M.D. Most Wanted
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Marie Ferrarella
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16
Chapter 1
There were some days that Reese Bendenetti felt as if he just hit the floor running.
This was one of those days.
He’d been up, dressed and driving before he was fully awake. Normally punctual, Reese was running behind, thanks to an asthmatic alarm clock that had chosen this morning to make a sound more like a cough than a ring when it went off. The sound had barely registered in his consciousness, and he’d fallen back to sleep only to jerk awake more than half an hour later.
When it came to getting up, Reese had been cutting time to the bone as it was, setting the clock to give him just enough leeway to shower, shave and have breakfast—provided he moved at a pace that could easily be mistaken for the fast-forward speed on a VCR.
That had been before his fateful early-morning encounter with the “little alarm clock that couldn’t.” Consequently, the shower had lasted all of two minutes, his hair had still been wet when he’d gotten behind the wheel of his ’94 ’Vette—the single indulgence he allowed himself—and his face was fated to remain untouched by a razor until he could find some time at the hospital in between rounds, emergency room patients and whatever else the gods chose to throw at him this morning.
Eating was something he couldn’t think about until he came within coin-tossing distance of a vending machine at the aforementioned hospital, Blair Memorial.
Reese knew he only had himself to blame. No one had made him become a doctor, no one had told him to go into general surgery or to specialize in internal medicine. Those had been his own choices. His mother, bless her, would have been satisfied if he’d become a part-time sanitation engineer. As long as he was happy—that was her only criterion. Rachel Bendenetti never placed any demands on him, only on herself.
But healing was the only thing that did make him happy. It was in healing others that Reese felt as if he were healing himself, renewing himself. Building a better Reese Bendenetti.
He never quite understood why, he just knew that making someone else’s life a little better, a little easier, always managed to do the same for him.
That was why whenever Lukas Graywolf, a cardiac surgeon, returned to the reservation where he’d been born and raised, Reese always volunteered to go along with him and provide services to people who would otherwise not be able to afford them. The way he saw it, the rewards were priceless. It had never been about money for Reese.
He’d been enamored with medicine ever since he’d applied his first Band-Aid. Almost twenty-five years later he could still remember the circumstances. After calling him a name, Janet Cummings had turned and begun to run away, only to trip on the sidewalk. She’d scraped her knee badly and it had bled. Without hesitating, he’d run into the ground-floor apartment he and his mother were living in at the time, gotten a Band-Aid and peroxide out of the medicine cabinet—the way he’d seen his mother do—and run back outside to come to Janet’s aid.
He never stopped to think that she deserved it because she’d been nasty to him, all he could think of was to stop the bleeding. Watching him, Janet had stopped crying. When he was finished, she’d shyly kissed his cheek.
Reese remembered lighting up like a Christmas tree inside. Janet had been six at the time. He’d been almost seven.
It was a feeling that he wanted to have again, and he did. Each time he worked on a patient.
Working on Tomas Morales’s perforated ulcer was a little more complex than applying peroxide and a Band-Aid to a scraped knee, but the feeling of satisfaction was still the same.
Taking off his mask, he tossed it into the hamper and sighed, bone weary. The operation had taken longer than he’d expected. As he ran a hand through his hair, holding the green cap he’d just removed in his other hand, his stomach growled. Fiercely.
“I heard that all the way over here,” Alix DuCane cracked. She was standing by the sink, putting lotion on her freshly scrubbed hands. The gloves she’d just taken off chaffed her flesh. If she wasn’t careful, she thought, she was going to wind up with skin like a lizard.
As if in response, his stomach growled again. One of the orderlies chuckled to himself.
Reese shrugged, tossing the paper towel he’d just used to dry his hands into the wastebasket.
“That’s what happens when all you’ve had for breakfast is a small candy bar.” It’d been stale at that, he thought. Hazards of war.
Having removed her own surgical cap, Alix shook out her short, curly blond hair as she crossed to him. “It was at least a granola bar, I hope.”
Reese grinned and shook his head. “Nope. Chocolate bar. Pure sugar in a sticky wrapper. I think the candy in the vending machine down the hall is melting.”
She tended to agree, having hit the machine more than once for an energy surge in the past week. Alix frowned in mock disapproval. “Shame on you, Dr. Bendenetti. What kind of an example are you setting for your patients? You’re supposed to know better.”
His shrug was careless, loose-limbed. The movement hinted that there was an ache there somewhere, waiting to emerge and make him uncomfortable. He needed a new mattress, he thought. And the time in which to purchase it.
But first things first. “Know where I can get a reliable alarm clock?”
Alix smiled to herself. She knew of several women on staff at the hospital, including two physicians, who would have been more than happy to volunteer to wake Reese up personally, any hour of the day or night. So long as they could occupy the space beside him in the bed right before then.
There was no denying it, Alix thought, looking at her friend with an impartial eye. Reese Bendenetti was one desirable hunk, made more so by the fact that he seemed to be completely unaware of his own attributes. To her knowledge, he rarely socialized. When he did, it was to catch a beer or take a cup of coffee with a group from the hospital. Never one-on-one, except with her, and theirs was a purely platonic friendship. They had a history together, going back to medical school. He’d known her when she was still married to Jeff. Before the boating accident that had taken him away from her.
Alix knew firsthand what a solid friend Reese could be. It seemed to her that it was one of life’s wastes that Reese didn’t have anyone in his life who could truly appreciate the kind of man he was.
Sometimes, she mused, dedication could be too much of a good thing.
But there was still time. Reese was young. And you never knew what life had in store for you just around the next corner.
“Is that what happened this morning?” she asked as they walked out of the room connecting two of the operating rooms. He raised a brow at her question. “I happened to see you peeling into the parking lot.”
Reese smiled ruefully. Driving too fast was a vice of his, and he was trying very hard to curb it.
But this morning there’d been a reason to squeeze through yellow lights that were about to turn red. He absolutely hated being late for anything, most of all his work at the hospital.
“My alarm suddenly decided to turn mute,” he confessed. “I woke up fifteen minutes before I was supposed to be here.”
She’d been to his apartment on several occasions and knew he lived more than fifteen minutes away from Blair Memorial.
“You can really fly when you want to, can’t you?” His stomach growled again. Rotating her shoulders, Alix smiled. “Join me in the cafeteria if you feel like it. I’m having a late breakfast myself. Julie was up all night, cutting a tooth to the sound of the Irish Rovers singing ‘Danny Boy.’” She’d played the CD over and over again in hopes of putting Julie to sleep. As it was she’d spent half the night pacing the floor with the eighteen-month-old. “In the meantime I’ll see if I can scrounge up a rooster for you.”
“You do that.” But instead of following her, Reese began heading down the corridor toward the back of the hospital. “I’ll see you downstairs in a few minutes,” he promised. “There’re some people in the E.R. waiting room I have to talk to first.”
She nodded. There was protocol to follow. She knew how that was.
Her own stint on the other side of the operating arena had been a negative experience. Reese had been there with her, to hold her hand when the surgeon told her that everything humanly possible had been done, but that Jeff had still expired. Expired. As if he’d been a coupon that hadn’t been redeemed in time, or a driver’s license that had been allowed to lapse. Each time she’d had to face a grieving family since—which mercifully was not often—she remembered her own feelings and tempered her words accordingly. Neither she nor Reese believed in distancing themselves from their patients. That’s what made them such good friends.
“I’ll save a bran muffin for you,” she called out to Reese.
He made a face. Bran muffins were just about the only things he didn’t care for. Knowing that, Alix laughed as she disappeared.
Reese continued down the hall to the emergency waiting room area. This was the part he liked best. Coming out and giving the waiting family good news instead of iffy phrases. Tomas Morales had been to his office late last week. Choosing his words carefully, Reese had cautioned the man that playing the waiting game with his condition was not advisable. Morales hadn’t wanted to go under the knife, and while Reese understood the man’s fear, he also understood the consequences of waiting and had wanted to make the man painfully aware of them.
Painful being the key word here, he thought, because Morales had been in agony when he was brought into the hospital. His oldest daughter, Jennifer, and his wife had driven him to the emergency room.
This morning, as Reese had run into the hospital, he’d come through the electronic doors just in time to hear himself being paged.
And the rest, he mused, was history.
Mother and daughter stood up in unison the moment he walked into the waiting area. Mrs. Morales looked painfully drawn. There was more than a little fear in her dark eyes. Her daughter was trying to look more positive, but it was clear that both women were frightened of what he had to tell them.
Reese didn’t believe in being dramatic or drawing the spotlight to himself, the way he knew some surgeons did. He put them out of their misery even before he reached them.
“He’s going to be just fine, Mrs. Morales, Jennifer.” He nodded at the younger woman. Jennifer quickly translated for her mother. But it wasn’t necessary. The older woman understood what the look in her husband’s doctor’s eyes meant.
She grasped his hand between both of hers. Hers were icy cold. The woman kissed the hand that had held the scalpel that had saved her husband’s life before Reese had a chance to stop her.
“Gracias,” Ava Morales cried, her eyes filling with tears. Then haltingly she said, “Thank you, thank you.”
Embarrassed, but greatly pleased to be able to bring the two women good news, Reese gave Jennifer the layman’s description of what had happened and paused after each sentence while she relayed the words to her mother. He ended by telling them that they would be able to see Mr. Morales in his room in about two hours, after he was brought up from the recovery room.
“Maybe you and your mother can go down to the cafeteria and get something to eat in the meantime,” he suggested. “It’s really not bad food, even for a hospital.”
Jennifer nodded, her eyes shining with unspoken gratitude. Quickly she translated his words to her mother.
As he began to walk away, he heard the older woman say something to her daughter. He gathered from the intonation that it was a question.
“Please, Dr. Bendenetti, where’s the chapel? My mother wants to say a prayer.”
“He’s out of danger,” Reese assured her. Of course, there was always a small chance that things might take a turn for the worse, but the odds were negligible, and he saw no reason to put the women through that kind of added torture.
“The prayer is for you,” Mrs. Morales told him halting. “For thank-you.”
Surprised, he looked at her. And then he smiled. The woman understood far more than he thought.
Reese nodded his approval. “Can’t ever have too many of those,” he agreed. Standing beside Mrs. Morales, he pointed down the corridor. “The chapel’s to the left of the front admitting desk. Just follow the arrows to the front. You can’t miss it.”
Thanking him again, the two women left.
And now, Reese thought as he walked out of the waiting room, it was time to tend to his own needs. His stomach was becoming almost aggressively audible. He was just grateful that it hadn’t roared while he was talking to the Morales women.
He took a shortcut through the emergency area itself. As he passed the doors that faced the rear parking lot where all the ambulances pulled in, they flew open. Two paramedics he knew by sight came rushing in, pushing a gurney between them.
Instinct and conditioning had Reese taking the situation in before he was even aware that he had turned his head.
There was a woman on the gurney. The first thing he noticed was her long blond hair. It was fanned out about her like a golden blanket and gave almost a surreal quality to the turmoil surrounding her. She was young, well-dressed and conscious. And it was quite obvious that she was in a great deal of pain. There was blood everywhere.
So much for finding time for his stomach.
Reese fell into place beside the gurney. “Exam room four is free,” he pointed toward it, then asked, “What happened?” of the attendant closest to him.
The name stitched across his pocket said his name was Jaime Gordon. The dark-skinned youth had had two years on the job and was born for this kind of work. He rattled off statistics like a pro, giving Reese cause, effect and vitals.
“Car versus pole. Pole won. Prettiest jag I’ve ever seen.” There was a wistful note in his voice as he flashed a quick, wide grin. “If it’d been mine, I would have treated it like a lady. With respect and a slow, gentle hand.”
It was then that the woman on the gurney looked up at him. Reese caught himself thinking that he had never seen eyes quite that shade of green, a moment before the education he’d worked so hard to attain kicked in again. He began seeing her as a physician would, not a man.
The woman was conscious and appeared to be lucid from the way she looked at him, but there was grave danger of internal bleeding. He needed to get her prepped and into X-ray as quickly as possible.
As he trotted alongside the gurney, he leaned in close to the woman so she could hear him above the noise. “Do you know where you are?”
London Merriweather’s thoughts kept wanting to float away from her, to dissolve into the cottony region that hovered just a breath away, waiting to absorb her thoughts, her mind.
Ever word took effort. Every breath was excruciating. But she couldn’t stop. Don’t stop. You’ll die if you stop. The words throbbed through her head.
“I know where…I’m going to be…once…Wallace…catches up to me,” she answered. Her eyes almost fluttered shut then, but she pushed them opened. “Hell.”
It had been a stupid, stupid thing to do. But all she’d wanted was a few minutes to herself. To be free. To be normal.
Was that so wrong?
She hadn’t seen that pole. She really hadn’t.
Officer, the pole just jumped up at me, honest.
Her mind was all jumbled.
It would be so easy to slip away, to release the white-knuckled grasp she had on the thin thread that tethered her to this world of lights and sounds and the smell of disinfectant.
So easy.
But she was afraid.
For the first time in her life, London Merriweather was truly afraid. Afraid if she let go, even for a second, that would be it. She’d be gone. The person she was would be no more.
She was twenty-three years old and she didn’t want to lose the chance of becoming twenty-four.
And she would. If she slipped away, she would. She knew that as surely as she knew her name.
More.
Stupid, stupid thing to do. Wallace was only doing his job, guarding your body. That’s what bodyguards did. They guarded bodies.
They hovered.
They ate away at your space, bit by bit until there wasn’t any left.
Trying to fight her way back to the surface again, London took a breath in. The pain almost ripped her apart. She thought she cried out, but she wasn’t sure.
London raised her hand and caught hold of the green-attired man beside her.
Doctor?
Orderly?
Trick-or-treater?
Her mind was winking in and out. Focusing took almost more effort than she had at her disposal.
But she did it. She opened eyes that she hadn’t realized had shut again and looked at the man she was holding on to.
“I don’t want…to die.”
There was no panic in her voice, Reese noted. It was a bare-fact statement she’d just given him. He was amazed at her composure at a time like this.
She found more words and strung them together, then pushed them out, the effort exhausting her. She forced herself to look at the man whose hand was in hers.
“You won’t let…that happen…will…you.”
It wasn’t a question, it was a mandate. A queen politely wording a request she knew in her heart could not be disobeyed.
Who the hell was she?
Reese had the feeling that this wasn’t some empty-headed joyrider the paramedics had brought to him but a woman accustomed to being in control of any situation she found herself in.
This must be a hell of a surprise to her, then, he decided.
“No,” he told her firmly. “I won’t.”
He noticed the skeptical look in Jaime’s dark eyes, but Jaime didn’t command his attention now. The young woman did.
He’d told her what she’d wanted to hear. What he’d wanted to hear, too. Because, to do was first to believe it could be done. That was his mantra, it was what he told himself whenever he was faced with something he felt he couldn’t conquer.
Just before he conquered it.
The woman smiled at him then. Just before those incredible green eyes closed, she smiled at him. “Good,” she whispered.
And then lost consciousness.
The next moment the rear doors burst open again. A man came running into the E.R. The unbuttoned, black raincoat he wore flapped about him like a black cape. He was at least six foot six, if not more, relatively heavyset with wide shoulders that reminded Reese of a linebacker he’d once seen on the field. The man had looked like a moving brick wall.
So did this one. And he moved amazingly fast for someone so large.
“Who’s in charge here?” he demanded in the voice of a man who was accustomed to being listened to and obeyed. The next moment, not waiting for an answer, the man’s eyes shifted to him. “Is it you?”
“I’m Dr. Bendenetti,” Reese began.
The man was beside him in an instant. His face was pale, his eyes a little wild. Reese had no doubt that the man could probably reach into his chest and rip out his heart if he took it into his head to do so.
“This is Ambassador Mason Merriweather’s daughter. I want the finest surgeons called in for her. When this is over, I want her better than new, Doctor.” A good five inches taller, the man had to stoop in order to get into Reese’s face. He did so as he growled, “Do I make myself clear?”
Threats had always had a negative effect on Reese. Now was no different. Disengaging his hand from the unconscious woman, his eyes never left the other man’s face. They’d brought the gurney to the swinging doors of room four. He waved the team that had clustered around the rolling stretcher into the room.
When the man started to follow, Reese blocked his way, placing his hand on the bigger man’s chest. There was no way he was going to allow the other man into the room.
“You’ll have to wait outside while we decide what’s best for her.” Stepping inside, Reese turned away from the man and toward his patient.
The swinging doors closed on the man’s stunned, outraged face.
