LITMIR.BIZ

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      Together they hoisted the animal. Jacquelyn caught her breath and breathed a prayer as she ran before Craig to the parking lot. “Dear God, please let Bailey be okay!”

      Chapter Four

      An eagle rode hot updrafts rising from the lake and Jonah Martin put down the medical journal he’d been studying and looked up at the sky. Insects whirred from the trees above him, and the distant sound of food being scraped from a picnic plate dulled the cutting edge of his loneliness. Somewhere overhead a jet whispered through the cloudless sky, reminding him for the briefest of moments that he hadn’t been home…in a long time.

      A sudden scream chilled him to the marrow. Out on the lake, a young woman on skis had fallen and was now splashing and screaming for help. For an instant his pulse quickened and his hands tingled in the old adrenaline rush he remembered from his stint in the E.R., then the woman’s scream turned to laughter and Jonah saw that her head and shoulders were safely above water. She wore a buoyant life vest, a skier’s best friend. Her boyfriend fussed loudly as he turned the boat to pick her up.

      “Yeah, hurry back,” Jonah murmured as he lowered his eyes again to the reports he had intended to study on his day off. “Don’t keep her waiting, buddy, or you’ll be sorry.”

      He reached under his sunglasses and pinched the bridge of his nose, consoling himself with the reminder that he’d learned his lesson. He’d been sorry every single time he’d ever become involved with a woman. Christine, the love of his high school and college years, had been more eager for a ring on her finger than for him. Marriage during medical school and internship wouldn’t be practical or fair to either of them, he had warned her; he’d be under tremendous pressure and working long shifts at the hospital. And if their love was real, it could stand the test of time….

      But Christine didn’t want to put love to the test. He’d received her letter the week after his arrival at medical school; she’d found someone else, an aspiring lawyer from Georgia, a boy willing to marry her right away. “He doesn’t mind that we’ll be married during his law school years,” she had written, and Jonah idly wondered if she realized she’d be financially supporting her new husband as he finished his education. He hadn’t wanted to place that kind of burden on her. He was a doctor; he had years of schooling and hard work before he could seriously consider establishing a home. And so, after receiving Christine’s letter, he had guarded his heart against romantic entanglements.

      He should have learned his lesson then, but he was a normal red-blooded male, and women, for some unaccountable reason, were drawn to him. He’d once heard a professor warn about the tendency for female patients to fall in love with their doctors, but Jonah had always found that his patients—mostly older women—thought of him more like a son than a love interest. His patients were no threat.

      But other women worried him. Ever since the incident at the University of Virginia Hospital, he’d been careful to keep younger women at arm’s length. He had been naive and completely innocent in his UVA days, but one nurse he dated told a different—and totally fabricated—story. He’d smelled mischief on her as strong as the cheap scent she wore, so after one disastrous date he ignored her advances. Later, he tried to ignore her threats…and found that he could not.

      And so began his troubles. His running. Now he was an expert at recognizing the lazily seductive glance that signaled trouble, and it always seemed easier to remove himself from a situation than to call for someone else’s job.

      Besides, people always believed the woman.

      So now he found himself sitting by a lake in Central Florida, one county away from Mickey Mouse, blocks from the southern belles who wore hoop skirts and talked with accents as thick and sweet as honey. Now he was the doctor he’d always dreamed of becoming, and the work here was fulfilling, even if it was lonely. From day one, he’d established a strong rapport with his patients and a frigid enmity with the women at the clinic—especially Jacquelyn Wilkes, whom he found particularly unsettling. He’d been harder on her than the others, though he couldn’t say what drove him to alienate her so ruthlessly. Perhaps it was her skill, her quiet competence…then again, maybe it was those green eyes.

      “Hurry, Craig! I can’t hear him breathing!”

      A familiar voice jangled across his nerves, nudging him out of his musings. Jonah dropped his magazine and stood. Jacquelyn Wilkes and a man were coming from the picnic area; the man staggered under the weight of a blanket-wrapped body in his arms. From the look of the sagging form in the blanket, the patient was a heavy adult, possibly a drowning victim….

      Without hesitating, Jonah unclipped his cell phone and dialed 911. “We need an ambulance sent to the picnic area at Lake Silver, stat,” he told the dispatcher, then he disconnected and sprinted to intersect Jacquelyn’s path.

      “Nurse Wilkes!” he called, falling into step beside her. “What’s the problem?”

      For the first time he could recall, she looked at him with honest appreciation in her eyes. “Dr. Martin, thank goodness! I don’t know what the problem is.” Her eyes were wide with fear as she continued jogging toward the parking lot. “Heatstroke, I think, or maybe snakebite.”

      Jonah nodded. “Pulse? Breath sounds?”

      “Pulse is strong, but slowing,” Jacquelyn answered, huffing. “Breath sounds are erratic.”

      “Puncture wounds?”

      “None that I could see. But I didn’t look closely, there wasn’t time. His breathing was so erratic—”

      The wail of sirens cut through the summer afternoon as an ambulance screeched to a halt in the parking lot.

      The thimble-shaped man carrying the victim stopped abruptly and sent Jonah a crooked smile. “You called an ambulance?”

      “Of course.” Jonah frowned, unable to understand the man’s expression, but there was no time to consider the quirks of Jacquelyn Wilkes’s friends. The emergency medical technicians were spilling out of the vehicle, and a curious crowd had begun to gather.

      “Possible heatstroke or snakebite,” Jonah called, hurrying forward. He pulled the back doors of the truck open himself. “I’m a doctor, and I’d be happy to ride with the patient to the E.R.”

      “Is this the victim?” one of the rescuers asked, pointing down the path.

      Jonah turned and followed the man’s gaze. Jacquelyn and her friend were approaching, the blanket-wrapped body still in the man’s arms. “Yes,” Jonah answered, reaching for the stretcher. “Let me give you a hand.”

      “Jacquelyn,” the burly man panted, halting with his burden. His flush deepened to crimson before the eyes of the curious crowd. “You’ve got to tell them.”

      Jacquelyn lifted the blanket. “Tell them what?”

      Jonah’s nerves tensed as the blanket fell away. The face resting on the man’s shoulder was black and furry; a velvet ear trailed over his arm. Long, lanky limbs pointed toward the sky, and a limp tail drooped out the side of the blanket. Jacquelyn Wilkes’s boyfriend was cradling the most massive dog Jonah had ever seen.

      Someone in the crowd of onlookers snickered and one of the paramedics turned away to hide a smile. The other EMT’s face purpled in sudden anger. “What’s this?” He turned to Jonah. “You called us out here to tend to a mutt?”

      Jonah held up his hand, but couldn’t think of a single word to offer in explanation. The red-faced man lowered the dog to the ground, then stood back, his arms folded tight across his chest. From the expression on his sweaty face, Jonah knew the man was wishing he could melt into the growing crowd and disappear.

      At that moment Jonah could have walked happily into the crowd himself and wished the day away. But his traitorous eyes moved to the place where she stood, clenching and unclenching her hands, copper curls clinging damply to her forehead and the nape of her neck, her eyes welling like a stormy sea.

      A

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