Caro Carson - The Doctor's Former Fiancee

She’d given her two-week notice, packed up her apartment’s meager contents in a do-it-yourself moving van and driven from the mushy snow on the gray Potomac River to the cool and dry hill country of brown Central Texas. Dr. Montgomery had welcomed her with a brief handshake, announced that he was leaving before the job gave him another heart attack and literally walked out the door.

This morning. Monday. Her first day as the new chair of the Department of Research and Clinical Studies at West Central Texas Hospital had started with a bang.

West Central. It was a fine hospital with a crazy name.

Is it west or is it central? You’re either in the west or in the center; you can’t be both. Every time she saw the hospital’s name on a sign, she heard the lightly mocking question in her mind. The voice that posed the question was always the same: always masculine, always affectionate. Always her ex-fiancé’s.

It had been a running joke between them, becoming so ingrained in her psyche that the thought played automatically, even six years after he’d left his medical training behind and moved to Boston. Six years after he’d traded in his white coat and stethoscope for an MBA from the prestigious Harvard University. Six years after he’d left her, his supposedly beloved fiancée, behind. Alone.

Still, she could hear his laughter: Is it west or is it central?

She pushed open the double doors with more force than necessary. The nurses stared, perhaps surprised at the amount of force coming from someone as petite as she was. Her Italian-American grandfather had fallen in love with her Polynesian grandmother in the South Pacific during World War II. Lana could have inherited her very black hair from either grandparent, but her grandmother’s genes had given her hair its straightness and her eyes just a touch of an almond shape—and the petite height that came with both Polynesian traits.

If I can be an Italian-Pacific-Asian-American, why can’t the hospital be West Central? Are you saying I’m an oxymoron?

No, you’re a perfect combination. Hands down the sexiest, brainiest, beautiful-est—

Beautiful-est?

Beautiful-est, unique-est woman on earth, and I’m smart enough to make you mine.

Braden had tapped the diamond she’d worn on her finger, the proof of his undying love.

He’d given her the ring in the middle of their third year of medical school. On their way to the surgical suite where they’d been interning, he’d taken her by the hand and pulled her into the quiet, dim light of the hospital’s small chapel, gotten down on bended knee and popped the question. She’d floated through their shift that day—her ring tucked into her bra so it wouldn’t poke through her latex gloves—feeling happy even when her arms had ached from holding retractors for hours while a thoracic surgeon repaired someone else’s damaged heart.

For the next year, just a glance at the ring had made her feel good, even when she was on the eighteenth hour of her day, walking down these same corridors to yet another patient.

With an impatient smack of her file against her thigh, Lana stopped her memories. She’d known coming back here would trigger them, not that they’d ever completely stopped. But she’d long ago acknowledged that the past was the past, and it shouldn’t prevent her from taking advantage of this new position. The desire to avoid memories of her former fiancé wouldn’t prevent her from grabbing the best opportunity she—or anyone in her field—could hope for. It was a great step toward her future, as the single but successful Dr. Lana Donnoli, a woman on the cutting edge of research, bringing new cures and new hope to patients across the country.

There was nothing wrong with being single. There was nothing wrong with being successful.

Wasn’t that what you told Braden when you broke your engagement, that you understood his dedication to his career?

She was using this corridor only as a shortcut to the conference room, not to circumvent the hospital chapel.

The conference room was dead ahead. Money for the hospital—for her hospital—was at stake, but she knew very little about this research project. If the study was failing to show results, it could be canceled. They’d lose over a million in funding. That much, she’d been able to learn in the hour since her administrative assistant had told her this meeting was on her morning’s schedule.

She was going to have to think fast to keep up with the representative from Plaine Labs International who’d come to hear the status of the study being conducted at West Central.

Is it west or is it central? You can’t be both.

She wouldn’t have time for memories.

Thank God.

Chapter Two

Braden tapped his fingers impatiently on the conference room’s table while a senior resident fumbled with the projector for her laptop. She’d told him three times that Dr. Montgomery, Braden’s former faculty adviser, had asked her to present the study’s midpoint data.

When the laptop’s screen was finally, successfully projected on the wall, Braden took advantage of that awkward moment before the young doctor clicked on the icon that would start the slide show. He’d become an expert at gathering all kinds of intelligence in those seconds. File names that looked personal indicated that any PLI-provided laptops were not being used strictly for research. The name of any file often indicated how many versions existed. Always, Braden would note the amount of total slides before the first one ballooned up to fill the full screen—in this case, slide one of forty-three.

Forty-three.

Death by PowerPoint. It looked as though this resident planned to make it a slow, painful death.

Braden would cut it short after a polite amount of slides had passed. He’d already received the raw data from the midpoint of this study. He’d done the statistical analysis himself. While there was some trend toward the treatment group having a better outcome than the placebo group, there was no statistical difference. Plaine Labs International was not going to sink another 1.2 million dollars and another eighteen months of time into this study, not with such weak results at the midpoint.

It was a shame, because Braden had a soft spot in his heart for the subject: a new medicine for migraines, something his father had suffered from. The man had been a force to be reckoned with, but Braden had been awed as a child at seeing his indefatigable father laid low within moments of a migraine’s onset. This particular molecule wasn’t going to work, though. It was time for PLI to cut its losses and move on.

Time to kill someone’s dream.

The door behind him opened with a hard push, and the PowerPoint physician looked up from her laptop and exhaled in relief. “Ah, Dr. Donnoli is here—our new department chair. She’ll be able to field any questions after the presentation, I’m sure.”

Dr. Donnoli? Dr. Donnoli was in West Central Texas Hospital? It couldn’t be. She was in Washington, D.C., adding more impressive credentials to her curriculum vitae. He knew, because he knew where all the key research physicians in America were. But he swiveled his chair to look, and it was her.

The beautiful-est girl in the world.

Damn it all to hell.

* * *

Lana crossed the beige carpet to the conference table, taking care to walk as if she were as confident as she hoped she looked in her high heels and her dark blue coat dress.

“Dr. Donnoli?” A young woman in a lab coat addressed her. “Would you like to make the presentation to Mr. MacDowell?”

MacDowell? Lana’s gaze darted from the woman to the man in the dark suit. He’d been sitting with his back to the door when she’d walked in, but now he was facing her. Braden MacDowell. Her Braden MacDowell.