Dr. Bodyguard
Autorzy
Jessica Andersen
Lektury
16,2K
Rozdziały
14
Chapter One
“Wellington? Darn it, Wellington, are you in here?”
Genie shoved at the revolving door and squinted into the research lab’s darkroom, trying to pick out her irritating co-worker’s broad-shouldered silhouette. She stepped inside, fumbled for a switch and heard the ultrasonic whine of warming red lights over the rumble of machinery. “Because if you’re hogging the developer again when my name is clearly written on the sign-up sheet, I’ll—”
A blur of motion swept across the faintly red darkness. “Dr. Watson?”
“Wellington, I—” But it hadn’t been her floormate’s voice. “Who—”
The stranger’s hand clamped over her mouth. His hard, hot arm latched on to her ribs and crushed her back against his body. She opened her mouth to scream and tasted the powdered latex of a lab glove. Only a muffled whimper emerged.
“Shut up.” His voice was uneven, his breath sour and his silhouette black against the bloody red lights. “Just shut up, slut-doctor-whore. Ruin a man’s life and think nothing of it, will you?”
Genie screamed against the glove, thrashed and tried to elbow her captor in the ribs. He cursed and shoved her against the waist-high counter that circled the room. A starburst of pain sang as her hip smacked against something square and solid and red-black.
His heartbeat pounded against her shoulder, quick and scared—or was that hers?—and he thrust against her backside and growled over the clanking hum of the X-ray developer. She tried to wrench away and he pressed harder, pushing her against the counter as she flailed her hands against the warm, red-black air.
She was trapped. Powerless. And her office, safe and bright, wasn’t twenty feet away.
“Thought you were safe in your ivory tower, didn’t you?” The whisper slid across her skin as his hand cruised up to cup her breast and pinch her nipple through the starched lab coat. “Thought you could take her away from me and I’d do nothing?”
Genie felt her soft leather shoes slide on the linoleum floor as the sharp scent of spilled developer chemicals and madness stung her nose and tears burned her eyes. Shaking her head, she tried to say, No, no! Why are you doing this? I help people. I don’t take them away! But her struggles only excited him more and he tightened his grip.
“We’re smarter than you think, Doctor. We figured out what you and the old man are up to. And we’re going to stop you. Permanently. But first…”
He shifted his grip, his intent clear. Oh, God! Genie squealed and kicked backward but encountered only air. Her attacker chuckled and ground her harder against the sink. She whipped her body from side to side in an effort to loosen his hot, trembling arms while her hands groped wildly for a weapon. Something. Anything.
Her grasping fingers glanced off a pair of bandage scissors and sent them spinning to the floor.
Oh, God!
She flailed, straining against his superior strength and trying for the freedom she knew was only a few feet away. Then at the last possible moment, when she heard the rasp of his zipper and felt his cruel, groping hand on her body, Genie touched something else with a straining fingertip.
Something heavy.
Something cold and metal and sharp-cornered.
As his hot fingers slithered up her leg beneath the sensible gray wool skirt, Genie screamed against the impersonal latex glove, grabbed the metal thing and swung it over her shoulder with all her might.
There was a sickening thud as it connected. A bitter curse. Warm wetness sprayed her cheek and the hand fell away from her mouth. She was free!
Then she saw a quick movement of black shadow against the unholy red light.
Pain exploded in her head.
And she saw no more.
“DR. WATSON? Dr. Watson?”
At first the voice reminded her of the loudspeaker at St. Agnes, where she’d done her residency. Dr. Watson. Paging Dr. Watson. Dr. Watson to the NICU.
She’d hated the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, full of sick babies, some born with genetic disorders. For many of the tiny lives in the NICU the cures were few, the costs high, and the bright spark of consciousness too quickly snuffed. Like Marilynn. Poor, dear Marilynn. Genie shuddered and tried to slide deeper into the beckoning blackness.
But the voice wouldn’t allow that. “Dr. Watson? Genie? Come on now, wake up.”
She must be dreaming. She heard the rubba-thump, rubba-thump of the light-proof revolving door and wondered what the light lock was doing in her bedroom.
“Genie? Can you hear me?” For that matter, what was a man’s voice doing in her bedroom? The last time that had happened the voice had belonged to the cable guy, and he’d been whiny and had a hanging butt crack the size of a Smithfield ham.
“She’s unconscious. And look at all that blood.” Another voice murmured agreement as the first one said, “Where the hell are the paramedics? The genetic research building is part of Boston General, for chrissake. The E.R.’s right down the street. What’s taking them so long?”
Frustration edged the tone, but the voice was still nice-gruff and interesting, without the nasal twang of Boston. His voice made Genie feel warm and fuzzy and she wanted to snuggle into the sound and bring it with her to the safe darkness.
“Genie? Can you hear me? Open your eyes, sweetheart.”
Sweetheart? She liked that. She hadn’t been anyone’s sweetheart in a long, long time. Not since her father died.
Her eyes remained stubbornly closed when she ordered them to open, but her head began to hurt like hell as if the act had alerted thousands of anxious neurons that she was conscious and ready for pain.
Rubba-thump, rubba-thump. The sound of the revolving light lock magnified the throbbing behind her eyes and she began to feel the hard, cool floor beneath her. This wasn’t her bedroom and, oh, she was beginning to hurt.
A new voice, excited. “The police and the paramedics are here.” An audible gulp. “Is Dr. Watson going to be okay? That’s an awful lot of blood.”
“I don’t think it’s all hers. I hope to hell it’s not.” She could feel her anchor move away. With a monumental effort she cracked open her eyes and made out a blurry man-shape against the bright, stabbing light.
“Don’t leave me. Please.” Was that pitiful croak really her own voice? It must have been, because she heard him crouch down beside her, felt him take her hand—
And she slid back into the warm, blessed darkness, taking his presence with her. Feeling safe.
“WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED, Nick?” Leo Gabney looked as though he wanted to yank at his hair as he paced the moss green waiting room at Boston General’s E.R. Instead he pulled a soggy handkerchief from his back pocket, wiped it across the top of his glistening scalp, turned and marched back the way he had come.
Nick watched his boss pace and didn’t say a word. He’d screwed up, that’s what happened. The developer room was across the hall from his office, for God’s sake. He should’ve known something was wrong. He should’ve been quicker, smarter. Better, said the Senator’s voice in the back of his head, and Nick twisted his lips in rare agreement.
He’d been annoyed when Jill had told him she hadn’t developed yesterday’s DNA sequencing because the darkroom was still being used. He’d said something pithy and rude about the one-step-holier-and-a-heck-of-a-lot-smarter-than-the-creator M.D., Ph.D. he was forced to share lab space with and had ignored the Occupied—Please Do Not Enter sign on the darkroom door. He’d simply barged in, intent on giving Dr. Genius a piece of his mind.
The red lights had been on. He’d expected that, since only an idiot would handle autorad film in white light and Dr. Genius was anything but an idiot. But he hadn’t expected the little room to be torn apart, with film cassettes opened and scattered willy-nilly and the developer’s guts strewn about like spaghetti.
Then he’d stepped further into the room and his foot had slipped on something dark. Something trailing. A black ribbon that led directly to the crumpled lab coat under the sink. He’d flicked on the fluorescents and the red of the dark lights had become a patchwork of macabre crimson splashes on the floor and walls.
Blood. Lots of it. And the motionless body of his archnemesis, Dr. Eugenie Watson, M.D., Ph.D.
“Gentlemen?” The strange voice echoed in the E.R. waiting room and Nick shot to his feet. It wasn’t the cops this time. It was a doctor in bloodstained greens.
It was too soon. They couldn’t possibly have stopped all that bleeding in so little time. She must’ve died.
Genius Watson was dead.
Nick remembered that he’d been rude to her that morning in the elevator, more out of habit than any real rancor, and perhaps also because for one brief moment he’d thought she looked nice in the soft gray wool skirt and high-buttoned blouse. Pretty. Touchable.
When a man started thinking of gray wool and lace collars as sexy, he needed to get laid. Fast. Or so he’d thought at the time. Now all he could think was that he’d do anything to go back in time and murder the guy in the darkroom for trashing their experiments and injuring Dr. Watson.
Killing her?
He had a sudden, sharp image of Watson’s bloody hand lying in his as they rode to the hospital in the shrieking ambulance. She had begged him not to leave when she should have been cursing him for not finding her sooner. How had he not known something was wrong? He’d been sitting in his office wrestling with that damned journal article. How had he not sensed something? Heard something?
“Is she—” Even Leo Gabney, the most insensitive man Nick had ever met, was unable to finish the question.
“Eugenie Watson is one tough lady.”
Nick glanced quickly at the doctor. “Then she’s—”
“Going to be fine.” Apparently the doctor was familiar with this fill-in-the-blanks form of conversation. “She has a whopping headache and a few stitches to close up the laceration across her eyebrow, but there’s no indication of more serious damage.”
“But what about—”
“The blood?” The doctor grinned. “Very little of it was hers. Her attacker must’ve been a mess when she was through with him. I’ve discussed it with Detective Sturgeon and he’ll put area hospitals on the lookout.”
Nick thought about the panty hose torn half off her body. He hated to ask. “Was she—”
The doctor shook his green-capped head. “No evidence of further sexual assault. I’d say she changed his mind by fighting back.” Both Nick and Gabney relaxed marginally. The doc continued, “But we can’t be sure exactly what happened. She doesn’t remember anything about the attack, which isn’t surprising if you consider what a horrible experience it must have been. The brain has its own way of protecting itself.”
“She doesn’t remember anything?” Nick spun toward the new voice, having not realized that Detectives Sturgeon and Peters had entered the room. Sturgeon was sucking one of the peppermints he’d been working his way through ever since he’d arrived at the lab on the heels of the paramedics. His sallow cheeks, moving in and out with each peppermint suck, made him as if he should be behind glass at the Boston Aquarium rather than at the helm of a major investigation. “Is she conscious?”
The doctor wasn’t intimidated by Sturgeon’s scowl. “She doesn’t remember the attack, and she’s conscious now but not in any shape to answer questions. You’ll have to wait.”
Then, just as Nick was coming to like the doctor, the guy said, “You can make do with this gentleman. He found Miss Watson.”
The cops turned with identical fishy looks and Peters flipped to a new page on his pad. “And your name would be?”
Nick sighed. “Dr. Nicholas Wellington the Third, Ph.D.”
Sturgeon raised an eyebrow. “Any relation to the Nicholas Wellington that ran for president a few years ago?”
Feeling that helpless mix of guilt and anger that always came with thoughts of the Senator, Nick nodded. “He’s my father.”
“I’M FINE.” Genie batted at the nurse’s hands and shooed the blood-pressure cuff away. “I’m a doctor, I should know when I’m okay to leave, don’t you think?” The nurse rolled her eyes and glanced at a nearby man in green scrubs as if to say Not frickin’ likely. The frazzled intern who grinned in reply didn’t look a day over fourteen.
Genie winced at the unkind thought. She hadn’t been much older than that when she interned—a fact her colleagues never let her live down. She was the last person who should be complaining about her doctor’s age, particularly when he was agreeing with her.
“That’s correct, you’re perfectly fine. Now.” He paused for emphasis. “But you know as well as I do that after a concussion of such severity you should be monitored for at least the next twenty-four hours in case there is additional swelling of the brain.”
She hated how he said “the brain” as if it belonged to someone else. It was her brain damn it, and it had no right to swell without her permission. Since she hadn’t given it permission to get any bigger than it already was, she should be able to go home.
But the fourteen-year-old intern remained firm. He crossed his arms over his weedy chest and frowned. “The only way I’m going to release you is if there’s somebody with medical training to observe you. Do you have any colleagues you could call? Any friends that could help you?”
Genie opened her mouth to reply, but nothing came out. How pitiful it sounded to say, “No. There’s no one.” But it was true.
Sure, she had acquaintances. She chatted with the elderly Chinese lady who cleaned the lab each night and she knew the names of all the grandchildren in the pictures that lined Ben’s desk at the security kiosk. And she had colleagues that she nodded to in the halls and smiled at in the lunchroom.
But there was nobody to call and say, “I’ve got a concussion. Will you come stay with me so I can sleep?”
Nobody.
Inexplicably, a low, intimate voice floated through Genie’s mind. She didn’t clearly remember anything after hearing the rubba-thump of the darkroom door behind her when she’d gone to develop the day’s films, but she did have a sketchy recollection of a comforting presence in the ambulance. She remembered a large, warm hand holding hers and a gentle voice saying she was going to be okay.
She assumed it had been a paramedic, and made a mental note to thank him for his excellent bedside manner—though with the way her bruised brain was working, it could be a few weeks before that particular note surfaced.
The nurse and the young intern left in a swirl of white and green, and when the door swung the other way, it revealed the face of Genie’s least favorite administrator.
She tried to summon a convincing scowl, one that would soothe the worried look on his face. “Jeez, Leo, don’t I rate anyone better? Couldn’t they have sent Hetta from personnel or Louie from accounts payable? Even one of Dixon’s goons. Anyone would be a better deathbed visit than you.” Though she didn’t like him much as an administrator, Leo was one of her favorite acquaintances and he smiled at her feeble snarl.
“Nope, everyone else already had plans. Since neither you nor I have a life, we were unanimously chosen for the roles of visitor and visited.” He tried to grin, but it faltered and his hand trembled as he wiped a handkerchief across his sweating head. “Jesus, Genie. I… I…” He couldn’t finish, just shrugged, and she wondered if he had been the one to find her in the darkroom.
She’d seen the bloodstained lab coat before the police had taken it away, but when she tried to imagine the attack, her mind slid away and showed her other things instead. Fields. Butterflies. Flowers. The hazy shape of a man holding his hand out to her.
Since Genie’s greatest source of pride was her well-ordered, methodical mind, she did not like this open rebellion and planned to make her brain behave at the earliest possible moment. But to do that, she had to go home. She’d never get any peace at Boston General. There would be candy stripers trying to cheer her up until she wanted to throttle them, doctors shining lights in her eyes every five minutes to make sure she wasn’t in a coma, and that big woman nurse with the mustache and the sponge baths…
She had to get out of here.
“Will you take me home, Leo?” It was worth a try, but even before the words were out, he shook his head.
“No. No. I don’t think that’s a good idea, Genie. You’re pretty banged up.” He paused and she could read the words, Although it could’ve been a whole lot worse, in his gaze. “No. I think you should stay right here and let the doctors look after you while the police find whoever did this.”
Genie didn’t want to think about who had attacked her. Even the word police made nausea swirl higher and sweat bead. She didn’t want to think about being attacked. Not here, not now. She needed to go home.
Needed to be alone so she could fall apart in private.
She frowned to keep the tears away, but the movement pulled at the stitches on her forehead and made her headache worse. “Then go away. I don’t want any visitors unless they’re going to take me home.” She stopped Leo on his way out. “Hey. Can you find the guy that rode with me in the ambulance? I want to thank him.”
Leo looked surprised. “You do? But I thought you didn’t…” He trailed off, then shrugged. “Okay, I’ll go get him.”
“He’s here?” Didn’t paramedics hang out at fire-houses? Or in ambulances? She thought so, though her E.R. experience was limited to a quick three-week rotation and taped reruns of the popular television show.
“Yeah, right outside. He’s been waiting around to make sure you were going to be okay. He was real worried about you.”
“Then send him in and go away, Leo.” The administrator headed for the door and Genie called after him, “And, Leo? Thanks for coming. Thanks for looking upset.” Even though he was probably more concerned about lawsuits and PR nightmares, it was nice to think that someone cared.
When he was gone, the nausea subsided and was replaced with a warm, fuzzy feeling Genie thought might be due to the little pill Nurse Walrus had given her a few minutes earlier. Her mind drifted.
She needed, she thought irrelevantly, to get a life. If nothing else, this…incident had brought home the fact that she’d let important things slide while she’d pursued her medical degree, then her Ph.D., becoming the youngest Primary Investigator that Boston General had ever seen.
She made another mental note. Make a few friends. Go on a date. Her lips curved. A date? With whom? The pool of eligible men at Boston General was pretty shallow. She certainly wasn’t dating George Dixon again—been there, done that, got the restraining order—and most of the other researchers she knew were either ancient, married or—as in the case of the handsome antichrist she shared lab space with—egocentric jerks.
At the thought of her worthy opponent, something niggled at the back of Genie’s brain, but the rumble of Leo’s voice in the hall diverted her and she thought that her paramedic must be pretty inefficient if he waited for each of his patients to wake up. Or else he’d picked up on the same weird vibrations she’d felt run up her arm when he’d been holding her hand in the ambulance.
She plucked at the overwashed sheet and wished she were wearing something other than a hospital johnny. Wished she had a comb and a mirror. Wished she hadn’t run out of laundry and been forced to scrounge in the back of her underwear drawer. Her heart sank at the thought of her colleagues at Boston General seeing the zebra striped satin panties and matching bra her mother had optimistically sent from Paris.
Never mind what the paramedic thought, she could just imagine the talk in the doctors’ lounge. Hey, did you see what Watson was wearing when they brought her in? Whoo-whee. Hot stuff for such a cold fish.
Genie didn’t want to be hot stuff. She didn’t want to be a cold fish. She just wanted to be—
The door opened. She glanced over to thank her paramedic and perhaps, since there was no time such as the present to work on her new resolve, ask him if she could buy him a drink. But instead her heart gave an unsteady thump and all that came out of her mouth was a startled, “Beef!”
The big blond man at the door stopped, looked intently at her, and a slow, sexy grin creased his face. He nodded and said in a disturbingly familiar drawl—one that could even be called nice if she stretched it—“Genius.”
And the battle lines were drawn. Again.
He knew she hated the nickname that had plagued her since she’d skipped fourth and fifth grades, landing smack in junior high at the age of eight. He called her that to bug her, the same reason she called him Beef to his face when the other women did it behind his back.
Nicholas “Beef” Wellington the Third. He might think the nickname was a culinary reference, but the women knew better. They called him Beef as a tribute to his masculine physique, a testimony to his hunkiness and grade-A buns.
Except for Genie. She called him Beef because she knew it irked him and because he was everything she was not—gorgeous, popular, wealthy and well-connected. And sexy. Had she mentioned sexy? He was also sloppy and easygoing, and for the past several months, Leo had forced her to share her precious lab space with him. Her equipment.
Practically her life.
Dr. Genius Watson and Dr. Beef Wellington. They were opposites. Thesis and antithesis. Matter and antimatter. Genie figured that over time they’d either cancel each other out or repel each other into different universes.
She was betting on the latter.
“I was expecting somebody else,” she said. “A paramedic.” Please, she thought, let it have been a paramedic.
Beef Wellington crossed the room in two ambling strides. His lab coat was unbuttoned and the weight of the ID badge, radiation monitor and pen collection in his left breast pocket pulled the coat askew to give her a quick glimpse of the tight, perfect chest and flat stomach beneath the worn T-shirt. There were rusty stains on his sleeves and on the faded jeans that showed through the gap in the white coat.
His dark blond hair had outgrown its midsummer buzz cut and drooped across his forehead and ears as though it couldn’t bear to be away from his face with its wide Viking cheekbones and slashing blade of a nose.
He leaned close and Genie could smell him, a combination of warm soap, acrylamide gel and male musk. He practically oozed pheromones. “Why do you need a paramedic? You sick or something?”
He seemed to have conveniently forgotten that she was lying in a hospital bed with stitches and a concussion. From the way her heart was tap dancing in her chest, she wouldn’t doubt a touch of arrhythmia, too.
She started to frown, then winced instead. “Never mind. Why are you here? Wasn’t it bad enough the administration inflicted Leo on me? They had to send you, too? Why? So you could gloat about having my equipment to yourself for the rest of the day? I think I’m feeling sicker by the minute.”
“Leo said you wanted to see me.” Wellington’s icy-blue eyes flashed as he said the name. Genie wondered fleetingly what the administrator had done to earn his ire this time—besides making him share lab space with a woman he couldn’t stand, of course.
As her hope that she hadn’t actually held Wellington’s hand started to crumble, Genie tried one last time. “Nope. I wanted to see the guy who rode here in the ambulance, to thank him. Leo said he was waiting outside. Did you see him?”
In the sickly hospital light she thought she saw the big man flinch. He nodded with a ghost of his usual grin. “Yeah. Sorry to ruin your day, Genius, but that was me.”
If she hadn’t been afraid it would attract the attention of the big, mustachioed nurse, Genie would’ve groaned. Wellington? Beef Wellington had held her hand all the way to the hospital? And she had liked it? Had vibrations?
She muttered, “I think I need another CAT scan,” and pulled the covers up over her face.
His dry chuckle sounded in the room and her stomach gave a little flutter. Probably from the concussion. “No you don’t. Dr. Murphy says you’ll be fine with a little rest. You’re just embarrassed that you begged me to hold your hand and ride with you.” His voice, mellow and warm, dropped a conspiratorial notch. “I won’t tell if you don’t.”
She spluttered and yanked the covers back down, squinting in the overbright light. “I never begged.”
“Suit yourself, Watson.” Nick moved around the room with purpose, locating her clothes on a nearby stool and holding out the gray wool skirt that she never wanted to see again as long as she lived. “Get dressed, the doc says you can go home.”
“I can?” Genie couldn’t look at the skirt so she focused on his eyes, which were a warmer shade of blue than she remembered. Melting ice rather than a glacier. “He changed his mind?”
“Not exactly.” Wellington looked down and noticed that the skirt was stiff with dried blood. He dropped it back on the pile and wiped his hands on his stained lab coat. “Never mind that. You can wear a blanket out. Want me to help you?”
“No, thank you.” She didn’t want his help. She didn’t want his presence. She particularly didn’t want him to see her zebra undies through the mile-wide slit in the back of the johnny.
But when she sat up, the room spun sickeningly and the honey rice cake she’d scarfed down between experiments that morning threatened a return visit.
“Easy there. I’ve got you, you’re okay.” His hands were steady on her shoulders and she sagged forward against his solid chest until she could feel his heartbeat against her cheek.
Suddenly her head didn’t hurt so much anymore.
“I want to go home.” She didn’t care that she was whining, that there were tears in her voice. She wanted her condo. She wanted a shower. She wanted to be alone when the tears came.
“I know you do. We’re going.” His voice rumbled against her cheek and the room spun again as he gathered her, blankets and all, in his arms and lifted her as though she weighed no more than her kitten. She closed her eyes and pressed her face in the hollow between his jaw and shoulder, where the smell of soap and musk was strongest.
“Are you taking me to a cab?” She didn’t think she had the strength to get herself out of a taxi and into her condo, but if that’s what it took to reach her own bed, she’d find a way—even if it meant crawling up the stairs on her hands and knees with her safari underwear shining like a striped beacon out the back of the hospital johnny.
She thought he smiled, heard a thread of laughter in his voice as he replied, “You’re not getting rid of me that easily, Genius.” The automatic doors whooshed open and she felt the change as they escaped from the hospital into the night air, crisp with fall in New England even through the funk of nearby Chinatown. “I’m taking you home.”
THE WATCHER SAW A BIG MAN in a doctor’s coat carry Dr. Watson past a row of busy ambulances toward the garage. She was wrapped in a blue blanket and from his vantage point deep in the darkness of a recessed stairwell, the watcher imagined her naked. He throbbed with frustration as he imagined what might have been. It should have been a warning for her. A pleasure for him.
His fingers rose to touch the neat bandage above his ear as desire turned to anger. The bitch had hurt him. She was going to pay for that.
Before, he’d merely wanted to stop her.
Now, he was going to end her.
