LITMIR.BIZ

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it had stalled several times before she finally got it running. Then it had stalled again at a red light when she was halfway there, and she’d wound up with a line of angry drivers behind her. As she’d pulled into the hospital lot the skies had opened up and dumped a deluge of rain on her as she walked to the building.

      Yesterday had been their monthly family dinner at her parents’ horse farm an hour away, and though she had warned them that she might have to work, apparently Clare’s absence had caused a stir again. Her phone had been blowing up all morning with calls from her seven siblings. When her brothers or sisters missed dinner no one freaked out. Of course, they all saw each other on a regular basis.

      Her three brothers and two of her sisters worked on the farm, and her other two sisters were stay-at-home mothers with four children each. In total Clare had twenty-two nieces and nephews ranging in age from newborn to twenty-six. It seemed as if every time she turned around one of her siblings was expecting another child, and her oldest niece and nephew were both newly married with first children on the way. An entirely new generation to remind Clare how much of a black sheep she really was.

      Being single and childless in such a traditional family made her a target for well-meaning and sometimes not-so-well-meaning relatives. No one could grasp the concept that she actually enjoyed being single, and that she wasn’t deliberately going against the grain. She was just trying to be happy on her own terms. Refusing to join the family business after high school had sent relations into a tizzy; they’d tagged her as the rebel. If they had bothered to pay attention they would have known she had always dreamed of being a nurse. But from the day she graduated from nursing school they had teased her relentlessly, saying that she’d only entered the profession to snag a rich doctor and live in a mansion.

      Her gaze automatically sought out her new boss.

      An attractive, smooth-talking multimillionaire well-known for his philanthropy, Parker was every woman’s dream. With his GQ model physique, rich brown hair always in need of a trim and eyes that looked green one minute and brown the next, he was way above average on the looks scale. Way, way above. At the sight of him on his first day at the hospital, her female staff had been reduced to giggling, blushing, hormonally driven adolescent girls.

      He was hands down one of the finest physicians she’d ever worked for. He was trustworthy, honest, reliable, and she had never once seen him in a foul mood. He was as charming as he was funny, and his often rumpled, shabby-chic appearance only added to his appeal. And despite being an East Coaster, he had exceptionally good manners. But most important, his rapport with children made him an outstanding pediatrician.

      He was also a shameless, womanizing serial dater. Or so she had heard. One who had apparently set his sights on her.

      As if.

      She’d learned the hard way that emotional entanglements with a coworker, especially one in a position of power, were a prescription for disaster. It was how her no-dating-coworkers rule had come to be. And though she’d made every effort possible to ignore him, he made that nearly impossible with his relentless teasing and barely veiled innuendo. All of that unwanted attention had resulted in a mild crush.

      Mild crush? She nearly laughed out loud at the understatement. She could fool her family and her coworkers, but she couldn’t fool her own heart. And though she would die before admitting it to another human being, she wanted him. Badly.

      Getting that first guilty glimpse of him every morning, with his slightly rumpled hair and lopsided tie, was by far the highlight of her day. She would imagine brushing back that single soft curl that fell across his forehead and straightening that tie and then she would push herself up on her toes...

      And that was where it always ended because if she let herself go any further, she would forget all of the reasons she needed to keep him at arm’s length. But even if he wasn’t her boss, he was off-limits. If her family got wind that she was dating a doctor, especially a rich one, they would never let her live it down.

      She just wished he would stop watching her. He had her so tied in knots she could barely eat her lunch. She supposed that was one of the advantages of a crush, or lust, or whatever this thing was. Inevitable weight loss. Since Dr. Reese had moved there, Clare had dropped a total of eighteen pounds. She hadn’t been this skinny since her first year of college. She felt so good without the extra weight that she’d begun jogging again. Though she did realize she would have never put on those eighteen pounds in the first place if she hadn’t gotten lax with her exercise regimen. Then again, she’d had no one to look good naked for. Nor the time or even the desire to go out and find someone.

      In her peripheral vision she saw Dr. Reese rise from the table where he’d been sitting with Dr. Wakefield, and her stomach did a flip-flop. He would have to walk past her to leave the cafeteria. Keeping her eyes on her phone, she watched in her peripheral vision as Parker neared her table, and when he walked past she could feel the air shift.

      Would he stop and give her a hard time? He was always making excuses to talk to her about things that weren’t work related. Probably because he knew it annoyed her. That’s what she wanted him to think anyway.

      Parker must have been in a hurry because he didn’t stop this time. She should have been relieved, so why the feeling of disappointment? She couldn’t go on this way, harboring an irrational lust for a man who was completely wrong for her, walking around in a state of constant confusion.

      Her phone rang and she answered, instantly back in work mode when Vanessa, one of her nurses, told her Janey’s vitals were no longer stable and getting worse by the minute.

      Clare jumped up, leaving her tray on the table and shoving her phone in her cardigan pocket as she headed for the closest elevator. Since she’d been discovered in the truck stop, just minutes after her birth and barely clinging to life, Janey’s condition had been touch and go. Being in the medical field, Clare had been trained to put her personal feelings aside and remain objective, but Janey was like no other patient she’d ever had. She had no one, and despite efforts to find her family, or anyone who may have known who her family was, the police had come up empty, so Janey had become a ward of the state. Clare couldn’t imagine being so helpless and alone, nor could she understand how a woman could abandon her child that way. Though she had no children of her own, or plans to have a baby anytime soon, Clare could see how fiercely protective her sisters were of their children. What could have happened to Janey’s mom to make her think that her baby would be better off without her? Or maybe she hadn’t been given a choice.

      The idea gave Clare a cold chill.

      She rounded the corner to see the elevator doors sliding closed and broke into a run, calling, “Hold the elevator!”

      A hand emerged to stop the door, a hand that she realized, as she slipped inside, was attached to the very person she was trying to avoid. And now she was the last place she wanted to be.

      Stuck alone with him.

      He hit the button for the fourth floor, wearing a look that made her knees weak, and as the doors slid shut said, “Hey there, sunshine.”

       Two

      Clare shot Parker one of those looks. This one seemed to say, Seriously, did you really just call me that?

      But a month ago she would have completely ignored him, so that was progress. Right?

      “They called you about Janey?” he asked her.

      “Erratic vitals,” Clare said, her concern for the infant clear on her face. Janey had made an emotional impact on everyone in the NICU, but Clare seemed more attached to her than anyone. He couldn’t deny that Janey’s case had tested his objectivity from the minute she was admitted to the hospital, barely clinging to life. And now, with treatment options diminishing, he was feeling the pressure.

      There had to be something he was missing...

      “She’s not getting better,” Clare said as if she were reading his mind.

      “No,”

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