LITMIR.BIZ

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to halt the studies under way, when to give up looking for a cure down that particular alley.

      And then, on days like today, Braden got to inform everyone involved that he’d decided their dream was over.

      Renovations and new wings had been added to the hospital during his six-year absence, so at the conclusion of his shortcut, Braden had to rely on a sign to point him down a new corridor. The old conference room had apparently made way for an entire conference center.

      Maybe the hospital chapel had been renovated or relocated. A pang of regret hit him. Maybe he wouldn’t get the chance to say goodbye.

      Impatient with himself for wasting his energy on nostalgia, Braden followed the signs through the new wing. A visit to the chapel would have been only a symbolic goodbye today. His first engagement was long over, and Braden was ready to move on. Ready to propose to his current girlfriend. Saying goodbye to the memory of his former fiancée wasn’t strictly necessary.

      Pulling his company’s funding for this project was.

      The new wing made West Central feel as strange to him as every other hospital he’d been to. He’d called on too many hospitals to count, flying from coast to coast, living in airports as he’d once lived in this hospital. But PLI rewarded him, raising his pay often and substantially, to keep him from being tempted by rival companies who tried to lure him away. There weren’t many executives who held both an M.D. and a Harvard MBA, so Braden was on the radar as a potential executive for practically every global biotech corporation.

      As president of research and development for PLI, Braden flew less often now. He allowed his handpicked regional directors to screen the applications and research sites. He let them build the thick skin they needed to cut failing programs.

      Braden personally flew in when the stakes were at their highest. Only the biggest investment. Only the biggest potential for return. Now his career had brought him full circle, back to where he’d started. Back to Texas.

      Today, he’d kill a dream at the hospital where his own most valuable, most precious dream had died.

      * * *

      Dr. Lana Donnoli had been given less than an hour’s notice for this meeting. Her predecessor, the esteemed Dr. Montgomery, had once been the faculty adviser during her residency in this hospital. He’d survived a myocardial infarct weeks ago, a common heart attack that must have caused him to reconsider his career. From his hospital bed, he’d called her office at the Washington, D.C., hospital where she worked and had offered her his position. It was an opportunity she couldn’t refuse, a chance to skip a few rungs to get higher on her career ladder. For that, she could face Texas again.

      She’d given her two-week notice, packed up her apartment’s meager contents in a do-it-yourself moving van and driven from the mushy snow on the gray Potomac River to the cool and dry hill country of brown Central Texas. Dr. Montgomery had welcomed her with a brief handshake, announced that he was leaving before the job gave him another heart attack and literally walked out the door.

      This morning. Monday. Her first day as the new chair of the Department of Research and Clinical Studies at West Central Texas Hospital had started with a bang.

      West Central. It was a fine hospital with a crazy name.

      Is it west or is it central? You’re either in the west or in the center; you can’t be both. Every time she saw the hospital’s name on a sign, she heard the lightly mocking question in her mind. The voice that posed the question was always the same: always masculine, always affectionate. Always her ex-fiancé’s.

      It had been a running joke between them, becoming so ingrained in her psyche that the thought played automatically, even six years after he’d left his medical training behind and moved to Boston. Six years after he’d traded in his white coat and stethoscope for an MBA from the prestigious Harvard University. Six years after he’d left her, his supposedly beloved fiancée, behind. Alone.

      Still, she could hear his laughter: Is it west or is it central?

      She pushed open the double doors with more force than necessary. The nurses stared, perhaps surprised at the amount of force coming from someone as petite as she was. Her Italian-American grandfather had fallen in love with her Polynesian grandmother in the South Pacific during World War II. Lana could have inherited her very black hair from either grandparent, but her grandmother’s genes had given her hair its straightness and her eyes just a touch of an almond shape—and the petite height that came with both Polynesian traits.

      If I can be an Italian-Pacific-Asian-American, why can’t the hospital be West Central? Are you saying I’m an oxymoron?

      No, you’re a perfect combination. Hands down the sexiest, brainiest, beautiful-est—

      Beautiful-est?

      Beautiful-est, unique-est woman on earth, and I’m smart enough to make you mine.

      Braden had tapped the diamond she’d worn on her finger, the proof of his undying love.

      He’d given her the ring in the middle of their third year of medical school. On their way to the surgical suite where they’d been interning, he’d taken her by the hand and pulled her into the quiet, dim light of the hospital’s small chapel, gotten down on bended knee and popped the question. She’d floated through their shift that day—her ring tucked into her bra so it wouldn’t poke through her latex gloves—feeling happy even when her arms had ached from holding retractors for hours while a thoracic surgeon repaired someone else’s damaged heart.

      For the next year, just a glance at the ring had made her feel good, even when she was on the eighteenth hour of her day, walking down these same corridors to yet another patient.

      With an impatient smack of her file against her thigh, Lana stopped her memories. She’d known coming back here would trigger them, not that they’d ever completely stopped. But she’d long ago acknowledged that the past was the past, and it shouldn’t prevent her from taking advantage of this new position. The desire to avoid memories of her former fiancé wouldn’t prevent her from grabbing the best opportunity she—or anyone in her field—could hope for. It was a great step toward her future, as the single but successful Dr. Lana Donnoli, a woman on the cutting edge of research, bringing new cures and new hope to patients across the country.

      There was nothing wrong with being single. There was nothing wrong with being successful.

      Wasn’t that what you told Braden when you broke your engagement, that you understood his dedication to his career?

      She was using this corridor only as a shortcut to the conference room, not to circumvent the hospital chapel.

      The conference room was dead ahead. Money for the hospital—for her hospital—was at stake, but she knew very little about this research project. If the study was failing to show results, it could be canceled. They’d lose over a million in funding. That much, she’d been able to learn in the hour since her administrative assistant had told her this meeting was on her morning’s schedule.

      She was going to have to think fast to keep up with the representative from Plaine Labs International who’d come to hear the status of the study being conducted at West Central.

      Is it west or is it central? You can’t be both.

      She wouldn’t have time for memories.

      Thank God.

      Chapter Two

      Braden tapped his fingers impatiently on the conference room’s table while a senior resident fumbled with the projector for her laptop. She’d told him three times that Dr. Montgomery, Braden’s former faculty adviser, had asked her to present the study’s midpoint data.

      When the laptop’s screen was finally, successfully projected on the wall, Braden took advantage of that awkward moment before the young doctor clicked on the icon that would start the slide show. He’d become an expert at gathering all kinds of intelligence in those seconds. File names that looked personal

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