Doctor In The House
Doctor In The House
Marie Ferrarella
Ivan Munro wanted to be feared, not loved… But Bailey DelMonico, his new intern, is determined to prove she isn't afraid of him– and more. In her own way, Bailey is as brilliant as Ivan– and people like her. Having realized she wanted to be a surgeon after several failed life experiences, she deftly absorbs a barrage of criticism from Munro without ever losing faith in her dreams. Or her conviction to show Ivan that no life is set in stone…But the more Munro fights against his intern's charm, the more cracks appear in his abrasive facade. Bailey soon sees that contrary to hospital gossip, Ivan has anything but a scalpel for a heart. Ever the optimist and always persistent, can Bailey now show Ivan that it's never too late to change– or fall in love?
Doctor in the House
Marie Ferrarella
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Dr. David Neubert,
who is everything a doctor should be.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 1
Dr. Ivan Munro liked saving lives, liked making a difference in those lives. It was people he didn’t care for.
People with their endless complaining. People with endless details about their humdrum lives that he had absolutely no interest in. If he possessed so much as a thimbleful of mild curiosity regarding his patients, he would have gone into a medical discipline that required contact with those patients on a fairly regular basis.
But such contact would have necessitated feigning interest on his part and he had never been one to lie or even seen the need to lie. Ever. For any reason whatsoever. The truth, any truth, was what it was and needed to be faced. No sugarcoating, no beating around the proverbial bush. Just shooting straight from the hip.
He’d chosen neurosurgery as much as it had chosen him and he’d selected it for three reasons. The first was to heal, to pit himself against the power that delivered such a low blow to the individual on his operating table. The second was that it was the only way he could possibly make it up to Scott, even though Scott was no longer around to see the results.
The last reason was distance. Neurosurgery afforded him distance. Once he tackled a condition, he could distance himself from the recovering patient and thus move on, leaving the chore of hand-holding to the patient’s friends, relatives and/or referring physician, all people who were far better suited to the tedious chore than he. They were the ones who either wanted or felt compelled to establish and maintain a rapport with the patient.
He’d been told, more than once, that he had the bedside manner of an anaconda. He took it as a compliment. Ivan could not, would not, allow emotions to get in the way of his making a judgment call.
Unfortunately, emotions or some sort of cursory display of them, was what most patients thought they both needed and were entitled to. His chief of staff, Harold Bennett, a man he grudgingly admired and respected, told him that was the way patients knew that they were in capable hands. They measured capability by the physician’s capacity to act as if he or she cared.
Ivan cared, all right, cared that he successfully eliminated the tumor, or reconnected the nerve endings, cared that he did no harm and only accomplished what he’d set out to accomplish: to make the patient better than he or she had been when they’d first laid down on his operating table.
But as for verbally talking the patient through the steps of the surgery before it transpired to set to rest any fears that patient might have, well, that just was not why he got up each morning to come to Blair Memorial Hospital.
Being “patient with patients” wasn’t something he was any good at and he saw no reason to pretend that he was. He wasn’t in medicine to forge friendships, only to save lives.
“They call you Ivan the Terrible, you know,” Harold told him over the lunch he’d insisted that his chief neurosurgeon share with him in his office.
There was an ulterior motive for the invitation. It was that most painful time of year again. January. Time for the annual review where budgets were wrestled with and unpleasant decisions had to be made. It was a time to lightly sprinkle praise and to make a sincere call for improvement. This meant even from a man who clearly did have the ability to walk on water, but did not, to any and all who took note, possess so much as a single drop of humility.
“I know,” Ivan replied, his attention appearing to focus on his sandwich. “It’s my name. Good sandwich,” he commented in the next breath, infusing as much interest and feeling in the last sentence as he had in the first two he’d uttered.
After almost a dozen years, Harold was skilled at tiptoeing into conversations with his chief neurosurgeon. “Funny, I don’t remember seeing ‘the Terrible’ on your application form.”
“I didn’t want to brag,” Ivan replied in the semi-raspy voice that was his trademark. As far as anyone knew, it had been awarded him courtesy of a near-crushed larynx he’s sustained from an incident in his late teens. An incident that he never talked about. Rumor had it he’d offended someone and they’d tried to hang him. The rumor tickled Ivan and he never bothered correcting it.
Harold tried again. “Ivan, I know that you’re good at your job—”
Dark eyebrows rose on a relatively unlined forty-six-year-old forehead as Ivan looked up at the man across the desk. He stopped eating.
“‘Good’ is a very mediocre word, reserved for things like pudding or foodstuffs chosen for breakfast and touted in mindless television commercials. It also can be used to praise a child for mastering accomplishments society requires, like potty training. ‘Good boy, good job,’” Ivan added for emphasis and as examples. “It also blandly shows up in greetings. ‘Good morning. Good afternoon.’ Or in partings. Such as good night or goodbye. Equally as bland and in no way descriptive of what I do when someone comes to your illustrious hospital holding a severed hand and expecting to be reunited with it so that it’s of some use to them.”
The chief of staff closed his eyes for a moment, searching for strength. He and Ivan had known one another for twelve years now. He had been the one to hire him and he was as close to a friend as he imagined Ivan Munro had. But there were times when the man’s personality was a little hard to take. Specifically the hours between dawn and midnight.
To get to his point, Harold acquiesced. “All right, you’re magnificent at your job—”
“Better,” Ivan allowed charitably, nodding his head and once again focusing on his pastrami on rye.
It was getting late. He had a meeting scheduled at one, Harold thought. At this rate, he was never going to get to his point. “Look, I didn’t call you here to praise you—”
There was a hint of a smile as Ivan looked at him. “Good—see how I worked in your word?—because you’re doing not that excellent a job of it.”
Abandoning finesse, Harold blurted, “Ivan, you need to learn humility.”
Ivan cocked his head, as if he were deliberating over the request. He obviously found it wanting. “Why, Harold? Will it make me a better neurosurgeon?”
Harold blew out a breath. “It’ll make you easier to get along with.”
Ivan laughed shortly. He paused to take a sip of the iced coffee—he required and consumed all forms of caffeine whenever possible—before commenting on what he felt was the absurdity of the last statement.
“I’m not here to get along with people, I’m here to put together people’s pieces, remember? You want someone easy to get along with, hire some clown in big, floppy shoes and a red rubber nose. I don’t do floppy shoes or red rubber noses, Harold.”
Harold looked at him over the half glasses that were perched on the tip of his nose. He wasn’t about to be dissuaded or diverted from the path he was determined to take. “We have classes now.”
Wide, rangy shoulders that could have belonged to a one-time football guard rose and fell carelessly at Harold’s words. “You’ve always had classes, Harold. This is a teaching hospital.” Holding his sandwich with both hands now, the pastrami overflowing at the nether end, he fixed Harold with a penetrating look. “The question is, do you have hot mustard?”
Harold sighed. Reaching for a packet of the requested condiment that was on his side of the tray, he pushed it across the desk toward his irritating neurosurgeon. “Classes that teach interns bedside manner,” he doggedly continued.
To his surprise, Ivan nodded his approval. “Excellent.”
Harold squelched the urge to pinch himself. His association with Ivan had taught him never to jump to an obvious conclusion even if it was shimmying before him. “You mean that?”
“Of course,” Ivan attested with feeling. “The more of those little buggers who come out knowing how to coo and make it ‘all better’ for Sally or Bobby or whoever, the less likely we’ll be having this annoying conversation again.”
Harold sighed. “How is it your parents never drowned you?”
“I was too fast for them,” Ivan deadpanned, then nodded toward the chief of staff’s plate. “You going to eat that pickle?”
“Why?” Harold asked. “You’re not sour enough?”
“Touché.” Not standing on ceremony and aware that the older man didn’t really care for pickles, Ivan commandeered it and dropped it on his own paper plate. A tiny yellow-green pool of pickle juice formed. Ivan played along with the chief’s quip. “Let’s just say I don’t need any input in that category.”
“No, by God, you don’t.” It was more of a lament than an evaluation. “All right, I can’t force you to take that class.”
“Glad you see that.”
Harold wasn’t finished. “But I can assign you a resident.”
Ivan’s expression was deceptively bland, but his eyes locked on the other man. “Not if you know what’s ‘good’ for you—see, there’s that word again—or for the resident.”
And then Harold said the unthinkable to him as he shook his head. “This is not negotiable, Ivan. You refuse and you’re gone.”
CHAPTER 2
Silence hung in the book-lined office, mingling with the smell of pastrami and the faint odor of lemon-scented furniture polish. Outside, the sky was appropriately gray, nursing a Southern California January that had been fraught with rain for most of the month. The fluorescent lighting seemed somber and dim.
“You’re not serious,” Ivan finally said.
Harold was relieved. He’d half expected Ivan to continue his silence—by leaving the room. Dialogue gave him hope. “Very.”
Ivan frowned. “I don’t respond well to threats, Harold.”
“This isn’t a threat, Ivan, it’s reality.” It wearied him to have to go over this, but the alternative—to lose Munro—was unthinkable. “As you probably already know, the board is not exactly crazy about you. You’ve alienated over half of them.”
Ivan pretended to look both aghast and saddened. “And here I was, getting ready to ask them to go to the prom with me.” He shook his head. “You just never know, do you?”
Like a full-on game of doubles played across an extra-wide tennis court, meetings with Ivan always exhausted him. Didn’t the man understand that he was on his side? That he was one of the very few who actually were? “Ivan, this isn’t a joke.”
“Isn’t it?” Ivan scowled at the very thought of having to nurture a fledgling surgeon. “How am I supposed to do my work with some wet-behind-the-ears lower life-form following my every move, sucking up to me and trying to absorb everything like a nondiscriminate sponge?”
Maybe the man wasn’t aware of the way he sounded. Maybe he should have brought in a video camera so that he could play this all back for Munro and let the neurosurgeon witness firsthand just how abrasive he came across. “Now that’s what I’m talking about. You’ve got to change your attitude.”
Unblinking, cold brown eyes fixed on him. Ivan’s face remained expressionless as he asked, “Why?”
The answer, Harold thought, was very simple. He smoothed out the edges of his bow tie with his thumb and index finger. A sign to those who knew him that he was nervous. “Because people hate working with you.”
Ivan shrugged again. “Easy enough solution. Get new people.”
The man just didn’t get it, did he? For the sake of a tenuous friendship and because Munro was the best neurosurgeon he had ever known in his thirty-year career, Harold persisted. “Ivan, if you don’t change, you can’t operate.”
Something resembling a smirk crossed Ivan’s lips. But when he spoke, he was deadly serious. No quips, no sarcasm. “I don’t operate with my attitude. I operate with my skill. Everything else is secondary and unimportant.”
Some people preferred to be nonconfrontational. Sadly for him, Harold thought, the chief neurosurgeon of Blair Memorial did not number among them. Arguing appeared to be something Ivan both enjoyed and keenly relished, sharpening his wit as if it were a sword in need of constant honing. So rather than continue on a field of battle where he was hopelessly out-matched, Harold moved aside what was left of his ham-and-Swiss sandwich and pushed forward a dark blue eight-by-eleven folder.
Ivan perused the cover with a smattering of interest, but made no effort to open the folder. “If that contains a bribe, Harold, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. I only take bribes on Fridays. Today is Monday.” With a nod of his head, he indicated the calendar on the chief’s desk. “Try me again at the end of the week.”
Harold pressed his thin lips together. He could almost hear his wife’s voice in his head. Rachel had been after him for years to retire. If he’d listened five years ago, his hair might still be black instead of completely gray. Ivan, he noted, still didn’t have so much as a single gray hair.
“I’m perfectly aware what day it is, Ivan,” he replied tersely. “And no, it’s not a bribe in the folder. It’s your career.”
Ivan glanced down at it, then back at the chief. “The folder should be bigger, then.”
“Open it,” Harold instructed.
To his surprise, Ivan smiled. Patiently. As if he were humoring someone not entirely in possession of his faculties. A few more sessions like this, Harold thought, and Munro might be right.
“Is it me,” Ivan asked, “or are you getting testier in your old age?”
“Oh, it’s definitely you,” Harold told him with feeling, his meaning clear. “All you. Now open the damn folder, Ivan.”
“Well, since you asked so nicely.” Ivan set aside the last of his sandwich and carefully wiped his fingers on the stiff napkins that had been provided along with lunch. Crumpling the napkin, he tossed it on the tray and then opened the folder.
Inside was an application for residency at Blair Memorial. The obligatory two-by-two photograph was glued in the space provided in the application’s upper left-hand corner. Ivan glanced at the photograph, ignored the application and allowed the cover to fall back into place.
Raising his chin, he looked the chief of staff in the eyes. “Turn her down.”
About to take a drink of his bottled water, Harold nearly choked. He stared at Munro in openmouthed disbelief. “Excuse me?”
“Turn her down,” Ivan repeated, enunciating every word as if the man had suddenly been struck deaf and born slow.
It took Harold less than a heartbeat to find his voice. “On what basis?”
“She’s too pretty,” Ivan told him matter-of-factly. He turned his attention back to the last of his sandwich and his iced coffee.
“What?” The single word fairly vibrated with incredulity.
“Pretty,” Ivan repeated. “Attractive, comely. I believe the term ‘handsome woman’ would have been applied to her a century ago.” His eyes narrowed as he looked across the desk at the chief. “That might be more your style, anyway.”
He had to know Ivan’s reasoning here. “And since when do looks even remotely figure into the selection process?”
“A woman who looks like that—” Ivan pushed the closed folder even farther away from him “—is not going to keep her mind on her work. She’ll be too busy flirting with all the eligible doctors and would-be doctors.” He rolled his shoulders, mimicking the exaggerated movements of a femme fatale. “And they’ll all be buzzing around her like so many bees who’ve lost their way to the hive.” Wrists pointed down, he wiggled his fingers in the air to illustrate. “Want my advice.” It really wasn’t a question, merely a declaration. “Nip this in the bud before it even starts. Tell her ‘thank you but no thank you.’ Better yet—” his eyes glinted as a thought came to him “—refer her to Sloan Memorial,” he said, referring to another teaching hospital in the area. “Let them deal with her and the chaos that she’ll leave in her wake.”
Harold had leaned back in his chair, waiting the neurosurgeon out. When the silence finally came, he seized it. “Are you through?”
Ivan looked down at the paper that had held his sandwich. A dollop of the spicy mustard was all that bore witness to the pastrami extravaganza that had been his lunch. He smiled as he crumpled the paper and placed it and the paper plate onto the tray. “I guess I am.” He pushed back his chair, ready to leave.
“I didn’t mean lunch,” Harold informed him. “I meant with your tirade.”
The choice of words amused Ivan. There were obviously holes in Harold’s education. “That wasn’t a tirade, Harold. When I have a tirade, there’s much rising of hair at the back of the neck. Usually involving the necks of the people I’m tirading against. Believe me, you’ll know when I deliver a tirade.”
“I’m not considering hiring her at Blair Memorial,” Harold said evenly.
“That’s good to know.” Ivan began to rise to his feet. “Now, I’m afraid that I have to—”
His next words had Ivan sitting down again. “I’ve already hired her.”
The surprise on Ivan’s face melted away a moment after it appeared. He shook his head sadly. “Big mistake.”
Harold wasn’t through. “She is your surgical resident.”
“Bigger mistake,” Ivan declared. When Harold made no attempt to rescind his words, Ivan grew serious. And annoyed. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said?”
“I’ve listened,” Harold informed him succinctly. “And like you’ve done so many times before, I’ve chosen to ignore what I’ve heard.” He leaned forward, trying to appeal to Ivan’s charitable nature—if such a thing existed. “There’s no leeway here, Ivan. She has an excellent grade point average—”
Biting back a choice expletive, Ivan waved a hand in disgust at the words. “Oh well, an excellent grade point average, that’ll save lives.”
“And she comes highly recommended.”
“By who?” he demanded, getting to his feet again. He shoved his hands deep into his lab coat as he began to pace the length of the overcrowded office. A stack of folders piled up in one corner toppled, sliding down like gleeful children on a sled sampled the first snows of winter in the mountains. “Some online dating service?”
“By professors at John Hopkins University,” Harold countered, turning in his chair to watch Ivan stride around the room on legs that had always struck him as being too long. “Professors for whom I have the utmost respect. She’s impressed every one of them.”
Ivan’s expression was nothing short of sour. He snorted as if he’d expected nothing less. “I won’t ask how.”
“Don’t be insulting, Ivan.”
“Insulting?” Ivan echoed. “You call this insulting? I haven’t even begun to be insulting.”
One of the reasons Harold Bennett had risen to his present position of chief of staff of one of the best hospitals in the Southwest was that he kept both his head and his temper during times of crisis. To see him angry was as rare as viewing the tail end of Halley’s comet. It was visible, but not very often.
But at the moment his expression was serious, closely bordering on angry. “If you do anything to make her leave, anything that will make her time here at Blair anything but informative and well-spent, I promise you, Ivan, there will be consequences. Consequences that you won’t like.”
Ivan looked at him, utterly unaffected by the prediction. “In other words, there’ll be no change from now.”
CHAPTER 3
“Do your worst, Harold.” Ivan drew himself up to his full six-three height, which was quite a bit taller than his chief of staff. His imposing personality made him seem even taller. “I can’t be expected to do my job while babysitting your latest project. And why is she your latest project?” he asked suddenly, skillfully turning the tables as he mounted his offensive. The best defense was a strong offense did not just apply to football, but to life, as well. Ivan continued to fire questions at him, just quickly enough so that Harold couldn’t answer. “Did you lose a bet? Is she your goddaughter? Or perhaps Rachel’s grandniece?”
Harold pursed his lips. When it came to Ivan, he hated admitting anything. The neurosurgeon always managed to turn the information into a rapier that he skillfully wielded.
“Not that it has any bearing on this,” the chief of staff began grudgingly.
Ivan’s well-shaped eyebrows rose as if to coax the rest from him. “Yes?”
Harold knew that somehow, some way, Ivan would discover this on his own. It blunted the edge if he admitted it first. “I know the young woman’s uncle.”
Crossing his arms before his chest, Ivan leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb. “Aha.”
“No ‘aha,’” Harold replied tersely. “That just happens to be an extraneous fact, one I know you with your unrelenting capacity to dig and burrow would unearth on your own in short order. I just want you to know that it doesn’t mean anything.” He saw the smirk on Ivan’s lips and felt compelled to defend his decision further. “I want only the best people working here at Blair.” He did his best to sound formidable and knew in his heart he fell short of the mark. “Which is why I’ve gone to bat for you so many times. If I hadn’t, you and I both know that your head would have been on a pike somewhere near the entrance of the hospital years ago.”
“Very medieval imagery, Harold. I had no idea you had it in you,” Ivan congratulated him, then paused at the threshold, the integrity that was his foundation keeping him from his exit. “So, in other words, I owe you.”
Harold snorted. “In any words you owe me.”
Ivan blew out a breath, a condemned man resigning himself to his firing squad. “And there’s no other way to repay the debt? Shine your shoes, take you to Disneyland? Wear a hair shirt for a week?”
Harold smiled, anticipating a truce. “The hair shirt has possibilities, but we can explore that at another time. I told the board that you were taking an active part in training our residents—”
Ivan allowed himself a smug moment. “In other words, you, Dr. Harold Bennett, chief of staff, our standard bearer of the truth, lied.”
Harold’s faded gray eyebrows drew together in one tufted, ragged line. “I don’t lie, Ivan. And in order for you to remain in the board’s good graces, you are going to have to at least appear to be involved with the residents.”
A fate, Ivan thought, only slightly less worse than death. Or maybe it was a tie. “Couldn’t I just drink hemlock?”
Harold spread his hands out. They were wide hands, capable hands, but not the hands of a skilled surgeon. He’d always envied Ivan that. But then, he was not at the top of people’s hate list, either. People liked him. In the long run, that balanced things out.
“Fresh out, Ivan. Now—” sitting up, he straightened the files on his desk and moved the tray aside “—you have the rest of the day to bemoan your fate. Report to my office tomorrow morning at eight.”
The dour look on Ivan’s face, the one that sent residents and attendings scrambling for high ground, returned. “I always thought I’d be shot at sunrise, not eight.”
Harold laughed. “Don’t put ideas in my head, Ivan. Tomorrow, eight.”
“Eight.” Ivan sighed mightily and then nodded, his slightly unruly mop of deep chestnut hair underscoring the motion almost independently. “Well, not that this hasn’t been fun, but I have a surgery to scrub in for.” He paused one last time to level a steely gaze at Harold. It was obvious that his seas were choppy. “If Mr. Dombrowski never dances again, it’s on your head.”
It was hard to tell whether or not Ivan meant it. The man did not possess what passed for a typical sense of humor. Maybe it was time to start thinking about retiring, Harold thought as the door to his office closed, with Ivan on the other side.
To reassure himself that he had done the right thing, Harold pulled over the dark blue folder and reviewed the pages in it again. He looked down at the picture in the file. The young blonde was smiling.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the image. “But he really is as good as he thinks he is. And you’ll learn a great deal. Once you get over hating me.”
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Ivan briefly entertained the thought of picking up the phone and calling in sick. The idea died. Not out of some misplaced nobility on his part, nor did he revisit his resistance and find it suddenly appalling. What he found appalling was the idea of a resident living in his shadow and calling it hers. He didn’t call in to postpone the inevitable because he didn’t know how. Didn’t know who to call because in the twelve years he’d been with Blair Memorial, he had never done it.
Sick or well, he had always shown up at the hospital. Even on the worst of days, he mustered on. Day in, day out. Ivan took no note of the months or even the seasons. Had Blair’s chief administrative assistant, a young woman aptly named Debi by her intuitive parents and afflicted with a case of terminal perkiness, not felt compelled to decorate the hospital halls, he wouldn’t have known what month it was. The woman felt some sort of obligation to celebrate every holiday known to God, man and the eternally vigilant greeting card people.
If the woman had left well enough alone, he wouldn’t have even known when holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas came around. Except for his older brother John, who he hadn’t heard from in years, he had no family. No one to drag him off for the purpose of spending the holidays with them. Because of that, each day seemed identical to the one that had come before. Some days necessitated short-sleeved shirts, others generated a need for sweaters, but by and large, the days Ivan experienced were all the same except for the weather.
Ivan switched on the TV just before he prepared to leave the apartment he’d been living in for the last twelve years. Living in Southern California, he was accustomed to periodically hearing the dire predictions of “the big one” coming, the earthquake of the magnitude that would destroy life and civilization as they all knew it.
He should only be so lucky today, he mused.
Buttoning his shirt and tucking it into his slacks, Ivan paused to listen as a very blond woman with flawless skin, what looked to be surgically enhanced lips and hypnotically blue eyes, summarized the day’s current local news.
Same old, same old, he thought.
“C’mon,” he murmured under his breath, talking to her as if she could hear. “If the big one’s coming, now would be a good day for it to get here.”
But the woman seemed entirely oblivious to the idea of earthquakes or any disturbances that might be called upon to rescue him. Contrarily, she appeared quite content to pour her heart into a story about how the department stores were bearing up to the after-Christmas slump in sales.
Ivan gave it a few minutes, waited to hear something promising, then shook his head as the story dragged on forever.
If more people were like him, he thought, the department stores would find themselves in a permanent slump. As a rule, shopping had never tempted him. He bought only what he needed and he needed very little. A few serviceable shirts and slacks with an equal number of socks and underwear to go with them were practically all he ever required.
His one weakness, his only hobby, was Philharmonic concerts. He attended them religiously, going all over the western map, arranging his schedule and people’s operations, whenever possible, around concert dates. Music was the very core of his existence, the only time he ever felt mellow, although he would have opted to be burned at the stake rather than admit that to a living soul.
He preferred to be viewed as a godless, soulless, unrelenting holy terror who inspired admiration, respect and fear in his fellow surgeons, not necessarily in that order. As for the hospital’s fresh crop of residents, in Ivan’s view, they hardly existed, ranking only slightly higher than the rodents that could be found on the food chain.
And, though the thought really bothered him, he was going to have to put up with one for the sake of continuing to do that which gave his life purpose and meaning.
Grunting, he switched off the television set and then tossed aside the remote. It bounced off his sofa, falling on the floor beneath the glass-topped coffee table. He left it there.
“No earthquakes,” he muttered, disgruntled. That meant that he was going to have to find a way to get this resident to request a transfer. And quickly.
He smiled as he left the house. No problem. By the time he was finished with this resident, she would think pairing up with Satan was an improvement.
CHAPTER 4
She sternly told herself that she wasn’t going to be nervous.
In all honesty, she hadn’t thought she would be because ordinarily, she wasn’t. Life, which had tossed its curveballs and its change-ups at her when she least expected them, had trained her to be prepared for anything. An ordinary case of first-day nerves did not figure into it.
Having gone through all that she had in her thirty-four years, Bailey DelMonico liked to think of herself as fearless.
For the most part, especially in the eyes of her family, she was.
And she should be now, she told herself. With a stifled sigh, she discarded the plaid garment she’d just tried on and returned to her first choice, a subdued pencil skirt. Black to match the chief of neurosurgery’s heart. Or so she’d been led to believe. Her two housemates, Jennifer and Adam, first-year residents at Blair Memorial, same as her, had sworn to it more than once.
Could be all talk, she reasoned, zipping up the skirt. Besides, no matter what this neurosurgeon’s reputation was—justified or not—she was fairly certain that he wouldn’t consume her for breakfast.
Bailey smiled to herself. She had already faced someone like that. Several “someones” like that, actually, if she were keeping count. Reformed cannibals. Those were part of the “perks” of having missionary parents who were famous for being the first to tread where angels feared to go.
Those angels, her father was fond of scoffing, were an overly cautious breed. And then he’d follow his comment up with his booming laugh. A laugh that somehow always made everything seem so much better. A laugh that was full of warmth and hope. And love.
Bailey pulled her honey-blond hair back and stuck in a few strategic pins to hold it up. It made her look older. Constantly mistaken for someone in her early twenties, she had a feeling she needed all the help she could get to be taken seriously.
God, but she wished she could hear her father’s laugh now. But she had left all that behind her. Her parents, their mission and her other life.
Her second other life, as well, she thought cryptically. Technically, she was about to embark on her third life. The first had involved being the daughter of two prominent, dedicated missionaries. She’d been halfway toward fulfilling her parents’ fondest dream and becoming a missionary herself before she realized that was not what she wanted. Her “second life” began when she’d decided, after a visit back to the States to check out colleges, to rebel against “all that goodness” that surrounded her. In her third year at Stanford, during spring break, she ran off and got married to the son of a professor. At the time, she’d thought that was what she wanted.
And it was. For about two months.
Slowly, she discovered, much to her surprise, that “all that goodness” she was fleeing was actually packaged inside of her. Not in such a way that she felt compelled, as her parents, Grace and Miles, were to spread the word of God and medicines in the darkest parts of the world. Her take on “goodness” was to help the sick and make them well. She wanted to become a doctor, a surgeon. The best surgeon she could be.
That was where she and her husband, Jeff, differed. She wanted to be a surgeon, he wanted her to be his wife and nothing else. He’d laughed and told her that taking care of him and his needs would always be more than a full-time job for her.
It took very little for her to realize that he was serious, that “carefree” was perilously close to “irresponsible” and that “dropdead gorgeous” only went so far in the scheme of things and was a very poor trade-off for respect. There was nothing about Jeff she could respect and he in turn seemed to have none for no one, least of all her.
What she’d foolishly believed was the greatest love of all time was merely a case of intense infatuation. She was more in love with the idea of love than she was with Jeff. She just hadn’t been smart enough at the time to know the difference. Jeff had been a feast for the eyes, beautiful in every sense of the word, but only outwardly. Inwardly, he lacked even the simplest of attributes that went into comprising her parents and her older brother, Simon.
Accustomed to selfless people, selfishness, especially of the magnitude that Jeff eventually displayed, was something Bailey found she just couldn’t get used to or accept. So, eighteen months after she said “I do,” she said “I don’t” and the marriage she’d thought would last forever was terminated.
Her parents waited for her return with open arms. And for a while, it was all right. But from the very beginning, she was restless. Restless because she’d discovered that there was another road she wanted to follow. One she was certain she was capable of traveling to the very end. One she swore to herself she wasn’t choosing just on a whim. She was a different person than she’d been six years earlier.
In their work, her parents were predominantly concerned with healing the soul, but not exclusively. They also fed the belly and brought medicines to the body. It was that part that interested her, that captured her imagination and fed her passion.
She applied to twelve medical schools, was interviewed by nine and was eventually accepted by six. She chose Johns Hopkins and threw herself into her studies. Being away from home the first time around, the taste of freedom in abundance had made her almost giddy. But the second time she was away, it was with a clear purpose. Bailey settled down and settled in, focusing on her goals and the career that she wanted with all her heart.
She had something to prove to everyone, most importantly, to herself.
The course work was hard, she was harder, determined to make up for what she considered lost time. With single-minded purpose, even though she worked to put herself through school, Bailey managed to graduate in less time than the average medical student. She fed on her own energy and enthusiasm, sometimes going for thirty-six hours at a time. Her letters of recommendation were glowing and well deserved.
She came to believe there was nothing she couldn’t do.
“I have the strength of ten because my heart is pure,” she murmured to the image in the mirror as she inspected herself one last time, reciting something her father had once read to her. Right now, she’d settled for the strength of two and a half.
Her pulse was beating fast. She closed her eyes and told herself to calm down.
Breathe, Bailey, breathe. He’s just a man, like everyone else. He has to put his pants on one leg at a time, same as you.
God, but she wished they were here right now, just for a few minutes. Her father and her mother. Or Simon. Or her uncle and aunt with whom she’d lived as an undergraduate. Someone she could turn to for an encouraging word. She liked her housemates, but right now, they were just contributing to the problem, telling her every single frightening encounter anyone had ever had with the great and terrible Ivan Munro.
Bailey pressed her hand against her abdomen. There was one hell of a huge butterfly inside, insisting on spreading his wings and flapping so that she felt utterly nauseous.
She hadn’t felt this nervous since that time she’d looked into Jeff’s eyes and knew that he was going to make love to her. Knew and worried that he would be disappointed because she was a virgin. So she did what she always did when she felt the slightest bit uncertain. She forged straight ahead. That time, she’d pulled out all the stops and made love to Jeff first, completely overwhelming him. She’d been so eager, so gungho, he hadn’t even noticed the momentary resistance he encountered when he’d entered her. He’d been too busy just trying to keep up.
Jeff never even suspected that she hadn’t been acting on instincts but on something she had witnessed as a young girl. Unknown to her parents, she’d snuck out to watch an elaborate mating ritual between two young people in one of the tiny African countries whose names kept changing nearly as often as the seasons.
Emulating it, she’d knocked Jeff’s socks off and kept him enamored of her for months.
Before the bloom finally came off the rose and the sexiest guy on the planet became someone she found she really didn’t like. Definitely not someone she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. Not unless she was firmly committed to doing what the Catholics had once referred to as penance. Because being with Jeff had turned into penance.
She laughed softly to herself, shaking her head. One of the pins in her hair began to slip. Bailey shoved it back, tucking her hair back around the pin.
All that seemed like more than a lifetime ago. And very small potatoes now that she looked back at it. It was not nearly in the same league as what she’d accomplished in the last few years.
And definitely not in the same league as what she was about to undertake today. She squared her shoulders and turned away from the reflection. Today, she was about to face the biggest challenge she’d ever gone up against.
Surviving Ivan the Terrible.
CHAPTER 5
He didn’t look like an unholy terror.
Those had been Adam’s parting words to her, to take care because Ivan the Terrible lived up to his name and ate residents for breakfast. Adam had issued the warning a minute before she, Jennifer and he had gone their separate ways just inside the entrance of the hospital. Adam was heading for the pediatric ward while Jennifer’s residency was in cardiology.
Apparently, it didn’t matter that Adam and Jennifer were assigned to different disciplines that had, in essence, nothing to do with neurosurgery. All paths at the hospital seemed to cross Dr. Ivan Munro’s in some manner, shape or form. Everyone who worked at Blair Memorial knew about the man. His reputation preceded him, both as a surgeon and as a devourer of residents. Which was why, legend had it, he hadn’t been given any residents to mentor in the last few years.
But maybe that reputation was exaggerated, Bailey thought now as she turned in her chair to look toward the doorway.
The man didn’t seem scary at all.
As instructed, she had entered Dr. Bennett’s office at exactly eight o’clock sharp. She’d arrived nearly half an hour earlier and had spent the time circling the floor. Punctuality counted, but sometimes, she’d learned, showing up early acted against you if people weren’t prepared for you. So she had moved around on the first floor, never far from where she was ultimately supposed to be, all the while practicing every known remedy for stress she could think of. The last thing she wanted was to appear like some wild-eyed, overeager idiot who didn’t know her left hand from her right, much less a suture from a scalpel.
Trying not to look as if she were drawing in a sustaining lungful of air, Bailey took measure of the man who walked in, or rather, sauntered in as if he owned the office and the hospital that went with it.
Bailey desperately tried to be impartial. Nerves would bring cold hands, a dead giveaway. She didn’t want to seem too inferior on their first meeting.
Ivan the Terrible was tall, with an athletic build and wide shoulders. The cheekbones beneath what she estimated to be a day-old stubble were prominent. His hair was light brown and just this side of unruly. Munro’s hair looked as if he used his fingers for a comb and didn’t care who knew it.
The eyes were brown, almost black as they aimed at her. There was no other word for it. Aimed. As if he was debating whether or not to fire at point-blank range.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, a line from a grade-B movie, “Be afraid. Be very afraid,” whispered along the perimeter of her brain. Warning her. Almost against her will, it caused her to brace her shoulders. Bailey had to remind herself to breathe in and out like a normal person.
Dr. Bennett had tried his level best to put her at ease and had almost succeeded. But an air of tension had entered with Munro. She wondered if the chief of staff was bracing himself, as well, bracing for some kind of disaster or explosion. Forewarned by everyone she encountered, she still didn’t really know what to expect.
“Ah, here he is now,” Harold Bennett announced needlessly. The smile on his lips was slightly forced, the look in his gray, kindly eyes held a warning as he looked at his chief neurosurgeon. “We were just talking about you, Dr. Munro.”
“Can’t imagine why,” Ivan replied dryly.
Harold cleared his throat, as if that would cover the less than friendly tone of voice Ivan had just displayed. “Dr. Munro, this is the young woman I was telling you about yesterday.”
Now his eyes dissected her. Bailey felt as if she were undergoing a scalpel-less autopsy right then and there. “Ah yes, the Stanford Special.”
He made her sound like something that was listed at the top of a third-rate diner menu. There was enough contempt in his voice to offend an entire delegation from the UN.
Summoning the bravado that her parents always claimed had been infused in her since the moment she first drew breath, Bailey put out her hand. “Hello. I’m Dr. Bailey DelMonico.”
Ivan made no effort to take the hand offered to him. Instead, he slid his long, lanky form bonelessly into the chair beside her. He proceeded to move the chair ever so slightly so that there was even more space between them. Ivan faced the chief of staff, but the words he spoke were addressed to her.
“You’re a doctor, DelMonico, when I say you’re a doctor,” he informed her coldly, sparing her only one steely glance to punctuate the end of his statement.
“I have a certificate from Johns Hopkins University that says differently.” Her tone was nonconfrontational and matter-of-fact. She was determined not to let Ivan the Terrible see that her insides felt like jelly. And she was just as determined not to be crushed into the ground like an insignificant bug at their first meeting.
Ivan didn’t bother sparing her a second glance. “Shall I tell her where she can put that certificate, or do you want that pleasure?”
Harold stifled a sigh. He knew this was all for show, to frighten off the young woman. He couldn’t very well discipline his chief neurosurgeon in front of a new resident, but neither did he want her madly running for the hills.
So instead, he smiled warmly at Bailey and shook his head like a weary father settling yet another squabble between his children. “I’m afraid that Dr. Munro is a little unorthodox,” he told her, then tried to sound as positive as he could as he added, “But I promise you that you’ll learn a great deal from him.”
It wasn’t hard to see that the man’s eyes were requesting her understanding. She appreciated that. Bailey smiled as she nodded. “Probably a lot of words I never heard before,” she allowed.
She thought she saw amusement flit across Dr. Bennett’s face and it heartened her. She’d gained an ally.
“Now, until I say differently, Dr. Munro is going to take over your education. Dr. Munro—” he fixed Ivan with a steely gaze that had been known to send lesser doctors running for their antacids but, as always, seemed to have no effect on the chief neurosurgeon “—I want you to award her every consideration. From now on, Dr. DelMonico is to be your shadow, your sponge and your assistant.” He emphasized the last word as his eyes locked with Ivan’s. “Do I make myself clear?”
For his part, Ivan seemed completely unfazed. He merely nodded, his eyes and expression unreadable. “Perfectly.”
“And if there’s any problem,” Harold continued, looking from the young woman to his chief sore spot, “I want to be informed of it immediately.” The sentence was no sooner out of his mouth than he saw Ivan raising his hand. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to guess exactly what the man was going to say. “After you give this arrangement at least several weeks to begin to work itself out.” Harold pushed his chair back from his desk and rose, signaling that the meeting was at an end. “Now, if you have the time, Dr. Munro, I would appreciate it if you showed our newest resident around Blair Memorial.”
To his credit, the chief of staff didn’t even flinch when Ivan shot a dagger in his direction.
“It’ll have to be another time,” Ivan replied. “My schedule’s full today.”
“That’s fine,” Bailey cut in quickly, refusing to be the source of a clash of wills between the two men. “I’ve already familiarized myself with the hospital layout, Dr. Bennett.”
“Oh?”
“My two roommates are residents here. I had them take me around during their off hours.”
Ivan smirked. “Enterprising little thing, isn’t she?” The words were only marginally addressed to the chief of staff.
His hand was on the doorknob. Bailey sprang to her feet, her chair making a scraping noise as she moved it back, then quickly joined the neurosurgeon before he could leave the office.
For his part, Ivan waited for her, nodded at the chief of staff and looked for all the world as if he had every intention of going along with the assignment that had been given him.
Optimist though he was, Harold Bennett knew better than to believe his eyes. A leopard did not change its spots and Ivan the Terrible was not about to become Ivan the Good because it was asked of him.
But he had seen something in the young woman’s eyes, something that gave him hope that Ivan had met, if not his match, at least someone who was not about to topple over like a loosely packed sandcastle the moment the first disgruntled words erupted out of Ivan’s mouth.
Ivan held the door open for her, allowing the young woman to leave first. He was male enough to notice that she was even better looking than her tiny photograph indicated and arrogant enough to feel that it had no bearing on anything as far as he was concerned.
Closing the door behind him, Ivan leaned over and whispered into her ear, “Just so you know, I’m going to be your worst nightmare.”
She gave him only the merest of looks as she appeared to consider the statement. “Funny, you don’t look like a burning cross on the front lawn.” And then she glanced up overhead at the ceiling. “I guess it must be the lighting.”
CHAPTER 6
Any hope that the man might possess a sense of humor and strike a truce died quickly. Munro looked angrier than Zeus upon learning of a rebellion spearheaded by the lesser gods. “First thing you’re going to have to do is lose the attitude, DelMonico.”
His eyes seemed to shoot thunderbolts. She refused to look away, although it wasn’t easy meeting his stormy gaze.
“Are you?” she asked innocently.
Abruptly he began walking again. “My attitude is a fixture around here.” He slanted a glance at her as if she were an annoying fly that insisted on buzzing around his head. “A smart mouth is not going to get you anything at Blair except thrown out.”
Bailey bit back the desire to point out that having a “smart mouth” certainly hadn’t hurt him. One retort to show him that she wasn’t afraid of him was all she was allowed. Anything more would not only be overkill, it just might also kill her chance to work at Blair Memorial before she started. Or at least, work at Blair under Munro. And from what she’d heard, Ivan Munro was capable of performing miracles in the operating room. She wanted to witness those miracles firsthand, to learn from them and eventually to become just as good a neurosurgeon as Munro. Because if you couldn’t be the best, why bother?
So, even as hot words burned on her tongue, Bailey forced herself to stay sober and replied, “Yes, Doctor.”
He thought he heard something in her voice, something he took exception to. “And mocking me isn’t going to get you anywhere, either.”
Her head shot up, surprised. “I wasn’t mocking you, Dr. Munro, I was replying.”
He resumed walking, his legs stretching out before him as he snorted his contempt. “I am a student of body language, DelMonico. Yours is telling me to go to hell.”
“I don’t think so, Doctor,” she replied, her voice as innocent as she could manage it. “I don’t allow my body to use that kind of language.”
He snorted again. “Right, no doubt that’s the missionary in you coming out.” The look he slanted her this time was positively wicked. “Ever hear the joke about the anthropologist who lost his way and the missionary’s daughter?”
A little less than a foot shorter than the chief neurosurgeon, Bailey found herself fairly trotting to keep up now. She hadn’t a clue where he was going and she was not about to be left behind. She’d told Dr. Bennett the truth, she had taken a tour of the hospital, but she hadn’t exactly committed the entire layout to memory. Yet.
“The anthropologist and the missionary’s daughter?” she repeated. “A thousand times, Doctor.”
About to turn a corner, Ivan halted. He debated whether she was just about the best stone-faced liar he’d ever encountered or if his new albatross had actually heard the obscure joke he was referring to. In any event, the joke was only intended as a test to see how easily the woman blushed and, more importantly, how quickly he could take her down.
This, he decided, was going to be more of a challenge than he’d first imagined. For all he knew, it might even turn out to be a bit on the entertaining side.
“Then I won’t bore you with it,” he finally replied.
Her eyes met his. She made sure to keep her relief under wraps as she said, “Thank you, Dr. Munro.”
For the first time since he’d been told about the ordeal he was expected to endure, Ivan allowed himself just the slightest hint of a smile. The corners of his mouth moved in a vague upward pattern before returning to their customary downward arc.
“I do believe you mean that, DelMonico.” He glanced at his watch and lengthened his considerable stride. “I’m due in surgery in a few minutes,” he informed her, although part of him bristled at making any sort of an excuse to this resident.
But if he meant his words to be taken as any sort of a dismissal, he was sorely disappointed. Rather than dropping behind and allowing him to continue on alone, she all but ran to keep up pace with him.
He frowned at her. “We don’t allow skipping in the halls, DelMonico.”
“I’m not skipping, Doctor,” she informed him, hurrying. “I’m running.”
Given that she was a lot shorter and in high heels, the woman kept up remarkably well. It occurred to him that she wasn’t wearing traditional scrubs. Was that for his benefit? Did she think she could “get to him” by looking soft, supple and feminine?
He almost laughed out loud at the notion.
But instead he informed her, “We don’t allow that, either.”
She had always been extremely physical. Life as a missionary’s daughter did not allow for hours spent on a sofa, in front of a computer or a television set. She’d learned to amuse herself the way children had before electronic devices had taken over the task. If need be, she could run like a gazelle fleeing a hungry predator. “Then you’re going to have to slow down, sir.”
She didn’t even sound winded, he noticed. “And why is that?”
“Because I can’t keep up using your pace.”
Rather than shorten his stride, he increased it. “That, DelMonico, is a given.”
Bailey took in a deep breath. Gritting her teeth, she lengthened her stride as far as she could and quickened her pace to make up for the difference. They turned heads as they snaked their way through the halls.
She was right behind him when they reached the entrance to Operation Room One.
Only then did Ivan stop. He felt a little winded himself. He needed to make time for morning jogs again, he thought. Somehow that had managed to slip by the wayside. These days, he lived and breathed his work and little else. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to a concert.
His eyes washed over her. Bailey did her best not to shiver. “Stubborn, aren’t you?”
Bailey smiled at him in response. “My father said it’s one of my best attributes.”
“Fathers lie,” he said flatly.
He wanted to get under her skin, to get her angry, so she struggled to remain clam. “If I may ask, what kind of operation is it?”
He gave her a look that easily would have left others quaking in their shoes. It annoyed him that he had no effect on her. “A complicated one.”
“Good,” she replied without missing a beat. “May I scrub in? I can—” She was about to tell him that she had her scrubs in her locker and could change into them faster than she could explain it, but she never got the chance.
She could see him shutting down right in front of her eyes. “You can scrub all you want, DelMonico,” he said, putting his hand on the swinging door, “but you’re not getting into my operating room.”
She covered his hand with her own. The action stopped him in his tracks. Ivan eyed her over his shoulder.
“What are you afraid of, Dr. Munro?”
She had done what few people ever did. She’d caught him by surprise. “I beg your pardon?”
His voice was cold, brittle. Bailey felt like someone who had just walked out onto the plank and now tottered on the edge of the wood. But if she backed off, Munro would have nothing but contempt for her. More contempt for her, she amended.
“What are you afraid of?” she repeated. “That you might be wrong?”
His eyes narrowed into slits. “I’m never wrong.”
Okay, maybe she should have been more specific. “About me, Dr. Munro. Wrong about me. You think I can’t cut it.”
“I know you can’t cut it,” he informed her mildly. “I’m not letting you cut anything.”
She lifted her chin pugnaciously. “What are you going to tell Dr. Bennett?”
Rangy shoulders rose and fell. “That I tried but it didn’t work out.”
She pushed back his lab coat from the hand she was covering and looked at his wrist. “After only ten minutes?”
He inclined his head. “We both lasted longer than I estimated.”
She drew herself up to her full five-foot-five height. “I’m not going anywhere, Dr. Munro.”
He nodded, as if she’d finally caught on. “My words exactly.”
Too late, Bailey realized her error. “Away,” she corrected. “I’m not going away.” As she spoke, her voice increased in strength and depth, even as she struggled to keep it low. She didn’t want to be accused of screaming or creating a scene. “I’ve come a long way to be standing right here in this hallway, arguing with you, and if you think that your reputation as the devil incarnate is going to scare me off, it won’t. I’ve seen the devil, Dr. Munro, and it’s not you.”
He stood there for a long moment, then drew his hand from beneath hers. Turning away from her, he pushed open the door to the operating room and walked through.
“Scrub in.”
CHAPTER 7
Ivan was vaguely aware of the indistinct squeal behind him and then the sound of eager footsteps growing fainter.
He assumed it was the little-resident-that-could’s way of showing her enthusiasm as well as her joy before she ran off to change into her scrubs and prepare for the operating room. Crossing the perimeter of the operating room, as much to show his presence as to get to the area where the sinks were, Ivan carefully took in every square inch.
Casting an aura of disquiet as he went.
As it should be. Complacent people were lax. Lax led to mistakes.
He wondered if he’d just made a mistake, being too soft. Telling DelMonico to scrub in.
It wasn’t as if he would allow her to touch one of the instruments. His only intention was to let her just breathe the same air as his surgical staff. He and only he would tackle Mark Spader’s brain tumor.
Brain tumor.
Alone by the sinks, Ivan took in a long breath and then released it. Like a magnet set on a table with metal fillings, the surgery before him drew away all thoughts of the resident and how he hated being harnessed with petty responsibilities that took away from the focus of his purpose here at Blair.
To mend as many patients as he could. To try, in some small, futile measure, to make it up to Scott for what he’d done. As if that were possible.
A dry, humorless laugh echoed within the small area as he shed his lab coat. He was already dressed in his surgical livery. Prepared, always prepared.
Except for that one night.
Against his will, thoughts came back to him. Scott Kiplinger was the reason he was here. Scott was the reason for everything, most of all why he had become a neurosurgeon. Because if there had been a neurosurgeon on duty that night, if one had been called to the ER in time instead of hours later, Scott might still be among the living. Walking, talking and being the best friend he’d ever had.
The best friend he’d killed as surely as if he had aimed that gun and pulled the trigger himself.
But he hadn’t physically pulled the trigger. Scott’s despair had pulled it that awful, beautiful afternoon in the meadow. That fateful afternoon when he had finally persuaded Scott to leave the confines of his house, where all the curtains were always drawn, shutting out life. Shutting in the darkness.
Scott had lived that way, never leaving his house, for almost two years. Ever since the accident.
The accident, Ivan thought darkly, remembering every vivid detail, that had been all his fault. If he hadn’t been speeding, if he hadn’t taken that curve so fast, if there hadn’t been ice on the ground, if Scott hadn’t been in the car.
If, if, if, IF.
Ivan sighed, scrubbing his damp hand over his face. Wiping it dry as he uttered a curse through clenched teeth, he then washed his hands a second time.
If.
Battling with the word didn’t change anything. Didn’t make him stay home instead of going out for a ride. Didn’t make him sober instead of buzzed on three beers.
Neither did it change how very naive he’d been, thinking he’d scored a coup, getting Scott to leave his house. At the outset, it had seemed like the perfect plan, driving Scott to the meadow where he had loved to hike and run. Scott, the all-around athlete, getting in touch with his past. It had seemed so right at the time.
He’d thought, believed, that the sight of something familiar, something once so beloved, would finally, magically, bring Scott around. Would suddenly rally him to grasp on to the fragments of life that he still had and make him want to build on them.
Make him want to be among the living again instead of among the wheelchair-bound wounded.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, Ivan upbraided himself for the thousandth time.
He’d had no idea that the pouch Scott had brought with him, the one attached to his wheelchair arm, didn’t contain the water bottle he’d said it did but the weapon he’d used to finally terminate all his pain.
Ivan closed his eyes as the hot water dissolved the heavy film of soap from his hands.
He could see it all so clearly. His sitting on the grass, to the left of Scott’s wheelchair, foolishly talking about what strides physical therapy had taken in the last couple of years and how he would do anything, anything, to help Scott start living again. He’d talked about Scott’s mother, about how he had to get on with his life, if only for her.
It was a topic he’d all but worn a hole in, but this time, this time, because Scott didn’t argue with him, he had thought he was getting through to Scott. This time, he’d been hopeful that he could begin making amends.
And then all hope vanished forever.
Because while he went on talking, making plans, gluing together a future, Scott had quietly taken the gun out of the pouch, placed it to his temple and ended the discussion.
Permanently.
The sound of the gun being discharged was deafening. The horror of having his best friend’s blood rain down on him never left him.
The feeling of hopeless futility imprinted its indelible mark on him that afternoon and changed him. The young, wild, carefree youth he’d been died along with Scott that day. The numbed man who eventually rose out of those ashes dedicated himself exclusively to becoming a neurosurgeon. It was the only thing that made sense to him. Becoming a neurosurgeon so that Scott’s death wasn’t entirely meaningless, that he hadn’t died without changing anything.
And now, twenty-five years later, all that mattered was the same thing that mattered twenty-five years ago: saving lives. Reconstructing broken shells so that they could continue in Scott’s name, even though none of them were ever aware of it.
Because no one else knew about Scott, except for Scott’s mother. Telling her about Scott’s suicide had been the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. Standing in the same room with the woman’s overwhelming grief had been worse than hell.
“It’s your fault, you know,” she’d shouted at him, her eyes redrimmed. “You’re the reason he’s dead. He should have never hung around with you.”
He’d tried to apologize, but Scott’s mother had just started screaming. Screaming like a woman whose heart had been ripped out of her breast. There wasn’t anything he could say.
He shut down that day, purging every drop of emotion from himself. Barring its return as he focused on what he needed to do. What he swore at Scott’s grave site to do.
But every successful operation he performed didn’t bring a feeling of triumph that lived beyond one moment. Most of all, none of the successes tendered, in some small form, a feeling of absolution.
It truly was as if everything had shut down inside of him the day Scott died. Because Scott had been his only friend in a world that, for him, had been largely dysfunctional due to abusive, self-destructive parents, and when Scott had given in to despair and killed himself, the light simply went out of everything, leaving him standing in perpetual darkness.
A darkness he had, since that day, resisted leaving, despite the efforts of various people who came and went in his life.
He made no attachments to anyone. Instead, he coexisted, which was far easier. To become involved, even in the slightest way, was risking far too much and the only risks Ivan was willing to take, the only ones he actually ever took, were in the operating room. There he performed daring surgeries that other neurosurgeons would never even contemplate.
He did them because neurosurgery was the terrain that the gods traversed whenever they took their constitutionals. And it was the terrain that he, Ivan, habitually crossed with long, confident steps. And no one ever knew about the insecurity that still resided inside.
Finished, his clean hands raised in the air, ready to have gloves drawn over them, Ivan pushed the swinging door that separated him from the operating room with his shoulder. The little-resident-that-could was already there, Ivan noted. He recognized her eager eyes above the blue surgical mask she, like the others in the chilled room, had donned.
Maybe she could keep up, after all. And then again, maybe she couldn’t. Either way, that wasn’t any of his concern. There was only one thing he cared about and it was lying, prepped and draped, on his operating table.
“All right, people,” Ivan announced to the staff that closed in around him. “Time to make a miracle.”
CHAPTER 8
“Oh my God, that was incredible,” Bailey cried.
It was difficult to keep from shouting out the words as she walked from the operating room to the back area where the sinks were. Trying to steady her racing pulse, she took in a deep, measured breath. It didn’t help. Everything inside her had kicked into high gear. It was the closest to high she had ever felt.
Bailey looked at the man she had been assigned to with genuine awe. “You were incredible.”
Ivan spared her a glance that could only be described as “disinterested.” The other members of the staff walked by, oblivious to the scene, trying to put distance between themselves and Ivan the Terrible.
“Yes, I know.”
The sound of his voice, utterly devoid of any sort of emotion, penetrated the wild rush she was experiencing. Bailey could only stare at the neurosurgeon incredulously. He’d performed nothing short of a miracle. “How can you be so calm?”
One shoulder moved in a vague shrug. “Low blood sugar.”
“I’m serious.” She tugged her mask down lower until she could undo the ties at the back of her neck. “Don’t you feel a rush, a surge?” She searched his face for a hint of what she was describing. “Isn’t your heart just pounding?”
The disinterested glance only deepened. Flattery, even sincere flattery, which he presumed this was, was neither accepted nor rejected. It was allowed to float free through time and space, like an untethered balloon until it faded away. “I performed surgery, DelMonico. I didn’t make love to the man.”
The words threw her completely off. Bailey looked at the man whose fingers had performed nothing short of magic in the room behind her. Mild surprise gave way to amusement. “I didn’t know you made love.”
He threw his gloves away and removed the bland surgical cap he’d worn during the six-hour operation. Other surgeons, once they had endured and surmounted all the various trials and obstacles to get there, selected a cap in colors that had some sort of significance to them. Ivan’s was the same color as it had always been. Blue. He didn’t believe in donning peacock finery. He believed in surgery.
One tug separated the mask’s ties at the back of his neck and he threw the mask into a bin. “There are many things about me, DelMonico, that you don’t know.”
Interest sparked in those deep blue eyes of hers. “I’m willing to listen.”
“I’m not willing to talk.” He figured that was enough of a put-down. Instead, her mouth curved even more. Ivan flashed one of his more deflating looks. “Careful, DelMonico, or someone’s going to have to tie a rope around your ankle to keep you earth-bound. Why are you so exhilarated, anyway?” he asked, unable to understand her reaction. “You were just on the sidelines.”
Sidelines or not, she was right there, where everything was happening. “But I got to see—” she cried, then abruptly switched sentences, so pumped she was unable to finish one thought before leaping to another. “You had half his skull off—His brain was exposed!”
“They call it ‘brain surgery’ for a reason, DelMonico.” He shook his head, as if not knowing what to make of her, sincerely doubting that she was for real. “Maybe you should review your notes from Neurosurgery 101.”
It was her turn to shake her head, but unlike him, her smile was wide. “You’re not going to do it.”
Despite the fact that he wanted to change out of his scrubs, he paused a moment to ask, “Do what?”
“You’re not going to deflate me.” She was far too excited about what she had witnessed, far too enthused about the work that lay ahead of her, to become just like him. She’d never believed in aiming low.
Ivan clucked his tongue. “Pity. There goes my fun for the afternoon.”
Turning away from her, Ivan was surprised when he felt her hand on his forearm. He glanced over his shoulder and waited for an explanation for the detainment.
Self-consciously, she dropped her hand to her side. “How long?” she asked.
His patience was pretty well stretched to the limit with her. “How long what?”
She pressed her lips together. “How long before I can do something like that?” She nodded her head back toward the O.R.
“Oh, I don’t know.” He paused, pretending to think. And then his expression was dismissive as he raised his eyes to hers. “If you study very hard—maybe a century or two. Maybe longer.”
A slam like that might have sent her reeling—or spoiling for a fight. But she was beginning to read between the lines and get a handle on him. The insults were a smokescreen. No one was that nasty for no reason. “You don’t want me to like you, do you?”
His eyes narrowed, telling her how insignificant she was in the scheme of his life. “I really don’t care how you feel about anything, DelMonico.”
He believed that, she thought. But she didn’t. She’d been taught never to focus on the bad, only the good. And if an animal swiped at you, it was only because he was wounded. The challenge here was to discover what Ivan the Terrible’s wound was.
She folded her arms before her. “Well, you won’t get me to dislike you.”
Ordinarily, he would have turned and walked away without bothering to reply. But for once, curiosity got the better of him. “Not that, again, I care in the slightest, but why is that, DelMonico?”
The answer was simple. Because she wanted to be the best and in order to do that, she had to learn from the best. She had to learn from him. Everything was always better when conducted in an air of congeniality rather than hospitality.
“Because you did exactly what you said back there,” she told him. “You performed a miracle. That tumor looked like it was a miniaturized octopus with its tiny tentacles woven all in and out of gray matter, and yet you got it all.”
He’d leaned against the wall to listen to her and straightened now. “Very poetic, DelMonico. Maybe you should think about becoming a poet instead of wasting your time here.”
She wasn’t going to let him bait her. She felt too good, too psyched, to let him burst her balloons and make her plummet. “I’m not wasting my time.”
He leveled a penetrating gaze at her. “You’re sure of that?”
There wasn’t even a half second of hesitation on her part. “Yes.”
“Ballsy,” Ivan pronounced, more to himself than to her. “Maybe it won’t take you a century or two. DelMonico. Maybe it’ll just take three-quarters of one.”
She had just been given a decent compliment, Ivan the Terrible style. She viewed it as one giant step in the right direction. “I’m going to knock that figure down to something manageable,” she promised.
Ivan snorted. “You think that, DelMonico. You go right ahead and think that.”
The tone he used clearly declared that while she might want to delude herself, he knew the truth and the truth, the way he saw it, said that she would never be capable of performing the kinds of surgeries he tackled on a regular basis. He just didn’t see it being in her, no matter what she thought.
“I will,” Bailey called after him as he began to walk away. “Because I have a good teacher.” She raised her voice when he made no attempt to turn around and added, “You.”
“Ha!” was Ivan’s only response. He kept on walking until he disappeared through the opposite set of swinging doors.
Bailey turned on her heel, quickly heading around to the other side, to the locker room where her things were stored. For all the contact she’d had with the patient, she could have almost remained in the clothes she’d worn originally. The clothes she’d secretly hoped put her in a better light as far as first impressions went. She realized that she could have just as well worn a paper sack for all the difference it made to Munro, but it had been worth a try.
She grinned to herself. She’d seen her first brain surgery today. Despite the fact that Munro had relegated her to a far corner of the operating room, she had been able to witness the infinite skill with which he wielded the robotic instruments used to excise the tumor that had all but paralyzed the thirty-two-year-old patient.
She didn’t care how much the neurosurgeon ranted and raved, how much he tried to get her to throw her hands up and scream “uncle” just before she quit. There was no way she was about to do that.
“Get used to it, Ivan Munro,” she murmured under her breath as she walked into the locker room. “I’m going to stick to you like glue until I know everything that you do.”
The second she entered the lockers she began shedding surgical livery. By the time she reached the locker that had been assigned her, she was in her underwear, ready to grab her street clothes and put them on.
The trouble with that was, someone, obviously thinking they were performing a good deed, had shut her locker door and flipped the combination lock. A lock to which she didn’t know the combination.
“Damn,” she muttered when the lock resisted opening.
“Problem?”
The question came from the other side of the lockers.
CHAPTER 9
Bailey’s first inclination was to grab her discarded scrubs and cover herself up as much as possible.
The only thing wrong with that plan was that she’d tossed the scrubs into the dirty laundry receptacle and it was now approximately ten feet away from her. She sensed that a mad dash to retrieve the discarded clothing would undoubtedly amuse the chief neurosurgeon who seemed to have materialized out of thin air. She was willing to bet double her staggering medical school loan that if she did that, Munro would make some sort of humiliating, condescending comment about her pubescent reaction.
So instead of making a laughable attempt to somehow cover up the lacey pink bra and panties, and the skin that was above, between and below, Bailey raised her chin and turned around. She looked the neurosurgeon straight in the eye as if she were dressed from head to foot in a suit of impenetrable medieval armor. Only for a moment did she have the impression that he wasn’t looking at her as if she were wearing impenetrable medieval armor. But at least he wasn’t leering.
“Actually, yes,” she replied as coolly as possible under the circumstances. “There is a problem. Someone seems to have snapped my lock shut.”
She couldn’t read his expression, but in her heart she just knew he was laughing at her. “That’s why they make locks. To lock.” And then he allowed a sigh to escape, as if this was all incredibly boring to him. “Use the combination.”
“If I knew the combination, Doctor, that would be an excellent suggestion.”
This time she saw his eyes slowly pass over her body. He seemed neither impressed nor disappointed. There appeared to be no reaction at all. She couldn’t help wondering if he had spent too much time viewing people only as patients. At another time, she might have begun to speculate about his personal life, but right now, only hers, and how she was going to live this down, concerned her.
Goose bumps formed along her arms and legs in response to the lowered temperature. “Do you have any other suggestions?” she asked, her mouth growing annoyingly dry.
“Yes.” He said the single word so slowly, it seemed to drip out of his mouth.
A beat passed. Nothing followed.
“Well?” she pressed, doing her best not to sound frantic. What if someone came in and saw her like this? Then what?
“Sorry.” Ivan shook his head. “Nothing I can readily repeat out loud without offending the sisterhood.”
Then he was reacting to her near nude state. She didn’t know whether to be flattered for having gotten to the almighty Ivan or offended. Added to that, she hadn’t a clue what he was referring to.
“The what?”
“Sisterhood,” he repeated, then waved his hand as if to move the word aside. “Or whatever organization you and other females belong to that goes around bringing the male of the species up on inflated charges of harassment.”
Frustrated, Bailey turned her back on him and gave the lock another tug, a harder one this time. It had the same results as the first one did. Nothing. The lock hung there, mocking her. Just like Munro.
“Really should have committed the combination to memory,” he told her. He leaned forward just a touch, but not enough to actually come close to her. “Gnawing on it won’t help, either.”
She turned around, her anger eradicating her embarrassment. “Thank you.”
He nodded, as if the exchange was of an ordinary nature. “I assume you don’t intend to spend the rest of your days at Blair Memorial like that.” For emphasis, Ivan’s eyes slid down and then up along her torso.
She struggled hard not to shiver, even if she told herself his gaze was clinical. “No, I don’t.”
Raising her chin again, Bailey strode past him back to the laundry receptacle to retrieve the shirt and pants. She couldn’t just continue standing here, talking to him while wearing only the amount of material used to produce a minor bikini.
About to take out the two items, the sound of Munro’s voice stopped her.
“I wouldn’t recommend that.” She didn’t turn around, but she did stop and wait for him to continue. “Germs, you know. Those scrubs were in the O.R.”
He had a point, but so did she and as far as she was concerned hers trumped his. “Well, I don’t really have a choice now, do I?”
In response, she heard him laugh. Tired of being his source of amusement, the high she’d sustained watching him operate completely dissipated, Bailey swung around to face him. Superior or not, she was ready to give him a piece of her mind, the consequences be damned. Someone needed to take this man down a peg and it might as well be her last act at Blair.
But whatever words she attempted to hunt up died in her throat as she saw what the neurosurgeon held in his hands. Neatly folded scrubs, both top and bottoms. “You could put these on.” He raised one eyebrow quizzically. “Size small, right?”
“Right,” she murmured, surprised. The scrubs had not been there before. And the ones she’d obtained earlier for herself had come from the supply area. “Where did you get those?”
“Magic,” he informed her dryly. And then he nodded toward the closet behind him. “Scrubs for visiting surgeons are kept in there.”
Something else she hadn’t known. The list of things she needed to familiarize herself with was growing astronomically. And then she replayed his words in her head. “I’m not visiting.”
“Yes,” Ivan acknowledged with more than a tinge of sorrow, “I know.” He looked down at the scrubs. “If you don’t want these—” He raised the uniform blues up over his head and completely out of her reach.
“No!” she cried. Not knowing what the man was capable of, she made a lunge for the scrubs to retrieve them. Her body brushed up against his as she reached up as far as she could.
She felt the same way she had in physics class when she’d accidentally touched a live wire. Electrical current zapped through her body.
If her momentary panic amused him, he didn’t show it. Neither did he seem affected by the fleeting contact of her barely covered anatomy against his.
Instead, Ivan lowered his arm and very soberly presented the fresh scrubs to her. She snatched them up as if she didn’t trust him to surrender the clothes to her.
“I’m making afternoon rounds in five minutes,” he informed her as he turned on his heel. With that, he walked out of the locker room.
Bailey all but hopped into the blue scrubs while making her way to the door, grateful to finally put something on her body. Punching her arms through the sleeves, she caught up to him on the other side of the door.
“What about my locker?” she asked. She still had a problem.
His tone was completely disinterested. “What about it?”
She was beginning to understand why some residents used his picture as a dartboard. “I still need to open it.”
Passing the nurses’ station, he picked up a file without breaking stride. “Not now you don’t.”
“No,” she agreed. Bailey glanced down and saw that one of her laces was untied. She knew better than to stop to tie it. That was going to have to wait for a lull, too. “But later—”
“Is later,” he told her with finality, and it was obvious that as far as he was concerned, “later” had no place in the present. “It’ll take care of itself.”
Not without help, Bailey thought. She made a mental note to find either a janitor or a pair of bull cutters, preferably the former wielding the latter. She didn’t care about going home dressed in scrubs, even though it was chilly outside, but her locker, the locker she’d purposely left with an open combination lock hanging from it, also contained her purse, her keys and all of her identification. She couldn’t drive her car or get into her house without them.
She supposed, Bailey thought, shoving a loose pin back into her hair, she could hook up with either Adam or Jennifer and they could drive her home. But even if she did, that still didn’t solve the problem of getting her things out of the sealed locker.
“You’re panting, DelMonico,” Ivan observed, making a left at the end of the corridor.
No, she wasn’t, but she knew that arguing seemed pointless. “You’ve got on your seven league boots again, Doctor.”
His glance was just short of belittling as he slanted it in her direction. “I guess you’ll just have to get a pair, DelMonico.”
She nodded as if he’d just made a perfect plausible suggestion. She had a hunch he got a certain amount of pleasure rattling people and she refused to accommodate him. “Just tell me where to shop,” she replied without missing a beat.
Bailey thought she heard Munro mutter something under his breath but decided that she might be better off not knowing exactly what that was.
Christians, one. Lions, zero, she thought with a suppressed smile.
CHAPTER 10
“So, how is the great neurosurgeon doing?”
When the phone had rung a second ago, Bailey had debated between answering it and throwing it across the room. But because she was too exhausted to throw, she brought the receiver to her ear.
Hearing the voice made her miraculously sit up.
“Simon? Simon, is that you?” Even as she said his name, she brightened. Her older brother had always had that effect on her, bringing rays of hope into an otherwise gloomy atmosphere.
“None other. How’re you doing, kid?”
She could hear the smile in his voice. “Great now that I hear the sound of your voice.”
A tiny note of concern entered. “How were you before you heard the sound of my voice?” And then he became serious, ever the big brother. “They treating you all right?”
She didn’t want him worrying or thinking that she couldn’t take care of herself. She’d come a long way from that little girl who used to tag after him, shadowing his every move.
“By ‘they,’ do you mean the people at the hospital or my roommates?”
“Yes.”
Good old Simon, she thought, always touching as many bases as he can.
“My roommates are great. They’re both younger than I am, but I knew they would be.” She’d known going in that she would be the oldest resident there, but she couldn’t dwell on that. She was just grateful for the opportunity. “Part of me feels like I’m their den mother.”
“Can’t be that bad,” her brother scoffed. “You’re what—six, seven years older than they are? Maybe even less?”
“Something like that.”
“Honey, five, six, seven years, that’s nothing. You’re hardly in the den mother league. Or even the baby-sitter league,” he added.
She begged to differ. Bailey propped herself up on her elbows and moved back until she was resting against the pillows.
“You’re seven years older than I am and you always acted as if you were my second father. Still do, sometimes,” she added slyly.
“Rank has its privileges,” he told her, unfazed. “Really, Bay, are you okay? Do you need anything? Don’t be your proud, stubborn self. Tell me if you need something.”
“Batteries.”
“Batteries?” Simon repeated in disbelief. “Bailey, are you—”
She laughed, stopping him before he allowed his imagination to run away with him. “Batteries so I can keep going without crashing and embarrassing myself. I’m way beyond vitamins, coffee and energy drinks.”
“You don’t need batteries, Bay. What you need is sleep.”
If only. Bailey laughed softly to herself. “Tell that to the attendings. As for the chief neurosurgeon, the guy I’ve been assigned to, he doesn’t seem to sleep. Ever. He’s there when I arrive in the morning and he’s still there when I leave at night.”
“Maybe he does it with mirrors,” Simon quipped.
“Maybe,” she allowed. “They call him Ivan the Terrible.”
“That doesn’t sound warm and toasty. He giving you a hard time?”
She almost responded with, “Is the Pope Catholic?” but given Simon’s increased dedication to piety, she decided to skip the rhetorical comment. “Dr. Munro gives everyone a hard time. I think he might be lonely.”
“With a name like Ivan the Terrible, I don’t doubt it. Don’t try to mend his broken wing, Bay.” It was a reference to her always bringing home hurt animals when she was a little girl. “Just take care of yourself—and get that rest. You know what happens if you burn the candle at both ends—”
“—all you wind up with is a lump of wax in the middle,” Bailey said, echoing her brother as she repeated the line she had heard more times than she could count. “All right, enough about me, how about you?” They cared about each other, but it was unusual for Simon to call out of the blue like this. “What’s new in your life? How are you doing?”
“I’m doing okay.”
Bailey sat up. She knew her brother inside and out, knew all the nuances. There was something just a little bit guarded about his answer, about his voice. She thought she’d heard him hesitate before he gave her the innocuous reply.
“Okay, give. What’s up? Something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” he protested. “You couldn’t be more off.” And then Simon paused for a second, as if debating just how to frame what he was about to tell her. “I’m being ordained.”
“Ordained?” That had always been her parents’ dearest wish, to have their children follow in their footsteps. At least Simon hadn’t disappointed them, she thought. “Oh, Simon, that’s wonderful. Mom and Dad must be proud enough to burst.”
“Pretty much,” he agreed modestly. “But Mom calls it a mixed blessing.”
“What’s mixing it?”
He laughed softly. “Well, I’m going to need my own ‘flock’.”
“Which means you’ll have to go off on your own,” she concluded, understanding. “Poor Mom.”
“Thanks. I was wondering where I was going to get my daily dose of guilt.”
She knew he wasn’t upset. Simon had always taken things in stride, upbeat, but with no false illusions. Unlike her, he didn’t have an impetuous bone in his body. He thought everything through carefully before making a move. She used to call him “the turtle” when they were younger because his moves were so deliberate and slow.
“I just mean, first me, then you.” She made an assumption as to where her brother’s first ministry would be. “I suppose they could come back to live in the States.”
He laughed at the thought. They both knew how settled their parents were, how dedicated to the life they had undertaken.
“Too savage for them,” he quipped. They both laughed. “Listen, I’m going to have some time before I start and I thought I’d come out to see my favorite sister in the flesh.”
“As I recall, I am your only sister,” she reminded him.
“Good thing for you,” he teased, sounding like the Simon she knew again. “If there’d been competition, you might not have made the cut. I’m not sure about the timing yet. How does the end of April, beginning of May sound to you?”
“Like it’s much too far away,” she told him wistfully. Talking to Simon had stirred feelings of nostalgia within her exhaustion.
“Know what you mean, Bay. I miss you, too,” he told her with affection. “I’ll call you again when I have something more concrete to offer, like flight number and time. You take care of yourself, hear?”
She had no idea why she felt so teary-eyed suddenly. “I will.”
“And tell anyone who gives you a hard time to back off and leave you alone or they’ll have your big brother to reckon with.”
“Will do.” The line went dead after a quick, “Goodbye.”
Bailey found herself smiling down at the receiver in her hand. She could just hear Munro’s response to that one. He’d tell her exactly where she could put her protective big brother. But she did appreciate the thought.
Appreciated her brother calling her, as well, even though the sound of Simon’s voice had made her feel almost sad and definitely homesick. Sad even though she loved what she was doing, loved the prospect of getting up each morning, coming in and donning her hospital livery, even though she knew that she was going to be at odds with Munro the moment the man laid eyes on her.
She hadn’t felt this homesick since that first week when she’d left home to get her undergraduate degree. After the first week, the intoxicating wave of freedom had swept her away and she’d gotten immersed in college life.
Until then, except for a week here and there, she had never been away from her parents or away from the continent of Africa, not since she was ten and they had first undertaken the mission to which they were still so fiercely dedicated.
Maybe it was putting up with Munro that made her feel like a lone crusader, stranded in the middle of the forest. She’d been at Blair Memorial for almost three full months now, and he had yet to allow her so much as to hold a scalpel in her hand, other than lining it up on a surgical tray just before a procedure. Granted he allowed her in the operating room for almost every surgery he did, but to watch, nothing more. He just had her do a thousand and one errands. Busywork.
It was time for him to show her a little respect. She’d known that progress would be slow, but this was almost going backward.
Bailey bounced up, no longer tired. She knew what she was going to do, she thought. What she had to do. She was going to the hospital tomorrow morning and confront Munro. She would demand that he start teaching her something beyond how to dash to Radiology to fetch MRI films and rush them back to him. She hadn’t endured all those years of grueling study and endless bills to be an errand girl.
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Marie Ferrarella
Ivan Munro wanted to be feared, not loved… But Bailey DelMonico, his new intern, is determined to prove she isn't afraid of him– and more. In her own way, Bailey is as brilliant as Ivan– and people like her. Having realized she wanted to be a surgeon after several failed life experiences, she deftly absorbs a barrage of criticism from Munro without ever losing faith in her dreams. Or her conviction to show Ivan that no life is set in stone…But the more Munro fights against his intern's charm, the more cracks appear in his abrasive facade. Bailey soon sees that contrary to hospital gossip, Ivan has anything but a scalpel for a heart. Ever the optimist and always persistent, can Bailey now show Ivan that it's never too late to change– or fall in love?
Doctor in the House
Marie Ferrarella
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To Dr. David Neubert,
who is everything a doctor should be.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 1
Dr. Ivan Munro liked saving lives, liked making a difference in those lives. It was people he didn’t care for.
People with their endless complaining. People with endless details about their humdrum lives that he had absolutely no interest in. If he possessed so much as a thimbleful of mild curiosity regarding his patients, he would have gone into a medical discipline that required contact with those patients on a fairly regular basis.
But such contact would have necessitated feigning interest on his part and he had never been one to lie or even seen the need to lie. Ever. For any reason whatsoever. The truth, any truth, was what it was and needed to be faced. No sugarcoating, no beating around the proverbial bush. Just shooting straight from the hip.
He’d chosen neurosurgery as much as it had chosen him and he’d selected it for three reasons. The first was to heal, to pit himself against the power that delivered such a low blow to the individual on his operating table. The second was that it was the only way he could possibly make it up to Scott, even though Scott was no longer around to see the results.
The last reason was distance. Neurosurgery afforded him distance. Once he tackled a condition, he could distance himself from the recovering patient and thus move on, leaving the chore of hand-holding to the patient’s friends, relatives and/or referring physician, all people who were far better suited to the tedious chore than he. They were the ones who either wanted or felt compelled to establish and maintain a rapport with the patient.
He’d been told, more than once, that he had the bedside manner of an anaconda. He took it as a compliment. Ivan could not, would not, allow emotions to get in the way of his making a judgment call.
Unfortunately, emotions or some sort of cursory display of them, was what most patients thought they both needed and were entitled to. His chief of staff, Harold Bennett, a man he grudgingly admired and respected, told him that was the way patients knew that they were in capable hands. They measured capability by the physician’s capacity to act as if he or she cared.
Ivan cared, all right, cared that he successfully eliminated the tumor, or reconnected the nerve endings, cared that he did no harm and only accomplished what he’d set out to accomplish: to make the patient better than he or she had been when they’d first laid down on his operating table.
But as for verbally talking the patient through the steps of the surgery before it transpired to set to rest any fears that patient might have, well, that just was not why he got up each morning to come to Blair Memorial Hospital.
Being “patient with patients” wasn’t something he was any good at and he saw no reason to pretend that he was. He wasn’t in medicine to forge friendships, only to save lives.
“They call you Ivan the Terrible, you know,” Harold told him over the lunch he’d insisted that his chief neurosurgeon share with him in his office.
There was an ulterior motive for the invitation. It was that most painful time of year again. January. Time for the annual review where budgets were wrestled with and unpleasant decisions had to be made. It was a time to lightly sprinkle praise and to make a sincere call for improvement. This meant even from a man who clearly did have the ability to walk on water, but did not, to any and all who took note, possess so much as a single drop of humility.
“I know,” Ivan replied, his attention appearing to focus on his sandwich. “It’s my name. Good sandwich,” he commented in the next breath, infusing as much interest and feeling in the last sentence as he had in the first two he’d uttered.
After almost a dozen years, Harold was skilled at tiptoeing into conversations with his chief neurosurgeon. “Funny, I don’t remember seeing ‘the Terrible’ on your application form.”
“I didn’t want to brag,” Ivan replied in the semi-raspy voice that was his trademark. As far as anyone knew, it had been awarded him courtesy of a near-crushed larynx he’s sustained from an incident in his late teens. An incident that he never talked about. Rumor had it he’d offended someone and they’d tried to hang him. The rumor tickled Ivan and he never bothered correcting it.
Harold tried again. “Ivan, I know that you’re good at your job—”
Dark eyebrows rose on a relatively unlined forty-six-year-old forehead as Ivan looked up at the man across the desk. He stopped eating.
“‘Good’ is a very mediocre word, reserved for things like pudding or foodstuffs chosen for breakfast and touted in mindless television commercials. It also can be used to praise a child for mastering accomplishments society requires, like potty training. ‘Good boy, good job,’” Ivan added for emphasis and as examples. “It also blandly shows up in greetings. ‘Good morning. Good afternoon.’ Or in partings. Such as good night or goodbye. Equally as bland and in no way descriptive of what I do when someone comes to your illustrious hospital holding a severed hand and expecting to be reunited with it so that it’s of some use to them.”
The chief of staff closed his eyes for a moment, searching for strength. He and Ivan had known one another for twelve years now. He had been the one to hire him and he was as close to a friend as he imagined Ivan Munro had. But there were times when the man’s personality was a little hard to take. Specifically the hours between dawn and midnight.
To get to his point, Harold acquiesced. “All right, you’re magnificent at your job—”
“Better,” Ivan allowed charitably, nodding his head and once again focusing on his pastrami on rye.
It was getting late. He had a meeting scheduled at one, Harold thought. At this rate, he was never going to get to his point. “Look, I didn’t call you here to praise you—”
There was a hint of a smile as Ivan looked at him. “Good—see how I worked in your word?—because you’re doing not that excellent a job of it.”
Abandoning finesse, Harold blurted, “Ivan, you need to learn humility.”
Ivan cocked his head, as if he were deliberating over the request. He obviously found it wanting. “Why, Harold? Will it make me a better neurosurgeon?”
Harold blew out a breath. “It’ll make you easier to get along with.”
Ivan laughed shortly. He paused to take a sip of the iced coffee—he required and consumed all forms of caffeine whenever possible—before commenting on what he felt was the absurdity of the last statement.
“I’m not here to get along with people, I’m here to put together people’s pieces, remember? You want someone easy to get along with, hire some clown in big, floppy shoes and a red rubber nose. I don’t do floppy shoes or red rubber noses, Harold.”
Harold looked at him over the half glasses that were perched on the tip of his nose. He wasn’t about to be dissuaded or diverted from the path he was determined to take. “We have classes now.”
Wide, rangy shoulders that could have belonged to a one-time football guard rose and fell carelessly at Harold’s words. “You’ve always had classes, Harold. This is a teaching hospital.” Holding his sandwich with both hands now, the pastrami overflowing at the nether end, he fixed Harold with a penetrating look. “The question is, do you have hot mustard?”
Harold sighed. Reaching for a packet of the requested condiment that was on his side of the tray, he pushed it across the desk toward his irritating neurosurgeon. “Classes that teach interns bedside manner,” he doggedly continued.
To his surprise, Ivan nodded his approval. “Excellent.”
Harold squelched the urge to pinch himself. His association with Ivan had taught him never to jump to an obvious conclusion even if it was shimmying before him. “You mean that?”
“Of course,” Ivan attested with feeling. “The more of those little buggers who come out knowing how to coo and make it ‘all better’ for Sally or Bobby or whoever, the less likely we’ll be having this annoying conversation again.”
Harold sighed. “How is it your parents never drowned you?”
“I was too fast for them,” Ivan deadpanned, then nodded toward the chief of staff’s plate. “You going to eat that pickle?”
“Why?” Harold asked. “You’re not sour enough?”
“Touché.” Not standing on ceremony and aware that the older man didn’t really care for pickles, Ivan commandeered it and dropped it on his own paper plate. A tiny yellow-green pool of pickle juice formed. Ivan played along with the chief’s quip. “Let’s just say I don’t need any input in that category.”
“No, by God, you don’t.” It was more of a lament than an evaluation. “All right, I can’t force you to take that class.”
“Glad you see that.”
Harold wasn’t finished. “But I can assign you a resident.”
Ivan’s expression was deceptively bland, but his eyes locked on the other man. “Not if you know what’s ‘good’ for you—see, there’s that word again—or for the resident.”
And then Harold said the unthinkable to him as he shook his head. “This is not negotiable, Ivan. You refuse and you’re gone.”
CHAPTER 2
Silence hung in the book-lined office, mingling with the smell of pastrami and the faint odor of lemon-scented furniture polish. Outside, the sky was appropriately gray, nursing a Southern California January that had been fraught with rain for most of the month. The fluorescent lighting seemed somber and dim.
“You’re not serious,” Ivan finally said.
Harold was relieved. He’d half expected Ivan to continue his silence—by leaving the room. Dialogue gave him hope. “Very.”
Ivan frowned. “I don’t respond well to threats, Harold.”
“This isn’t a threat, Ivan, it’s reality.” It wearied him to have to go over this, but the alternative—to lose Munro—was unthinkable. “As you probably already know, the board is not exactly crazy about you. You’ve alienated over half of them.”
Ivan pretended to look both aghast and saddened. “And here I was, getting ready to ask them to go to the prom with me.” He shook his head. “You just never know, do you?”
Like a full-on game of doubles played across an extra-wide tennis court, meetings with Ivan always exhausted him. Didn’t the man understand that he was on his side? That he was one of the very few who actually were? “Ivan, this isn’t a joke.”
“Isn’t it?” Ivan scowled at the very thought of having to nurture a fledgling surgeon. “How am I supposed to do my work with some wet-behind-the-ears lower life-form following my every move, sucking up to me and trying to absorb everything like a nondiscriminate sponge?”
Maybe the man wasn’t aware of the way he sounded. Maybe he should have brought in a video camera so that he could play this all back for Munro and let the neurosurgeon witness firsthand just how abrasive he came across. “Now that’s what I’m talking about. You’ve got to change your attitude.”
Unblinking, cold brown eyes fixed on him. Ivan’s face remained expressionless as he asked, “Why?”
The answer, Harold thought, was very simple. He smoothed out the edges of his bow tie with his thumb and index finger. A sign to those who knew him that he was nervous. “Because people hate working with you.”
Ivan shrugged again. “Easy enough solution. Get new people.”
The man just didn’t get it, did he? For the sake of a tenuous friendship and because Munro was the best neurosurgeon he had ever known in his thirty-year career, Harold persisted. “Ivan, if you don’t change, you can’t operate.”
Something resembling a smirk crossed Ivan’s lips. But when he spoke, he was deadly serious. No quips, no sarcasm. “I don’t operate with my attitude. I operate with my skill. Everything else is secondary and unimportant.”
Some people preferred to be nonconfrontational. Sadly for him, Harold thought, the chief neurosurgeon of Blair Memorial did not number among them. Arguing appeared to be something Ivan both enjoyed and keenly relished, sharpening his wit as if it were a sword in need of constant honing. So rather than continue on a field of battle where he was hopelessly out-matched, Harold moved aside what was left of his ham-and-Swiss sandwich and pushed forward a dark blue eight-by-eleven folder.
Ivan perused the cover with a smattering of interest, but made no effort to open the folder. “If that contains a bribe, Harold, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. I only take bribes on Fridays. Today is Monday.” With a nod of his head, he indicated the calendar on the chief’s desk. “Try me again at the end of the week.”
Harold pressed his thin lips together. He could almost hear his wife’s voice in his head. Rachel had been after him for years to retire. If he’d listened five years ago, his hair might still be black instead of completely gray. Ivan, he noted, still didn’t have so much as a single gray hair.
“I’m perfectly aware what day it is, Ivan,” he replied tersely. “And no, it’s not a bribe in the folder. It’s your career.”
Ivan glanced down at it, then back at the chief. “The folder should be bigger, then.”
“Open it,” Harold instructed.
To his surprise, Ivan smiled. Patiently. As if he were humoring someone not entirely in possession of his faculties. A few more sessions like this, Harold thought, and Munro might be right.
“Is it me,” Ivan asked, “or are you getting testier in your old age?”
“Oh, it’s definitely you,” Harold told him with feeling, his meaning clear. “All you. Now open the damn folder, Ivan.”
“Well, since you asked so nicely.” Ivan set aside the last of his sandwich and carefully wiped his fingers on the stiff napkins that had been provided along with lunch. Crumpling the napkin, he tossed it on the tray and then opened the folder.
Inside was an application for residency at Blair Memorial. The obligatory two-by-two photograph was glued in the space provided in the application’s upper left-hand corner. Ivan glanced at the photograph, ignored the application and allowed the cover to fall back into place.
Raising his chin, he looked the chief of staff in the eyes. “Turn her down.”
About to take a drink of his bottled water, Harold nearly choked. He stared at Munro in openmouthed disbelief. “Excuse me?”
“Turn her down,” Ivan repeated, enunciating every word as if the man had suddenly been struck deaf and born slow.
It took Harold less than a heartbeat to find his voice. “On what basis?”
“She’s too pretty,” Ivan told him matter-of-factly. He turned his attention back to the last of his sandwich and his iced coffee.
“What?” The single word fairly vibrated with incredulity.
“Pretty,” Ivan repeated. “Attractive, comely. I believe the term ‘handsome woman’ would have been applied to her a century ago.” His eyes narrowed as he looked across the desk at the chief. “That might be more your style, anyway.”
He had to know Ivan’s reasoning here. “And since when do looks even remotely figure into the selection process?”
“A woman who looks like that—” Ivan pushed the closed folder even farther away from him “—is not going to keep her mind on her work. She’ll be too busy flirting with all the eligible doctors and would-be doctors.” He rolled his shoulders, mimicking the exaggerated movements of a femme fatale. “And they’ll all be buzzing around her like so many bees who’ve lost their way to the hive.” Wrists pointed down, he wiggled his fingers in the air to illustrate. “Want my advice.” It really wasn’t a question, merely a declaration. “Nip this in the bud before it even starts. Tell her ‘thank you but no thank you.’ Better yet—” his eyes glinted as a thought came to him “—refer her to Sloan Memorial,” he said, referring to another teaching hospital in the area. “Let them deal with her and the chaos that she’ll leave in her wake.”
Harold had leaned back in his chair, waiting the neurosurgeon out. When the silence finally came, he seized it. “Are you through?”
Ivan looked down at the paper that had held his sandwich. A dollop of the spicy mustard was all that bore witness to the pastrami extravaganza that had been his lunch. He smiled as he crumpled the paper and placed it and the paper plate onto the tray. “I guess I am.” He pushed back his chair, ready to leave.
“I didn’t mean lunch,” Harold informed him. “I meant with your tirade.”
The choice of words amused Ivan. There were obviously holes in Harold’s education. “That wasn’t a tirade, Harold. When I have a tirade, there’s much rising of hair at the back of the neck. Usually involving the necks of the people I’m tirading against. Believe me, you’ll know when I deliver a tirade.”
“I’m not considering hiring her at Blair Memorial,” Harold said evenly.
“That’s good to know.” Ivan began to rise to his feet. “Now, I’m afraid that I have to—”
His next words had Ivan sitting down again. “I’ve already hired her.”
The surprise on Ivan’s face melted away a moment after it appeared. He shook his head sadly. “Big mistake.”
Harold wasn’t through. “She is your surgical resident.”
“Bigger mistake,” Ivan declared. When Harold made no attempt to rescind his words, Ivan grew serious. And annoyed. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said?”
“I’ve listened,” Harold informed him succinctly. “And like you’ve done so many times before, I’ve chosen to ignore what I’ve heard.” He leaned forward, trying to appeal to Ivan’s charitable nature—if such a thing existed. “There’s no leeway here, Ivan. She has an excellent grade point average—”
Biting back a choice expletive, Ivan waved a hand in disgust at the words. “Oh well, an excellent grade point average, that’ll save lives.”
“And she comes highly recommended.”
“By who?” he demanded, getting to his feet again. He shoved his hands deep into his lab coat as he began to pace the length of the overcrowded office. A stack of folders piled up in one corner toppled, sliding down like gleeful children on a sled sampled the first snows of winter in the mountains. “Some online dating service?”
“By professors at John Hopkins University,” Harold countered, turning in his chair to watch Ivan stride around the room on legs that had always struck him as being too long. “Professors for whom I have the utmost respect. She’s impressed every one of them.”
Ivan’s expression was nothing short of sour. He snorted as if he’d expected nothing less. “I won’t ask how.”
“Don’t be insulting, Ivan.”
“Insulting?” Ivan echoed. “You call this insulting? I haven’t even begun to be insulting.”
One of the reasons Harold Bennett had risen to his present position of chief of staff of one of the best hospitals in the Southwest was that he kept both his head and his temper during times of crisis. To see him angry was as rare as viewing the tail end of Halley’s comet. It was visible, but not very often.
But at the moment his expression was serious, closely bordering on angry. “If you do anything to make her leave, anything that will make her time here at Blair anything but informative and well-spent, I promise you, Ivan, there will be consequences. Consequences that you won’t like.”
Ivan looked at him, utterly unaffected by the prediction. “In other words, there’ll be no change from now.”
CHAPTER 3
“Do your worst, Harold.” Ivan drew himself up to his full six-three height, which was quite a bit taller than his chief of staff. His imposing personality made him seem even taller. “I can’t be expected to do my job while babysitting your latest project. And why is she your latest project?” he asked suddenly, skillfully turning the tables as he mounted his offensive. The best defense was a strong offense did not just apply to football, but to life, as well. Ivan continued to fire questions at him, just quickly enough so that Harold couldn’t answer. “Did you lose a bet? Is she your goddaughter? Or perhaps Rachel’s grandniece?”
Harold pursed his lips. When it came to Ivan, he hated admitting anything. The neurosurgeon always managed to turn the information into a rapier that he skillfully wielded.
“Not that it has any bearing on this,” the chief of staff began grudgingly.
Ivan’s well-shaped eyebrows rose as if to coax the rest from him. “Yes?”
Harold knew that somehow, some way, Ivan would discover this on his own. It blunted the edge if he admitted it first. “I know the young woman’s uncle.”
Crossing his arms before his chest, Ivan leaned a shoulder against the doorjamb. “Aha.”
“No ‘aha,’” Harold replied tersely. “That just happens to be an extraneous fact, one I know you with your unrelenting capacity to dig and burrow would unearth on your own in short order. I just want you to know that it doesn’t mean anything.” He saw the smirk on Ivan’s lips and felt compelled to defend his decision further. “I want only the best people working here at Blair.” He did his best to sound formidable and knew in his heart he fell short of the mark. “Which is why I’ve gone to bat for you so many times. If I hadn’t, you and I both know that your head would have been on a pike somewhere near the entrance of the hospital years ago.”
“Very medieval imagery, Harold. I had no idea you had it in you,” Ivan congratulated him, then paused at the threshold, the integrity that was his foundation keeping him from his exit. “So, in other words, I owe you.”
Harold snorted. “In any words you owe me.”
Ivan blew out a breath, a condemned man resigning himself to his firing squad. “And there’s no other way to repay the debt? Shine your shoes, take you to Disneyland? Wear a hair shirt for a week?”
Harold smiled, anticipating a truce. “The hair shirt has possibilities, but we can explore that at another time. I told the board that you were taking an active part in training our residents—”
Ivan allowed himself a smug moment. “In other words, you, Dr. Harold Bennett, chief of staff, our standard bearer of the truth, lied.”
Harold’s faded gray eyebrows drew together in one tufted, ragged line. “I don’t lie, Ivan. And in order for you to remain in the board’s good graces, you are going to have to at least appear to be involved with the residents.”
A fate, Ivan thought, only slightly less worse than death. Or maybe it was a tie. “Couldn’t I just drink hemlock?”
Harold spread his hands out. They were wide hands, capable hands, but not the hands of a skilled surgeon. He’d always envied Ivan that. But then, he was not at the top of people’s hate list, either. People liked him. In the long run, that balanced things out.
“Fresh out, Ivan. Now—” sitting up, he straightened the files on his desk and moved the tray aside “—you have the rest of the day to bemoan your fate. Report to my office tomorrow morning at eight.”
The dour look on Ivan’s face, the one that sent residents and attendings scrambling for high ground, returned. “I always thought I’d be shot at sunrise, not eight.”
Harold laughed. “Don’t put ideas in my head, Ivan. Tomorrow, eight.”
“Eight.” Ivan sighed mightily and then nodded, his slightly unruly mop of deep chestnut hair underscoring the motion almost independently. “Well, not that this hasn’t been fun, but I have a surgery to scrub in for.” He paused one last time to level a steely gaze at Harold. It was obvious that his seas were choppy. “If Mr. Dombrowski never dances again, it’s on your head.”
It was hard to tell whether or not Ivan meant it. The man did not possess what passed for a typical sense of humor. Maybe it was time to start thinking about retiring, Harold thought as the door to his office closed, with Ivan on the other side.
To reassure himself that he had done the right thing, Harold pulled over the dark blue folder and reviewed the pages in it again. He looked down at the picture in the file. The young blonde was smiling.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the image. “But he really is as good as he thinks he is. And you’ll learn a great deal. Once you get over hating me.”
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Ivan briefly entertained the thought of picking up the phone and calling in sick. The idea died. Not out of some misplaced nobility on his part, nor did he revisit his resistance and find it suddenly appalling. What he found appalling was the idea of a resident living in his shadow and calling it hers. He didn’t call in to postpone the inevitable because he didn’t know how. Didn’t know who to call because in the twelve years he’d been with Blair Memorial, he had never done it.
Sick or well, he had always shown up at the hospital. Even on the worst of days, he mustered on. Day in, day out. Ivan took no note of the months or even the seasons. Had Blair’s chief administrative assistant, a young woman aptly named Debi by her intuitive parents and afflicted with a case of terminal perkiness, not felt compelled to decorate the hospital halls, he wouldn’t have known what month it was. The woman felt some sort of obligation to celebrate every holiday known to God, man and the eternally vigilant greeting card people.
If the woman had left well enough alone, he wouldn’t have even known when holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas came around. Except for his older brother John, who he hadn’t heard from in years, he had no family. No one to drag him off for the purpose of spending the holidays with them. Because of that, each day seemed identical to the one that had come before. Some days necessitated short-sleeved shirts, others generated a need for sweaters, but by and large, the days Ivan experienced were all the same except for the weather.
Ivan switched on the TV just before he prepared to leave the apartment he’d been living in for the last twelve years. Living in Southern California, he was accustomed to periodically hearing the dire predictions of “the big one” coming, the earthquake of the magnitude that would destroy life and civilization as they all knew it.
He should only be so lucky today, he mused.
Buttoning his shirt and tucking it into his slacks, Ivan paused to listen as a very blond woman with flawless skin, what looked to be surgically enhanced lips and hypnotically blue eyes, summarized the day’s current local news.
Same old, same old, he thought.
“C’mon,” he murmured under his breath, talking to her as if she could hear. “If the big one’s coming, now would be a good day for it to get here.”
But the woman seemed entirely oblivious to the idea of earthquakes or any disturbances that might be called upon to rescue him. Contrarily, she appeared quite content to pour her heart into a story about how the department stores were bearing up to the after-Christmas slump in sales.
Ivan gave it a few minutes, waited to hear something promising, then shook his head as the story dragged on forever.
If more people were like him, he thought, the department stores would find themselves in a permanent slump. As a rule, shopping had never tempted him. He bought only what he needed and he needed very little. A few serviceable shirts and slacks with an equal number of socks and underwear to go with them were practically all he ever required.
His one weakness, his only hobby, was Philharmonic concerts. He attended them religiously, going all over the western map, arranging his schedule and people’s operations, whenever possible, around concert dates. Music was the very core of his existence, the only time he ever felt mellow, although he would have opted to be burned at the stake rather than admit that to a living soul.
He preferred to be viewed as a godless, soulless, unrelenting holy terror who inspired admiration, respect and fear in his fellow surgeons, not necessarily in that order. As for the hospital’s fresh crop of residents, in Ivan’s view, they hardly existed, ranking only slightly higher than the rodents that could be found on the food chain.
And, though the thought really bothered him, he was going to have to put up with one for the sake of continuing to do that which gave his life purpose and meaning.
Grunting, he switched off the television set and then tossed aside the remote. It bounced off his sofa, falling on the floor beneath the glass-topped coffee table. He left it there.
“No earthquakes,” he muttered, disgruntled. That meant that he was going to have to find a way to get this resident to request a transfer. And quickly.
He smiled as he left the house. No problem. By the time he was finished with this resident, she would think pairing up with Satan was an improvement.
CHAPTER 4
She sternly told herself that she wasn’t going to be nervous.
In all honesty, she hadn’t thought she would be because ordinarily, she wasn’t. Life, which had tossed its curveballs and its change-ups at her when she least expected them, had trained her to be prepared for anything. An ordinary case of first-day nerves did not figure into it.
Having gone through all that she had in her thirty-four years, Bailey DelMonico liked to think of herself as fearless.
For the most part, especially in the eyes of her family, she was.
And she should be now, she told herself. With a stifled sigh, she discarded the plaid garment she’d just tried on and returned to her first choice, a subdued pencil skirt. Black to match the chief of neurosurgery’s heart. Or so she’d been led to believe. Her two housemates, Jennifer and Adam, first-year residents at Blair Memorial, same as her, had sworn to it more than once.
Could be all talk, she reasoned, zipping up the skirt. Besides, no matter what this neurosurgeon’s reputation was—justified or not—she was fairly certain that he wouldn’t consume her for breakfast.
Bailey smiled to herself. She had already faced someone like that. Several “someones” like that, actually, if she were keeping count. Reformed cannibals. Those were part of the “perks” of having missionary parents who were famous for being the first to tread where angels feared to go.
Those angels, her father was fond of scoffing, were an overly cautious breed. And then he’d follow his comment up with his booming laugh. A laugh that somehow always made everything seem so much better. A laugh that was full of warmth and hope. And love.
Bailey pulled her honey-blond hair back and stuck in a few strategic pins to hold it up. It made her look older. Constantly mistaken for someone in her early twenties, she had a feeling she needed all the help she could get to be taken seriously.
God, but she wished she could hear her father’s laugh now. But she had left all that behind her. Her parents, their mission and her other life.
Her second other life, as well, she thought cryptically. Technically, she was about to embark on her third life. The first had involved being the daughter of two prominent, dedicated missionaries. She’d been halfway toward fulfilling her parents’ fondest dream and becoming a missionary herself before she realized that was not what she wanted. Her “second life” began when she’d decided, after a visit back to the States to check out colleges, to rebel against “all that goodness” that surrounded her. In her third year at Stanford, during spring break, she ran off and got married to the son of a professor. At the time, she’d thought that was what she wanted.
And it was. For about two months.
Slowly, she discovered, much to her surprise, that “all that goodness” she was fleeing was actually packaged inside of her. Not in such a way that she felt compelled, as her parents, Grace and Miles, were to spread the word of God and medicines in the darkest parts of the world. Her take on “goodness” was to help the sick and make them well. She wanted to become a doctor, a surgeon. The best surgeon she could be.
That was where she and her husband, Jeff, differed. She wanted to be a surgeon, he wanted her to be his wife and nothing else. He’d laughed and told her that taking care of him and his needs would always be more than a full-time job for her.
It took very little for her to realize that he was serious, that “carefree” was perilously close to “irresponsible” and that “dropdead gorgeous” only went so far in the scheme of things and was a very poor trade-off for respect. There was nothing about Jeff she could respect and he in turn seemed to have none for no one, least of all her.
What she’d foolishly believed was the greatest love of all time was merely a case of intense infatuation. She was more in love with the idea of love than she was with Jeff. She just hadn’t been smart enough at the time to know the difference. Jeff had been a feast for the eyes, beautiful in every sense of the word, but only outwardly. Inwardly, he lacked even the simplest of attributes that went into comprising her parents and her older brother, Simon.
Accustomed to selfless people, selfishness, especially of the magnitude that Jeff eventually displayed, was something Bailey found she just couldn’t get used to or accept. So, eighteen months after she said “I do,” she said “I don’t” and the marriage she’d thought would last forever was terminated.
Her parents waited for her return with open arms. And for a while, it was all right. But from the very beginning, she was restless. Restless because she’d discovered that there was another road she wanted to follow. One she was certain she was capable of traveling to the very end. One she swore to herself she wasn’t choosing just on a whim. She was a different person than she’d been six years earlier.
In their work, her parents were predominantly concerned with healing the soul, but not exclusively. They also fed the belly and brought medicines to the body. It was that part that interested her, that captured her imagination and fed her passion.
She applied to twelve medical schools, was interviewed by nine and was eventually accepted by six. She chose Johns Hopkins and threw herself into her studies. Being away from home the first time around, the taste of freedom in abundance had made her almost giddy. But the second time she was away, it was with a clear purpose. Bailey settled down and settled in, focusing on her goals and the career that she wanted with all her heart.
She had something to prove to everyone, most importantly, to herself.
The course work was hard, she was harder, determined to make up for what she considered lost time. With single-minded purpose, even though she worked to put herself through school, Bailey managed to graduate in less time than the average medical student. She fed on her own energy and enthusiasm, sometimes going for thirty-six hours at a time. Her letters of recommendation were glowing and well deserved.
She came to believe there was nothing she couldn’t do.
“I have the strength of ten because my heart is pure,” she murmured to the image in the mirror as she inspected herself one last time, reciting something her father had once read to her. Right now, she’d settled for the strength of two and a half.
Her pulse was beating fast. She closed her eyes and told herself to calm down.
Breathe, Bailey, breathe. He’s just a man, like everyone else. He has to put his pants on one leg at a time, same as you.
God, but she wished they were here right now, just for a few minutes. Her father and her mother. Or Simon. Or her uncle and aunt with whom she’d lived as an undergraduate. Someone she could turn to for an encouraging word. She liked her housemates, but right now, they were just contributing to the problem, telling her every single frightening encounter anyone had ever had with the great and terrible Ivan Munro.
Bailey pressed her hand against her abdomen. There was one hell of a huge butterfly inside, insisting on spreading his wings and flapping so that she felt utterly nauseous.
She hadn’t felt this nervous since that time she’d looked into Jeff’s eyes and knew that he was going to make love to her. Knew and worried that he would be disappointed because she was a virgin. So she did what she always did when she felt the slightest bit uncertain. She forged straight ahead. That time, she’d pulled out all the stops and made love to Jeff first, completely overwhelming him. She’d been so eager, so gungho, he hadn’t even noticed the momentary resistance he encountered when he’d entered her. He’d been too busy just trying to keep up.
Jeff never even suspected that she hadn’t been acting on instincts but on something she had witnessed as a young girl. Unknown to her parents, she’d snuck out to watch an elaborate mating ritual between two young people in one of the tiny African countries whose names kept changing nearly as often as the seasons.
Emulating it, she’d knocked Jeff’s socks off and kept him enamored of her for months.
Before the bloom finally came off the rose and the sexiest guy on the planet became someone she found she really didn’t like. Definitely not someone she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. Not unless she was firmly committed to doing what the Catholics had once referred to as penance. Because being with Jeff had turned into penance.
She laughed softly to herself, shaking her head. One of the pins in her hair began to slip. Bailey shoved it back, tucking her hair back around the pin.
All that seemed like more than a lifetime ago. And very small potatoes now that she looked back at it. It was not nearly in the same league as what she’d accomplished in the last few years.
And definitely not in the same league as what she was about to undertake today. She squared her shoulders and turned away from the reflection. Today, she was about to face the biggest challenge she’d ever gone up against.
Surviving Ivan the Terrible.
CHAPTER 5
He didn’t look like an unholy terror.
Those had been Adam’s parting words to her, to take care because Ivan the Terrible lived up to his name and ate residents for breakfast. Adam had issued the warning a minute before she, Jennifer and he had gone their separate ways just inside the entrance of the hospital. Adam was heading for the pediatric ward while Jennifer’s residency was in cardiology.
Apparently, it didn’t matter that Adam and Jennifer were assigned to different disciplines that had, in essence, nothing to do with neurosurgery. All paths at the hospital seemed to cross Dr. Ivan Munro’s in some manner, shape or form. Everyone who worked at Blair Memorial knew about the man. His reputation preceded him, both as a surgeon and as a devourer of residents. Which was why, legend had it, he hadn’t been given any residents to mentor in the last few years.
But maybe that reputation was exaggerated, Bailey thought now as she turned in her chair to look toward the doorway.
The man didn’t seem scary at all.
As instructed, she had entered Dr. Bennett’s office at exactly eight o’clock sharp. She’d arrived nearly half an hour earlier and had spent the time circling the floor. Punctuality counted, but sometimes, she’d learned, showing up early acted against you if people weren’t prepared for you. So she had moved around on the first floor, never far from where she was ultimately supposed to be, all the while practicing every known remedy for stress she could think of. The last thing she wanted was to appear like some wild-eyed, overeager idiot who didn’t know her left hand from her right, much less a suture from a scalpel.
Trying not to look as if she were drawing in a sustaining lungful of air, Bailey took measure of the man who walked in, or rather, sauntered in as if he owned the office and the hospital that went with it.
Bailey desperately tried to be impartial. Nerves would bring cold hands, a dead giveaway. She didn’t want to seem too inferior on their first meeting.
Ivan the Terrible was tall, with an athletic build and wide shoulders. The cheekbones beneath what she estimated to be a day-old stubble were prominent. His hair was light brown and just this side of unruly. Munro’s hair looked as if he used his fingers for a comb and didn’t care who knew it.
The eyes were brown, almost black as they aimed at her. There was no other word for it. Aimed. As if he was debating whether or not to fire at point-blank range.
Somewhere in the back of her mind, a line from a grade-B movie, “Be afraid. Be very afraid,” whispered along the perimeter of her brain. Warning her. Almost against her will, it caused her to brace her shoulders. Bailey had to remind herself to breathe in and out like a normal person.
Dr. Bennett had tried his level best to put her at ease and had almost succeeded. But an air of tension had entered with Munro. She wondered if the chief of staff was bracing himself, as well, bracing for some kind of disaster or explosion. Forewarned by everyone she encountered, she still didn’t really know what to expect.
“Ah, here he is now,” Harold Bennett announced needlessly. The smile on his lips was slightly forced, the look in his gray, kindly eyes held a warning as he looked at his chief neurosurgeon. “We were just talking about you, Dr. Munro.”
“Can’t imagine why,” Ivan replied dryly.
Harold cleared his throat, as if that would cover the less than friendly tone of voice Ivan had just displayed. “Dr. Munro, this is the young woman I was telling you about yesterday.”
Now his eyes dissected her. Bailey felt as if she were undergoing a scalpel-less autopsy right then and there. “Ah yes, the Stanford Special.”
He made her sound like something that was listed at the top of a third-rate diner menu. There was enough contempt in his voice to offend an entire delegation from the UN.
Summoning the bravado that her parents always claimed had been infused in her since the moment she first drew breath, Bailey put out her hand. “Hello. I’m Dr. Bailey DelMonico.”
Ivan made no effort to take the hand offered to him. Instead, he slid his long, lanky form bonelessly into the chair beside her. He proceeded to move the chair ever so slightly so that there was even more space between them. Ivan faced the chief of staff, but the words he spoke were addressed to her.
“You’re a doctor, DelMonico, when I say you’re a doctor,” he informed her coldly, sparing her only one steely glance to punctuate the end of his statement.
“I have a certificate from Johns Hopkins University that says differently.” Her tone was nonconfrontational and matter-of-fact. She was determined not to let Ivan the Terrible see that her insides felt like jelly. And she was just as determined not to be crushed into the ground like an insignificant bug at their first meeting.
Ivan didn’t bother sparing her a second glance. “Shall I tell her where she can put that certificate, or do you want that pleasure?”
Harold stifled a sigh. He knew this was all for show, to frighten off the young woman. He couldn’t very well discipline his chief neurosurgeon in front of a new resident, but neither did he want her madly running for the hills.
So instead, he smiled warmly at Bailey and shook his head like a weary father settling yet another squabble between his children. “I’m afraid that Dr. Munro is a little unorthodox,” he told her, then tried to sound as positive as he could as he added, “But I promise you that you’ll learn a great deal from him.”
It wasn’t hard to see that the man’s eyes were requesting her understanding. She appreciated that. Bailey smiled as she nodded. “Probably a lot of words I never heard before,” she allowed.
She thought she saw amusement flit across Dr. Bennett’s face and it heartened her. She’d gained an ally.
“Now, until I say differently, Dr. Munro is going to take over your education. Dr. Munro—” he fixed Ivan with a steely gaze that had been known to send lesser doctors running for their antacids but, as always, seemed to have no effect on the chief neurosurgeon “—I want you to award her every consideration. From now on, Dr. DelMonico is to be your shadow, your sponge and your assistant.” He emphasized the last word as his eyes locked with Ivan’s. “Do I make myself clear?”
For his part, Ivan seemed completely unfazed. He merely nodded, his eyes and expression unreadable. “Perfectly.”
“And if there’s any problem,” Harold continued, looking from the young woman to his chief sore spot, “I want to be informed of it immediately.” The sentence was no sooner out of his mouth than he saw Ivan raising his hand. It didn’t take a brain surgeon to guess exactly what the man was going to say. “After you give this arrangement at least several weeks to begin to work itself out.” Harold pushed his chair back from his desk and rose, signaling that the meeting was at an end. “Now, if you have the time, Dr. Munro, I would appreciate it if you showed our newest resident around Blair Memorial.”
To his credit, the chief of staff didn’t even flinch when Ivan shot a dagger in his direction.
“It’ll have to be another time,” Ivan replied. “My schedule’s full today.”
“That’s fine,” Bailey cut in quickly, refusing to be the source of a clash of wills between the two men. “I’ve already familiarized myself with the hospital layout, Dr. Bennett.”
“Oh?”
“My two roommates are residents here. I had them take me around during their off hours.”
Ivan smirked. “Enterprising little thing, isn’t she?” The words were only marginally addressed to the chief of staff.
His hand was on the doorknob. Bailey sprang to her feet, her chair making a scraping noise as she moved it back, then quickly joined the neurosurgeon before he could leave the office.
For his part, Ivan waited for her, nodded at the chief of staff and looked for all the world as if he had every intention of going along with the assignment that had been given him.
Optimist though he was, Harold Bennett knew better than to believe his eyes. A leopard did not change its spots and Ivan the Terrible was not about to become Ivan the Good because it was asked of him.
But he had seen something in the young woman’s eyes, something that gave him hope that Ivan had met, if not his match, at least someone who was not about to topple over like a loosely packed sandcastle the moment the first disgruntled words erupted out of Ivan’s mouth.
Ivan held the door open for her, allowing the young woman to leave first. He was male enough to notice that she was even better looking than her tiny photograph indicated and arrogant enough to feel that it had no bearing on anything as far as he was concerned.
Closing the door behind him, Ivan leaned over and whispered into her ear, “Just so you know, I’m going to be your worst nightmare.”
She gave him only the merest of looks as she appeared to consider the statement. “Funny, you don’t look like a burning cross on the front lawn.” And then she glanced up overhead at the ceiling. “I guess it must be the lighting.”
CHAPTER 6
Any hope that the man might possess a sense of humor and strike a truce died quickly. Munro looked angrier than Zeus upon learning of a rebellion spearheaded by the lesser gods. “First thing you’re going to have to do is lose the attitude, DelMonico.”
His eyes seemed to shoot thunderbolts. She refused to look away, although it wasn’t easy meeting his stormy gaze.
“Are you?” she asked innocently.
Abruptly he began walking again. “My attitude is a fixture around here.” He slanted a glance at her as if she were an annoying fly that insisted on buzzing around his head. “A smart mouth is not going to get you anything at Blair except thrown out.”
Bailey bit back the desire to point out that having a “smart mouth” certainly hadn’t hurt him. One retort to show him that she wasn’t afraid of him was all she was allowed. Anything more would not only be overkill, it just might also kill her chance to work at Blair Memorial before she started. Or at least, work at Blair under Munro. And from what she’d heard, Ivan Munro was capable of performing miracles in the operating room. She wanted to witness those miracles firsthand, to learn from them and eventually to become just as good a neurosurgeon as Munro. Because if you couldn’t be the best, why bother?
So, even as hot words burned on her tongue, Bailey forced herself to stay sober and replied, “Yes, Doctor.”
He thought he heard something in her voice, something he took exception to. “And mocking me isn’t going to get you anywhere, either.”
Her head shot up, surprised. “I wasn’t mocking you, Dr. Munro, I was replying.”
He resumed walking, his legs stretching out before him as he snorted his contempt. “I am a student of body language, DelMonico. Yours is telling me to go to hell.”
“I don’t think so, Doctor,” she replied, her voice as innocent as she could manage it. “I don’t allow my body to use that kind of language.”
He snorted again. “Right, no doubt that’s the missionary in you coming out.” The look he slanted her this time was positively wicked. “Ever hear the joke about the anthropologist who lost his way and the missionary’s daughter?”
A little less than a foot shorter than the chief neurosurgeon, Bailey found herself fairly trotting to keep up now. She hadn’t a clue where he was going and she was not about to be left behind. She’d told Dr. Bennett the truth, she had taken a tour of the hospital, but she hadn’t exactly committed the entire layout to memory. Yet.
“The anthropologist and the missionary’s daughter?” she repeated. “A thousand times, Doctor.”
About to turn a corner, Ivan halted. He debated whether she was just about the best stone-faced liar he’d ever encountered or if his new albatross had actually heard the obscure joke he was referring to. In any event, the joke was only intended as a test to see how easily the woman blushed and, more importantly, how quickly he could take her down.
This, he decided, was going to be more of a challenge than he’d first imagined. For all he knew, it might even turn out to be a bit on the entertaining side.
“Then I won’t bore you with it,” he finally replied.
Her eyes met his. She made sure to keep her relief under wraps as she said, “Thank you, Dr. Munro.”
For the first time since he’d been told about the ordeal he was expected to endure, Ivan allowed himself just the slightest hint of a smile. The corners of his mouth moved in a vague upward pattern before returning to their customary downward arc.
“I do believe you mean that, DelMonico.” He glanced at his watch and lengthened his considerable stride. “I’m due in surgery in a few minutes,” he informed her, although part of him bristled at making any sort of an excuse to this resident.
But if he meant his words to be taken as any sort of a dismissal, he was sorely disappointed. Rather than dropping behind and allowing him to continue on alone, she all but ran to keep up pace with him.
He frowned at her. “We don’t allow skipping in the halls, DelMonico.”
“I’m not skipping, Doctor,” she informed him, hurrying. “I’m running.”
Given that she was a lot shorter and in high heels, the woman kept up remarkably well. It occurred to him that she wasn’t wearing traditional scrubs. Was that for his benefit? Did she think she could “get to him” by looking soft, supple and feminine?
He almost laughed out loud at the notion.
But instead he informed her, “We don’t allow that, either.”
She had always been extremely physical. Life as a missionary’s daughter did not allow for hours spent on a sofa, in front of a computer or a television set. She’d learned to amuse herself the way children had before electronic devices had taken over the task. If need be, she could run like a gazelle fleeing a hungry predator. “Then you’re going to have to slow down, sir.”
She didn’t even sound winded, he noticed. “And why is that?”
“Because I can’t keep up using your pace.”
Rather than shorten his stride, he increased it. “That, DelMonico, is a given.”
Bailey took in a deep breath. Gritting her teeth, she lengthened her stride as far as she could and quickened her pace to make up for the difference. They turned heads as they snaked their way through the halls.
She was right behind him when they reached the entrance to Operation Room One.
Only then did Ivan stop. He felt a little winded himself. He needed to make time for morning jogs again, he thought. Somehow that had managed to slip by the wayside. These days, he lived and breathed his work and little else. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been to a concert.
His eyes washed over her. Bailey did her best not to shiver. “Stubborn, aren’t you?”
Bailey smiled at him in response. “My father said it’s one of my best attributes.”
“Fathers lie,” he said flatly.
He wanted to get under her skin, to get her angry, so she struggled to remain clam. “If I may ask, what kind of operation is it?”
He gave her a look that easily would have left others quaking in their shoes. It annoyed him that he had no effect on her. “A complicated one.”
“Good,” she replied without missing a beat. “May I scrub in? I can—” She was about to tell him that she had her scrubs in her locker and could change into them faster than she could explain it, but she never got the chance.
She could see him shutting down right in front of her eyes. “You can scrub all you want, DelMonico,” he said, putting his hand on the swinging door, “but you’re not getting into my operating room.”
She covered his hand with her own. The action stopped him in his tracks. Ivan eyed her over his shoulder.
“What are you afraid of, Dr. Munro?”
She had done what few people ever did. She’d caught him by surprise. “I beg your pardon?”
His voice was cold, brittle. Bailey felt like someone who had just walked out onto the plank and now tottered on the edge of the wood. But if she backed off, Munro would have nothing but contempt for her. More contempt for her, she amended.
“What are you afraid of?” she repeated. “That you might be wrong?”
His eyes narrowed into slits. “I’m never wrong.”
Okay, maybe she should have been more specific. “About me, Dr. Munro. Wrong about me. You think I can’t cut it.”
“I know you can’t cut it,” he informed her mildly. “I’m not letting you cut anything.”
She lifted her chin pugnaciously. “What are you going to tell Dr. Bennett?”
Rangy shoulders rose and fell. “That I tried but it didn’t work out.”
She pushed back his lab coat from the hand she was covering and looked at his wrist. “After only ten minutes?”
He inclined his head. “We both lasted longer than I estimated.”
She drew herself up to her full five-foot-five height. “I’m not going anywhere, Dr. Munro.”
He nodded, as if she’d finally caught on. “My words exactly.”
Too late, Bailey realized her error. “Away,” she corrected. “I’m not going away.” As she spoke, her voice increased in strength and depth, even as she struggled to keep it low. She didn’t want to be accused of screaming or creating a scene. “I’ve come a long way to be standing right here in this hallway, arguing with you, and if you think that your reputation as the devil incarnate is going to scare me off, it won’t. I’ve seen the devil, Dr. Munro, and it’s not you.”
He stood there for a long moment, then drew his hand from beneath hers. Turning away from her, he pushed open the door to the operating room and walked through.
“Scrub in.”
CHAPTER 7
Ivan was vaguely aware of the indistinct squeal behind him and then the sound of eager footsteps growing fainter.
He assumed it was the little-resident-that-could’s way of showing her enthusiasm as well as her joy before she ran off to change into her scrubs and prepare for the operating room. Crossing the perimeter of the operating room, as much to show his presence as to get to the area where the sinks were, Ivan carefully took in every square inch.
Casting an aura of disquiet as he went.
As it should be. Complacent people were lax. Lax led to mistakes.
He wondered if he’d just made a mistake, being too soft. Telling DelMonico to scrub in.
It wasn’t as if he would allow her to touch one of the instruments. His only intention was to let her just breathe the same air as his surgical staff. He and only he would tackle Mark Spader’s brain tumor.
Brain tumor.
Alone by the sinks, Ivan took in a long breath and then released it. Like a magnet set on a table with metal fillings, the surgery before him drew away all thoughts of the resident and how he hated being harnessed with petty responsibilities that took away from the focus of his purpose here at Blair.
To mend as many patients as he could. To try, in some small, futile measure, to make it up to Scott for what he’d done. As if that were possible.
A dry, humorless laugh echoed within the small area as he shed his lab coat. He was already dressed in his surgical livery. Prepared, always prepared.
Except for that one night.
Against his will, thoughts came back to him. Scott Kiplinger was the reason he was here. Scott was the reason for everything, most of all why he had become a neurosurgeon. Because if there had been a neurosurgeon on duty that night, if one had been called to the ER in time instead of hours later, Scott might still be among the living. Walking, talking and being the best friend he’d ever had.
The best friend he’d killed as surely as if he had aimed that gun and pulled the trigger himself.
But he hadn’t physically pulled the trigger. Scott’s despair had pulled it that awful, beautiful afternoon in the meadow. That fateful afternoon when he had finally persuaded Scott to leave the confines of his house, where all the curtains were always drawn, shutting out life. Shutting in the darkness.
Scott had lived that way, never leaving his house, for almost two years. Ever since the accident.
The accident, Ivan thought darkly, remembering every vivid detail, that had been all his fault. If he hadn’t been speeding, if he hadn’t taken that curve so fast, if there hadn’t been ice on the ground, if Scott hadn’t been in the car.
If, if, if, IF.
Ivan sighed, scrubbing his damp hand over his face. Wiping it dry as he uttered a curse through clenched teeth, he then washed his hands a second time.
If.
Battling with the word didn’t change anything. Didn’t make him stay home instead of going out for a ride. Didn’t make him sober instead of buzzed on three beers.
Neither did it change how very naive he’d been, thinking he’d scored a coup, getting Scott to leave his house. At the outset, it had seemed like the perfect plan, driving Scott to the meadow where he had loved to hike and run. Scott, the all-around athlete, getting in touch with his past. It had seemed so right at the time.
He’d thought, believed, that the sight of something familiar, something once so beloved, would finally, magically, bring Scott around. Would suddenly rally him to grasp on to the fragments of life that he still had and make him want to build on them.
Make him want to be among the living again instead of among the wheelchair-bound wounded.
Stupid, stupid, stupid, Ivan upbraided himself for the thousandth time.
He’d had no idea that the pouch Scott had brought with him, the one attached to his wheelchair arm, didn’t contain the water bottle he’d said it did but the weapon he’d used to finally terminate all his pain.
Ivan closed his eyes as the hot water dissolved the heavy film of soap from his hands.
He could see it all so clearly. His sitting on the grass, to the left of Scott’s wheelchair, foolishly talking about what strides physical therapy had taken in the last couple of years and how he would do anything, anything, to help Scott start living again. He’d talked about Scott’s mother, about how he had to get on with his life, if only for her.
It was a topic he’d all but worn a hole in, but this time, this time, because Scott didn’t argue with him, he had thought he was getting through to Scott. This time, he’d been hopeful that he could begin making amends.
And then all hope vanished forever.
Because while he went on talking, making plans, gluing together a future, Scott had quietly taken the gun out of the pouch, placed it to his temple and ended the discussion.
Permanently.
The sound of the gun being discharged was deafening. The horror of having his best friend’s blood rain down on him never left him.
The feeling of hopeless futility imprinted its indelible mark on him that afternoon and changed him. The young, wild, carefree youth he’d been died along with Scott that day. The numbed man who eventually rose out of those ashes dedicated himself exclusively to becoming a neurosurgeon. It was the only thing that made sense to him. Becoming a neurosurgeon so that Scott’s death wasn’t entirely meaningless, that he hadn’t died without changing anything.
And now, twenty-five years later, all that mattered was the same thing that mattered twenty-five years ago: saving lives. Reconstructing broken shells so that they could continue in Scott’s name, even though none of them were ever aware of it.
Because no one else knew about Scott, except for Scott’s mother. Telling her about Scott’s suicide had been the hardest thing he had ever done in his life. Standing in the same room with the woman’s overwhelming grief had been worse than hell.
“It’s your fault, you know,” she’d shouted at him, her eyes redrimmed. “You’re the reason he’s dead. He should have never hung around with you.”
He’d tried to apologize, but Scott’s mother had just started screaming. Screaming like a woman whose heart had been ripped out of her breast. There wasn’t anything he could say.
He shut down that day, purging every drop of emotion from himself. Barring its return as he focused on what he needed to do. What he swore at Scott’s grave site to do.
But every successful operation he performed didn’t bring a feeling of triumph that lived beyond one moment. Most of all, none of the successes tendered, in some small form, a feeling of absolution.
It truly was as if everything had shut down inside of him the day Scott died. Because Scott had been his only friend in a world that, for him, had been largely dysfunctional due to abusive, self-destructive parents, and when Scott had given in to despair and killed himself, the light simply went out of everything, leaving him standing in perpetual darkness.
A darkness he had, since that day, resisted leaving, despite the efforts of various people who came and went in his life.
He made no attachments to anyone. Instead, he coexisted, which was far easier. To become involved, even in the slightest way, was risking far too much and the only risks Ivan was willing to take, the only ones he actually ever took, were in the operating room. There he performed daring surgeries that other neurosurgeons would never even contemplate.
He did them because neurosurgery was the terrain that the gods traversed whenever they took their constitutionals. And it was the terrain that he, Ivan, habitually crossed with long, confident steps. And no one ever knew about the insecurity that still resided inside.
Finished, his clean hands raised in the air, ready to have gloves drawn over them, Ivan pushed the swinging door that separated him from the operating room with his shoulder. The little-resident-that-could was already there, Ivan noted. He recognized her eager eyes above the blue surgical mask she, like the others in the chilled room, had donned.
Maybe she could keep up, after all. And then again, maybe she couldn’t. Either way, that wasn’t any of his concern. There was only one thing he cared about and it was lying, prepped and draped, on his operating table.
“All right, people,” Ivan announced to the staff that closed in around him. “Time to make a miracle.”
CHAPTER 8
“Oh my God, that was incredible,” Bailey cried.
It was difficult to keep from shouting out the words as she walked from the operating room to the back area where the sinks were. Trying to steady her racing pulse, she took in a deep, measured breath. It didn’t help. Everything inside her had kicked into high gear. It was the closest to high she had ever felt.
Bailey looked at the man she had been assigned to with genuine awe. “You were incredible.”
Ivan spared her a glance that could only be described as “disinterested.” The other members of the staff walked by, oblivious to the scene, trying to put distance between themselves and Ivan the Terrible.
“Yes, I know.”
The sound of his voice, utterly devoid of any sort of emotion, penetrated the wild rush she was experiencing. Bailey could only stare at the neurosurgeon incredulously. He’d performed nothing short of a miracle. “How can you be so calm?”
One shoulder moved in a vague shrug. “Low blood sugar.”
“I’m serious.” She tugged her mask down lower until she could undo the ties at the back of her neck. “Don’t you feel a rush, a surge?” She searched his face for a hint of what she was describing. “Isn’t your heart just pounding?”
The disinterested glance only deepened. Flattery, even sincere flattery, which he presumed this was, was neither accepted nor rejected. It was allowed to float free through time and space, like an untethered balloon until it faded away. “I performed surgery, DelMonico. I didn’t make love to the man.”
The words threw her completely off. Bailey looked at the man whose fingers had performed nothing short of magic in the room behind her. Mild surprise gave way to amusement. “I didn’t know you made love.”
He threw his gloves away and removed the bland surgical cap he’d worn during the six-hour operation. Other surgeons, once they had endured and surmounted all the various trials and obstacles to get there, selected a cap in colors that had some sort of significance to them. Ivan’s was the same color as it had always been. Blue. He didn’t believe in donning peacock finery. He believed in surgery.
One tug separated the mask’s ties at the back of his neck and he threw the mask into a bin. “There are many things about me, DelMonico, that you don’t know.”
Interest sparked in those deep blue eyes of hers. “I’m willing to listen.”
“I’m not willing to talk.” He figured that was enough of a put-down. Instead, her mouth curved even more. Ivan flashed one of his more deflating looks. “Careful, DelMonico, or someone’s going to have to tie a rope around your ankle to keep you earth-bound. Why are you so exhilarated, anyway?” he asked, unable to understand her reaction. “You were just on the sidelines.”
Sidelines or not, she was right there, where everything was happening. “But I got to see—” she cried, then abruptly switched sentences, so pumped she was unable to finish one thought before leaping to another. “You had half his skull off—His brain was exposed!”
“They call it ‘brain surgery’ for a reason, DelMonico.” He shook his head, as if not knowing what to make of her, sincerely doubting that she was for real. “Maybe you should review your notes from Neurosurgery 101.”
It was her turn to shake her head, but unlike him, her smile was wide. “You’re not going to do it.”
Despite the fact that he wanted to change out of his scrubs, he paused a moment to ask, “Do what?”
“You’re not going to deflate me.” She was far too excited about what she had witnessed, far too enthused about the work that lay ahead of her, to become just like him. She’d never believed in aiming low.
Ivan clucked his tongue. “Pity. There goes my fun for the afternoon.”
Turning away from her, Ivan was surprised when he felt her hand on his forearm. He glanced over his shoulder and waited for an explanation for the detainment.
Self-consciously, she dropped her hand to her side. “How long?” she asked.
His patience was pretty well stretched to the limit with her. “How long what?”
She pressed her lips together. “How long before I can do something like that?” She nodded her head back toward the O.R.
“Oh, I don’t know.” He paused, pretending to think. And then his expression was dismissive as he raised his eyes to hers. “If you study very hard—maybe a century or two. Maybe longer.”
A slam like that might have sent her reeling—or spoiling for a fight. But she was beginning to read between the lines and get a handle on him. The insults were a smokescreen. No one was that nasty for no reason. “You don’t want me to like you, do you?”
His eyes narrowed, telling her how insignificant she was in the scheme of his life. “I really don’t care how you feel about anything, DelMonico.”
He believed that, she thought. But she didn’t. She’d been taught never to focus on the bad, only the good. And if an animal swiped at you, it was only because he was wounded. The challenge here was to discover what Ivan the Terrible’s wound was.
She folded her arms before her. “Well, you won’t get me to dislike you.”
Ordinarily, he would have turned and walked away without bothering to reply. But for once, curiosity got the better of him. “Not that, again, I care in the slightest, but why is that, DelMonico?”
The answer was simple. Because she wanted to be the best and in order to do that, she had to learn from the best. She had to learn from him. Everything was always better when conducted in an air of congeniality rather than hospitality.
“Because you did exactly what you said back there,” she told him. “You performed a miracle. That tumor looked like it was a miniaturized octopus with its tiny tentacles woven all in and out of gray matter, and yet you got it all.”
He’d leaned against the wall to listen to her and straightened now. “Very poetic, DelMonico. Maybe you should think about becoming a poet instead of wasting your time here.”
She wasn’t going to let him bait her. She felt too good, too psyched, to let him burst her balloons and make her plummet. “I’m not wasting my time.”
He leveled a penetrating gaze at her. “You’re sure of that?”
There wasn’t even a half second of hesitation on her part. “Yes.”
“Ballsy,” Ivan pronounced, more to himself than to her. “Maybe it won’t take you a century or two. DelMonico. Maybe it’ll just take three-quarters of one.”
She had just been given a decent compliment, Ivan the Terrible style. She viewed it as one giant step in the right direction. “I’m going to knock that figure down to something manageable,” she promised.
Ivan snorted. “You think that, DelMonico. You go right ahead and think that.”
The tone he used clearly declared that while she might want to delude herself, he knew the truth and the truth, the way he saw it, said that she would never be capable of performing the kinds of surgeries he tackled on a regular basis. He just didn’t see it being in her, no matter what she thought.
“I will,” Bailey called after him as he began to walk away. “Because I have a good teacher.” She raised her voice when he made no attempt to turn around and added, “You.”
“Ha!” was Ivan’s only response. He kept on walking until he disappeared through the opposite set of swinging doors.
Bailey turned on her heel, quickly heading around to the other side, to the locker room where her things were stored. For all the contact she’d had with the patient, she could have almost remained in the clothes she’d worn originally. The clothes she’d secretly hoped put her in a better light as far as first impressions went. She realized that she could have just as well worn a paper sack for all the difference it made to Munro, but it had been worth a try.
She grinned to herself. She’d seen her first brain surgery today. Despite the fact that Munro had relegated her to a far corner of the operating room, she had been able to witness the infinite skill with which he wielded the robotic instruments used to excise the tumor that had all but paralyzed the thirty-two-year-old patient.
She didn’t care how much the neurosurgeon ranted and raved, how much he tried to get her to throw her hands up and scream “uncle” just before she quit. There was no way she was about to do that.
“Get used to it, Ivan Munro,” she murmured under her breath as she walked into the locker room. “I’m going to stick to you like glue until I know everything that you do.”
The second she entered the lockers she began shedding surgical livery. By the time she reached the locker that had been assigned her, she was in her underwear, ready to grab her street clothes and put them on.
The trouble with that was, someone, obviously thinking they were performing a good deed, had shut her locker door and flipped the combination lock. A lock to which she didn’t know the combination.
“Damn,” she muttered when the lock resisted opening.
“Problem?”
The question came from the other side of the lockers.
CHAPTER 9
Bailey’s first inclination was to grab her discarded scrubs and cover herself up as much as possible.
The only thing wrong with that plan was that she’d tossed the scrubs into the dirty laundry receptacle and it was now approximately ten feet away from her. She sensed that a mad dash to retrieve the discarded clothing would undoubtedly amuse the chief neurosurgeon who seemed to have materialized out of thin air. She was willing to bet double her staggering medical school loan that if she did that, Munro would make some sort of humiliating, condescending comment about her pubescent reaction.
So instead of making a laughable attempt to somehow cover up the lacey pink bra and panties, and the skin that was above, between and below, Bailey raised her chin and turned around. She looked the neurosurgeon straight in the eye as if she were dressed from head to foot in a suit of impenetrable medieval armor. Only for a moment did she have the impression that he wasn’t looking at her as if she were wearing impenetrable medieval armor. But at least he wasn’t leering.
“Actually, yes,” she replied as coolly as possible under the circumstances. “There is a problem. Someone seems to have snapped my lock shut.”
She couldn’t read his expression, but in her heart she just knew he was laughing at her. “That’s why they make locks. To lock.” And then he allowed a sigh to escape, as if this was all incredibly boring to him. “Use the combination.”
“If I knew the combination, Doctor, that would be an excellent suggestion.”
This time she saw his eyes slowly pass over her body. He seemed neither impressed nor disappointed. There appeared to be no reaction at all. She couldn’t help wondering if he had spent too much time viewing people only as patients. At another time, she might have begun to speculate about his personal life, but right now, only hers, and how she was going to live this down, concerned her.
Goose bumps formed along her arms and legs in response to the lowered temperature. “Do you have any other suggestions?” she asked, her mouth growing annoyingly dry.
“Yes.” He said the single word so slowly, it seemed to drip out of his mouth.
A beat passed. Nothing followed.
“Well?” she pressed, doing her best not to sound frantic. What if someone came in and saw her like this? Then what?
“Sorry.” Ivan shook his head. “Nothing I can readily repeat out loud without offending the sisterhood.”
Then he was reacting to her near nude state. She didn’t know whether to be flattered for having gotten to the almighty Ivan or offended. Added to that, she hadn’t a clue what he was referring to.
“The what?”
“Sisterhood,” he repeated, then waved his hand as if to move the word aside. “Or whatever organization you and other females belong to that goes around bringing the male of the species up on inflated charges of harassment.”
Frustrated, Bailey turned her back on him and gave the lock another tug, a harder one this time. It had the same results as the first one did. Nothing. The lock hung there, mocking her. Just like Munro.
“Really should have committed the combination to memory,” he told her. He leaned forward just a touch, but not enough to actually come close to her. “Gnawing on it won’t help, either.”
She turned around, her anger eradicating her embarrassment. “Thank you.”
He nodded, as if the exchange was of an ordinary nature. “I assume you don’t intend to spend the rest of your days at Blair Memorial like that.” For emphasis, Ivan’s eyes slid down and then up along her torso.
She struggled hard not to shiver, even if she told herself his gaze was clinical. “No, I don’t.”
Raising her chin again, Bailey strode past him back to the laundry receptacle to retrieve the shirt and pants. She couldn’t just continue standing here, talking to him while wearing only the amount of material used to produce a minor bikini.
About to take out the two items, the sound of Munro’s voice stopped her.
“I wouldn’t recommend that.” She didn’t turn around, but she did stop and wait for him to continue. “Germs, you know. Those scrubs were in the O.R.”
He had a point, but so did she and as far as she was concerned hers trumped his. “Well, I don’t really have a choice now, do I?”
In response, she heard him laugh. Tired of being his source of amusement, the high she’d sustained watching him operate completely dissipated, Bailey swung around to face him. Superior or not, she was ready to give him a piece of her mind, the consequences be damned. Someone needed to take this man down a peg and it might as well be her last act at Blair.
But whatever words she attempted to hunt up died in her throat as she saw what the neurosurgeon held in his hands. Neatly folded scrubs, both top and bottoms. “You could put these on.” He raised one eyebrow quizzically. “Size small, right?”
“Right,” she murmured, surprised. The scrubs had not been there before. And the ones she’d obtained earlier for herself had come from the supply area. “Where did you get those?”
“Magic,” he informed her dryly. And then he nodded toward the closet behind him. “Scrubs for visiting surgeons are kept in there.”
Something else she hadn’t known. The list of things she needed to familiarize herself with was growing astronomically. And then she replayed his words in her head. “I’m not visiting.”
“Yes,” Ivan acknowledged with more than a tinge of sorrow, “I know.” He looked down at the scrubs. “If you don’t want these—” He raised the uniform blues up over his head and completely out of her reach.
“No!” she cried. Not knowing what the man was capable of, she made a lunge for the scrubs to retrieve them. Her body brushed up against his as she reached up as far as she could.
She felt the same way she had in physics class when she’d accidentally touched a live wire. Electrical current zapped through her body.
If her momentary panic amused him, he didn’t show it. Neither did he seem affected by the fleeting contact of her barely covered anatomy against his.
Instead, Ivan lowered his arm and very soberly presented the fresh scrubs to her. She snatched them up as if she didn’t trust him to surrender the clothes to her.
“I’m making afternoon rounds in five minutes,” he informed her as he turned on his heel. With that, he walked out of the locker room.
Bailey all but hopped into the blue scrubs while making her way to the door, grateful to finally put something on her body. Punching her arms through the sleeves, she caught up to him on the other side of the door.
“What about my locker?” she asked. She still had a problem.
His tone was completely disinterested. “What about it?”
She was beginning to understand why some residents used his picture as a dartboard. “I still need to open it.”
Passing the nurses’ station, he picked up a file without breaking stride. “Not now you don’t.”
“No,” she agreed. Bailey glanced down and saw that one of her laces was untied. She knew better than to stop to tie it. That was going to have to wait for a lull, too. “But later—”
“Is later,” he told her with finality, and it was obvious that as far as he was concerned, “later” had no place in the present. “It’ll take care of itself.”
Not without help, Bailey thought. She made a mental note to find either a janitor or a pair of bull cutters, preferably the former wielding the latter. She didn’t care about going home dressed in scrubs, even though it was chilly outside, but her locker, the locker she’d purposely left with an open combination lock hanging from it, also contained her purse, her keys and all of her identification. She couldn’t drive her car or get into her house without them.
She supposed, Bailey thought, shoving a loose pin back into her hair, she could hook up with either Adam or Jennifer and they could drive her home. But even if she did, that still didn’t solve the problem of getting her things out of the sealed locker.
“You’re panting, DelMonico,” Ivan observed, making a left at the end of the corridor.
No, she wasn’t, but she knew that arguing seemed pointless. “You’ve got on your seven league boots again, Doctor.”
His glance was just short of belittling as he slanted it in her direction. “I guess you’ll just have to get a pair, DelMonico.”
She nodded as if he’d just made a perfect plausible suggestion. She had a hunch he got a certain amount of pleasure rattling people and she refused to accommodate him. “Just tell me where to shop,” she replied without missing a beat.
Bailey thought she heard Munro mutter something under his breath but decided that she might be better off not knowing exactly what that was.
Christians, one. Lions, zero, she thought with a suppressed smile.
CHAPTER 10
“So, how is the great neurosurgeon doing?”
When the phone had rung a second ago, Bailey had debated between answering it and throwing it across the room. But because she was too exhausted to throw, she brought the receiver to her ear.
Hearing the voice made her miraculously sit up.
“Simon? Simon, is that you?” Even as she said his name, she brightened. Her older brother had always had that effect on her, bringing rays of hope into an otherwise gloomy atmosphere.
“None other. How’re you doing, kid?”
She could hear the smile in his voice. “Great now that I hear the sound of your voice.”
A tiny note of concern entered. “How were you before you heard the sound of my voice?” And then he became serious, ever the big brother. “They treating you all right?”
She didn’t want him worrying or thinking that she couldn’t take care of herself. She’d come a long way from that little girl who used to tag after him, shadowing his every move.
“By ‘they,’ do you mean the people at the hospital or my roommates?”
“Yes.”
Good old Simon, she thought, always touching as many bases as he can.
“My roommates are great. They’re both younger than I am, but I knew they would be.” She’d known going in that she would be the oldest resident there, but she couldn’t dwell on that. She was just grateful for the opportunity. “Part of me feels like I’m their den mother.”
“Can’t be that bad,” her brother scoffed. “You’re what—six, seven years older than they are? Maybe even less?”
“Something like that.”
“Honey, five, six, seven years, that’s nothing. You’re hardly in the den mother league. Or even the baby-sitter league,” he added.
She begged to differ. Bailey propped herself up on her elbows and moved back until she was resting against the pillows.
“You’re seven years older than I am and you always acted as if you were my second father. Still do, sometimes,” she added slyly.
“Rank has its privileges,” he told her, unfazed. “Really, Bay, are you okay? Do you need anything? Don’t be your proud, stubborn self. Tell me if you need something.”
“Batteries.”
“Batteries?” Simon repeated in disbelief. “Bailey, are you—”
She laughed, stopping him before he allowed his imagination to run away with him. “Batteries so I can keep going without crashing and embarrassing myself. I’m way beyond vitamins, coffee and energy drinks.”
“You don’t need batteries, Bay. What you need is sleep.”
If only. Bailey laughed softly to herself. “Tell that to the attendings. As for the chief neurosurgeon, the guy I’ve been assigned to, he doesn’t seem to sleep. Ever. He’s there when I arrive in the morning and he’s still there when I leave at night.”
“Maybe he does it with mirrors,” Simon quipped.
“Maybe,” she allowed. “They call him Ivan the Terrible.”
“That doesn’t sound warm and toasty. He giving you a hard time?”
She almost responded with, “Is the Pope Catholic?” but given Simon’s increased dedication to piety, she decided to skip the rhetorical comment. “Dr. Munro gives everyone a hard time. I think he might be lonely.”
“With a name like Ivan the Terrible, I don’t doubt it. Don’t try to mend his broken wing, Bay.” It was a reference to her always bringing home hurt animals when she was a little girl. “Just take care of yourself—and get that rest. You know what happens if you burn the candle at both ends—”
“—all you wind up with is a lump of wax in the middle,” Bailey said, echoing her brother as she repeated the line she had heard more times than she could count. “All right, enough about me, how about you?” They cared about each other, but it was unusual for Simon to call out of the blue like this. “What’s new in your life? How are you doing?”
“I’m doing okay.”
Bailey sat up. She knew her brother inside and out, knew all the nuances. There was something just a little bit guarded about his answer, about his voice. She thought she’d heard him hesitate before he gave her the innocuous reply.
“Okay, give. What’s up? Something wrong?”
“Nothing’s wrong,” he protested. “You couldn’t be more off.” And then Simon paused for a second, as if debating just how to frame what he was about to tell her. “I’m being ordained.”
“Ordained?” That had always been her parents’ dearest wish, to have their children follow in their footsteps. At least Simon hadn’t disappointed them, she thought. “Oh, Simon, that’s wonderful. Mom and Dad must be proud enough to burst.”
“Pretty much,” he agreed modestly. “But Mom calls it a mixed blessing.”
“What’s mixing it?”
He laughed softly. “Well, I’m going to need my own ‘flock’.”
“Which means you’ll have to go off on your own,” she concluded, understanding. “Poor Mom.”
“Thanks. I was wondering where I was going to get my daily dose of guilt.”
She knew he wasn’t upset. Simon had always taken things in stride, upbeat, but with no false illusions. Unlike her, he didn’t have an impetuous bone in his body. He thought everything through carefully before making a move. She used to call him “the turtle” when they were younger because his moves were so deliberate and slow.
“I just mean, first me, then you.” She made an assumption as to where her brother’s first ministry would be. “I suppose they could come back to live in the States.”
He laughed at the thought. They both knew how settled their parents were, how dedicated to the life they had undertaken.
“Too savage for them,” he quipped. They both laughed. “Listen, I’m going to have some time before I start and I thought I’d come out to see my favorite sister in the flesh.”
“As I recall, I am your only sister,” she reminded him.
“Good thing for you,” he teased, sounding like the Simon she knew again. “If there’d been competition, you might not have made the cut. I’m not sure about the timing yet. How does the end of April, beginning of May sound to you?”
“Like it’s much too far away,” she told him wistfully. Talking to Simon had stirred feelings of nostalgia within her exhaustion.
“Know what you mean, Bay. I miss you, too,” he told her with affection. “I’ll call you again when I have something more concrete to offer, like flight number and time. You take care of yourself, hear?”
She had no idea why she felt so teary-eyed suddenly. “I will.”
“And tell anyone who gives you a hard time to back off and leave you alone or they’ll have your big brother to reckon with.”
“Will do.” The line went dead after a quick, “Goodbye.”
Bailey found herself smiling down at the receiver in her hand. She could just hear Munro’s response to that one. He’d tell her exactly where she could put her protective big brother. But she did appreciate the thought.
Appreciated her brother calling her, as well, even though the sound of Simon’s voice had made her feel almost sad and definitely homesick. Sad even though she loved what she was doing, loved the prospect of getting up each morning, coming in and donning her hospital livery, even though she knew that she was going to be at odds with Munro the moment the man laid eyes on her.
She hadn’t felt this homesick since that first week when she’d left home to get her undergraduate degree. After the first week, the intoxicating wave of freedom had swept her away and she’d gotten immersed in college life.
Until then, except for a week here and there, she had never been away from her parents or away from the continent of Africa, not since she was ten and they had first undertaken the mission to which they were still so fiercely dedicated.
Maybe it was putting up with Munro that made her feel like a lone crusader, stranded in the middle of the forest. She’d been at Blair Memorial for almost three full months now, and he had yet to allow her so much as to hold a scalpel in her hand, other than lining it up on a surgical tray just before a procedure. Granted he allowed her in the operating room for almost every surgery he did, but to watch, nothing more. He just had her do a thousand and one errands. Busywork.
It was time for him to show her a little respect. She’d known that progress would be slow, but this was almost going backward.
Bailey bounced up, no longer tired. She knew what she was going to do, she thought. What she had to do. She was going to the hospital tomorrow morning and confront Munro. She would demand that he start teaching her something beyond how to dash to Radiology to fetch MRI films and rush them back to him. She hadn’t endured all those years of grueling study and endless bills to be an errand girl.
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Marie Ferrarella
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современные любовные романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Ivan Munro wanted to be feared, not loved… But Bailey DelMonico, his new intern, is determined to prove she isn′t afraid of him– and more. In her own way, Bailey is as brilliant as Ivan– and people like her. Having realized she wanted to be a surgeon after several failed life experiences, she deftly absorbs a barrage of criticism from Munro without ever losing faith in her dreams. Or her conviction to show Ivan that no life is set in stone…But the more Munro fights against his intern′s charm, the more cracks appear in his abrasive facade. Bailey soon sees that contrary to hospital gossip, Ivan has anything but a scalpel for a heart. Ever the optimist and always persistent, can Bailey now show Ivan that it′s never too late to change– or fall in love?