Intensive Care

Chapter Two

Ripley spent that night going over Ida Mae Harris’s lab workups backward and forward until the notations blurred together. Then she staggered to bed and slept a few hours, plagued by a tangle of waterfalls, hot black eyes and unfamiliar aches. The shrill ring of the alarm was almost a relief, but when she reached her office at Boston General, the tension she’d felt after Harris’s attack returned in force.

A book she remembered leaving open to a page on cardiac complications was closed. Her chair, which she usually pushed all the way under the desk, was askew.

Had someone been in her office? She glanced at the door. It had been locked as usual. She shook her head.

She was still rattled from the day before, that was all. She was shaky from being assaulted, and worried by Mr. Harris’s strange choice of words. The voice on the phone said Dr. Davis killed my wife. Had he meant her phone call when Ida Mae died? It seemed the likeliest answer, but the phrasing bothered Ripley. What if someone else had called Mr. Harris and told him R-ONC was responsible for his wife’s death?

She’d be looking at a malpractice suit, and even worse, it meant that someone in her dwindling department couldn’t be trusted.

“He’s late.”

Ripley jumped, cracked her elbow on the corner of her desk, and swore. It wasn’t often that her best friend, Tansy, snuck up on her. Usually, the pretty blonde entered the room with a flourish and an invisible fanfare. Men lit up. Women smiled. Her energy was infectious.

Not today. Ripley grimaced. “You look about how I feel. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing important.” Tansy’s smile barely flattened the frown. A sleepless night was etched in the slump of her shoulders and the dark circles under her eyes. “How are you feeling after yesterday?”

“Jumpy and sore,” Ripley replied. “And I know Cage is late.”

The new RSO’s threatened audit was another reason for her nerves. Though Ripley and her technicians were scrupulous about their radiation practices, Zachary Cage was reputed to be on a mission. And Leo Gabney was looking for an excuse to close the R-ONC department and shuffle their expensive patients elsewhere across the city, where Ripley knew they’d get adequate care.

Adequate, but not exceptional. And though she’d originally taken the R-ONC position to prove to her father that she wasn’t going to join him in his cushy private practice, over the years the department had become her baby. Her family.

It was the only family she was likely to have, Ripley knew, and she wasn’t about to let the administration, or the new RSO, take it away from her.

“Ida Mae Harris’s autopsy is today, you know,” Tansy broke the silence, shooting her a sidelong glance.

And there was her biggest worry in a nutshell. She touched the manila folder on her desk. It was all that was left of a sixty-eight-year-old woman who’d been looking forward to a milestone anniversary she would never reach. “Yes, I know.”

“They won’t find anything that Gabney will be able to use against us.” Tansy gave her a one-armed hug. Though she spent much of her time on loan to Hospitals for Humanity—HFH—an international group of doctors who took assignments under the worst of conditions, Tansy worked in R-ONC when she was at home. She understood.

“I almost hope they do find something, you know? At least then we’d have an answer.” Ripley shrugged. “It’s always better to know than to wonder.”

“Well, whatever they find, it wasn’t anything R-ONC did wrong. It wasn’t anything you did wrong.” Of anyone in the hospital, only Tansy knew how much Ripley needed to hear the words. Only Tansy knew how insecure the seemingly invincible Dr. Davis was about her work, how much it frightened her to play God.

How much it hurt when she lost a patient. A friend.

Ripley squeezed her eyes shut. “I hope you’re right. And I hope the new RSO doesn’t cause problems.” Her temperature spiked as her mind flashed back to black eyes and the hot whispered promises of her dreams.

Or had that been a nightmare?

“What sort of problems would those be?” The rough rumble came from close behind her, too close, and the sizzle that lanced through her midsection was unmistakable.

Ripley spun and faced the door. Cage. She stifled a curse that he’d walked through the outer office and into the inner sanctum without her realizing it, before she’d been able to prepare herself to see him again.

She didn’t want him to know about the autopsy. Didn’t want him to know that she couldn’t explain Ida Mae’s death. Her past experience with Radiation Safety had taught her it was best to tell them as little as possible.

And her own reactions told her it was safest to keep her distance from this RSO in particular. With R-ONC’s future uncertain, she couldn’t afford the weakness that came with an emotional entanglement.

Her father had taught her that, as well.

Cage’s face gave away nothing as they squared off in her doorway, and once again Ripley felt that click of connection. Something primitive flared deep in his black eyes and he held out his hand like a challenge. “We weren’t properly introduced yesterday. I’m Cage, the new RSO.”

She took the hand and felt her heart kick when his fingers closed over hers. “Dr. Davis.” He held on a moment longer than necessary before allowing her to pull away.

“A pleasure,” he replied, but a lift of his heavy brow told her it was anything but.

“Though I’m grateful for your help in the atrium yesterday, I’m not thrilled about a full audit. I have patients to treat, and the violations you mentioned were Dixon’s way of getting back at me for refusing to date him.” A hint of temper seeped into Ripley’s voice and she gestured toward the outer office, feeling tired and cranky. Twitchy. Tense. “Never mind. Come on, I’ll show you where we keep the radiation logs.”

She tried to brush past him, but the RSO didn’t budge and she ended up too close, staring up into his dark, dark eyes. A tremble began in her stomach and worked its way out from there. Irritation, she told herself. Nerves.

Lust, whispered her subconscious. Sexual awareness.

It took her a long moment to realize that he wasn’t gazing into her eyes with mirrored desire. He was focused over her shoulder, staring at Ida Mae’s paperwork piled on the corner of her desk. “What is that, your personnel file?”

Ripley spun away and slapped a hand on the pile. “This is confidential patient information, Mr. Cage. Off-limits unless you’re a doctor.”

Something dangerous flashed in his eyes, but he stepped back and inclined his head. “My apologies. After you, Dr. Davis.”

Why had he thought it was her personnel file? Ripley had no idea, just as she had no idea why the outer office suddenly seemed crowded and hot.

Hyperaware of him following close behind, she walked to a padlocked refrigerator, pulled out a green binder and handed it to him. “Here’s the main radiation log. It’s up to date as of this morning.”

Their fingers brushed when he took the rad log. “Of course it is.” His voice gave away nothing, but Ripley felt as though he was mocking her. Or perhaps himself. “I would expect nothing less.”

With that, he spun on his heel and headed for the treatment rooms that branched off the outer office. In his wake, Ripley stared.

“Wow,” said Tansy’s voice from the inner office. The blonde crossed the room to stand at Ripley’s shoulder and watch Cage walk away.

“Yeah,” Ripley agreed. “Wow, what a jerk.”

Tansy’s lips curved slightly and she glanced at Ripley. “That’s not quite what I meant. That’s who rescued you from Ida Mae’s husband?” They watched as Cage crouched down and began copying serial numbers off the linear accelerator in Treatment Room One.

A foul, whiskey-laden breath on the side of her neck. Hard, grabbing fingers. A sweep of glittering glass. Panic. Warm black eyes and cool waterfalls. Ripley shivered and rubbed her arms where goose bumps came to life at the thought. “Yes, but that doesn’t make him any less dangerous to R-ONC. You heard him at the meeting. He’s on a witch hunt.”

They watched him bend over to peer at the electrical hookups. With a fleeting spark of her usual manner, Tansy murmured, “I wouldn’t mind being the witch he’s hunting for, if you know what I mean.” She leveled a telling glance at her friend. “But I get the feeling he’s already picked her out.”

“Did you just call me a witch?” Ripley deflected the quick jolt with sarcasm, but Tansy’s knowing look told her the sparks flying in the little office hadn’t been her imagination.

What a time for her libido to wake up. What a poor choice for it to make.

“Just calling it how I see it, Dr. Davis.” Then Tansy sobered. “I’m just glad he was there for you yesterday. When I imagine what might have happened…”

“Let’s not think about it right now, okay?” Ripley patted her friend’s arm and tried to summon a reassuring smile. “It’s over.”

Then she remembered Harris’s words in the atrium, and thought of her desk chair that morning. The closed files. The subtle disarray. And she wondered.

Was it really over? Or was it just beginning?

FINGERS POUNDING on the keyboard of the linear accelerator, Cage congratulated himself on learning three things in the first two minutes he’d been in the Radiation Oncology department. One, Ripley Davis didn’t want him auditing R-ONC. Two, she didn’t want him to know about the papers on her desk. And three, she was so goddamn beautiful she made his chest ache.

The first two were no surprise. The third was shocking. Cage had thought all the softer emotions had been burned out of him long ago with a single pencil-thin beam of radiation and a tidal wave of guilt.

“I keep the programs updated.” Her voice at his shoulder was a jolt he refused to show, but the buzz of her nearness sliced through him and set up a greedy alarm in his brain.

“So I see.” And it was true. She’d upgraded the software every time another glitch in the treatment equipment had come to light. “Too bad it takes people dying for Radcorp to debug these death traps.” He slapped the shielding of the linear accelerator with a scowl.

She sucked in a breath on what he thought might have been a growl. “I think those stories are exaggerated, don’t you, Mr. Cage? And let’s not forget the hundreds of thousands of patients who are helped each year by radiation treatment.”

“But it’s okay to forget about the people who died because Radcorp and a group of R-ONCs at Albany Memorial ignored the reports and kept treating patients with a broken accelerator?” Cage’s fingers were beginning to hurt from punching the keys so hard. He paused, clenched his fists and blew out a breath. “Never mind. The programs look fine and your fixes are up to date. Where are your disposal logs?”

“I get it.” Ripley’s voice sharpened and the air between them snapped. “You dislike R-ONCs in general. And here I thought it was me you didn’t like. Because let me tell you, Cage, I’m grateful for your help yesterday, but—”

Whatever she’d planned to tell him was lost in a flurry of noise and color from the outer office.

“Dr. Rip, Dr. Rip!” With lots of “vroom-vroom” noises and imaginary squealing tires, a purple-haired girl flew toward the treatment room, pushing a small boy in a hospital-issue wheelchair. They skidded to a halt and the girl’s hair slid off her head and landed on the floor.

Ripley and the kids took one look at the purple road-kill and started laughing.

Cage took one look at the girl’s naked pink scalp and the fine blue veins beneath, and shuddered.

“Livvy, what are you doing here? I thought you were between treatments. Is everything okay?” Ripley hugged the girl and bent to pick up the purple wig. “Hey, Milo. What’s up?” She didn’t touch the boy, who sagged back as though exhausted by the shared laughter. A Boston baseball cap looked ridiculously large on his bald head.

Cage’s stomach clenched on the three cups of coffee he’d poured into it that morning. One of the reasons he’d chosen Rad Safety was its distance from the actual patients. He could help them without ever seeing them. Without remembering.

“Belle called my mom and said Milo wasn’t feeling so hot.” The girl was older than she looked at first, Cage realized as she adjusted the purple wig on her slippery scalp. She was probably in her early teens, though her painful thinness and large eyes made her seem younger. “So a few of us came in for a visit. We were just talking about the game next week, weren’t we, Milo?”

The boy in the chair nodded limply. “Yep.” The word was no more than a breath, but Ripley didn’t seem to notice. Her callousness made Cage think of other doctors. Other times.

She glanced at him and explained, though he hadn’t asked. “The Tammy Fund has a box at the ballpark and they give it to a different R-ONC department after each game. The kids love it. We’ve got tickets for next week.”

Cage shrugged. “Baseball’s okay.”

He felt the damaged ligaments in his pitching arm ache. The pain was duller than the throb in his soul, but both reminded him of a man who’d cared more for his career than his family.

“Do I know you?” The soft question pulled Cage from the memory of broken promises and busted dreams, but he had no answer for the girl. Nor did he take the hand she offered when she said, “I’m Olivia Minton.”

“Cage. And no, we haven’t met.” He backed away on the pretext of flipping the green binder open and studying an unseen column of numbers.

“Don’t worry, kids. He’s rude to everyone.” Ripley glared at him and herded the children away. “Did you just stop by to say hi, or did you want something?”

“We wanted to say hi,” Livvy said staunchly at the same time Milo breathed, “We wanted some markers.”

Ripley laughed and the sound zinged through Cage. “Going to tattoo yourselves again?” She crossed to a desk drawer and pulled out a handful of pens. “Just remember, these are the permanent ones we use to mark you for radiation treatment. The ink takes weeks to fade.”

Milo cheered softly and clutched the pens in his lap like a prize. Livvy thanked Ripley and cast one long look back at Cage before she pushed Milo out the door, but Cage didn’t tell the girl where she’d seen him before.

He was five years, one court battle and a master’s degree in Health Physics away from being that man. His love of the game had faltered, leaving behind a need for revenge.

“They’re not contagious,” Ripley said without preamble as she stalked back over to him, holding a thick binder as if she wanted to smack him with it. “You won’t catch cancer from shaking hands.” She didn’t say you jerk, but it was implied.

“Those your wipe logs? Thanks.” Ignoring the dig, Cage grabbed the ledger and opened it on the nearest table, though he knew what he’d see. Nothing. He’d already figured he wasn’t going to find a single digit out of place in the R-ONC department. He’d bet that every sheet was filled in to the last MilliCurie of radioactive material and the last tenth of a rad of waste. He’d find every bottle of neutralizer filled to the brim and every employee’s training up to date.

And he’d bet his job she was hiding something.

He hefted the logbooks and ignored the twinge of protest from his shoulder. “I’ll get these back to you when I’ve gone over everything.”

“Fine. Just don’t shut me down, okay? I have patients that depend on me.” She glanced over and tucked a strand of curly dark hair behind her ear. The gesture was strangely vulnerable. “We do good things here, Cage. We save lives.”

Cage didn’t say anything, because his answer would have been you don’t save all of them, and that would never do. Instead, he repeated, “I’ll get these back to you when I’m done with them,” and escaped out into the hall beyond the R-ONC doors.

Once he was outside her offices, he leaned against a decorative column and concentrated on breathing air that didn’t carry a faint hint of her scent. He had to clear his head. He didn’t have time to get tied up over a woman. Any woman. Especially a R-ONC.

“You okay, boss?” As seemed to be his habit, Whistler appeared out of nowhere.

“Fine.” Cage didn’t want to talk about R-ONC, or about the way Ripley Davis made him feel mad and guilty and horny all at once. Nor did he want to talk about the rumors of radioactivity gone astray. He wasn’t sure who he could trust in the Rad Safety department yet. If anyone. “Any calls this morning?”

“Nothing exciting or I would’ve paged you.” The young man shrugged. “A few gray egg deliveries.” The radioactive material arrived in lead-lined capsules. It was delivered to Rad Safety, checked in and dispersed to the labs.

Everything was checked and double-checked. There was no radioactivity in the hospital that couldn’t be accounted for each and every moment of the day. So where the hell had the nukes supposedly found in the broom closet come from? Cage had no idea, but the concept was unnerving. Since he was working on coffee-shop rumor and speculation, he had no evidence, either.

When he’d brought it up with the Head Administrator, Gabney had stared at him, hard, and prattled on about the Hospital of the Year award. Cage had gotten the message.

Don’t rock the boat.

Too bad for Gabney it was Cage’s mission in life to do exactly that. Heather had died because a group of doctors hadn’t wanted to make waves. Cage had vowed it wouldn’t happen again.

The doors to the R-ONC department swung open and there was Ripley Davis, marching across the foyer to the stairs. Cage’s head came up. “Here. Take these.” He shoved the R-ONC radiation logs at Whistler. “Check them against our databases, but don’t worry if you don’t find anything. I bet they’re up to date.”

Whistler’s eyes cut from Ripley to Cage and back. “What’re you going to do?”

“I’m going to have a little chat with Dr. Davis,” Cage said, feeling an unfamiliar tingle of anticipation. “I think she and I have gotten off on the wrong foot.”

Whistler snorted. “Good luck. She can be a real hard case with people who’re trying to interfere with R-ONC. Her head tech used to say Dr. Davis treats that department like it’s her husband, and the patients like her children.”

Cage’s eyes followed her figure down the stairs, admiring the long, no-nonsense stride and the gentle sway of hip and hair. He grimaced. Husband. Children.

In his experience, doctors gave little value to family.

TANSY WAS LATE for their midmorning coffee break, so Ripley sat alone at the rear of the hospital café with her back to the room and hoped everyone got the hint. She was in no mood for company.

She scowled at her muffin and wished the new Radiation Safety Officer to the devil. It was his fault she felt out of synch today. She was tired because she’d dreamed about him and she was behind schedule because he’d insisted on testing each of the treatment machines separately, though there hadn’t been an accelerator-related death in four or five years.

And she was worried because she couldn’t help feeling Zachary Cage had seen more than she wanted him to, both in the lab and in her. If he and the Head Administrator ganged up against R-ONC, she’d be out in a minute. Her patients would be farmed out and forgotten, and she’d wind up doing a hundred Pap smears a day in her father’s practice.

Ripley bowed her head as tears threatened and the bruises left by Ida Mae’s husband throbbed.

“There you are!” The dark, rough voice spoke close at her shoulder for the second time that day, but she didn’t give Cage the satisfaction of seeing her flinch. Somehow, she’d known he was there. A hint of electricity in the air, a shadow of heat had warned her of his presence.

“Go away,” she muttered as he slid onto the wall bench opposite her, “I’m waiting for someone.”

She could meet rude with rude any day.

“I saw Dr. Whitmore in the hall. She asked me to tell you she was on the way to an autopsy and she’d see you at lunch.” He grinned, but the motion of his face didn’t lighten the darkness of his eyes one bit. He knew very well she didn’t want him there. “So I’ll keep you company instead.”