.
“Isn’t that the patient who had gangrene or something?” someone else asked.
Bonnie nodded and put in, “Yeah, Doctor Kearney used maggots to clean out the wound before she would operate.”
“Maggots?” Madison asked, a distasteful look on her face. Looking down at her meal, it suddenly didn’t seem as tasty and she pushed it aside. She went to take a drink of her juice and looked at it suspiciously—as though it carried some of the disgusting slugs in it.
“Yeah, she got some sterilized maggots or something, and put them in the wound. They ate all the diseased flesh so she was able to operate and close up the healthy tissue,” Bette explained and then laughed at Madison’s expression. “Come on, you have to admit that’s clever. They eat only the bad flesh, the corpulent stuff, and leave the healthy tissue.”
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