Dr. Mom And The Millionaire

He’d been there. She hadn’t.

He didn’t say as much, but that was the message she got as challenge slipped once more into those disturbingly blue eyes.

“Good enough,” she told him, wondering why he couldn’t have piled up his car when someone else had been on call. “Get some rest.”

She stepped into the wide hall, feeling more as if she’d escaped the room rather than merely left it. She’d dealt with demanding type-As, the chauvinism prevalent among some of her male colleagues and her son’s terrible twos. All of which, she felt, qualified her as something of an expert when it came to handling difficult men.

But a woman didn’t handle Chase Harrington. She worked around him. Still, she hadn’t lost her cool when he’d lost his patience. Or when he’d so cavalierly informed her of how she could handle his leg and his medication. And she thought she’d done a commendable job of ignoring the way his glance kept moving to her mouth as she spoke. All he’d done was make her forget to ask if he had any more questions about his condition, which was something she rarely failed to do with a patient.

Irritated with herself for letting him get to her, refusing to go back and let him do it again, she headed for her next patient intent, for the moment, on putting the man from her mind.

Her intentions were honorable. But Brent Chalmers axed them within ten seconds of her walking into his card-and-mylar-balloon-filled room. The gangly blond teenager with the shy smile had heard that Chase was there.

He’d never actually heard of Chase before. Until a few weeks ago when his throwing arm had been mangled in a thresher, the boy’s life had centered around sports, a car he was saving to buy and the little farming community of Sylo a hundred miles away. If he’d ever read the business section of a newspaper, it was only because he’d been required to write a report on it for class. He’d just overheard the nurses whispering about some rich guy who’d climbed Mt. McKinley and his ears had perked up.

Brent was usually serious and quiet, and whenever he saw Alex he worried aloud about his ability to ever use his arm. Today, though, as she examined his nicely healing wounds all he wanted to talk about was how awesome it must feel to reach the top of the world.

“Man,” he mused. “Can you imagine the shape he must be in to do something like that?”

The question was rhetorical, but she could easily have answered it. Even as she marveled at the boy’s excitement, a mental picture of a beautifully muscled male intent on conquering a mighty mountain flashed in her mind. She couldn’t begin to imagine the determination, the endurance, the sheer strength of will such a challenge required. But Chase apparently went after what he wanted, claimed it, then moved on.

The thought disturbed her, almost as much as the odd jolt she’d felt when she’d first met his eyes.

What disturbed her more was that he’d distracted her from her patient.

“Do you, Dr. Larson?” Brent asked, shaking his stick-straight blond hair out of his eyes.

“I’m sorry.” Pulling the top of his gown back up over the muscles developing in his bony shoulders, she blinked at his narrow, expectant face. “Do I what?”

“Think you could ask him how long he had to train before he made his climb. And maybe you could ask how long it took. I mean, that would be so cool. Climbing like that, I mean. Wouldn’t it?”

“Actually, I can think of about eight hundred things I’d rather do than struggle for oxygen while I freeze my backside over a mile-high drop-off.” Smiling easily at his unbridled interest, she nodded to the nurse to replace his elastic bandage and sling. “Tell you what. Now wouldn’t be a good time, but if you’d like, I’ll ask Mr. Harrington if he feels up to having company tomorrow. If he does, you can talk to him about the mountain yourself before I release you on Monday.”

The mix of emotions flushing his face was fascinating. “Oh, don’t do that,” he begged. “I couldn’t talk to him. I mean not, like, to his face,” he explained, sounding as if she’d just suggested a personal audience with the Pope. “But, thanks. Yeah, really.” The onslaught of discomfort gave way to a smile. “I’m getting out of here?”

“You sure are. There’s something I haven’t told you, though. I haven’t had a chance to redo the room you’ll be staying in since I bought my house. It’s sort of pink.” Wendy, the pregnant teenager who’d lived with her until she’d delivered and moved out last month, had called it rose. It reminded Alex more of antacid. “And you have to share a bathroom with my four-year-old.”

His expression suddenly shifted, concern moving into features sharpening with the first angles of budding manhood. “I don’t mind, ma’am,” he murmured, his voice cracking. “I’m used to my little brothers and sisters.”

She hadn’t meant for him to go shy on her. But that’s how Brent usually was. It had only been the prospect of the extraordinary that had breached the adolescent self-consciousness and quiet manners she normally saw.

“I know you are,” she told him, rather wishing she could see that enthusiasm again. He was such a neat kid. And his family was salt of the earth. She’d met all four of his brothers and sisters. They and his parents had held vigil while she and a team of vascular surgeons had reconstructed his arm. Their prayers and his doctors’ skills had brought him this far, but it would take months of daily physical therapy for him to regain use of the limb. The problem was his parents’ insurance. It wouldn’t cover a live-in rehab facility and his family’s circumstances and distance from town made outpatient treatment impossible.

Alex had figured that two more weeks of intensive therapy would give him enough of a start to continue on his own at home. His beleaguered parents had been thrilled, and embarrassingly grateful, when she’d offered to have him stay with her during that time. Since she was used to having someone borrow her spare room, she told them, it wouldn’t be an inconvenience at all.

Alex left Brent a few moments later to move on to her next patient. But as she headed for elderly Maria and her shiny new knee, she couldn’t help wondering if Chase had ever known what it was like to truly need something and not be able to get it.

She was thinking about him again. Irritated with herself for not being able to get him out of her mind, she started down the hall, deliberately humming a repetitive tune from one of Tyler’s tapes. Once that melody got started in her head, she knew it would take forever to get it out. It drove her positively nuts. But she figured even that was better than wondering what it was that drove the compound femur in three-fifty-four.

Chapter Three

The mind-numbing melody had been replaced by the theme from Tarzan by the time Alex and Tyler arrived at Granetti’s for dinner at six o’clock that evening. Parking her sedate silver Saturn in her spot at the hospital, since the restaurant they were going to was across the street, she explained to her son for the third time that she wasn’t going to work, that they were going to dinner and, no, they couldn’t go to Pizza Pete’s.

“But I want pizza.”

“You can have pizza here. Or spaghetti,” she told him, which reminded her to grab a handful of wet-wipes from the glove box to stuff into her purse. “You like spaghetti better, anyway.”

Alex stifled a sigh as she watched her little boy scrunch his nose. The tiny golden freckles scattered over it seemed to merge as he considered her observation. Sometime in the last twenty-four hours, his baby-fine blond hair had managed to grow to below his eyebrows. He now needed a haircut as badly as he needed new tennies.

She supposed she should see if Brent wanted a haircut, too. The boy was beginning to look like a sheep dog.

Tyler’s frown suddenly changed quality. She could practically see the mental gears shifting behind his dark brown eyes as he unbuckled his seat belt and opened his door.

“How fast will a Viper go?”

“A viper?” she repeated, doing a little mental shifting of her own. She had no idea how he’d gone from pizza to reptiles. “I don’t know, honey. Is that the kind of snake that goes sideways?”

“It’s not a snake.” he informed her, as if she should have somehow known that. “It’s a car.”

“It is?”

“Yeah. And they go really fast. Does it go as fast as a Cobra?”

That, she knew, was definitely a car. Her next door neighbor’s son-in-law drove one. Tyler loved that thing. Especially when its tires squealed.

“It sure sounds like it should.” Checking her purse to make sure she had her pager, she looped the strap over her shoulder while Tyler scrambled out. She truly had no idea how his mind worked. The challenge was simply to keep up with him.

“Can we get a video with a Viper in it?” Tyler hollered, running around the back of the car.

Absently straightening the skirt of her sleeveless shift as she stood, Alex patiently told her forty-pound bundle of energy she didn’t know if they made Viper videos, then tucked the back of Tyler’s favorite T-shirt—a blue one sporting a green lizard—into the waistband of his cargo pants before she reached for his hand.

He was still talking as they crossed the street, informing her now that Tom, their cat, could watch the video with him, which somehow reminded him that he’d forgotten to feed his gerbil. With the low sun slanting its warm rays against her face and her precious, precocious little boy chattering away beside her, she should have been enjoying the moment.

Instead, she was trying to figure out what it was about Chase Harrington that disturbed her most. The way she’d seemed to absorb his agitation or the fact that she couldn’t seem to get him out of her mind.

The afternoon had been blessedly uneventful—if she discounted the fact that she’d discovered a new leak in her washing machine. After she’d finished rounds, she’d picked up Tyler at the hospital day-care center and headed for home. The guest room now had fresh sheets, the washing of which had revealed the leak, there was milk in her refrigerator and she and Tyler were on their way to a relatively quiet, uninterrupted dinner with her two closest friends and their families. There was no reason for her to be thinking of Chase now. She wouldn’t have to deal with him again until tomorrow.

Grasping that thought, she pushed open Granetti’s brass-trimmed door. The homey Irish-Italian pub-cum-restaurant was a comfortable, neighborhood sort of place that felt like a home away from home. On this particular evening, the atmosphere was even more welcoming.

Under the lattice-and-faux-grape-leaf-covered-ceiling and the Guinness beers signs on the back wall, a wide swath of black paper shouted Happy XXXII, Alex in bilious green. Neon-pink balloons hovered over the chairs.

Below the banner, tables had been pushed into a long line to accommodate the thirty-odd people who greeted her with a deafening “Surprise!” when she walked in holding Tyler’s hand.

“Wow! It’s a party, Mom!”

Stunned, Alex let his hand slide from hers. Before she could blink, her wide-eyed little boy had darted for the dark-haired preschooler dashing toward him. When he reached Griffin, his “very best” friend, they slugged each other and grinned.

“It’s about time you caught up with us. I hate it when you’re younger.” Kelly Hall wrapped Alex in a quick hug. Her honey-blond hair was plaited in its usual French braid and her hazel eyes were laughing. “Happy belated birthday.”