Lynne Marshall - A Mother For His Adopted Son

“What’s the name of the head of the department?” Sam asked.

“Judith Rimmer. Or, as we volunteers like to call her, Helen Mirren without the star power. Hubba-hubba, if you know what I mean.”

Sam’s brows rose at the thought—so even old guys had crushes—but off to the dungeon he went. Once he exited the elevator, he wondered why the fluorescent lights even looked dimmer down in the hospital basement, but pressed on. He passed the Matériel Management department, then Central Service—the cleaning and sterilization area. He knew where Pathology was—he’d visited there regularly to get early reports on his patients and to discuss prognoses with the pathologists. He’d also unfortunately been to the morgue far more often than he cared to in the line of duty. Nothing cut deeper than losing a child patient, and for the sake of science he’d sat in on his share of autopsies to help make sense of the tragedies.

Sam sidestepped the morgue double doors, refusing to even glance through the ocean-liner-style windows for activity, then squinted and saw the small department sign for Ocularistry and Anaplastology in bold black letters. How many people would even know what it meant?

The office was shoved into the farthest corner in the hallway, as if it had been an afterthought. The panel of fluorescent lights just outside the door blinked and buzzed, in need of a new tube, making things seem eerier than they already were. He wasn’t sure whether to knock or just go inside. He glanced at his watch, he’d wasted enough time finding the department, so without a moment’s further hesitation he pushed through the door of the “prosthetic eye people’s” department.

A dainty, young platinum-blonde woman with short hair more in style with a 1920s flapper than current fashion arranged flesh-colored silicone ears under a glass display case, as if they were necklaces and earrings in an upscale jewelry store. She looked nothing like Helen Mirren but might pass as her granddaughter. What had that volunteer been talking about? On the next table sat a huge model of an eyeball. He narrowed his gaze at the odd juxtaposition.

The woman glanced up with warm brown eyes surrounded with dark liner and smoky underlid smudges. Not the usual look he noticed in the hospital, and the immediate draw caught him off guard. His son was in Recovery, having just lost an eye, for God’s sake. He had no right to notice an attractive woman! The fact he did ticked him off.

“I’m looking for Judith Rimmer.” Okay, so he sounded gruffer than necessary, maybe impatient, but it wasn’t even noon and he’d already been through one hell of a no-good, very bad day, to paraphrase one of his son’s favorite books.

“She’s currently in Europe,” Andrea Rimmer said. The intruder had barged in and brought a whole lot of stress with him, and her immediate response was to bristle.

The brown-haired man with intense blue eyes, of which neither was prosthetic, stared her down, not liking her answer one bit. He may be a head taller than she was, but she wasn’t about to let him intimidate her. She’d had plenty of practice of standing up to men like that with her father.

“When will she be back?” He seemed to look right through her, which further ticked her off. Wasn’t she a person, too? Was her grandmother the only one who mattered in this department?

“Next week.” She could play vague with the best of them.

“I’ll come back then.”

It hadn’t been her idea to take the apprenticeship for ocularist four years ago. Nope, that had been good old Dad’s plan. She’d barely graduated from the Los Angeles Art Academy when he’d pressured her into getting a “real job” while she found her bearings in the art world. Now that she was in her last year of the apprenticeship, and since Grandma was threatening to retire and was expecting Andrea to take her place, she’d felt her back against the wall and resented the narrow choice being shoved down her throat. Work full-time. Run the department. The place didn’t even have windows!

What about her painting? Her dreams?

Had the demanding doctor brushed her off by assuming she was an inexperienced technician because she was young? She didn’t think twenty-eight was that young, but being short probably made her seem younger. If he thought he could be rude because she was young or a nobody, this guy with the tense attitude had just pushed her intolerant button.

“She may not be coming back.” She sounded snotty, which wasn’t her usual style, as she rearranged the ears again. But she didn’t really care because this guy, who may be good-looking but seriously lacked the charm gene so who cared how good-looking he was, had just ruined her morning for no good reason.

She glanced up. He raised a brow and stared her down in response to her borderline impudent reply, and she saw the judgment there, the same look she’d seen in her father’s eyes time and time again. I’m a doctor. You dare to talk to me like that?

The imaginary conversation quickly played out in her head. What? Am I not good enough for you? A feeling, unfortunately, she’d had some experience with on the home front most of her life. After all, wasn’t she the daughter of a woman with only a high-school education? A stay-at-home mother keeping a spotless house for a husband who rarely visited? A woman so depressed she’d turned into a shadow of her former self? Half of her DNA might be genius, but the other half, often insinuated by her father, was suspect. Well, good ol’ Dad should have thought about that before knocking up her mother if it meant so damn much to him.

The invading doctor continued to stare down his nose at her. Andrea wasn’t about to back down now. The nerve. Did he think she was a shopgirl, a department receptionist minding the store while Granny frolicked in France? She’d just spent a week making this latest batch of silicone ears, measuring the patients to perfection, matching the skin color, creating the simplest and most secure way to adhere them to what was left of their own ears. And unless anyone looked really closely, no one would notice. Just ask the struggling musician Brendan, who’d had his earlobe chopped off by a mobster, what he thought about her skills!

“What do you mean, she may not be coming back?” His tone shifted to accusing as if he should have been privy to the memo and voted on the decision. Wasn’t that how demanding doctors, just like her father, behaved? I need this now. Don’t annoy me with facts . He stood, hands on hips, his suit jacket pushed aside, revealing his trim and flat stomach—wait, she didn’t care about his physique because he was rude—refusing to look away from the visual contact they’d made. Something really had this guy bothered, and she was the unfortunate party getting the brunt of it.

“It’s called retirement.”

His wild blue stare didn’t waver, and, as illogical as it seemed under the circumstances, something was going on with the electrical charge circulating around her skin because of him.

A beeper went off on his belt, breaking the standoff and the static tickling across her arms. He glanced at it. She was glad because she really didn’t know how much longer she could take him standing in the small outer office, and most especially gazing into those intense eyes.

It was her job to notice things like that. Eyes. Yeah, she’d become quite an expert during her apprenticeship. If she kept telling herself that, maybe she wouldn’t scold herself later for falling under the spell of a completely pompous stranger based solely on his baby blues.

“I’ve gotta go.” Obviously in no mood to deal with her touchy technician act, he turned and huffed off, right out the door.