LITMIR.BIZ

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as by the urgency behind his rasped words. Given the sedation he’d had, that urgency totally confused her. It was the same sort of frantic undertone she’d encountered when accident victims came out of surgery worried about someone who’d been in the accident with them, an overwhelming need that reached beyond any immediate concern for themselves.

      But he’d been alone. And he was talking about a meeting.

      “They need to know I didn’t…stand them up.”

      The soft click and beep of monitors melded with the quiet shuffle of the nurse moving around Alex as she stood with her hand in his, studying the compelling lines of his face. She couldn’t begin to imagine what sort of deal he had going that was so important to him that he’d fight through the fog of drugs to keep from jeopardizing it. It was none of her business anyway.

      He was her business though. And she definitely recognized signs of an iron will when she saw one. Right now, that will was definitely working against him.

      Shelving an odd hint of dread at the thought of encountering that will when he was conscious, she curved her free hand over his shoulder. She wanted him calm. Better yet, she wanted him sleeping. “What time was your meeting?”

      Over the blip of the heart monitor, he whispered, “Seven-thirty.”

      “As late as it is, I’m sure your party has already figured out that you’re not showing up tonight. You can talk to your secretary in the morning and straighten out everything.” Practicality joined assurance. “You wouldn’t be able to carry on a phone conversation anyway. Your voice is barely audible.”

      His brow furrowed at that.

      “Try to let go of it for now,” she urged. “Get some rest.”

      The muscles beneath her hand felt as hard as stone, but she could feel him relaxing beneath her touch. He said nothing else as she stood there watching the furrows ease from his brow and listening to his breathing grow slow and even.

      Letting her hand slip from his, Alex stepped back, her glance cutting to the nurse hanging a fresh bag of saline for his IV. She didn’t believe for a moment that he’d accepted her logic or her suggestion. The painkiller he’d been given had just kicked in. With the sedatives still in his system, he couldn’t have stayed awake no matter how hard he’d tried.

      She glanced at the institutional black-and-white clock high on the wall.

      Her day had started nearly twenty hours ago and she was tired. Not exhausted the way she’d so often been during her residency. “Exhausted” came after forty hours with no sleep. But those days of honing her skills in the competitive battlefield of a teaching hospital were over. She had a normal life now. As normal as any practicing surgeon and single mom had, anyway. This kind of tired was a piece of cake.

      “I don’t imagine any of his family is here yet. Did they want me to call?”

      “His family wasn’t notified,” the soft-spoken nurse replied. “His chart says the only person he wanted contacted was his lawyer.”

      “His lawyer?”

      The nurse shrugged. “That’s what he told them in Emergency. Some guy in Seattle. The only other thing he wanted was to make a phone call about a meeting. The one he was talking about just now, I guess. They told him they’d call anyone he wanted for him, but he apparently insisted that he had to make the call himself.

      “He was in no shape to use a phone,” she continued, checking the monitors and noting the readings. “From the notes in his chart, the paramedics already had him full of morphine and all anyone downstairs cared about was getting his bleeding under control and getting him into CT and surgery.”

      Alex slipped off her cap, threading her fingers through her short dark hair as she cast one last glance at the still and sedated man on the gurney. Even with the morphine, if he’d been conscious, he’d been in pain. Even then, in pain and bleeding, that meeting had haunted him.

      Unless he was negotiating world peace or working on a deal to cure some disease, she still had no idea what would have been that important to him. But Honeygrove was hardly the Hague, there were no big medical research facilities that she knew of in town, and she was shooting in the dark. Her concerns tended to remain very close to home. It was people she cared about. Her family. Her friends. Her patients. There was no way to know what really mattered to a man like Chase Harrington.

      She couldn’t relate at all to him. Yet, as Alex told the nurse to call her at home if there was any change and headed for the locker room, she actually felt bad for the guy. For all his wealth and notoriety, when he’d been hurt and in pain, when he’d just come through what had to be a horrific accident, there hadn’t been anyone he cared to call except the person he paid to look out for his interests. No wife. No girlfriend. No parent. No friend. Just his lawyer.

      She found that incredibly sad.

      It wasn’t long, however, before it became apparent that she was the only one inclined to feel compassion toward him. It had literally taken general anesthesia and a walloping dose of narcotic to end his insistence about needing to make his call. And while use of a phone no longer seemed to be a problem, Alex had the distinct impression when she left another emergency surgery the next morning that at least one member of the hospital administration and part of its staff would love to have him re-anesthetized.

      Or, maybe, it was euthanized.

      Chapter Two

      “I’d appreciate it enormously if you’d see him and get back to me as soon as you can, Doctor. He’s not cooperating with me and I’ve been getting calls all morning from reporters and wire services wanting to know his condition and what he’s doing in Honeygrove. I simply can’t release the statement he gave me,” Mary Driscoll, the dedicated assistant to the hospital’s administrator, implored Alex over the top of her silver-rimmed half glasses.

      Dressed in a dove-gray business suit with slashes of black that somehow managed to match her bobbed hair, Mary looked perfectly coordinated, as always, and enormously capable of handling the myriad crises she intercepted for her boss. Alex knew the administrator, Ryan Malone, personally. The dashing and diplomatic man who’d gone out of his way to make her feel welcome at Memorial had just married one of her friends. And she knew he trusted Mary’s judgment implicitly.

      If Mary was finding Chase Harrington difficult, Alex thought uneasily, then he was definitely presenting a challenge.

      “What did he tell you to say?” she asked, her voice low so it wouldn’t carry beyond the corner of the hallway Mary had cornered her in.

      “He told me to say nothing about him other than that he’s in excellent condition following a minor accident.”

      “Excellent?” Alex repeated, stifling the urge to laugh. “I don’t think so.”

      “My point exactly.”

      “I wouldn’t call it a minor accident, either.”

      Looking vindicated, Mary murmured, “Thank you, Doctor. I tried to tell him that it’s hospital policy to issue the truth about a patient’s condition, even if it’s just a statement like ‘guarded’ or ‘stable.’ Or we could go with ‘no comment.’ His response was that rules are bent all the time. That was when I offered to let him discuss the matter with Mr. Malone,” she continued, as Alex’s eyebrows arched, “but he informed me that he’d already given me his statement, and that the hospital administrator was the last person he wanted to see. He doesn’t want anyone in his room other than necessary medical staff.”

      The murmur of voices drifted toward them when the wide doors of the surgical department swung open. Stepping back so the gowned attendants could bring out a patient on a gurney, Alex could practically feel the weight Ryan’s assistant carried shift to her own shoulders. It was something in the woman’s eyes. The encroaching relief, probably.

      “If that’s what he wants, we’ll

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