Cara Colter - The Greatest Risk

He looked quickly away from Faye to public relations genius, Abby Edwards. Abby’s lovely golden-brown eyes held nothing but admiration for him.

It was quiet now as the audience waited. Dr. Strong wanted the love back. The silence was an empty void he was compelled to fill with his voice.

“I have a special surprise for all of you today,” he announced. “To coincide with the opening of this leading-edge clinic, I am unveiling an amazing new product.”

He liked the little murmur of anticipation. They thought he was just a motivational speaker, the latest health and fitness guru, but Richard’s days of being underestimated were over. He was a scientist, an inventor, a miracle worker.

Really, he knew he should hold on a bit longer before releasing NoWait. The science on his new product was not quite as solid as it could have been. But he knew it worked! And he knew unveiling it would forever cement the admiration and adoration he felt from this crowd.

He’d already sent out several secret letters about the product to celebrities. Famous actress Cynthia Reynolds had answered him personally. Her interest promised him access to the world of fame and riches, promised him that finally he was going to matter.

He reached into his inside pocket, touched Cynthia’s letter affectionately, and then pulled out the slim, gold box that had been nestled beside it. On it was a picture of him. The box was beautiful, a marketing marvel. But then he, Richard Strong, of all people, knew that packaging was everything. Packaging and the pitch.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I present to you NoWait, a pure homeopathic oil that guarantees weight loss.” He paused and repeated, softly, “Guarantees.”

He had their attention now. Dr. Richard Strong lowered his voice, felt the audience leaning toward him. “Unwanted pounds can vanish within hours.”

He savored the gasp of the audience. “With the amazing NoWait oil, a woman can go from a size sixteen to a size six within one month.”

The silence ended abruptly. Voices rose and fell in incredulous excitement. He held up his hand.

“NoWait,” he repeated the name. “A little rub on the skin, and in no time you’re thin.” There was a ripple of appreciative laughter. He knew it was time to pull back.

“Please join me inside,” Richard invited, “for a tour of the new facility.”

The press was calling out questions. People were pushing forward. Flushed with the intoxicating power of success, Dr. Richard Strong passed out NoWait samples, accepted congratulations, gave thoughtful, intelligent answers to the press. Only he knew how often in his mind he had fielded those very questions.

They loved him. He could see it. He could feel it. He needed it.

Dr. Richard Strong would have been quite dismayed to learn there were two people in his audience not the least taken with him.

One, a curvy, attractive, middle-aged woman with shoulder-length blond hair had to hug herself against the chill she felt as she saw the crowds pushing toward the man she had once been married to, the father of her son.

“I know who you really are, Richard Strokudnowski,” she whispered.

The other person who was not totally enamored with Dr. Richard Strong had happened by the ribbon-cutting ceremony by pure chance. He had been on his way to the main hospital building to see his ailing grandmother, and his way had been blocked by the crowd.

Resigning himself to the delay, he had listened with customary skepticism. But it was with growing alarm that he took in the looks on the faces in the crowd.

They were buying this nonsense. Well, why wouldn’t they? The man was the new Chief of Staff of a branch of a medical institution with an impeccable reputation.

Narrowing his eyes on the man at the center of the crush of attention, Detective Daniel O’Callahan folded his arms over the broadness of his chest.

“I know a snake-oil salesman when I see one,” he muttered out loud.

The observation earned him dirty looks from several of the pudgy people around him. Still, Daniel made a quick mental note that the good doctor needed to be watched.

Which would take time, the commodity Daniel had the least of. He sighed and put Dr. Richard Strong on a back burner. But he knew he wasn’t about to forget him.

“E xcuse me,” Maggie Sullivan said, trying to get by the couple who were blocking the main staircase into Portland General Hospital.

Sheesh, she thought to herself, weren’t they just a little old for that? She glanced at them from behind a silky curtain of blond hair. She could feel herself blushing.

The woman was perhaps forty, coiffed, bejeweled and dignified in every way—except that she had her tongue tangled with that of a silver-haired man who was pressed so tightly against her that a piece of paper couldn’t have been inserted between them.

To make matters worse, Maggie was sure she recognized the woman from the seminar that she and her best friend, Kristen, were taking at the recently opened Healthy Living Clinic. The New You: Bold and Beautiful was being given by Dr. Richard Strong himself, which made it twice as appealing.

Maggie did not think the performance she was reluctantly witnessing was what Dr. Strong meant when he’d finished the seminar by giving them a homework assignment. He’d said, “Be bold. Do something totally out of character this week.”

For Maggie that had meant eyeing up the bold and flirty red summer dress in the front window of Classy Lass, a haute couture shop way out of her price range.

“Excuse me,” she said again, a trifle more forcefully.

The couple moved marginally, without unfastening their lips. Maggie slid by them, giving them a look of firm disapproval that she was pretty sure neither one of them saw.

Maggie, she told herself, don’t be so judgmental. She did not know the story behind the obvious passion of that kiss. Maybe one of them was being admitted for a life-threatening illness or a complicated surgery. It would be okay to kiss like that if you thought you were saying goodbye forever. Wouldn’t it?

At the top of the stairs, she paused and looked back on the situation, prepared to reevaluate it in this softer light.

The pins had fallen out of the woman’s hair, and her silk jacket was halfway off her shoulder. She was running her knee up the man’s thigh.

Maggie turned away from the scene so fast she bumped into the door. Dazed, she held her bruised nose, opened the door and hurried through it. Her face felt as if it was on fire. And, in truth, it wasn’t just because she’d embarrassed herself by slamming full-force into a glass door. Nor was it entirely because of seeing the couple behaving so brazenly in public.

There was a tingle in the pit of her stomach that felt like hunger, only more intense. She felt as if she needed something, but with a type of need that was frightening, the kind of need she imagined a junkie must feel, or a gambling addict, or a person with the shakes reaching for a drink.

And she, Maggie Sullivan, was just not that kind of girl. In fact, she prided herself on the amount of control she had, on how responsible she was, how reliable.

But the truth was, this feeling had been enveloping her at odd moments for days. It had nearly overwhelmed her when she saw a young couple holding hands, when she overheard a whispered “I love you” in the hospital cafeteria, when she saw a man and a woman pushing a stroller. On those occasions, Maggie would feel an emptiness so vast, a yearning so strong, she felt as though the emotions could overtake her entire well-ordered life.

“I’m twenty-seven,” she murmured. “Biological clock.”

Unfortunately not a single soul had warned her that the ticking of a biological clock could seem much more like the ticking of a time bomb—as if it could explode without warning, leaving nothing but wreckage where a neat and tidy little life had once been.