LITMIR.BIZ

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challenge. “Trust me, Mr. Allen, you don’t want me to come looking for you. And in case you’re thinking you can take me, you can’t. I’ve got a black belt in Tae Kwon Do.” He patted Allen’s shirt pocket with the card in it. “Do we understand one another?”

      The breath Allen exhaled was hot and pungent. “I can have you sued—”

      Very calmly, Mac turned toward the head nurse. “Wanda, don’t forget to call the animal control department so they can check out Mr. Allen’s dog for distemper. And while you’re at it, get in touch with social services. They said they wanted to be called if there was possible child abuse and negligence suspected.”

      Jerking away, Allen moved over to the side and straightened his shirt. “All right.”

      “All right what?” Mac asked amiably.

      Allen fired each word out as if it was a bullet. “All right we understand each other.”

      The smile on Mac’s face was cold as he regarded the other man. “Good.” And then he squatted down to Tommy’s level and took the boy’s hand in his. Mac pressed another card into the boy’s palm, closing his fingers over it. “And you can call me anytime you want to talk—night or day. Got that?”

      Tommy solemnly nodded his head. There was a slight glimmer of hope in his eyes. And more than a little affection.

      Taking Tommy’s hand, the boy’s stepfather glared at Mac. “Can we go now?”

      Mac spread his hands wide. “Never said you couldn’t.” Muttering something angrily under his breath, Allen turned away. “Two weeks,” Mac called after him in a voice that sounded as if his greatest concern in the world was what to have for dinner that night.

      Wanda pressed her lips together, shaking her head. “Never did know what Jane saw in that man.”

      Mac had never met the late nurse, but he took a philosophical guess at her reason for marrying a man who was clearly not one of the kinder citizens of the world. “Maybe she saw something in him that we can’t.”

      Wanda could only shrug, resigned to ignorance. “Maybe. You know, if you hadn’t come along, I would have decked that man.”

      “Now that I would have paid to see.” Mac laughed. “Good night, Wanda,” he said cheerfully.

      He got exactly two feet farther in his escape when someone called out to him.

      “Oh, Dr. Mac, could you—?”

      Mac didn’t even turn around. Instead he stepped up his pace.

      “Nope, no way.” He raised his hands as if to ward off anything else that might be coming his way. “I’m out of here. Now.”

      He hurried out through the rear doors before someone else managed to waylay him. The place, he decided, was harder to shed than a wad of gum stuck in a little girl’s hair.

      Just on the other side of the doors, Jolene watched him make his way out of the immediate parking area toward the larger one reserved for doctors. She thought of the last comment he’d made to her when his pager went off.

      “Well, he certainly is in a hurry to get to his date,” she said to Wanda.

      One more hour to go, Wanda thought, rounding the main desk and claiming her chair. Not that she got that much opportunity to sit at this job. In her mind’s eye, she replayed Mac pushing Tommy’s stepfather against the wall. She could have cheered. No doubt about it, Mac was her hero. After the father of her children, of course she added with a mental smile.

      She flipped open a chart. “Man deserves to play hard after the day he put in.”

      From everything Rebecca had said to her, playing hard was never a problem for the good doctor. “Nothing he didn’t sign on for by going to medical school,” Jolene commented.

      Wanda looked up. Dr. Mac didn’t need her to defend him, but she felt a need to say something, especially after he had come to Tommy’s aid that way. She had a very soft spot in her heart for the boy. “As far as I know, they don’t give a course on how to handle self-centered bastards.”

      Jolene thought of her own ex. And a few physicians she’d had run-ins with along the way. “They should start,” she agreed, “by setting up a series of classes in nursing school.”

      Wanda said nothing, just laughed. These two, she thought, were on a collision course. It was just a matter of time.

      And if she was lucky, she was going to have herself a ticket on the fifty-yard line. It was something to look forward to.

      Mac frowned.

      Ordinarily he could compartmentalize his thoughts and place them out of the way, sequestering them to the far recesses of his mind where they couldn’t bother him. It was the foundation for his ability to be able to both work hard and play hard, each of which he found important to maintaining a healthy outlook on life and a good balance in his life.

      But even as he found himself in the company of a voluptuous woman whose morals appeared to be as easily shed as a pair of sunglasses, Mac was preoccupied. His thoughts were continually being kidnapped by a small boy with huge eyes and a drop-dead gorgeous nurse with an attitude problem.

      Several times in the evening, Lynda had to tap him on the shoulder to get his attention.

      The evening had ended the way neither one of them would have imagined. He kissed the woman good-night and left her at her door even after she’d invited him in for a nightcap and whatever else might follow. Twice.

      Frustrated, Lynda shouted after him. “I liked you better in the elevator.” The pronouncement was followed by a thunderous slamming of her front door that rocked the night air.

      He made a mental note to send her flowers and a short apology. She deserved more than half a date.

      And he, Mac thought, getting back into his car, deserved to know what it was about Jolene DeLuca that crawled under his skin and remained there, like an unfortunate brush with poison oak.

      Mac slipped out of his lab coat and hung it in his locker. A week had gone by without his having run into the feisty San Francisco transplant. Eight days to be exact.

      He figured it was just as well. There was no sense, as his mother had once said, in borrowing trouble.

      Except that Margaret MacKenzie had been talking about the institution of marriage at the time. She maintained that the state of matrimony was not worth the trouble it generated.

      Remembering now, he shook his head. It was one of the few times he ever recalled his parents being in agreement.

      More than once, he’d wondered how and why the two of them had ever gotten together in the first place. Granted they’d been a handsome couple back then, still were when they’d finally decided to give the sham they referred to as a marriage a mercy killing. But he had always thought that marriage had to be based on something far more substantial than liking the looks of the face you woke up next to in the morning.

      His relationship with either of his parents wasn’t such that he could ask one or the other for any insight. The only person in his family he’d ever been close to when he was growing up was Carrie.

      The same held now. But even Carrie’s happy marriage didn’t change his mind about the institution in general. Marriage wasn’t for him, not even remotely.

      At an early age, Mac had come to the conclusion that there was a reason it bore the label of Institution. Institutions were places meant to restrain you, to keep you away from life in general. Prisons were institutions designed to separate the inmates from the rest of life. Marriage did the same. It imprisoned you, kept you from being happy while it sucked out your very soul, leaving behind an empty, useless shell.

      Maudlin thoughts, Mac mused.

      He walked down the corridor toward the rear of the hospital. He wasn’t prone to maudlin thoughts. In general, he was

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