LITMIR.BIZ

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returned her call without further prompting, she’d camp on his doorstep. I’ll renew my quest tomorrow, she vowed, even if I have to leave Annie with a hotel-provided baby-sitter. It was a desperate attempt at pluck, coming from a devoted mother who hated to let her beloved, seriously ill child out of her sight for a single second.

      Having looked their fill at the seals, polar bears and penguins, Jess and Annie headed for the giraffes and the other hooved African animals, pausing at a vendor’s cart on the way, so that Jess could buy her daughter a paper cone of raspberry-colored cotton candy. Her cheeks flushed from what Jess prayed was just excitement and not another bout of chills and fever to come, Annie took a bite of the spun-sugar confection, which colored her mouth a streaky hot pink, and ran ahead.

      “Zebras, Mummy! Zebras!” she exclaimed.

      Calling himself an idiot for maintaining his tenuous low-key pursuit of them, but intrigued by Jess’s delicate good looks and what appeared to be the strong bond between her and her daughter, Stephen Hunter kept pace. As he watched, unable to intervene, Annie stumbled and fell to the pavement, skinning her left knee slightly.

      Jess was beside her in a flash, inspecting the damage. “Are you all right, darling?” she demanded worriedly, sinking to her haunches so that she and Annie were at the same level as she attempted to brush every trace of dirt from the abrasion with a clean handkerchief.

      Annie seemed willing to take the mishap in her stride. However, she complained, “My head feels hot, Mummy.”

      From what Jess could tell on closer inspection, her child’s large green eyes were exceptionally bright, as if from a fever. When she tested Annie’s forehead with the back of her wrist, she learned, to her dismay, that it was burning up. Her beloved child’s deteriorating immune system had failed to protect her from yet another virus or bacterial infection.

      “Oh, baby,” Jess whispered, her heart sinking as she enveloped the girl in a guilty hug. “We’ve got to get you back to the hotel at once.”

      She wasn’t aware of the tall blond man’s approach. As a result, she almost jumped to find him towering over them.

      “Excuse me, my name is Stephen, and I’m a doctor. Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked in his decidedly American accent.

      He was tall and lean, with boyishly tousled, sun-bleached hair and penetrating blue eyes that hinted at the possibility of Nordic ancestry. His hands were neat and long-fingered. They looked capable. Jess’s off-the-cuff impression was that he had a kind face. Despite everything she’d heard about crime in American cities, she was inclined to trust him. Instinct told her his claim to be a physician wasn’t an empty boast.

      Still, she wasn’t accustomed to accepting medical advice from strangers on the sidewalk—especially not where Annie’s welfare was concerned.

      With a fluid motion that wasn’t lost on him, she arose. “Thanks, but not really,” she said in her cultivated British voice. “The abrasion on my daughter’s knee isn’t serious. However, she seems to have caught cold. I’ve decided to give up on the zoo for today…and return to our hotel.”

      Viewed at close range, she was stunning, in the fair-skinned, dark-haired way Stephen liked best. A young Elizabeth Taylor, as she’d looked when she starred in the classic version of Father of the Bride, he thought, ever the vintage-movie buff. Her accent betrayed that she was British—on holiday in the U.S., if her reference to a hotel was any indication. More than he could have said, he liked her natural air of refinement and her obvious devotion to her daughter.

      After three wasted years spent imprisoned in the cocoon of his heartache and loneliness, he realized, the social man in him was on the verge of reaching out again. He had to admit, the idea was more than a little frightening. Meanwhile, in his practiced and usually infallible judgment, her daughter had contracted something more serious than a garden-variety upper respiratory infection.

      With an unmistakable air of authority that swept past Jess’s weakened defenses, Stephen crouched to lay his wrist against the child’s forehead and feel her neck with strong but gently probing fingers. Brief though it was, the latter exam caused her to wince. And no wonder, Stephen thought with a slight shake of his head. She had swollen glands, and doubtless a sore throat. Though he couldn’t be sure without a thermometer, he estimated her temperature at one hundred and one degrees Fahrenheit or thereabouts.

      He made a production of examining her knee, as well. Producing a brightly colored stick-on bandage from the pocket of his tweed sport jacket, where he always carried them for his younger patients, he applied it to the child’s injured knee as if it were a badge of honor before getting to his feet.

      “Better?” he asked.

      Distracted from her fever and the pain of her injury by the bandage’s novelty, Annie managed a shy “I guess so” as she stared up at the tall, blond stranger. She quickly added a polite “Thank you,” at Jess’s prompting.

      “Your daughter has swollen glands and a temperature,” Stephen added, gazing directly into Jess’s dark-fringed brown eyes. “Hadn’t you better take her to a doctor?”

      Tempted for a hot moment to abandon her us-against-the-world stance and let herself lean on this blond Viking of a physician who had invaded their privacy as if he owned it, Jess felt anger, tinged with panic, flow through her veins. What was he doing, exactly? Accusing her of negligence? Or attempting to secure a new patient?

      “I would if we had one here in the U.S.,” she snapped, then crumbled as Annie shivered slightly. “We just got here from England day before yesterday, and the weather’s much chillier than I expected,” she added almost apologetically, drawing her daughter close. “I’m afraid Annie’s cardigan’s not warm enough….”

      Stephen didn’t hesitate. “Here…take my coat,” he insisted, shrugging off his tweed sport jacket and wrapping it warmly about Annie’s shoulders. “Did you come by car?”

      Jess nodded, overwhelmed by his take-charge manner and, now that she’d dropped her defenses, more than a little grateful for his intercession.

      “Show me where it’s parked,” he offered. “I’ll carry her.”

      With her mother at the tall stranger’s side, evincing approval, Annie didn’t protest when Stephen lifted her in his arms. Instead, she seemed to wrap her arms about the blond doctor’s neck and nestle against his tan oxford-cloth shirt as if she belonged there, as if she appreciated his fatherliness.

      It was just an illusion, of course, fostered by Jess’s anxiety that she wouldn’t be equal to managing Annie’s medical crisis on her own, not to mention her residual pain over the fact that Annie’s father had so seldom evinced an interest in the girl. Instead of reading stories and taking their precious five-year-old on outings, Ronald Holmes had spent most of his free time chasing other women and driving fast cars while under the influence.

      As she led the way to the Wolf parking lot, where she’d left their cherry-red rented sedan with its unnerving left-hand drive, Jess reflected that her husband’s untimely and undignified exit from their lives had become irrelevant. She and Annie were on their own, and in a sense they’d always been. Thanks to the fact that Ronald had died before the divorce was final, they had more than enough money at their disposal to pay for Annie’s treatment. If they could just find a marrow donor…

      Their little procession of three had reached her rental car and, squaring her shoulders, Jess fitted her key in the door on the passenger side. Taking Annie from his arms and placing her inside, she exchanged his jacket for the heavy woolen shawl she’d left on the seat and returned it to him.

      “We’ll be fine now,” she told him, gazing up into his sky-colored eyes. “Thanks for your help.”

      Stephen shrugged off her gratitude with a polite murmur. Of his two chief emotions—a half-formed wish to see her again and his strong concern for her child—the latter took precedence. “Where are you staying?” he asked.

      Again the multitude of news stories Jess

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