Merline Lovelace - The Texan's Royal M.D.

She elicited the same basics from him. “Texas born and bred,” he admitted cheerfully. “I traveled quite a bit during my years in the navy, but this area kept pulling me back. It’s home to four generations of Brennans now. My parents, grandparents, one brother and two of my three sisters all live within a few blocks of each other.”

She eyed the ultraexpensive high-rises crowding the beachfront. “Here on the island?”

“No, they live in Houston. So do I, most of the time. I keep a place here on the island for the family to use, though. The kids all love the beach.”

“And you’re not married.”

It was a statement, not a question, which told Mike she wouldn’t be walking through the soft evening light with him if she had any doubts about the matter.

“I was. Didn’t work out.”

That masterful understatement came nowhere close to describing three months of mind-blowing sex followed by three years of growing restlessness, increasing dissatisfaction, angry complaints and, finally, corrosive bitterness. Hers, not his. By the time the marriage was finally over Mike felt as though he’d been dragged through fifty miles of Texas scrub by his heels. He’d survived, but the experience wasn’t one he wanted to repeat again in this lifetime. Although...

His psyche might still be licking its wounds but his head told him marriage would be different with the right woman. Someone who appreciated the dogged determination required to build a multinational corporation from the ground up. Someone who understood that success in any field often meant seventy-or eighty-hour workweeks, missed vacations, opting out of a spur-of-the-moment junket to Vegas.

Someone like the leggy brunette at his side.

Mike slanted the doc a glance. One of his sisters was a nurse. He knew the demands Kathleen’s career made on her and on the other professionals she worked with. Anastazia St. Sebastian had to have a core of steel to make it as far as she had.

His curiosity about the woman mounted as they turned onto a side street. A few steps later they reached the Spanish-style villa that had recently become one of Galveston’s most exclusive spots. It sat behind tall gates with no sign, no lit menu box, no indication at all that it was a commercial establishment. But the hundreds of flickering votive lights in the courtyard drew a pleased gasp from Zia, and the table tucked in a private corner of the candle-lit patio was the one always made available to the top officers and favored clients of Global Shipping Incorporated.

“Back to subjecting your bother to all kinds of medical torture,” he said when they’d been seated and ordered an iced tea for the doc and Vizcaya on ice for Mike, who sincerely hoped a slug of white rum would kill the lingering aftereffects of pálinka . “Did you always want to be a physician?”

“Always.”

The reply was quick but not quite as light as she’d obviously intended. Mike hadn’t survived all those summers and holidays in the bare-knuckle world of the docks without learning to pick up on every nuance, spoken or not.

“But....?” he prompted.

She flashed him a look that ran the gamut from surprised to guarded to deliberately blasé. “Med school’s been a long and rather grueling slog. I’m in the homestretch now, though.”

“But...?” he said again, the word soft against the clink of cutlery and buzz of conversation from other tables.

The arrival of the server with their drinks saved Zia from having to answer. She hadn’t shared her insidious doubts with anyone in her family. Not even Dominic. Yet as she sipped her iced tea she felt the most absurd urge to spill her guts to this stranger.

So why not confide in him? Odds were she’d never see the man again after tonight. There were only a few days left on her precious vacation. And judging from Dev’s comments about Global Shipping Inc., its president and CEO had a shrewd head on his shoulders. Granted, he couldn’t begin to understand the demands and complexities of the medical world but that might actually be a plus. An outsider could assess her situation objectively, without the baggage of having cheered and supported and encouraged her through six and a half years of med school and residency.

“But,” she said slowly, swirling the ice in her tall glass, “I’m beginning to wonder if I’m truly right for pediatric medicine.”

“Why?”

She could toss out a hundred reasons. Like the overwhelming sense of responsibility for patients too young or too frightened to tell her how they hurt. The aching helplessness when faced with children beyond saving. The struggle to contain her fury at parents or guardians whose carelessness or cruelty inflicted unbelievably grievous injuries.

But the real reason, the one she’d thought she could compensate for by going into pediatric medicine, rose up to haunt her. She’d never talked about it to anyone but Dom. And even he was convinced she’d put it behind her. Yet reluctantly, inexplicably, Zia found herself detailing the old pain to Mike Brennan.

“I developed a uterine cyst my first year at university,” she said, amazed that she could speak so calmly of the submucosal fibroid that had changed her life forever. “It ruptured during winter break, while I was on a ski trip in Slovenia.”

She’d thought at first that she’d started her period early but the pain had become more intense with each hour. And the blood! Dear God, the blood!

“I almost died before they got me to the hospital. At that point the situation was so desperate the surgeons decided the only way to save my life was to perform an emergency hysterectomy.”

She fell silent as the waiter materialized at their table to take their order. Mike sent him away with a quiet, “Give us some time.”

“I love children,” Zia heard herself say into the silence that followed. “I always imagined I’d have a whole brood of happy, gurgling babies. When I accepted that I would never give birth to a child of my own, I decided that at least I could help alleviate the pain and suffering of others.”

“But...”

There it was. That damned “but” that had her hanging from a limb like a bird with a broken wing.

“It’s hard giving so much of myself to others’ children,” she finished, her voice catching despite every attempt to control it. “So much harder than I ever imagined.”

Her doubt and private misery filled the silence that spun out between them. Mike broke it after a moment with a question that cut to the core of her bruising inner conflict.

“What will you do if you don’t practice medicine?”

“I’ll stay in the medical field, but work on another side of the house.”

There! She’d said it out loud for the first time. And not to her brother or Natalie or the duchess or her cousins. To a stranger, who didn’t appear shocked or disappointed that she would trade her lifelong goal of treating the sick for the sterile environment of a lab.

Like all third-year residents at Mount Sinai, she’d been required to participate in a scholarly research project in addition to seeing patients, attending conferences and teaching interns. Worried by the seeming increase in hospital-acquired infections among the premature infants in the neonatal ICU, she’d searched for clues via five years’ worth of medical records. Her extensive database included the infants’ birth weight, ethnic origin, delivery methods, the time lapse to onset of infections, methods of treatment and mortality rates.

Although she wouldn’t brief the results of her study until the much anticipated annual RRP—Residents’ Research Presentation—her preliminary findings had so intrigued the hospital’s director of research that he’d suggested an expanded effort that included more variables and a much larger sample base. He’d also asked Zia to conduct the two-year study under his direct supervision. If the grant came through within the next few months, she could start the research as her spring elective, then join Dr. Wilbanks’s team full-time after completing her residency.