The Doctor’s Former Fiancée

by Caro Carson

  “I don’t get migraines.”

  “Exactly. The salient question is, what do you get that Dr. Montgomery was trying to treat?”

  “I know you are a doctor, but I’ll tell you what I’ve told your brothers. You are not my doctor.”

  Despite the topic, his mother was smiling—or rather, trying not to smile. The corners of her mouth were twitching.

  Braden’s bafflement warred with impatience. “What is amusing you? This is serious.”

  “If you say so, son. Lana Donnoli is back in town, and you want to bring a guest out here for Valentine’s weekend.”

  “Not Lana.” Good God, not Lana. Not that heartbreak. His mother had it all wrong.

  “Grab a dish towel.” She started scrubbing the pan she’d used to make his chicken-fried steak. “Better yet, go on back to town and see your Lana.”

  “It’s business. She can wait until morning.”

  She only smiled. “No son of mine would ever be so rude to a lady over the phone.”

  “I wasn’t rude. I was businesslike.”

  “I’m sorry to spoil your surprise, but I can put two and two together. Lana calls, and you leave the room. When I follow, you pretend to be angry with her and hang up. Tonight, you can’t stay at the ranch, because you are sleeping at the Four Seasons. Here, give me that dish towel and go on to your hotel.”

  “No, that isn’t—”

  The mother who was supposedly so frail put her hand on his shoulder and gave him a shove toward the door. “I’m delighted that you and Lana are back together. Valentine’s will be wonderful. You don’t have to tell her I figured it out. I’ll act surprised.”

  “You’ll be surprised because Lana Donnoli is not the woman I’m planning on marrying.”

  She escorted him all the way to the front door, forcing him out of his own childhood home in the gentlest way possible. “Marriage? You’re going to announce a marriage? Sweetheart, that is so romantic. Now go. Lana’s waiting, and I can’t stand to listen to another of these fake fights on your phone.”

  Braden realized his phone was ringing. He checked the screen. It was indeed Lana. He let it ring. She could chat with his assistant this time.

  “Mom, don’t get your hopes up like this. You’ll be disappointed.”

  “Right. Mum’s the word. I’ll be surprised, I promise. Good night, sweetheart.”

  Braden had barely gotten his rental car started when his phone vibrated again. It was laughable that his mother thought he might need to fake a phone fight with Lana. They’d had plenty of real ones, burning up the line from Boston to Austin, back in the day. He waited for the fifth ring that would cue his assistant to answer, then enjoyed the silence while he began the long drive down the ranch road.

  The phone rang again within seconds.

  For the love of—

  His emotions were engaged now. This negotiation was breaking down. Phone calls with Lana always had been disastrous.

  He answered without taking his eyes off the long ranch road. “Give it a rest, Lana. I’m not going to argue with you all night. Those days are long over.”

  There was a moment of silence, which Braden imagined meant Lana was suitably subdued by his show of temper.

  A woman’s voice finally spoke. “Lana? Who is Lana?”

  Braden let his eyes flick to the screen, although it was unnecessary. Of course, the name and thumbnail photo of Claudia St. James were displayed in full color.

  “I’m sorry, Claudia. It was nothing. A business call.”

  “It didn’t sound like a business call. Who is Lana?”

  Braden sighed in defeat. The drive into Austin was going to be a long one.

  Chapter Six

  The patients enrolled in PLI’s migraine study might not suffer from high blood pressure, but Lana was pretty sure hers was going through the roof.

  She glared at her phone’s screen. Braden wasn’t going to return her last call, obviously. His executive assistant had sounded excruciatingly cool and competent, so Lana knew her message hadn’t been lost. Braden’s workday was apparently over, although his assistant’s obviously was not. Poor woman.

  Well, Lana was no slave driver. She wasn’t going to call her own assistant this late at night and demand that Myrna rearrange her schedule to be here at eight in the morning, no matter what Braden demanded. Her blood pressure hiked up another millimeter just thinking about it.

  She ought to lock the office door and go home. Braden could show up tomorrow at the time of his choosing, but she wouldn’t be here. He could stew in the hallway, calling her number in vain. Since not-for-profit hospitals didn’t provide their department chairs with twenty-four-hour assistants like Braden had, he’d be stuck listening to her voice mail. Even better.

  The whole scenario sounded wonderfully vengeful—but Lana knew it was a fantasy. She wouldn’t do it. This wasn’t about her personal irritation; this was about patients who were suffering.

  She had some sleuthing to do, stat. It was nearing midnight, and she needed to find a link between Marion MacDowell and the other enrollees. All patients had listed their other medical conditions upon entering the study. Lana had sorted those lists every which way, but nothing striking had appeared, no similarities in secondary diseases beyond the migraines.

  Her stomach growled. She’d intended to battle her exhaustion only long enough to call Braden, set up a future appointment and then go home. Her new apartment was full of cardboard boxes. The headboard and rails of her bed were propped against the wall, unassembled, so her mattress was flat on the floor. Her great ambition for the evening had been to locate the box containing her microwave oven, heat up an organic frozen dinner and then flop onto that mattress for the night.

  Instead, Braden had insisted that West Central return its data to PLI. She would have to wait one more day before giving in to her exhaustion. Patients were counting on her.

  The rush of adrenaline was welcome. Knowing she’d be seeing Braden again in a matter of hours made her feel energized. Not because she was looking forward to seeing him, but because she was in competition with him. She had to beat Braden at his own game. The challenge was better than coffee.

  “All right, Dr. Montgomery,” she murmured into the silence of her office. “Why did you put Marion MacDowell on this drug?”

  She tapped her pencil at the corner of her mouth. Perhaps she needed to look at Marion MacDowell’s involvement from a fresh angle. The medicine may have been designed to treat migraines, but an unusual side effect might have been reported. Sometimes, a prospective medicine had a side effect that turned out to be more beneficial than the original effect. A prospective asthma medicine, for example, might unexpectedly cause low blood sugar and become a diabetes medication. It was a rare occurrence, but it happened.

  Perhaps Dr. Montgomery had noticed that PLI’s migraine drug was causing an unusual but beneficial side effect, one that could benefit Marion MacDowell in some way.

  It was a long shot.

  It was also nearly midnight.

  Lana started looking for frequently reported side effects of the study. At least one hundred patients had been enrolled during the six months before Dr. Montgomery had given the last slot to his friend. Lana began sorting her list again, this time by date of enrollment, then copying the side-effect data for only the first six months’ worth of patients, then...

  An hour later, she glared at her still-dark phone screen. So far, she’d found nothing. At this rate, it was quite possible she’d still be here at eight in the morning, still wearing the same dress from today’s meeting. Braden would know she’d pulled an all-nighter.

  She doubted he’d be shocked. They’d pulled more all-nighters together than she could count during residency. Having Braden by her side had made those years an adventure. They’d met every challenge together. Lana and Braden versus the evil attending physicians. Lana and Braden conquering forty-eight-hour workdays. Lana and Braden slipping into the storage room.

  She
closed her eyes for a moment and let her head rest on the tall back of Dr. Montgomery’s oversized leather desk chair. When she opened her eyes again, Braden was there, standing on the other side of the glass door, framed by pink paper hearts.

  She was dreaming.

  Braden opened the door without knocking.

  She was not dreaming.

  “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

  Lana stood immediately. Her pumps had been kicked off long ago, so jumping to her feet didn’t do much for her, size-wise. Braden walked past Myrna’s desk to stand before hers, hands on his hips, glaring down at her as if she were a disobedient child.

  She was no child. “This is my office. I’m the one who gets to ask what you’re doing here.”

  “I was just walking past the door,” he said, frowning at her. “Your lights were on.”

  “At midnight, you just happened to be walking down this hallway of West Central?”

  “Yes. My brother had a late dinner break, so I came by to see him.” He crossed his arms over his chest. He’d changed into a soft knit shirt and jeans, she noticed, the same clothes he’d always preferred, even when she and all the other residents were living in scrubs.

  Jeans or not, he hadn’t come to pull an all-nighter by her side. He was having dinner with his brother. It wasn’t his job to find a reason to keep pentagab viable. He got to sit back, relax and wait for someone else to make the case for him.

  Must be nice.

  “While you were having dinner, I was working on pentagab.”

  He only raised one eyebrow at her. “That’s not a particularly wise way to spend your time. The drug is dead.”

  The man was a broken record on the subject. She threw her hands up. “Aren’t you the least bit curious about why your mother was taking it?”

  “You’re investigating my mother right now?”

  “I only have until eight in the morning, since you refused to change your schedule.” She pinned him with a look, and for once, he looked away first. “I haven’t figured out why Montgomery gave it to your mother yet, but I’ve eliminated a few possibilities. It’s nothing cardiovascular, for example.”

  “Let me see what you’ve got.” Braden stepped around her desk, crowding her personal space, leaning in to see her computer screen, practically forcing her out from behind her own desk.

  They brushed arms. His forearms were bare. His skin was warm, the muscles underneath firm. His whole body was intimidating, too large and vivid after being only a memory, only a broken dream for so long. Lana felt...well, she felt...

  She felt indignant, that was what she felt. How dare this man walk into her office and take over?

  She pushed her shoulder in between him and her desk, reaching for her monitor and shutting it off with a press of a button. She faced him squarely. He didn’t step back.

  “Eight in the morning, Braden. We have a meeting at eight, and until then, I’m not ready to present anything to you. In the meantime, your manners are appalling.”

  “My what?”

  “Do you always barge into other people’s offices and help yourself to their desks?”

  Lana could have stood there forever, watching him splutter, enjoying his speechless moment. The man had apparently been treated with too much deference for too long. It was gratifying to the extreme to be the one to remind Mr. Millionaire Mogul that manners still mattered.

  He gestured around her, toward her monitor. “That’s my data, and if I want to—”

  She cut him off, literally going toe-to-toe with him, heedless that her toes were bare. “It is West Central’s data, and until I present it to PLI, I can study it any way I want to, for as long as I want to, for any reason I want to.”

  She was so close, she could see the way his pupils widened briefly. He loomed over her. “And that’s what you want?”

  The backs of her legs were against her desk. To put any distance between them, she’d have to lean backward, practically lie on her own desk. Their position suddenly seemed sexual, the air charged with possibilities that should never, ever feel so tempting. She spoke through clenched teeth. “It’s what I want. So back off.”

  Or else kiss me.

  The words popped into her head, crystal clear. Alarming.

  Abruptly, Braden turned away from her. He stood with his back to her, hands on his hips again. Although she could not detect the slightest tremor in him, although nothing about his posture appeared anything less than commanding, she had the intuition that Braden felt unsteady.

  So did she.

  He spoke quietly. “You’re looking into my mother’s health. It’s not cardiovascular, you said.”

  “N-no. It doesn’t appear to be so.” Lana felt like a fool. Of course, the man was worried about his only remaining parent. That was why Braden was so intense tonight. She’d leapt to the conclusion that his emotions were for her. Worse, she’d assumed it was sexual attraction, that the man still could find her irresistible after all these years, when he was actually worried for his mother.

  Humbled, she turned the monitor back on. “Do you know why Montgomery wanted her to have this drug?”

  He turned around to face her. “She won’t tell me.”

  Lana sighed. “That’s a shame. It would save me a lot of time if she would. I’m looking for a needle in a haystack.”

  Braden walked around to the opposite side of the desk, where any other visitor to her office would have stood. “Were you planning on staying here all night until you found it?”

  “It was one way to be sure the door was unlocked at eight, at least.”

  Braden looked at her in surprise for a moment. She knew the moment he realized she was needling him, because one corner of his mouth turned up in the beginnings of a grin. “We could work together. An all-nighter, like old times.”

  He remembered. She felt a pang in her heart, a bittersweet beat.

  The ghost of a grin disappeared from Braden’s lips. “You’ve already pulled a few all-nighters this week, haven’t you? You look like you’re about to drop. When’s the last time you ate?”

  She couldn’t remember when she’d eaten last. There’d been some dry cereal when she’d gotten dressed in the morning, because she hadn’t remembered to buy milk yet. Myrna had offered her a Danish at some point today.

  Braden strode to her office door with a soft curse under his breath and yanked it open. “You always took your ‘patients first’ mantra too far. Go home, Lana. Eat. Get some sleep.”

  She only stood there, memories rushing through her. Braden had always been the one to make sure she didn’t overdo it. She’d always been the one willing to run on adrenaline alone, willing to sacrifice everything. Everything.

  Braden kept holding the door open, but he looked as if he was ready to bodily force her through it. “Haven’t you learned anything in six years? You’re human like the rest of us. You can’t run forever without food and sleep. Go home.”

  Oh, but she had learned something. She’d learned more about herself than she’d wanted to. Her patients first mantra had been a facade back then, something she’d spouted to justify the hours she put in. The real reason she had worked longer and harder than anyone else in their residency program wasn’t to take care of patients. It was to prove she was the best.

  Patients first had meant I’m the most dedicated resident in this program. Lana knew that now, but back then, she’d kept pushing herself, believing it was the only way to be a great physician, until she’d met Braden MacDowell. His father had founded this very hospital, but Braden said he’d also taught him how to ride a horse and build a campfire. Lana had started to let herself believe she could be a great doctor and still have fun, with Braden by her side.

  Then Braden had gone away.

  Without Braden to keep her in check, her drive to be the best had cost her everything. She’d worked herself to exhaustion, she’d miscarried their accidental pregnancy, and her life had never been the same.

  Patients f
irst meant something different now. Lana wasn’t pulling an all-nighter because she thought she was better than the other residents, or even because her department couldn’t afford to lose a million dollars. She genuinely wanted those children in D.C. to keep getting pentagab, and there was no one except her to make that happen.

  If she let Braden boss her into leaving, if she left to eat and sleep and focus on her own needs, then hundreds of children in D.C. would lose their study medicine.

  Lana stood her ground while Braden held the door. “If I leave now, will you keep the study going until I have a chance to finish this analysis? Your mother and everyone else will keep their medicine?”

  “The study was canceled today. You can leave because you won’t find anything that makes pentagab suddenly start working for migraines.”

  “Not for adults, I agree. But for the pediatric study, will you keep that one going while I try to find out what is happening with your mother?”

  “Possibly. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “But—”

  “Tomorrow. Not at eight o’clock. Sleep in. I can’t negotiate with someone who’s half-dead.”

  Lana turned her monitor off once more. The pediatric study might live another day. The possibility of victory made her drop her guard. As she passed Braden on her way out, she said, “You can’t be half-dead. Either you’re dead or you’re not. You can’t have it both ways.”

  He was silent for a moment, for a fraction of a second, but it was long enough for Lana to want to kick herself for falling into their old game of pointing out oxymorons to one another.

  “It would take a minor miracle,” Braden murmured. Then he turned and walked away, leaving her alone as she locked the door from the inside, stepped into the hall and pulled it shut behind her.

  She was nearly to her car before his oxymoron hit her: a minor miracle. A miracle couldn’t be minor; it could only be, well, miraculous.

  The pang in her heart didn’t catch her by surprise this time. Braden had remembered their old game, but that didn’t mean her old fiancé was her new friend. He’d given pentagab and her pediatric patients only a single day’s reprieve. The ruthless businessman couldn’t turn back into the caring physician she’d once loved.