Дж. Уорд: Lover Unleashed

Oh, what things had she set in motion?

And where would they all be when this came to an end?

Sometimes the only way to know how far you’d come was to return to where you once had been.

As Jane Whitcomb, M.D., walked into the St. Francis Hospital complex, she was sucked back into her former life. In one sense, it was a short trip — merely a year ago, she’d been the chief of trauma service here, living in a condo full of her parents’ things, spending twenty hours a day running between the ER and the ORs.

Not anymore.

A sure clue that change had come a-knock-knock-knockin’ was the way she entered the surgical building. No reason to bother with the rotating doors. Or the ones that pushed into the lobby.

She walked right through the glass walls and passed the security guards at the check-in without their seeing her.

Ghosts were good like that.

Ever since she’d been transformed, she could go places and get into things without anyone having a clue she was around. But she could also become as corporeal as the next person, summoning herself into a solid at her will. In one form, she was utter ether; in the other, she was as human as she’d once been, capable of eating and loving and living.

It was a powerful advantage in her job as the Brotherhood’s private surgeon.

Like right now, for example. How the hell else would she be able to infiltrate the human world again with a minimum of fuss?

Hurrying along the buffed stone floor of the lobby, she went past the marble wall that was inscribed with the names of benefactors, and wended her way through the crowds of people. In and among the congestion, so many faces were familiar, from admin staff to doctors to nurses she’d worked with for years. Even the stressed-out patients and their families were anonymous and yet intimates of hers — on some level, the masks of grief and worry were the same no matter whose facial features they were on.

As she headed for the back stairs, she was on the hunt for her former boss. And, Christ, she almost wanted to laugh. Through all their years of working together, she had come at Manny Manello with a variety of OMGs, but this was going to top any multicar pileup, airplane crash, or building collapse.

Put together.

Wafting through a metal emergency exit, she mounted the rear stairway, her feet not touching the steps but floating above them while she ascended as a draft did, going up without effort.

This had to work. She had to get Manny to come in and take care of that spinal injury. Period. There were no other options, no contingencies, no lefts or rights off this road. This was the Hail Mary pass. . and she was just praying that the receiver in the end zone caught the fucking football.

Good thing she performed well under pressure. And that the man she was after was one she knew as well as the back of her hand.

Manny would take the challenge. Even though this was going to make no sense to him on so many levels, and he was likely to be livid that she was still «alive,» he was not going to be able to walk away from a patient in need. It simply wasn’t in his hardwiring.

On the tenth floor, she ethered through another fire door and entered the administrative offices of the surgery department. The place was kitted out like a law firm, all dark and somber and rich-looking. Made sense. Surgery was a huge revenue center for any teaching hospital, and big money was always spent to recruit, hold, and house the brilliant, arrogant hothouse flowers who cut people open for a living.

Among the scalpel set at St. Francis, Manny Manello was at the top of the heap, the head of not just a subspecialty, as she had been, but the whole kit and caboodle. This meant he was a movie star, a drill sergeant, and the president of the United States all rolled up into a six-foot-tall, stacked son of a bitch. He had a terrible temper, a stunning intellect, and a fuse that was about a millimeter long.

On a good day.

And he was an absolute gem.

The guy’s bread and butter had always been high-profile professional athletes, and he tackled a lot of knees and hips and shoulders that would otherwise have been career enders for football, baseball and hockey players. But he had a lot of experience with the spine, and although a neurosurgeon on backup would also be nice, given what Payne’s scans were showing, this was an orthopedic issue: If the spinal cord was severed, no amount of neuro anything was going to help her. Medical science just hadn’t progressed that far yet.

As she rounded the corner of the receptionist’s desk, she had to stop. Over to the left was her old office, the place where she had spent countless hours pushing papers and doing consults with Manny and the rest of the team. The nameplate on the door now read, THOMAS GOLDBERG, M.D. CHIEF, TRAUMA SURGERY.

Goldberg was an excellent choice.

Still hurt to see the new sign for some reason.

But come on. Like she’d expected Manny to preserve her desk and office as a monument to her?

Life went on. Hers. His. This hospital’s.

Kicking her own ass, she strode down the carpeted corridor, fiddling with her white coat and the pen in her pocket and the cell phone that she hadn’t had reason to use yet. There was no time to explain her back-from-the-dead routine or cajole Manny or help him through the mind fuck she was about to deliver. And no choice but to somehow get him to come with her.

In front of his closed door, she braced herself and then marched right through—

He wasn’t behind his desk. Or at the conference table in the alcove.

Quick check of his private bath. . not there either, and there was no moisture on the glass doors, or damp towels around the sink.

Back in the office proper, she took a deep breath. . and the faded scent of his aftershave lingering in the air made her swallow hard.

God, she missed him.

Shaking her head, she went around to his desk and looked over the clutter. Patient files, stacks of interdepartmental memos, reports from the Patient Care Assessment and Quality Committee. As it was just after five in the afternoon on a Saturday, she’d expected to find him here: Electives were not done on weekends, so unless he was on call and dealing with a trauma case, he should have been parked behind this mess pushing papers.

Manny put the «twenty-four/seven» in workaholic .

Heading out of the office, she checked his admin assistant’s desk. No clues there, given that his schedule was kept in the computer.

Next stop was down to the ORs. St. Francis had several different levels of operating rooms, all arranged by subspecialty, and she went to the pod that he usually worked in. Peering in through the glass windows in the double doors, she saw a rotator cuff being worked on, and a nasty compound fracture. And although the surgeons had masks and caps on, she could tell none of them was Manny. His shoulders were big enough to stretch even the largest of the scrub sets, and besides, the music drifting out was wrong in both cases. Mozart? Not a chance. Pop? Over his dead body.

Manny listened to acid rock and heavy metal. To the point where, if it hadn’t been against protocol, the nurses would have been wearing earplugs for years.

Damn it. . where the hell was he? There were no conferences at this time of year, and he had no life outside of the hospital. The only other options were him at the Commodore — either passed out from exhaustion on the couch at his condo or in the high-rise’s gym.

As she headed out, she fired up her cell phone and dialed into the hospital’s answering system.

«Yes, hello,» she said when the call was answered. «I’d like to page Dr. Manuel Manello. My name?» Shit. «Ah. . Hannah. Hannah Whit. And here’s my callback.»