Hard Knocks

by Ruby Lang

  HARD KNOCKS

  Ruby Lang

  Avon, Massachusetts

  Copyright © 2016 by Mindy Hung.

  All rights reserved.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher; exceptions are made for brief excerpts used in published reviews.

  Published by

  Crimson Romance

  an imprint of F+W Media, Inc.

  10151 Carver Road, Suite 200

  Blue Ash, OH 45242. U.S.A.

  www.crimsonromance.com

  ISBN 10: 1-4405-9657-3

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9657-5

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-9658-1

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-9658-2

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  Cover art ©123RF/maridav and @iStock/harrastaja.

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  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Acknowledgments

  More from This Author

  Also Available

  CHAPTER ONE

  What a day for seeing the sights, Helen Chang Frobisher thought as she entered the exam room and took in the two mountain ranges facing her.

  In the chair: the Alps. On the table: the Andes.

  Of course, Portland never lacked for scenic views, but the two physically imposing gentlemen in front of her were a different story. They turned their boulder-hewn faces toward her and squared their chiseled shoulders. Alps stood up, but Andes just closed his eyes again. Clearly, he was her man.

  Lacerations to the forehead and scalp, her brain noted as her heels clicked forward.

  Andes was in a hospital gown. Alps was wearing a nattily tailored suit, but she doubted he was a businessman. Both men were too large, too craggy, too ... panoramic, she thought briefly before putting on her doctor face.

  They had been sewn up. The chart indicated minor contusions on the blond one she’d dubbed Alps. Dark-haired and dark-eyed Andes, however, had clearly taken a harder hit.

  “Dr. Frobisher, I thought you’d be interested in meeting these gentlemen,” Dr. Max Weber yelped. He flapped his clipboard excitedly.

  She hadn’t even noticed her colleague next to the huge men, so preoccupied she had been. He was practically dancing.

  “Their minor car accident is our special treat!” Weber said. “Dr. Frobisher, I’d like you to meet—but wait, you probably already know who they are.”

  Max looked eagerly at Helen. Blond Alps, the one who wasn’t white-faced in the bed, came slowly toward her. She looked way, way up into his eyes. Smarter than the average landmass, she thought, meeting his alert, interested gaze. He cleared his throat. “Dr. Frobisher,” he said, “I’m Adam Magnus and that lump over there is Serge Beaufort.”

  He put out his hand, and she took it, her slender fingers immediately lost in his palm. Out of sheer bloody-mindedness, she was tempted to squeeze with everything she had. She took in his close-cropped blond hair and the Slavic cheekbones. His eyes were that color that everyone said was blue, but which she privately thought of as ghostly and white. But there was a disarming sprinkling of freckles across his nose—a nose that had been broken once or twice. Farm boy meets gladiator, she thought, trying once more to fit him into neat categories.

  She caught another glimmer of amusement from him and ignored it.

  A nurse had wrapped a bandage around Alps’s forehead—Adam Magnus’s, she corrected herself—and there was a little blood on his shirt. Minor head wounds had a tendency to bleed a lot. Still, what the hell was wrong with her colleague, Weber? He was fluttering around the patients like a drunken Southern belle. She flicked her gaze back at Magnus.

  “You should probably sit down, Mr. Magnus,” she told him.

  “I’m fine,” he said. He was still holding her hand. “Dr. Weber and the nurses in the ER already worked their magic.”

  “Dr. Frobisher,” Max screeched, “you don’t know who these gentlemen are? Serge Beaufort is the goalie of the Oregon Wolves, and Adam Magnus here is the enforcer. He’s the guy who makes sure everyone stays clear of our other players.”

  “That’s great,” said Helen extricating her hand. She moved closer to Andes. She still wasn’t sure why she was here. Maybe something had shown up on a CT scan. “And the Wolves are ...”

  “They’re our hockey team.”

  “Portland has a hockey team? No offense,” she added, with a quick grin to the patients.

  Andes barely registered her words. Alps quirked her a wry smile.

  Helen felt her stomach tighten a fraction.

  Adam Magnus was kind of gorgeous, if you went for the gigantic, lethal bodyguard look.

  Helen didn’t.

  Well, not usually.

  Weber was offended for the players’ sakes. “Are you telling me you don’t follow hockey? Doesn’t anyone watch the Wolves in this town? Helen, you’re Canadian, for God’s sake.”

  “I don’t follow hockey nowadays,” Helen said, shrugging. “So ... no one here is complaining of chronic headache, I take it.”

  She turned to the patient with a barely suppressed sigh. Head trauma was not her specialty—she usually looked at migraine and pain, but Weber had called her in on a routine mild traumatic brain injury case just because he thought she’d like to meet some hockey players. She supposed she ought to be grateful that her supervisor was the enthusiastic sort who paid attention to his charges.

  Weber gestured for Helen to check the patient out. She ran through her list of standard questions, observing her patient’s hearing, his speech, his memory. Definitely a concussion, she thought, as she wound down her exam. Interestingly, Beaufort’s coordination and reflexes were still quite sharp.

  Athletes, she thought again.

  They’d probably both been playing since they were barely old enough to skate. That was how they honed that coordination and those reflexes that could grab bullets out of the air. That was how they learned the stick was an extension of their limbs. The movements were practiced and repeated and practiced until the procedures of each specific motor task, each grip on the stick, each flick of the wrist, each turn of the head, became etched in the neuroanatomy. Her brother had played for a while. Fat lot of good that had done him.

  She quickly checked off another set of boxes in her head as she completed Serge Beaufort’s exam. He was murmuring in French, something about a puppy.

  Oh, she was just enough of a snob to think that all those beautiful masculine reflexes could be put to something more interesting: ice sculpting, puppeteering, exotic dancing, Swedish massage. But instead, they chose to chase a little round pellet around the ice while wearing helmets and loose jerseys. It seemed like such a waste of flesh. She’d read a study that looked a
t whether athletes had a limited range of facial and vocal expressions because most of their concentration had gone into developing their larger muscle groups. She peered at Serge Beaufort’s slack jaw again. His eyes were closed.

  Unfair to judge the poor man right now, she thought. He had, after all, suffered a blow to the head.

  But the mountain behind her, Adam Magnus, he had an imperturbable athlete’s face. She sneaked a peek at him. No, that wasn’t quite true. From a distance, he seemed impassive, but up close, he was hardly vacant. There was a restlessness around his eyes and mouth. His voice, although not animated, was deep and amused. So he chose to work in a profession where he used his body more than his brain. No wonder he had a smile in his voice. She’d cackle if she were paid handsomely to fill out designer suits and hit pucks. His buddies probably thought it was fine for him to gun his sports car on a Sunday afternoon and get into traffic accidents. They probably jeered whenever he punched someone, guffawed when he kneed someone in the groin.

  There. She’d put Adam Magnus in his box and shut the lid.

  God, she was a horrible, judgmental shrew these days. How the hell was she supposed to be a good doctor if she was already this cynical at the beginning of her career?

  She finished up her notes on Serge Beaufort, aware of Adam’s eyes on her. It was almost as if he could hear her thoughts. She felt herself redden, just a little, so she tightened her face and held her spine straight even as a small part of her failed.

  It was this way all the time, now. She was angry, easily frazzled. She lost her concentration. If she kept this up, she’d be useless to her patients. There was no need to resent Adam Magnus. There was no need to be spiteful with everyone and anyone for simply being.

  Except, she was.

  Nurse Pham came in with the CT scan, and Weber left with her, chattering the whole time.

  Helen took a deep breath. Her life was not terrible. Actually, it had been pretty charmed. Small-town upbringing in the Okanagan Valley, daughter of one of the town doctors, a house with dogs, wide-plank tables, and sunshine. She’d picked apples and done ballet. She had an older brother to assume the burden of being a perfect child. And she had been so stupid, so gloriously stupid, to take that for granted, to think that the whole thing would be forever preserved in the honey of memory, that her parents would always be fortyish, strong and wise and healthy, and that she would always return to find things that way.

  She’d spent a few unhappy years in her teens at the San Francisco Ballet School, but that home—that beautiful home nestled in Canada—was the constant. When she finally quit dancing, college and medical school and residency went by in a whirl of work and studying and trying to sleep.

  Everything until then had been good. Then her father’s diagnosis came, just a couple of months after she’d started practicing as a neurologist. He’d been a boxer in his youth, and he’d suffered minor head trauma from a car accident a few months prior to diagnosis. But no one could say if either was linked to his growing illness, and it wasn’t much use trying to find out. She’d handled that well at first, too. She’d conferred with her dad’s physicians when she’d flown up to see her parents. Degenerative brain disease wasn’t her specialty, but she’d researched treatments and gone about her life with the usual practical optimism that one expected from a doctor. Except that he’d only gotten worse. And now she could say that all her optimism was gone.

  She was grateful that this patient was disoriented, so that he couldn’t gauge how far her mind wandered during this exam.

  She pocketed her pen and tried to smooth down the ridges of her sudden anger.

  “How is he?” asked Adam Magnus.

  His voice was unexpectedly close to her ear.

  “We’ll keep him overnight for observation,” she told him.

  “We have an away game tomorrow.”

  She wanted to flip him the bird.

  “Dr. Weber will confer with your team physician,” she said crisply. “But the fact is, Mr. Beaufort has had a concussion. He needs to rest, and air travel would exacerbate his condition.”

  He was only looking out for his friend’s job, she told herself. No need think the worst of him.

  “Your turn,” she said. “Sit down.”

  She should just go on her way, she thought. But for some reason, she needed to establish some sort of authority over him. And he did indeed have a head injury, minor though it was, and head injuries interested her.

  “I’ve already been checked,” he protested.

  “Scientific curiosity. This isn’t really an exam,” she said, giving his sturdy chest a little push. “And you’re not my patient, and I’m not really your doctor. Just call it an opinion.”

  “I guess some opinions are stronger than others,” he said, with that glint again.

  Mercilessly, she shone her penlight right into his laughing eyes. His pupils constricted immediately.

  She went through the motions of an exam, but there didn’t seem to be much to see, just as he had pointed out, she told herself. Alps was fine. More than fine. Sure, he had a few nicks and dents, but he was still solid and golden. She felt a little foolish for pushing him around, making him sit. She had just wanted to put him in a separate place, but it hadn’t worked. For some reason, he made her jumpy. She felt transparent. She had needed to put him where he couldn’t touch her, and now she was the one touching him.

  She moved her hand away.

  His phone trilled with an irritating, old-fashioned telephone ring, and he glanced at her apologetically.

  “You’re fine,” she said curtly. “I’ll get a nurse in to finish up with your friend.”

  She turned on her heel, and Adam stood with his back to her as he talked quietly on the phone.

  She closed the door and walked down the hallway to give Weber the lowdown. She checked in with Nurse Pham and signed her forms. The hockey players had been the last of her patients. She was off the clock. Now would be a perfect time to call her mother. She hiked over to the physicians’ lounge.

  “It’s your dad’s naptime,” May Yin Frobisher said over the phone. “I hate to wake him when it’s so hard to get him to sleep.”

  Helen knew it was. It was why she had chosen to call now instead of later. She squelched down her guilt and became brisk. “Just a quick check-in today. How is his depression?” she asked. “How is the new medication working out for him?”

  She and her mother ran through their set list of questions. While they talked, it was easy to forget that this was her mother and that the patient with parkinsonism was her own father.

  Satisfied, she was about to hang up, when May Yin said, hesitantly, “Helen, I’ve been thinking. With your dad’s condition being the way it is, we’d like to move to a smaller place. Somewhere without stairs.”

  “Mum, Dad’s doing fine right now. The new medication has been working well. The tremors are under control.”

  May Yin was silent. She was probably twisting her still-black hair. Her husband and daughter often ganged up to veto her. It never did any good, Helen thought with a sick twist in her stomach. Besides, with her father deteriorating every day, he didn’t have a say.

  When May Yin spoke again, her voice had become precise and distant. “It would be better for us to move before your father gets worse—”

  Helen wanted to open her mouth, but May Yin kept talking, ruthlessly and without inflection. “It is only going to go downhill from here,” she said. “I’ve been asking your brother to look for condos in Vancouver, so that we’ll be near him and Gordon, closer to the kinds of medical services that your father needs. Helen, I know it’s your childhood home and you love it, but I can’t do this anymore. I can’t take care of your father by myself. I can’t drive hours every week to take him to specialists. I can’t pick up after him and cook and keep the house clean—”

  “I’ll send you money for a housekeeper. And you can hire someone to drive you.”

  She grimaced as she heard herself. T
his was exactly the kind of illogic she discouraged in patients and families. And here she was thinking magically, If I don’t go back, my father won’t worsen. He’ll stay the way I left him. The house will be perfect and welcoming. Everything will be okay.

  She closed her eyes and wished her words back, but her mother, who had a lot to deal with these days, had a short fuse, too. “I know this upsets you, Helen. But I’ve already made a decision. Besides, if we move, it’ll make it easier for you to visit.”

  May Yin hung up.

  Her mother was quietly angry, which Helen was used to. She could hardly blame her mother. Helen had not been to see her parents since summer. She didn’t live that far down the coast from them. And added to the fact that she and her father had always been close, she was a neurologist. She could be of use to him.

  Except when she couldn’t.

  She shoved the phone back in her pocket and strode out of the room as if she knew where she was going.

  Her father’s central nervous system was failing. His brain was shutting down and dying, and here she was with her fancy medical degree, and there was not a thing she could do about it.

  • • •

  Adam could not afford to be distracted, least of all by the woman who had just left the room. But her gestures had been so deft, her movements so precise—it was fascinating to watch her, and much more pleasant than the task at hand.

  He was dimly aware that the first doctor—Weber, his name was—had come back in and was reassuring him about Serge’s health. Of course Serge would be fine. He’d taken worse hits before. But the media attention for this traffic accident was probably going to be ugly, even though the kid was fine. The season had barely started, and the Wolves were already in a losing streak. Worse, this was only the team’s second year in operation, but already it was their second year occupying the bottom of the NHL rankings. The town was indifferent to the team unless the players did something stupid. Their billionaire owner was reviled. Hardly anyone showed up to games. Hell, they hadn’t even been able to get crowds into the goodwill pancake breakfast they’d held.