by Caro Carson
Sheer dumb luck had put those children’s cards on her desk, reminding him of one key piece of leverage: the pentagab study. His conscience didn’t bother him. Yes, he’d used patients to make Lana spend more time with him, but PLI could legitimately use the safety data if they found a way to make pentagab viable. His mother held the key, an illness she was trying to hide, and it was up to Lana to make the diagnosis.
Braden trusted her ability absolutely. She was a good doctor. She’d solve this mystery.
It was a definite possibility, at any rate.
He pulled up to the front of the mid-century ranch house, a sprawling one-story constructed of wood and whitewashed local brick. Home. Braden took a moment to be thankful that, in his early thirties, he could still return to his childhood home and still be sure that his mother was there, undoubtedly in the kitchen, probably preparing a pitcher of iced tea. His dad had died of a sudden, severe heart attack too many years ago, a shocking event for them all. He couldn’t take his mom for granted.
He glanced over at Lana, whose earlier ecstasy with the brisket had clearly given way to some degree of apprehension. He covered her hand with his own. “It’s okay, Lana. Mom always loved you. She’s going to hug you, not hurt you.”
She turned to him, and the grim look on her face relayed all the enthusiasm of someone facing an executioner’s squad. “I broke our engagement. I don’t think many mothers appreciate women who do that to their sons. This was a bad idea.”
“You’re wrong. I was here when you called on Monday night, and Mom did a little eavesdropping. She was thrilled that we were talking again. She jumped to all kinds of conclusions.”
“And you let her?” Lana swiftly pulled her hand out from beneath his.
Braden sighed. “No, I assured her that it was strictly business. Let’s go eat some brisket and get down to business. Duty calls, Dr. Donnoli.”
* * *
Dinner was less awkward than Lana had expected. Marion hadn’t been completely surprised at her arrival, since Braden had apparently already told her that Lana was chairing the research department at West Central. The only moment that had seemed off was when Braden was pulling out Lana’s chair, and Marion had said, “Where is your suitcase? I thought you were coming for Valentine’s weekend?”
Braden had finished pushing her chair in smoothly after only the slightest pause. “I told you, Mom. This is only business.”
“Well,” she’d said after throwing her son a very motherly glance, “you are welcome anytime at the River Mack Ranch, Lana. Lord knows I’ve got enough spare rooms around here. The lodge is empty right now, too. Where are you living? Do you need a place?”
Lana had stammered something about the apartment she’d already rented, the brisket had been unwrapped and the corn pudding passed around, and the rest of the meal had gone smoothly.
Jamie was married now and had a baby, Lana learned, and she was unsurprised that Marion loved her new grandmother status. She’d raised three boys in this gigantic ranch house while her husband had undoubtedly spent most of his time in the city at his hospital, so being a grandmother was probably a piece of cake for Marion. Some women were just cut out for motherhood. Lana knew she was not.
When they were engaged, Braden had always talked about having children as though it was a foregone conclusion. He hadn’t been alarmed at all by the prospect when she’d called to tell him she was pregnant. Then again, why should he have been? He hadn’t been facing morning sickness or the prospect of a rapidly enlarging belly making his daily work awkward. He would have flown in for the birth, she was certain, but he wouldn’t have had to push himself back to a residency program while he was still recovering from childbirth.
No one would have thought badly of him for it, either. Paternity leave was a rarity. Fathers weren’t expected to care for newborns round the clock; they were expected to bring home the bacon. Her own father had been very satisfied with his life, coming home from work, settling into the armchair he’d paid for in the house he’d paid for, waiting for his wife to bring him the dinner he’d paid for. Lana had been required to help her mother because she was a girl, and it hadn’t been hard to see that the boys had it easier in the Donnoli household. They watched car races on TV with Dad while she assembled a lasagna and washed the dishes as it baked.
“Why, no, I haven’t heard from Dr. Montgomery in a week, at least,” Marion said.
Marion and Braden kept talking as if a silent dinner guest were a normal occurrence. Lana roused herself enough to smile and ask Marion for the coleslaw, but it was Braden’s watch that caught her eye when he handed her the Styrofoam container. He was able to bring home the bacon. He could bring home more bacon than she’d know what to do with. He’d been born into an affluent family, the son of a doctor, but he’d taken affluence exponentially further.
She had no aspirations to that kind of wealth. Her career mattered. Her patients mattered—including Marion MacDowell.
She wasn’t here to get a complex over incomes. She was here to help Marion MacDowell. She’d be helping PLI in the process, but if they could determine a new use for pentagab, she’d be helping the children who had drawn her pictures with their crayons. Those kids were as close to motherhood as she was likely to get. She wasn’t going to let those kids down.
Braden sat back and tossed his spoon into the empty banana-pudding container. “I hate to talk business on a full stomach, but it can’t be avoided. Lana is here because we have some questions that need answered, Mom. Montgomery enrolled you in a study that he had no business involving you in.”
Oh, no, you don’t.
Just because he was the president of a Fortune 100 company, he didn’t get to run her house call on this patient.
Braden barreled on. “I know you don’t think Jamie and Quinn and I are real doctors, but you have to admit that Lana is, so I want you—”
“Braden.” Lana cut him off. She wanted to say, Braden, you heavy-handed dolt, but she satisfied herself with just his name. “Marion is my patient, not yours. You need to excuse yourself. I don’t break doctor-patient confidentiality rules for anyone. For any reason.”
“Go,” Marion said to Braden, with a little shooing motion of her hand. “Go give the horses one scoop of oats each.”
Braden looked from his mother to Lana with an expression that warred between fierce and incredulous. Incredulous won, followed shortly by laughter. “Okay, I’ll go do my chores, but then can I see if Jimmy Waterson wants to play?”
“Jimmy moved to Oklahoma, but his little brother Luke is still around. Now go, because I said so.”
Lana smiled at the tone of voice Marion must have used with an elementary-school version of Braden.
“Did you bring your stethoscope?” Marion asked as soon as they were alone.
Lana smiled at the woman she’d always admired. “No, I’ve reviewed the records, and I’m already certain there’s nothing wrong with your heart and lungs.”
“Speaking of hearts,” Marion said, reaching across the table to take one of Lana’s hands, “I can’t tell you how good it is to see you at my kitchen table once more.”
“Thank you. Thank you so much, but please believe me, Braden and I are only working together because of this study.” Lana was truly touched, but she was also an experienced physician, and she’d seen patients like Marion before. Marion was trying to steer the conversation away from her health.
Some patients felt that illness was a sign of personal weakness. Lana had walked into many treatment rooms during her residency only to have the patient sitting on the treatment table assure her that he or she was fine and had no complaints. Generally, a younger and exasperated family member would then start talking, explaining why they’d dragged Grandma or Grandpa to the doctor.
Lana cut to the chase—but not until she reached across the table to hold Marion’s other hand in hers. “So tell me, how long have you been in pain?”
* * *
Lana left through the k
itchen door to find Braden.
He wasn’t in the stable, but leaning on the split-rail fence of the paddock adjacent to the barn. Lana had to pick her way across the ground carefully, cursing the heels of her pumps, but grateful for the long sleeves of her blazer. Austin in February reached highs in the sixties during the day, making it seem balmy in comparison to D.C., but once the sun went down, the crisp bite of winter was unmistakable.
A dog barked in the distance. Sound traveled far out in the country, but she must’ve made very little noise as she gingerly stepped around prickly plants, because Braden didn’t turn until she’d nearly reached him.
He tugged the brim of his Stetson in greeting. “Hi, Doc.”
“Hi.” One syllable was all she could manage around the lump in her throat. Braden the doctor had always turned her head, as handsome as he’d looked when wearing the authority of a white coat and a stethoscope. But good God, Braden the cowboy was hot in a way that appealed to a sexier fantasy. She gestured toward his hat. “Why the...? Where did you...?”
“It was hanging by the door. Old habit—you don’t go out to the horses without a hat.”
“Oh. Right.” She hoped the ghost of a smile about his lips wasn’t because he could tell how flustered she was by the side of him that had always turned her on. Did he remember?
He reached out, and she placed her hand in his unquestioningly. He guided her last precarious steps, until she stood against the fence with him, close enough to hear his phone buzz in his pocket.
He ignored it, focusing on her. “Did you learn anything new about my mother?”
His mother. Lana felt stupid, stupid, stupid. It was the second time she’d mistaken his concern for his mother as attraction to her.
“I learned enough. She gave me permission to talk to you.”
Braden cleared his throat and kicked the toe of his boot into the dirt by the fence post.
Lana understood.
“She’s not in any acute distress,” she assured him. “There’s nothing to indicate any kind of terminal condition.”
It was doctor-speak for your mother isn’t dying of anything. Her tone of voice might have said, don’t worry, darling, but she couldn’t help it. He wasn’t her darling anything, not anymore, but the old impulse to help him lingered.
Lana gave her fellow doctor the details. “She’s never been given a specific diagnosis, probably because she’s got a cluster of nonspecific symptoms. The overarching symptom, however, is pain. She can pinpoint when it started, after she had what she called a ‘spring head cold’ that left her with some muscle weakness. Her pain is chronic, but right now she says it is a two on a ten-point scale.”
“How bad has it gotten?”
Lana shivered in the cold night air. “She gave it an eight when Montgomery enrolled her in the pentagab study.”
“Perhaps the pentagab helped.”
“Perhaps. She presents the clinical picture of postviral, autoimmune-mediated chronic pain response.”
“Like a postherpetic syndrome?”
“Yes, but she never had shingles, or any other kind of rash. I asked.”
The beginnings of a smile touched Braden’s lips. His mouth was all she could see of him in the ranch’s dim outdoor lighting. The Stetson made his eyes unreadable in the night. “Of course you did. You probably thought of it before I did. You’re ten times the doctor I would’ve been.”
She tucked her hands under her arms and hunched her shoulders against the cold night air, ignoring his compliment. She didn’t agree with him, anyway. He would’ve been a great doctor, if only he’d wanted to be.
It was an old argument, and it was irrelevant to the problem at hand. “Without knowing which virus triggered this, I don’t know how you can recruit similar patients for a new study. Postviral syndromes aren’t studied for just that reason. They’re practically impossible.”
Braden turned his head, gazing westward over the dark acreage of his family’s land. Lana recognized the set of his jaw under the brim of his hat. He was calculating something, a risk, a benefit.
“PLI will break some new ground, then.”
And that was his final decision, Lana knew. On a cold February night, Braden MacDowell had decided that the considerable resources of Plaine Labs International would be brought to bear on the problem of postviral pain syndromes, and so it would happen. The man wielded power.
Lana shivered.
“You’re freezing,” he said. “Let’s step into the barn.”
After two steps, it was obvious that Lana’s pumps weren’t meant for ranching. Braden scooped her up and carried her like a bride over a threshold.
She made an ineffectual noise of protest, but it was so obvious that her shoes were impractical, Braden only had to glance at her to silence her objection.
It was disconcerting, how much her body remembered the feeling of being carried by Braden. He’d done this often, any time she’d forgotten to bring her boots to the ranch, or she’d looked tired in the hospital parking lot, or she’d taken too long to make her way to the bedroom after Braden had sweet-talked her into taking a nap before a night shift.
The winter night couldn’t compete with his body heat, radiating from his skin to her hands around his neck, through his shirt and hers, to where her blazer gaped open and her breasts were pressed against his chest. It was an old move, a bit of muscle memory, but Lana tossed her long hair over one shoulder and ducked her head under the brim of his cowboy hat in order to be carried more easily. She felt safe. Cared for.
She was with her Braden, the man she’d promised to love forever.
The inside of the barn was lit by dim night-lights that ran down the cement floor of the single, central aisle, gently illuminating the wooden doors of the stalls. A horse stamped and gave a snort at their entrance through the sliding barn door, but otherwise, the two humans barely disturbed the sleepy atmosphere, which was warm with leather and hay.
Braden let her legs drop, slowly, as he kept his arm around her back. In her skirt and pumps, her calves were exposed to the soft abrasion of denim on the way down. She still had one arm around his neck, and her toes had barely made contact with the barn floor when Braden reached behind himself to slide the door closed.
It banged shut. The horses protested with muffled snorts. Maybe Braden didn’t have quite his usual control. Maybe she affected him the way he did her. Physically. Sexually.
The thought made her feel powerful.
She was biting her lower lip, she realized, so she stopped and moistened her lips instead. The barn’s night-lights were low to the ground, and they threw their light upward, under the brim of the Stetson. Lana watched Braden’s eyes. He watched her mouth.
“Did you feed the horses?” she whispered, feeling the motion of her own lips as they formed the consonants and vowels.
“Yeah. They’re happy.”
Then further words were senseless. This was about bodies, and breath, and wanting. She tugged Braden closer with her arm around his neck. He undid the single button of her blazer with a quick motion of one hand, a hand that then spread over her hip, his palm hot, the pressure sure. He brought her hips tightly against his, sliding his hand under her blazer to her lower back, anchoring her to him with delicious heat.
Lana brought her other arm up to encircle his neck, but she knocked his hat off first, deliberately. It was a woman’s right to make her cowboy remove his hat.
It tumbled down his back. She never heard it hit the floor, because Braden’s mouth swooped down to cover hers, and her own moan of agreement filled her ears.
Her thoughts scattered as his tongue invaded, a sensation of taste and texture, her brain unable to string together words like man and mine. She pushed closer, stepping so that one of his legs was between hers, the denim of his jeans brushing the insides of her ankles, making her crazy.
Braden leaned back against the wooden door he’d slammed shut, pulling Lana up his length so that only her toes touched the ground
. She could hardly breathe, but the kissing seemed more important. And the touching. His hands—oh, their heat, sliding up the back of her thigh, warming the skin he exposed to the cool barn air as he slid her skirt higher.
She tried to keep one hand in his thick hair as she reached for his belt buckle with the other, but those darned cowboy belt buckles took two hands. She knew that; it was true every time they made love after they’d been to the ranch, and it hadn’t been that long ago. She shouldn’t have forgotten that it took two hands—
It hadn’t been that long—
Why had it been so very, very long?
He left me. I wasn’t enough.
She let go of his buckle and jumped backward as if he were a trap she needed to escape. She backed away one shaky step, bumping into a stall door.
The enormous horse whose stall she’d bumped against stuck his head over the side, pushing her, and she yelped.
Braden was right in front of her, catching her hand, murmuring her name. “Lana, honey. Shh...it’s all right.”
“No!” She moved away from the horse and from him. “No, it isn’t okay. What are we doing here?”
“We’re going back to where we left off.” With firm hands on her waist, he pulled her squarely to him. “Where we never should have left off. We never should have broken up.”
Lana pushed against his chest with two hands, keeping a few inches of space between their bodies. “Yes, we should have. There were good reasons for our engagement to end.”
“The miscarriage—”
“We’d already grown apart, Braden, and you knew it. That’s why you flew in that weekend, because you knew we were falling apart. We couldn’t save it. That pregnancy only delayed the inevitable a few weeks.”
“We need to try again. This week has proved we still have something worth saving. That kiss alone proves it.”
“That kiss was just chemistry.”
“Bull.”
She inhaled sharply.
Braden let her go. He bent down to retrieve his hat, then smacked it a few times against his leg to dust it off. “You might want to fix your hair,” he said, pulling the Stetson low on his forehead.
