DR. MOM AND THE MILLIONAIRE

by Christine Flynn

  "It's a conference call," he explained.

  Understanding perfectly how difficult it could be to get the requisite parties lined up for such a call, she gave a shrug, checked his shoulder and his leg and left him discussing stock options and bonus tie-ins.

  The next day, he had his secretary there. The moment Alex walked in, Gwen Montgomery rose from the chair where she'd been going over lists on a legal pad. The woman introduced herself because Chase was, again, on the phone and immediately started to leave so Alex could examine her patient.

  The slender, middle-aged woman seemed to epitomize the perfect executive assistant. She looked as professional as she did efficient. Her suit was tailored, her slightly graying dark hair was skimmed back in a sophisticated knot and she positively reeked organizational ability. Judging from the size of the rocks on her finger, she was also very married.

  "There's no need for you to go anywhere," Alex told her, wishing she could pull off that polished look. "I'm just going to check his leg. He doesn't even need to get off the phone," she said, shaking her head at Chase when he held up one finger to indicate he'd cut his call short if she wanted him to. "We're getting this down to a system."

  There really was no need to interrupt him. She could tell him his leg was looking good simply by giving him a smile. Which she did—and felt her pulse jump when his glance held hers long enough to stall her breath before he smiled back.

  It didn't matter that the smile looked tired. Not just then, anyway. Her only thought was that the man didn't play fair. He didn't even have to touch her to jerk around with her heart rate.

  Conscious of the other woman's presence, she glanced toward Gwen. Chase's secretary wasn't paying any attention to them at all. She was back in her chair with her lists.

  Alex was gone a few moments later, leaving him to his calls and his secretary and telling herself it would do no good at all to remind the man that he needed rest. He'd just argue with her and that was what she was intent on avoiding.

  She was pretty much convinced he was trying to avoid it, too, by the time she met Ronni and Kelly for lunch the next day.

  "I'm sure there are details that Tanner left out. I mean, he was far more interested in the kind of construction Chase had used on his corporate tower than in where he'd been all his life. You should have seen him." Kelly's hazel eyes smiled as she leaned forward to be heard over the lunchtime buzz of conversation at Granetti's. "He was going on and on about some sort of plastic laminate Chase's contractor used to insulate something or other and all I wanted to know is what he thought of the man."

  "What did he think?" Alex asked mildly.

  "When I finally pinned him down, he said he seemed like a regular guy. In guyspeak, that's a compliment. Overall, I think he's adopted a wait-and-see attitude. Tanner's pretty reserved when it comes to really accepting people." She lifted her teacup. "He did say he thought the people who adopted Chase were a pair of 'real jewels,' though. So I think he's got a little sympathy going for him there."

  "Ryan said pretty much the same thing. About the Harringtons," Ronni clarified. She'd pushed her chicken Caesar aside and sat with her arms crossed on the table, her fingers loosely wrapped below her elbows to keep from reaching for the basket of garlic-cheese bread. Two pieces were all she'd allowed herself. "It didn't sound as if Chase wanted to talk about his own life, though. He was more interested in what had happened to their natural parents and in the two of them. Apparently, he hadn't known he was adopted until Mr. Harrington died and the lawyer was reading the will."

  "It was in the will?" Alex asked.

  Ronni shook her head, red curls bouncing. "Ryan didn't say. I don't know how it came up. But can you imagine how that had to feel?"

  "Or how about this?" Kelly asked, remembering something else. "Tanner said Chase asked his mother … his adoptive mother, I mean … why he hadn't been told before that he was adopted. Apparently, she said his adoptive father got him for her with the understanding that Chase never be told because he didn't want Chase's relatives showing up someday expecting financial help. I guess he figured that when he died it didn't matter anymore."

  Alex nearly choked on her coffee. "Got him for her?"

  "That makes it sound as if he was a toy or something," Ronni muttered.

  "I'm still hung up on the part where the Harringtons obviously knew about his brothers. He had family they deliberately kept from him." Kelly shook her head in disbelief. "Tanner said Chase was really low-key about all of this, but it was pretty obvious he and the Harringtons had been estranged for a while before the old goat croaked."

  Alex frowned into her coffee. She couldn't begin to imagine how Chase must have felt to have heard what he had. But she could clearly recall how unimpressed he'd looked when she'd told him that the only thing that mattered to his brothers was that he was family. It was easy to see now why the word had left him so cold.

  "Have you met him yet?" the pregnant pediatrician asked, handing a passing waiter the basket of bread to get it out of her reach.

  Kelly shook her head. "You?"

  "Not yet. Ryan thinks it might be easier if we wait until he's discharged. He said if it were him, he'd want to feel better than Chase looks before springing a whole new family on him. What about you?" she asked Alex. "You're his doctor. What do you think of him?"

  Alex gained a moment by leaning back to let the waitress take the remains of her salad. "He's my patient," was all she was willing to say.

  "We know that." Ronni's tone was as bland as the milk in her glass. "We're not asking for anything confidential."

  "Which you could tell us anyway," Kelly informed her. "He's our brother-in-law. That makes him family."

  "He's not immediate family."

  "Then how about a little professional courtesy?"

  Ronni leaned closer, her voice dropping. "She's avoiding the question."

  "No kidding."

  They were right.

  They wanted to know how she felt about Chase. The problem was that she didn't want to feel about him at all.

  "Let's just say that as a patient, he's … difficult," she allowed, since that was hardly a secret. "He pushes himself too hard and his personality isn't well suited to taking orders."

  Ronni eyed her evenly. "So we know what you think of him as a patient, but that's not what we're asking. What do you think of him as a man?"

  "I try not to think of him that way."

  "Because he's a patient?" Kelly inquired with deceptive innocence. "Or because he happens to be an incredibly perfect specimen of Malone masculinity and he's getting under your skin?"

  Alex's brow furrowed. "I thought you said you hadn't met him."

  "I haven't." Smiling at her friend's unguarded response, Kelly lifted her shoulder in a shrug. "But I've seen pictures. And every female in the hospital under the age of fifty is talking about him." The smile turned knowing. "So what's going on?"

  "Not a thing." Not a thing Alex could describe rationally, anyway. "I'll admit he's gorgeous. And he's not as big a jerk as I first thought he was," Alex conceded. "He's a complicated man, with a lot going on in his life right now. But that doesn't mean I care about him except as a patient. Or as Ryan and Tanner's brother.

  "Even if he were interested in me, which I don't really think he is," she had to point out, because he'd seemed more cautious around her than anything else, "he's not someone I'd want to get involved with. He'll be gone in a few days, anyway."

  Neither Kelly nor Ronni said a word. They just looked at each other as if to say the woman was protesting far too much, and glanced back at her.

  "He's not going anywhere for at least three months," Ronni nonchalantly advised. "Ryan leased the Pembroke estate for him."

  "He's staying at the Pembroke estate?"

  "It's just sitting there empty since that little weasel, Axel Pembroke, absconded with the foundation funds. The foundation owns it anyway and they were more than happy to have someone like Chase Harrington lease it for a fe
w thousand dollars a month. They've cleaned out all of Axel's personal stuff and changed the locks, but Ryan said the furniture's all still there. And the stuff in the kitchen."

  "I understand it has art," Kelly mused.

  Ronni nodded. "True. But I hear they've already sold the most valuable pieces and a couple of huge televisions."

  "Excuse me?" Alex muttered as her friends veered off track. Glancing at her watch, she grimaced. Her afternoon appointments started in five minutes. Fortunately, the clinic was only three minutes away. "What I meant was, he's staying in Honeygrove?"

  Since it was her turn to buy, Ronni had snagged the check. Taking her credit card from her wallet, she looked at Alex in confusion. "I thought you knew that. He said you told him he'd have to have a few months of therapy and since he has to do it somewhere, he might as well do it here." She dropped a platinum card on the bill. "He's interested in the old Taylor Building across the street, too. I guess he could see it from his window and got curious about it. It's been empty for a year. He's looking into tearing it down and putting new medical offices in there."

  Chase hadn't said a word to her about his plans. But, then, there hadn't been any opportunity for discussion, either. He'd said he wasn't leaving Honeygrove until he'd accomplished what he'd come to do, but he'd connected with his brothers now, and she'd assumed he'd want to go back to Seattle as soon as he could. If he wanted to stay in Honeygrove, that was certainly his prerogative. The hospital's physical therapy department was excellent.

  Focusing on the practicalities was what Alex would have done with any patient. And with any other patient, that was all the thought she would have given the matter as she gathered her purse a few minutes later and she and her friends left the crowded little restaurant. But Chase wasn't any other patient. And now that he was going to be around for a while, she didn't know if the knot in her stomach was one of anxiety or anticipation.

  She wasn't going to worry about it. She had an afternoon of appointments, and after she picked up Tyler and Brent, who was staying with her now, she had to feed them, see to baths and whatever else they required before she sat down with the two charts she needed to review for surgeries in the morning. If she had time, she also had a tape of a new pediatric femoral reduction procedure she wanted to watch and a mountain of laundry to attack.

  She fell asleep ten minutes into the tape and only finished half the laundry. Because she really needed the white load, she threw it into the washer on her way out the utility-room door the next morning. After adding soap while she verbally hurried Tyler along, she helped Brent secure his arm in his navy-blue canvas sling, then hustled them both into the garage and the car.

  The fog of sleep had lifted while she'd stood under the shower listening to the ancient pipes rattle and her mind had been on fast forward ever since. She never assumed that her schedule for the day would hold, but she liked to pretend she had at least some control over her life by starting out the day with a plan.

  Today, she would drop Tyler off first. Then Brent. Her latest houseguest had a long day of therapy ahead of him. But the sessions would be broken up by spending time in the therapy center's lounge and visiting with the friends he'd made on the med-surg floor.

  Assuming her arthroplasty and her arthroscopy went well, she would then join Tyler for a quick lunch, see the four appointments she had in her office that afternoon, round on her patients in the hospital and be home with the boys in time to feed them something reasonably nutritious by seven. She still had the tape she wanted to watch, so she'd try it again after the boys went to bed.

  She'd forgotten to feed the cat.

  The thought of Tom meowing his little heart out in front of the pantry door had her turning around four blocks from her house. The delay only cost her five minutes. Next to nothing in the overall course of her day. But as she left the driveway for the second time that morning, the car's CD player booming Shania Twain instead of Disney since it was Brent's turn to pick the music, she couldn't help thinking that anyone who'd known her five years ago wouldn't believe what they were seeing now.

  Before she'd become pregnant with Tyler, her world had been ordered, focused and almost boringly predictable. She'd known where she was going, what she wanted and when she was going to get it. She'd loved living that way. Her life had centered around medicine, an occasional trip to a museum or a symphony, and Dr. Matt Bowden. She'd been one of those rare people who was actually content with everything. Except the hideous hours and pressures of residency. But she'd known that wouldn't last forever. She'd just focused on the dream she and Matt had shared, until she'd become pregnant and Matt had pulled the plug on all their plans.

  But that was ancient history. And her life had evolved in a totally different direction.

  Out of sheer necessity, she'd developed a knack for rolling with the punches, and she didn't think much about what might have been. Her life was full. She had Tyler. And if she didn't always deal as well with chaos as people thought she did, that was her business. She was fine in a crisis. She could handle disruption. It was usually afterward, when she was alone at night, that she sometimes wondered how she'd made it through the day—and where she was going from there.

  As she approached Chase's room at five o'clock that afternoon, she couldn't help thinking about the curve life had thrown him and wondering if maybe he didn't feel a little like that, too.

  * * *

  Chapter Six

  « ^ »

  The ring of the telephone at the nurses' station blended with the conversation of a doctor and nurse in the hall behind her when Alex stopped in the doorway of Chase's room. Beyond the dozen plants that had joined the lush tropical arrangement that had first caught her attention, she could see him on the telephone. Again.

  He was speaking in low, certain tones as he tossed a notepad into the open briefcase on the narrow table bisecting his bed. A small calculator occupied the beige surface, along with a yellow legal tablet and a partially opened map.

  She needed to talk to him about his decision to stay in Honeygrove. Apparently he needed to talk to her, too. The instant he caught her eye, he hesitated, his expression changing almost imperceptibly. Without breaking his visual hold, he murmured to his caller that he had to go.

  "Is Gwen on a break?" she asked, since she'd halfway expected to find his secretary there.

  "She's running errands for me."

  With one hand in the pocket of the open lab coat covering her knee-skimming gray jersey dress, another fingering the single pearl at her throat, Alex moved into the room. The late-afternoon light slanted through the narrow window blinds, glinting off his pen when he tossed that aside, too.

  "Do you even know how to relax?" she asked, frowning at the documents in the fax machine's receiving tray.

  "Probably not." Totally at ease with the admission, he ran a glance the length of her legs and skimmed to where she fingered the pearl resting just above her breasts. "But you shouldn't have any problem relating to that."

  Realizing what she was doing, she dropped the pearl and shoved her hand into her pocket. "I shouldn't?"

  "You're the one with the medical practice, a four-year-old, a menagerie and a rotating door on your guest room. All I'm doing is trying to keep from climbing the walls."

  There was still a certain caution about him, the same watchfulness that made her feel as if he were guarding what he said and did around her. It was just less noticeable with that droll glint in his eyes. "It's not a menagerie," she informed him, determinedly matching his ease. "It's only a cat, two goldfish and a gerbil."

  "Tanner said it was a rescued lab rat."

  Confusion caused her to hesitate. "Why were you and Tanner talking about something like that?" Their resident rodent wasn't a rat. Tanner just said it looked like one.

  The glint in those intense blue eyes disappeared. Looking as if he wasn't sure just how much he should admit, or how much he wanted her to know, Chase watched her continue to the foot of his bed. "I asked h
im about you. Ryan, too," he finally decided to say. "I make it a point to know everything I can about the people around me."

  Dismissing the admission with a shrug, his gaze narrowed on her face. "From what I understand, the only time you slow down is to collapse. Considering that, you have no room to criticize how I choose to spend my time."

  He wasn't challenging her. He sounded as if he were merely stating a fact he knew she couldn't dispute in order to answer the first question she'd asked.

  "Our circumstances are hardly the same." Reaching into her pocket at the electronic beep of her pager, she glanced down at the number she was to call. Not recognizing it as one that required immediate attention, she ignored the page along with the validity of Chase's assertion. "I'm not the one who needs rest."

  He might have argued that one with her. Sparring with Alex Larson had been the brightest spot of the past six days and he truly wouldn't have minded the diversion now. But ever since he'd made the mistake of touching her, they'd avoided disagreement as diligently as they would a stroll through a minefield.

  Knowing she was leery of him, all he considered as she turned to his unbandaged leg was that he was growing more intrigued with her by the day.

  He'd taken it for granted that she was divorced. But Ryan had said she'd never been married. His brother hadn't known who her child's father was, though, or the circumstances that had led to her raising a child alone. It hadn't occurred to Chase that she was doing so much on her own. From everything he'd heard, it seemed, too, that she was always willing to take on more.

  Or, maybe, he thought, studying the graceful curve of her neck, it wasn't a willingness so much as it was a need.

  There was a restlessness about her. He recognized it because he felt it himself. Fought it relentlessly. Even when she looked tired, something inside her wouldn't let her stay completely still.

  At that very moment, absorbed in her assessment, that inner agitation showed. He doubted anyone else would notice. The hand inside the pocket of her lab coat was moving almost imperceptibly. He'd bet every share of stock he owned that she was worrying something between her fingers.