by Lori Wilde
He nodded. “Sounds like a plan.”
Mark closed the door after him, leaving Dante alone in the office that was three times the size of his office in Quantico. He ran a hand along the polished mahogany desk, spun the leather swivel chair, thickly padded and hand-stitched. His feet sank into the opulent Karastan carpet patterned in a burgundy, black and beige paisley. He walked over to flip the special-order wood blinds covering a wide picture window behind the desk, and his gaze traveled to the built-in floor-to-ceiling bookcases, chock-full of medical tomes, lining two of the four walls.
The place was too cushy, too plush. A doctor could get very soft here. Dante curled his lip in distaste. Was that what had happened to his ex-roommate? Had he gotten so accustomed to living the good life that greed had driven him to start producing Rapture?
You don’t know for sure that Mark is involved. It could be anyone. Covey, Butler, Dr. Rodriquez, the orderly named Ricky, even Elle.
Dante fisted his hands. He didn’t know the answer for sure, but he was going to find out. He remembered Mark’s hunger for the finer things in life. They’d both grown up with similar backgrounds—absent mother, abusive father, oldest sibling. And they were both high achievers, striving to escape the dire circumstances they’d been born into. But where Mark placed high values on material possessions and grandiose titles, Dante valued ideals like honor and integrity.
And revenge.
It was true. Revenge was a stronger motivator than either honor or integrity. If he wasn’t so determined to put Furio Gambezi behind bars for Leeza’s death, he wouldn’t be undercover, lying about who he was. Spying on people who assumed he was their friend.
The two sides of Dante’s personality warred.
The humanitarian part of him was disgusted at how low he’d stooped. But another part of him, the bloodthirsty side, realized the end did indeed justify the means. When Gambezi and the scum who was supplying the gangster with Rapture were off the streets, countless lives would be spared. For that goal, the cost of Dante’s integrity was a small price to pay. He couldn’t lose sight of it.
Still, he found betraying his own ideals hard to live with. He crossed to the window and opened the blinds, hoping that a glimpse at nature would soothe the battle going on in his head.
Hands jammed into his pockets, he stared out the window to where the verdant field trailed off into a copse of oak and pecan trees. The sky had become overcast since he’d been inside; he remembered the weather report had called for an afternoon drizzle. It had rolled in early from the Colorado River, bringing a gray but compelling dampness.
Better get to work. You’ve got to make this look convincing.
Just as he was about to turn from the window, one of the hospital’s side exit doors opened and a woman stepped out.
The flare of auburn hair immediately seized his attention. He took a deep breath. Elle Kingston hesitated on the back porch. Dante noticed she held something clutched in her hands, but he couldn’t tell what it was. Furtively she glanced first to the right and then to the left, looking guilty as sin.
Suspicious behavior.
What was she up to?
He narrowed his eyes, watching as she hunched her shoulders against the drizzle and scurried across the lawn. She paused at the edge of the forest, looked over her shoulder again and then quickly disappeared into the trees.
ELLE SLIPPED INTO the forest, the four cans of almost-expired infant formula that she had boosted from the newborn nursery cradled in her arms. Fear pushed her heart rate higher. Anxiety had her biting her bottom lip.
Please, please, let the baby be okay, she prayed.
Worried that she might have been seen, Elle cast one more glance over her shoulder, looking back from where she’d come.
In the foggy drizzle, the five-story hospital built of stylized red stone looked positively gothic with its witch’s hat turrets, black slate roof and gingerbread trim. The guarded wrought-iron gates, privacy hedges and trellises twined with English ivy only added to the air of mystery.
Neighbors called it a fortress. Pleased patients dubbed it a sanctuary. Texas Monthly had christened Confidential Rejuvenations a place where celebrity secrets go to die.
At times like this, with gray weather enshrouding those stony walls, the place made Elle feel exquisitely sad at the thought of all those people with so much to hide.
The thing of it was, in spite of her occasionally mixed feelings about Confidential Rejuvenations and the work they did here, she loved her job. And she was concerned over the strange goings-on of the recent weeks. First there’d been the media leaks, then the arson in the laundry room. After that, several items had gone missing. Strange things like a ham from the kitchen, crutches from central supply, a crate of bleach from the janitor’s closet.
Taken one by one, the occurrences were nothing more than criminal mischief, but added together, it didn’t seem like a coincidence. Elle was beginning to wonder if someone was purposely trying to sabotage the hospital. The idea that someone was intentionally doing harm to the place she loved angered her.
She shook off her fanciful thoughts. There was no time for this. She had to make this quick. She had less than an hour left on her lunch break.
Resolutely she pushed deeper into the woods. After several minutes of hiking, she passed the meditation sanctuary tucked away in a grotto of trees. The overgrowth of vines crawling across the walkway leading to the structure told her no groundskeepers had been up here to maintain it in a very long time. Patients seeking solitude rarely visited this sanctuary since they’d built a bigger one down by the river. More often it was used illicitly for romantic trysts by patients and hospital staff alike. Elle narrowed her eyes as she walked past, wondering if anyone was inside. But the windows were tinted, keeping passersby from peeking in.
The grounds of Confidential Rejuvenations encompassed over a hundred acres, most of it covered by the thick grove of indigenous trees that ran parallel to the river. Walking paths extended throughout the forest in several directions, but Elle diverged from the beaten trail.
Instead, she ducked under the branch of an aged oak and stepped over a moss-covered fallen log, keeping her eyes to the ground. Several minutes later, she saw what she was searching for—faint footprints in the mud.
Yes. It had to be near.
She crouched, studying the undergrowth, looking for any signs of the baby. Growing up with brothers and a father who hunted, Elle had learned through osmosis a tracking trick or two. She set down the bottles of formula and moved deeper into the undergrowth.
“Where are you little guy?” Elle cooed and pushed aside the thick carpeting of monkey grass slicked with fine beads of rain. “Come out, come out wherever you are. I might not be mama, but I’ve got food.”
Then she heard a twig crack loudly on the path she’d abandoned.
Startled, she rocked back on her heels, hand to her throat, pulse pounding, and jerked her head around. Peering through the newly budded leaves, she stared at the broad-shouldered man silhouetted in the tunnel of trees.
She recognized him immediately as he stood there looking very out of his element in his tailored silk suit. His intense, dark eyes drilled into her as if he could see deep down inside to all the things she tried so hard to hide—her fears, her insecurities, her doubts, the dark secrets she told no one, not even her best friends.
The little hop of sexual excitement catching low in her belly took Elle by surprise.
“Looking for something?” asked Dr. Dante Nash, his voice as cool as well water.
His presence threw her off balance and Elle hated being in a defensive position. She rose to her feet.
“You followed me,” she accused.
“I did,” he admitted without the slightest hint of apology in his voice.
“Why?”
Tree branches separated them. Dante on the path. Elle ankle-deep in the undergrowth, studying him like a cautious child peering from around her mother’s skirt. He mad
e her feel things she didn’t want to feel—interest, attraction, compulsion and possibility.
He shrugged. “Curiosity.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are you spying on me?”
His smile was slight and didn’t reach his light brown eyes. She found herself wondering when was the last time the man had genuinely smiled, and then Elle wondered why she was wondering.
“Why?” he asked. “Are you up to something that would invite spying?”
Oh, he was good, answering a question with a question, turning things around on her. His cagey manner made her bristle. Mark had been equally adept at evading her questions.
“No,” she denied, realizing just how defensive she sounded.
He glanced at the baby bottles she’d settled on the ground at her feet. “What’s that all about?”
She stepped in front of the baby bottles, blocking his view. Her gaze tracked over him, over the fine lines of his suit, growing damper every minute he stood in the drizzle. She was getting wet as well. She could feel her unruly hair growing frizzier by the second. “I really don’t think it’s any of your concern.”
“I don’t know about that,” Dante said. “Looks to me as if that baby formula came from the supply closet of Confidential Rejuvenations.”
“What if it did?”
“That’s theft in anyone’s book. Are you a thief, Elle Kingston?” His eyes locked with hers and he never looked away.
It was damned disconcerting. A buzz of sexual energy sizzled down her neck.
“What are you?” she snapped. “A cop?”
For a moment so brief she was sure she must have imagined it, a look of uneasiness passed over his face. He moved closer, pushing the soggy tree branches out of his way, and with each step toward her, Elle’s heart beat harder and her breath grew more shallow. He stopped within an arm’s length of her and she quelled the sudden urge to reach out to run her fingers over his strong, commanding jaw and fit the tip of her finger into the cleft at his chin.
“Mark’s been talking to me about buying into Confidential Rejuvenations,” he said. “It’s in my best interest to know if the hospital has a big problem with employee theft.”
“The formula expires in two days. It would be thrown out anyway.” She didn’t owe this man an explanation, so why was she giving him one?
“Who’s the formula for?”
Good grief, why wouldn’t he just go away and leave her in peace?
But he just kept staring at her, one eyebrow quirked up on his forehead, that irritating half smile hanging on the corner of his too-tempting mouth.
She glared. “Don’t you have patients to see?”
“Nope. It’s my first day. No patients yet.”
“Then go unpack your stethoscope or something.”
“Already unpacked.”
She glowered at him.
He shrugged. She could tell he was enjoying jerking her chain. “I was bored,” he said. “Following you seemed like more fun than staring at the four walls of my office.”
“And I’m busy.”
He glanced around at the forest. “Doing what?”
“That’s none of your business, Dr. Nash,” she replied tartly.
“What are you hiding, Nurse Kingston?”
The seductive way he said her name sent flames of lust licking through her belly. This was ridiculous, the way her traitorous body was reacting.
“Nothing,” she denied.
“No?”
She shook her head.
“Then why are you outside in the rain, while your hair goes wild all over your head?”
“I’m a water nymph in disguise,” she retorted.
His smile broadened and for the first time it reached his eyes. A real smile. “I can see that,” he murmured. “So much fiery red hair.”
He closed the short distance between them until the toes of his sleek black Gucci shoes, dotted with water sprinkles, were almost butted up against her white leather nurse’s clogs. The dark flicker in his eyes sent alarm bells ringing inside her as he reached up to finger a strand of her frizzed-out locks.
She gulped, unable to find her voice, not knowing what she would say even if she found it. He was the most enigmatic man she’d ever met, and he made her feel that if she were to peel back the complicated layers of his personality, she could dig endlessly and never find his true center. How did a woman ever learn to trust a man she couldn’t know?
I dunno, how come you trusted Mark?
Because she dumbly loved too easily, loved too hard. But no more. She was done with opening her heart too fully, too soon. She was finished with blind loyalty. From now on, she was going to be cautious and cynical and distrustful.
Dante’s fingers lingered at her hair. “No secrets at all, water nymph? Nothing you want to get off your chest? Nothing to confess?”
She could scarcely think. The heat from his body, the fragrance of his captivatingly masculine cologne mixed with the musky scent of damp forest rattled her brain.
“Nothing.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said, his hot, laser-sharp gaze puncturing hers. “A smart woman like you, who knows how to keep other people’s secrets, is bound to have a few secrets of her own.”
Her nipples tightened to hard buds underneath her scrub top. She was glad for her lab coat buttoned up over her clothes. Still, in this rain…
She stifled the urge to look down and see if her arousal was visible through her scrubs. But she didn’t want to turn his attention in that direction, so she simply tried her best to look cool and calm.
“Spoken like a man who’s dying to reveal a few skeletons from his closet,” she countered.
He took his fingers from her hair, but he did not lower his hand. Rather, he stroked the back of one finger along the line of her jaw.
His touch was like fire. She swallowed, forced herself not to shudder.
“A fringe of raindrops,” he explained. “On your chin.”
Elle sucked in her breath, stepped back away from him, away from his exploring fingers that sent heated lightning shooting straight to her womb. He was looking at her with the most compelling expression on his face. She watched his eyes drift to the tell-tale throbbing of her pulse at the juncture of her throat and collarbone.
What was with this guy?
A soft noise from the undergrowth drew their attention to the ground.
That’s when Elle saw what she’d come into the forest searching for—a fawn with wide, terrified eyes.
Her nurturing instincts vanquished any weak-kneed fantasies she might be having about the man beside her. Heedless of the mud, she knelt on the carpet of pine needles and dead leaves and reached out to the baby.
The fawn trembled at her touch, unable to run, even to stand on its wobbly little legs.
“That’s your secret?” Dante sounded strangely relieved.
All business now, Elle looked up at him. This baby needed her. She had no time for sexy thoughts. “Hand me one of those bottles, will you?”
Dante leaned over to retrieve the bottle as Elle gathered the fawn into her arms and tucked it in the crook of her left elbow. He straightened and turned to hand her the formula. His forearm brushed lightly against her shoulder. She caught a closer glimpse of the steely set of his jaw where the hint of a five o’clock shadow had started to sprout. A whiff of his woodsy cologne set her heart pumping. Oh boy, this wasn’t good. Not good at all.
Forget about him.
Resolutely, she focused her attention on the fawn squirming in her arms. Gently she placed the bottle’s nipple on the baby’s lower lip. She bent it slightly to express a squirt of milk.
The fawn tentatively flicked out its tongue. Once it tasted the milk, the baby made greedy sucking noises and it was easy for Elle to slip the nipple into its hungry little mouth.
“How did you know the fawn was here?” Dante asked, crouching beside her, his deep voice as comforting as hot chocolate on a cold winter day.
“I’ve been watching a pregnant doe from the back window of the E.D.,” she said. “Every morning she crosses over from the farms to the road and heads down to the river. Two days ago, she didn’t cross. Then yesterday, when she went down to the water, I noticed she wasn’t pregnant any longer. Then this morning…” She let her words trail off and took a deep breath to keep the tears from her voice. “After the disaster drill, we had a motor vehicle collision victim come into the E.D. for stitches. The driver hit a doe in the road and rolled his SUV. I just knew…”
Elle pressed her lips together. A tear slid down her cheek. Ah dammit, she was crying. Why was she crying? She was an E.D. nurse. She’d seen a lot worse things than a dead deer. She blinked and sniffled back the tears.
Dante clamped a hand on her forearm and squeezed gently. “It’s okay to feel tender-hearted over an orphaned baby.”
Just like that, he got her.
Mark would have told her she was being ridiculous. Mark, the same man who’d kept promising her they’d start a family next year, then the next and the next, until finally he left her for a much younger woman who clearly did not have a ticking biological clock.
The fawn wriggled in her arms. It made a soft bleating noise of complaint. What was she doing wrong? The baby chewed the nipple. Milk squirted every which way. Elle was having trouble holding the animal—the rambunctious youngster was stronger than it looked. The fawn kicked at her with its rowdy little hooves, butted the bottle with its head. The formula flew from her hands and landed in the bushes.
“Oh fiddlecakes,” she said, and reached for a second bottle.
“Fiddlecakes?” He sounded amused. “I thought the term was fiddlesticks.”
“Something my grandmother used to say. I spent a lot of time with her growing up. Both my parents did shift work.”
“Medical?”
“Cops.”
An odd expression she couldn’t read crossed Dante’s face. Then he surprised her by plunking down beside her on the ground. “Give him here.”
“What are you doing?”
“Let me hold him and you can hold the bottle.”
“You’re going to get mud on your suit.”
