As she listened to him repeat an explanation to Eva, she also knew he'd put even more demands on himself lately. His bedside manner was changing, too. She rarely saw him touch a patient to offer reassurance or comfort anymore. It was a professional barrier, she was sure. But since his divorce last year, that barrier seemed to be slipping into his personal life as well.
As bad as she was about having no time for a social life, Mike was ten times worse.
"So, how are you feeling now?" Mike asked.
Eva's indomitable spirit fought through her fear. "Like I was hit in the chest with a wrecking ball."
"With or without spikes?"
Eva seemed to consider. "Without."
"That sounds about right." The corners of Mike's eyes crinkled with a faint smile as he glanced toward the monitor again. Just as he did, his pager went off. "You're looking good," he assured her, reaching inside his lab coat to silence the electronic device clipped to his belt. "Almost good enough to start chasing those grandkids of yours." His glance slid to the illuminated digits on the pager. "But we'll have you rest across the hall for a while anyway."
"You know, Katie," the patient whispered, watching her adored doctor check the number he was to call. "You should get yourself a man like this. I know for a fact he's not married. I asked him about every one of the pictures in his office and there wasn't a wife among them."
That was because he'd finally divorced the little gold digger, Katie thought.
"Oh, I'm afraid that really isn't possible," she replied, going along easily with the conversation while removing the telemetry leads from the woman's chest. "The day I graduated from nursing school, two friends and I signed a pact. We agreed never to marry a physician. Ever." Raising the side rail, she shook her head in mock seriousness. "I'm afraid getting involved with someone like Dr. Brennan is out of the question."
Mike's expression was utterly bland. "I think everything's under control here," he announced, having heard—and deliberately ignored—what they were saying. "I'm going to leave you in this nurse's capable hands, Eva. But I'll check on you this evening. You behave yourself.
"Make sure that IV is wide-open," he said to Katie when he turned. "And if I'm not here when you get back from across the hall, page me. I need to talk to you."
Katie was back from the CICU in less than ten minutes. But when she walked back through the unit's double doors, she immediately encountered Dr. Aniston, an opinionated, overbearing cardiologist who still thought of nurses as subservient ladies in starched white hats who dusted patients' rooms and passed out pills. He was imperiously demanding to see the nurse assigned to one of his patients. Since she was that nurse, and since she hadn't been around when he'd come onto the floor, his mood was not good.
"I was about to leave," he informed her, signing off on an order with his flashy gold pen. "I don't have time to wait around for nursing staff."
"I was moving a patient to intensive care."
She'd been doing her job. Since he had no reply for that, he chose to ignore her statement completely.
"This patient can be discharged," he said without so much as a glance toward her. His balding head gleamed like a strobe under the overhead lights. "I'm changing the dosage on his meds. Explain that to him and have him make an appointment with my office in three days."
On the other side of the counter, Alice rocked back in her chair. Catching Katie's eye, she rolled hers toward the ceiling—an antic which would have made Katie smile had Dr. Aniston not been facing her. The cardiologist was a royal pain in the posterior. Even his patients found him abrupt. But he was good and he knew it, and his ego had grown to exceed all five feet eight inches of his banty-legged frame.
He and Mike were so totally opposite, she thought, the comparison unavoidable as the man huffed off. Mike could be in the middle of a crisis, but he'd be like the eye of the storm. Dead calm. Dr. Aniston was the storm. And even if something wasn't a crisis, he turned it into one.
"Is Dr. Brennan still here?" she suddenly asked Alice.
Alice opened her mouth, but it was Jan, of the fantasy-inducing Hawaiian vacation photos, who replied as she approached the desk. "If you're looking for him, he's in the lounge. I just saw him go in."
After a quick "Thanks," Katie headed down the hall, the soft soles of her white sneakers soundless on the polished floor. She'd see what Mike wanted, then distribute meds, check on her new admit and start on her discharge. But if he intended to rope her into some new project now that his old one was nearly complete, the answer would simply have to be no. Friend or not, she had to start asserting herself somewhere.
Since he was the one who'd pointed that out, he shouldn't complain if she decided to practice on him.
The staff lounge was part locker room, part lived-in living room. The old willow-green sofa sagged from years of interns and residents catching a few winks between crises.
The round, white Formica table sported a couple of cigarette burns from the era before smoking had been banned from the building. But the microwave, refrigerator and coffeepot worked, and the tall window at the far end of the room let in daylight—what wasn't blocked by gray clouds and the parking garage, anyway.
Mike was on the far side of the room. Standing by one of the gray lockers, he was trading his lab coat for his suit jacket.
"Heading for your office?" she asked, her gaze skimming over the shoulders of his crisp, white shirt.
"Yeah. I've got appointments this morning. Surgery this afternoon." Looking preoccupied, he flicked a glance across the newspapers cluttering the table, watching her approach. "How's Eva doing?"
"She was stable when I left her. She thinks you walk on water."
She thought he might smile. All he did was shake his head. "She's just feeling grateful right now." He shrugged a beautifully tailored jacket over his broad shoulders, automatically tugging his shirt cuffs from his sleeves. The smile finally formed. Not much of one. But it was there. "I can't believe you told her about that crazy pledge."
"Hey, I'm a woman of my word. I couldn't have her getting her hopes up now, could I?"
Katie's soft smile was infectious. Mike returned it mostly because he couldn't avoid it—even though he knew there was far more to that pledge of hers than she'd ever admit. The old oath she and her buddies had taken sounded like a joke. And it might have been just that at one time. But it wasn't any longer. Not for Katie. He had the nagging feeling she was dead serious about never marrying a doctor, because in her mind, to marry a doctor would be to marry a man like her father.
Most people wouldn't see that as a problem at all. Dr. Randall Sheppard was one of the town's most prominent pediatricians, a man who was incredibly generous with his time and his talents. A true gift to the community. But while, to Mike, he was the inspiration for why he'd become a doctor himself, Katie saw him only as someone who'd taken far more than he ever gave as a husband and father.
Mike grabbed his overcoat, checking the pocket to make sure he still had the ticket for the dry cleaning he kept forgetting to pick up. He couldn't help but think that Katie was cheating herself big-time letting such a prejudice interfere with her prospects, especially since he knew how much she wanted a family of her own. But her hang-ups about her dad were one subject he'd learned to avoid with her.
"Anyway," she continued, reaching into the inside pocket of his overcoat to hand him the slip of paper that was sticking out, "Eva wanted to fix me up with her grandson, but I told her I didn't do blind dates, either. Is this what you're looking for?"
Exasperation lined his brow. "Thanks," he muttered, shoving the ticket into his shirt pocket.
"What did you want to talk to me about?"
"I need a favor."
"I'm not picking up your dry cleaning."
"Cute."
"And I'm not going to coordinate another research study for you. I got roped into the one you're doing by default as it was. Nurses started coming to me with their questions because they knew I knew you, a
nd the next thing I knew, I was monitoring half your study patients because no one else 'understood your criteria.'" She mentally stiffened her spine. "I'm sorry, Mike," she added, softening anyway. "Please, don't ask."
"Do I detect a backbone?"
"I mean it," she warned, refusing to soften any further.
"Then I guess it's a good thing it's not another study." He knew the extensive checks and cross-checks in a research project could be a real pain for the nursing staff. He truly appreciated Katie taking his on. "But it's not like you didn't owe me. Didn't I rescue that schizophrenic cat of yours last month?"
The light of triumph turned his blue eyes wicked. He had her there and he knew it. Spike, her chickenhearted guard cat of indeterminate pedigree, had escaped her apartment as she'd dragged in her Christmas tree and headed straight up the twenty-foot pine by her front window. Mike happened to own an extension ladder. It had been left behind by the previous owners of his house.
"Okay. So we're even," she decided. Skeptical anyway, she tipped her head. "What's the favor?"
He had one arm in the sleeve of his overcoat. "It's not that big a deal. I just need a date. For the Heart Ball," he explained, fabric rustling as he tackled the other sleeve. "Dr. MacAllister insists that I go. It's kind of hard to turn down the chief of staff."
Katie blinked at the man looming four feet in front of her. When she looked at Mike, she saw … Mike. But she also knew what other women saw. His hair was a rich shade of sable, thick and worn just casual enough to invite a woman's fingers to test its softness. His features were chiseled, his jaw angular, his nose thin as a blade, and his mouth carved and sensuously full. Then there were his eyes, those incredible, piercing blue eyes that held such intelligence and compassion, and revealed very little of what was actually going on inside the man himself.
All that before she got below his neck. Under his nicely fitting clothes were a pair of broad shoulders, a set of sinewy biceps, taut pecs and a six-pack of abdominal muscles that would have any woman with an ounce of breath left in her body sighing with pure longing.
Having gone a tad farther than she'd intended to prove her point, she casually glanced back up to meet his eyes, dismissing the faint flutter in her stomach as nothing more than autonomic response.
"You want me to get you a date? Geez, Mike. Look around you. There are a dozen women in this hospital alone who'd kill to go out with you. And what about all those hard little bodies at the gym?" She didn't go to the gym herself. Her ego couldn't take it. But she'd seen him in a tank and jogging shorts. All he'd have to do was walk through the weight room and women would be dropping at his feet. "You could probably have your pick."
"I don't want a real date," he countered, too busy dismissing the idea to be flattered by Katie's certainty. "I don't want to have to call somebody back, or make small talk all night. Then there'd be the expectations and hints about getting together again. Or maybe she'd be bored to death with me and chomping at the bit to go home. I just don't want to deal with any of that right now."
He didn't want to deal with dating, period. Katie was fairly certain of that. Since his divorce following his move from Portland eighteen months ago, he hadn't expressed an interest in going out with anyone at all. At least, he hadn't to her.
"So what is it you want?" she asked, at a loss.
"I want you to go with me."
She stared at the challenge in his jaw.
"You know," she said, wondering if he knew how defensive he looked, "for someone who knows his way around the inside of a chest, you don't know squat about how to touch a girl's heart. But, hey, a free dinner? A chance to wear something someone hasn't thrown up on?" She shrugged. She and Mike always had a good time together. "Why not?"
She was a little surprised by how relieved he looked. "Thanks, sport." He curved his hand over her shoulder and gave her a little squeeze. "I owe you one."
"Yeah, you do," she muttered good-naturedly, and walked with him to the door.
She turned left for the med room.
Mike turned right, heading for the unit's wide double doors. Moments later, he was jogging down the stairwell, preferring movement to waiting for an elevator. Taking all three flights and a short hall to the street in less than a minute, he left the hospital with its familiar sounds and antiseptic smells, and strode into the gray drizzle that was winter in the Northwest. There might be days when that drizzle turned to a downpour or to sleet or, occasionally, to snow, but from October to June, some sort of precipitation invariably seemed to be falling from the cloud-filled sky.
He wanted sunshine. Just a day of it, he thought, then dismissed the wish as a waste of mental energy. Even if the clouds did decide to depart, he wouldn't have time to take advantage of the break.
He had one less concern to deal with at the moment, however. He could forget about having to scrape up a date for the hospital auxiliary's annual charity fund-raiser. The necessity was hardly a priority. The event was a month away, but he'd seen no point in letting the matter nag at him. He'd known it would, too. And the thought of having to spend an evening being attentive to someone he barely knew while mingling with the movers and shakers who could help shape his career, held all the appeal of a toothache. Even if the evening hadn't been important from a career standpoint, he really didn't want to ask someone out and have her think he was interested in pursuing a potential relationship. Since his divorce, he'd had no desire to throw himself back into that briar patch again. There wasn't much of anything he even missed about not having a special woman in his life. Except sex.
His dark eyebrows jammed together, the thought catching him off guard as he finally reached his car and then jockeyed the black Lexus through the early-morning rush-hour traffic. He'd been so busy he hardly even thought about sex anymore—which should have told him right there that he was working way too hard.
Frowning past the windshield wipers swiping at the rain, he headed toward the complex of modern medical offices eight blocks away. It wasn't that he didn't think about sex at all, he reminded himself. He was a healthy, thirty-four-year-old male who responded predictably to an attractive woman. He just wasn't into casual sexual relationships. Not that he'd found himself tempted by one lately, he had to concede. Or, not so lately, for that matter.
That thought failed to provide the encouragement he was looking for. It also made him consider that there were times, sex aside, when having a girlfriend would be handy. For a nice dinner out. A quiet evening by the fire. For occasions like the Heart Ball. Thanks to Katie, though, he didn't have to concern himself about that last one. Even though she'd given him a hard time about it, he'd known he could count on her. She was like family that way.
Mike didn't question the faint smile that came and went with the thought. His mind was already racing ahead as he turned down the parking ramp under the two-story office complex and pulled into the space marked Michael J. Brennan, MD. He had follow-ups with two bypasses and an atrial defect, and work-ups with three referrals whose records he'd studied until midnight. After a quick lunch, he had a leaky mitral valve to repair.
If all went well, he could check on his other hospitalized patients, hit the gym for a quick workout, run back by the hospital to check on the valve, grab takeout and be home by nine-thirty. Unfortunately, that would be a little late to ask Katie if she'd go over the discrepancies he'd found in the data collection for his research study. Having hit her up for one favor today, he'd been reluctant to mention wanting her help with that, too. Maybe she could do it tomorrow if it wasn't her night at the free clinic. If she balked, he could bribe her with dinner. If that didn't work, he could always bring up the time he'd beat up his kid brother for her, but he liked to save the big guns for when he really needed them.
* * *
Chapter Two
« ^ »
"You know, Michael, if I wasn't your friend, you'd have waited until we were at work tomorrow to ask me to do this."
"But you are my friend, and I like taki
ng advantage of you."
"At least you're honest."
"So," he said, shutting the door and closing out the steady drum of rain while she shook water droplets from her curls, "are blood pressures being taken at the prescribed intervals after the drug is administered, or is someone getting sloppy? The readings I'm getting are all over the place."
Slipping off her burgundy raincoat, she eyed Mike evenly. He stood with his back to the massive, carved oak entry door, a navy T-shirt hugging his chest and gray, drawstring sweatpants hanging loosely on his narrow hips.
He'd obviously had time to get comfortable. She needed the same.
"First things first." She'd just spent the three hours since she got off work trying to scrape up more volunteers for the free clinic. She needed a break. She needed food. "You said we'd order takeout."
"Already done. I called Wangs. Two orders of mu shu pork and a large house special fried rice are on their way." Taking her coat, he flicked a glance over the long, cocoa-colored sweater and leggings she'd changed into between work and … work. "You get the glasses. I'll get the wine."
Pulling off her wet shoes so she wouldn't track up his parquet-tiled floors, she watched him lay her coat over the long, empty planter that served as a divider between the spacious entry and the more spacious dining room before he headed through the foyer for his kitchen. She knew he couldn't hang the garment in the guest closet. It didn't have any hangers. Like the empty planter, there wasn't much of anything in the obscenely spacious house at all.
FROM HOUSECALLS TO HUSBAND Page 2
