LITMIR.BIZ

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reluctantly complied.

      “Hmm, that sucker’s a definite keeper,” Sarah pronounced with a wickedly naughty grin Kate desperately wished she could replicate. But dull old Katherine had done only one naughty thing in her life—and she was still suffering the aftereffects.

      “Oh, Sarah, I don’t know,” she wailed piteously. “I’ve already spent so much money on the spa and clothes and shoes I’ll never wear that the numbers are all but worn off my credit card.”

      “So what? You’re a rich surgeon, aren’t you?” Eyes the color of sunshine on jade sparkled the way they always did when Sarah teased her childhood friend. Another pair of sun-dappled, jade-green eyes shimmered for an instant in Kate’s mind. Eyes that were haunted and bleak and…brutally angry. Years of practice helped her banish the image almost as quickly as it appeared.

      “What I am is darn near broke after this past week,” she declared firmly. “I’ll be lucky to make the mortgage payment on my flat next month.”

      Sarah dismissed that with typical Hunter imperturbability. Besides, she knew all about the trust fund from Kate’s maternal grandfather that had put her friend through medical school—with plenty left over. “Nonsense,” she declared airily. “Did you or did you not tell me only two weeks ago that you were…uh, let’s see, how did you put it exactly?” She lifted one winged brow. “Oh yeah, I remember, ‘fed up with looking in the mirror and seeing someone’s dried-up spinster aunt’?”

      Kate felt her face warming. Her wine-soaked soliloquy on the night of her thirtieth birthday still had the power to make her wince. “Well, yes, I might have said something like that, but—”

      “Did you or did you not tell me your sex life was a total dud?” The sudden glint in Sarah’s eyes dared her to disagree.

      Damn her, Kate thought peevishly as she swallowed the skillfully worded denial already forming in her mind. “Yes, but I’d had a few glasses of champagne and—”

      “Look at yourself, Katie!” Sarah demanded now. “A terrific, trendy hairdo instead of that awful retro-hippie look—”

      “Thanks very much.”

      “—and flattering makeup instead of that awful pink lip gloss.”

      “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Sarah, I spend most of my time behind a surgical mask. My patients don’t care whether or not I slather on mascara before I scrub.”

      “But those studly residents prowling the halls do.”

      “Attendings do not date residents,” Kate declared in her mother’s haughtiest tones.

      Sarah, the rat, ignored her the way she always did. “Mark my words, sweetie, straight men all over the Bay Area will be falling prostrate at your feet, begging to be your devoted sex slave for life.”

      Because Kate had a particularly vivid imagination, the image that arose featured hard muscles beneath bronzed skin, narrow hips and a particularly outstanding example of masculine anatomy. Her breathing sped up. But when her imagination directed her attention higher, to bold aggressive features and deep-set, haunted eyes, she deliberately wiped her mind clean.

      “I don’t recall mentioning anything about sex slaves—”

      “No, what you actually said was, and I quote, ‘Oh Sarah, just once in my life I’d like to feel wild and wicked and…utterly wanton instead of so damned proper and…matronly. Just once I’d like to have a man lick champagne from my navel and drive me into a frenzy with his mouth. Just once I’d like to—”

      “Enough, please,” Katherine begged, her cheeks flaming. Narrowing her gaze, she glared at her friend with as much indignation as she could muster. “What did you do, bring a tape recorder along with that obscenely huge bottle of bubbly you forced down my throat?”

      “No need,” Sarah replied breezily. “I have a photographic memory, remember? It’s genetic, like Mom’s dimples and Dad’s laugh.”

      Kate arched a brow. “She who gloats brings serious karma down on her head,” she foretold in somber tones.

      Sarah smiled smugly. “I’ll remind you of this conversation on your wedding day.”

      Kate’s heart leaped—and yet again those haunted, sea-green eyes rose to taunt her. She had once loved Elliot Hunter with all of her heart and soul. She had given him her virginity with the sheer joy of being a part of him. Now she cringed inside every time she remembered the foolishly naive ninny she’d been at twenty.

      “I don’t want to get married,” she said a little too shrilly—then forced herself to take a breath. “All I want is a little spice in the romance department before all my vital juices dry up.”

      Sarah lifted her own perfectly shaped—and naturally golden—brows. “You want children, right?”

      So desperately it was a soul-deep ache. “Yes, but—”

      “And you’ve always said you believe in marriage before kids, right?”

      “For me, yes, but—”

      “So go for it, girl! Be proactive for a change. Be aggressive, be bold, be a little naughty.” Sarah clamped her hands on Kate’s bare shoulders and turned her toward the mirror again.

      Biting her lip, Kate shifted her gaze to the skimpy cocktail dress, swaying just a little to make the hem tease her thighs—like the brush of a man’s mouth. Her breath caught, and she nibbled at the inside of her cheek.

      Was it so wrong to want to feel feminine and desired and cherished just once in her life? Was it wrong to ache to hold a child to her breasts and feel an eager little mouth suckle? To have the child’s father curve strong arms around the two of them, love shining in his eyes?

      “I’ll take it,” she said, making up her mind. As Sarah gave her a fierce hug, Kate had a feeling she’d just taken a giant step on the road toward some unknown destiny. She only hoped she wouldn’t live to regret it.

      Somewhere on the road outside Puebla del Mar, southern Spain

      “Bueno, mamacita, breathe through the contraction. You’re doing fine. Uh, fantastico, sí?”

      Pausing while his fractured instructions were translated to the laboring mom, who looked more like a child herself, Elliot Hunter used his forearm to swipe away the sweat mixed with blood from the gash in his temple.

      Though a surgeon by training and inclination, he’d done a rotation in obstetrics during his internship at Stanford Medical Center. All but a few of those births, however, had been normal deliveries in antiseptic conditions with the state-of-the-art equipment and superbly trained, highly skilled personnel of one of the best hospitals in the world backing him up.

      In this case he had to make do with the few essentials in his medical bag—stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, an old-fashioned thermometer. Instead of scrubbing for the full five minutes, he’d drenched his hands in tequila from the bottle in his duffel, the only antiseptic he had. Instead of surgical scrubs he wore jeans, six-year-old boots and a Medics Without Limits T-shirt. An identical shirt, the last one he had that was clean, was folded nearby, ready to be used as a blanket for the newborn.

      When the contraction finally eased, he settled back on his heels, resting his aching spine. The air was thick with heat and dust and the smell of sage. There wasn’t a hint of cloud cover, and the merciless midday sun beat down on the dusty road where, less than an hour earlier, the bus taking him to the seashore had blown a tire.

      Before the driver could regain control, it had plowed into a rattletrap pickup truck driven by a frantic husband racing his pregnant wife to a woman’s clinic in Puebla.

      When the tire had blown, Elliot had been jammed into the corner of the last seat in the bus’s rear, doing his best to block out the sights and sounds of happy, chattering families on holiday. The sickening screech of metal compressing metal had jolted him

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