M.D. Most Wanted

He wondered if the man had finally decided to take a break and go home for a few hours. Diligence could only be stretched so far.

“Jolly green giant on a break?” he asked Mona, the strawberry blonde who’d paged him.

The woman shook her head and pointed toward room seven.

Apparently, Reese thought, diligence could always be stretched just a wee bit further. The man he’d just asked about was now hovering over London Merriweather’s bed. To his surprise the booming voice the bodyguard had earlier used on him had been replaced by a voice that was soft and pleading.

A gentle giant, Reese mused. Who would have thought it?

“Promise me you won’t do that again, London,” he was saying. “I’m only here to look out for you. I’m the good guy.”

London only sighed in response, but to Reese it sounded like a repentant sigh. But then, maybe he was reading things into it. He didn’t really know the woman. She might just be placating the big guy.

Sensing his presence, Wallace glanced toward the door. The look he gave Reese clearly labeled him as the intruder, rather than the other way around.

Since only five minutes at an ICU patient’s bedside was allowed, Wallace had taken to peering periodically into London’s room when the nurse’s back was turned. Each time he did, he saw that London was still sleeping. His agitation grew with each unfruitful visitation. As did his concern.

So when he’d looked in this time and found that her eyes were open, his heart had leaped up like a newly released dove at a wedding celebration. He’d lost no time in coming in and peppering the young woman for whose safety he was responsible with questions and admonishments.

“You gave me some scare,” he’d freely confessed, saying to her what he would never have admitted to another man. “When I saw your car hit that pole, I thought my heart stopped.” A small smile had curved his lips. “I found out I still remembered how to pray.”

She’d looked at him ruefully then and he could see that she was sorry. When she had that look on her face, he couldn’t bring himself to be angry with her, even though they both knew that she’d pulled a stupid stunt by taking off at top speed like that, trying to lose him. London was alive, and that was the bottom line. That was all that counted. The rest could be worked out somehow. He’d make sure of it.

Wallace had said his piece and didn’t want London to be upset, with him or with herself so he’d smiled shyly at her and added, “Bet the Big Man Upstairs was surprised to hear from me after all this time.” He’d placed his hand over hers, dwarfing it. Letting her know that he would always be there for her. That there was nothing to be afraid of. “But you’re going to be okay. The doc who operated on you told me so.”

She’d nodded, as if she knew she was going to be all right. Because Wallace had told her so. “Sorry. I just wanted to get away.”

And he’d looked at her, his dark eyes pleading once more. The next time could prove fatal. “Not from me, London. Not ever from me. I’m not just your bodyguard, I’m your friend. I’m the guy who’s supposed to keep you safe, remember?”

She’d bitten her lip and nodded. He’d almost gotten her to promise never to take off like that again when the doctor had walked in on them.

Self-conscious about his lapse in protocol, Wallace quickly lifted his hand from London’s.

“She woke up,” the bodyguard told him. There was a touch of defensiveness in his voice, and the soft tone Reese had heard just a moment earlier was completely gone, vanishing as if it had never existed.

Reese nodded as he approached the bed. “So I see.”

His eyes shifted to the woman in the bed. He looked at her with a discerning eye. London still looked very pale, but there was a brightness in her eyes that had been absent earlier. She was definitely coming around, he thought.

“Let me check your vital signs.” Reese’s tone was light, conversational as he took the stethoscope from around his neck and placed the ends in his ears.

“Vital signs all present and accounted for, Doctor,” London cracked. She would have saluted him, but her arms still felt as if they each weighed more than a ton.

“You don’t mind if I check for myself.” He picked up her wrist and placed his fingers on her pulse. Mentally he began counting off the seconds and beats.

“Feel free.” She watched him for a moment. He looked so cool, so calm. Was that just a facade? What did it take to light a fire under him? “Did you know that in some cultures, if you save a person’s life, that life belongs to you?”

His eyes met hers briefly. “Makes a casual birthday present seem a little ordinary and rather insignificant, doesn’t it?”

Taking a pressure cuff that was attached to the wall, Reese wrapped it around her arm, then increased the pressure until the cuff was tight along her arm. This was something the nurses did periodically, but he liked checking for himself. Nothing like hands-on experience whenever possible.

He kept his eye on the readings as the air was slowly let out. Her blood pressure was excellent. And she was no longer speaking in fragments, which meant that she wasn’t having trouble taking in deep breaths. She had amazing recuperative powers.

Satisfied, he removed the cuff, then made a notation in her chart. He was aware that the giant standing on the other side of her bed was watching his every move. “How do you feel?”

She almost felt worse than when she’d first come in on the gurney. But then, she reminded herself, she’d probably been in shock.

“Like Humpty-Dumpty.”

He laughed under his breath. “Well, lucky for you we’re staffed with something other than all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.” He smiled at her. “So we were able to put Humpty-Dumpty together again.” Reese replaced the cuff in its holder on the wall. “Your vital signs are all strong. You keep this up and you can move into the suite that Grant, here—” he nodded at the giant “—insisted on reserving for you.”

He was referring to one of the rooms located in what the hospital staff referred to as the tower. Large, sunny rooms that could have easily been mistaken for hotel suites, made to accommodate VIPs who came to the hospital with their own entourages. CEOs, movies stars and, on occasion, politicians made use of the suites whenever circumstances forced them to stay at the hospital.

At present only one of the four rooms was in use. While checking London in, Wallace had insisted on reserving the largest suite for her once she was well enough to leave the ICU. The tab had begun the moment he’d made the request formally.

London tried to raise herself up on her elbows and discovered that it was yet another stupid move. Pain shot all through her, going off through the top of her head. She winced and immediately chastised herself. She didn’t like displaying her vulnerability.

Reese was at her side, adjusting the IV drip that was attached to her left hand. “You feel pain, you can twist this and it’ll increase the medication dosage.”

She frowned. “I don’t do drugs.”

“You do for the moment,” Reese informed her mildly, stepping back.

London sighed. All she’d wanted was a little control of her life, and now look—she was tethered to a bed, watching some clear substance drip into her body and listening to an Ivy League doctor tell her what to do.

She looked at him. “I don’t want a special room. I want to go home.”

“Then you shouldn’t have tried to break the sound barrier using a Jaguar,” Reese informed her mildly, ignoring the glare that was coming from the woman’s bodyguard. He replaced her chart, then sank his hands deep into the pockets of his lab coat as he regarded his newest patient. He offered her what he deemed was his encouraging smile. “We’ll try not to keep you too long.”

She sighed. It was already too long. She knew it was her own fault, but that didn’t change the fact that she didn’t want to be here. That being in a hospital made her uneasy, restless. She wanted to get up out of bed, walk out the door and just keep walking until she hit the parking lot.

But being tethered to an IV and feeling as if she had the strength of an anesthetized squirrel wasn’t conducive to her going anywhere. At least, not for the moment.

She tried to shut out the sadness that threatened to blanket her.

“I called your father.” Wallace had been wrestling with the way to tell her since he’d put through the call to the embassy.

They both knew he had to, but he also knew how much she didn’t want him to make the call.

London sighed again, more loudly this time. Great. This was just what she needed on top of everything else. To experience her father’s disapproval coming down from on high. They hardly had any contact at all, except when her father felt the need to express his disappointment about something she’d done or failed to do.

In the past year she had turned her hand—and successfully at that—to fund-raising for charities. There hadn’t been a single word of commendation from her father even though the last affair had raised so much money that it had made all the papers.

She looked at Wallace. She had thought she could trust him. In the past eighteen months, while he’d been heading the security detail for her father that she thought intruded into the life she was still trying to put together, they had become friends.

Obviously, salaries transcended friendships.

“Why?” she asked sharply. “There’s no point in worrying him.”

Wallace didn’t care for the fact that the doctor was privy to this exchange, but he had no say in the matter. Reaching for the newspaper section that was folded and stuffed into his overcoat pocket, he tossed it onto her bed.

“He’d be plenty worried if I hadn’t. This was on the bottom of page one in the L.A. Times. I figure a story just like it is bound to turn up in the papers or on the news in Madrid.” The small brown eyes bored into her. “You know how much your father likes to watch the news.”

Almost against her will she looked at the paper. Ambassador’s Daughter Nearly Killed In Car Accident.

London frowned. Stupid, stupid. She shouldn’t have given in to impulse. But she’d been so tired of having her every move shadowed, of feeling isolated but not alone.

“Yes, I know.” Well, there was no undoing what she’d done. She was going to have to pay the piper or face the music or something equally trite. London pressed her lips together. Her eyes shifted toward Reese. “Wallace, I’d like to talk to the doctor alone.”

Wallace opened his mouth in protest. The doctor should be the one to leave, not him. But there was clearly nothing he could do. Reluctantly he inclined his head. “I’ll be right outside.”

Because none of this was his fault, London mustered a smile, resigning herself to the inevitable. And, she supposed, in light of everything, there was a certain comfort in knowing Wallace was around. “Yes, I know.”

“Right outside,” he repeated, this time for Reese’s benefit just before he left the room.

For a moment there was no sound except the gentle noises made by the machines that surrounded the upper portion of her bed, monitoring her progress, assuring the medical staff that all was going as it should.

Reese had places to be, patients to see. He didn’t have time to dance attendance on a headstrong young woman who hadn’t learned how to curb her desire for speed. “You wanted to say something to me?”

“Yes.” She’d never been very good at being humble. Maybe because it made her feel as if she were exposing herself, leaving herself vulnerable.

Finally she said, “Thanks.”

She made it sound as if it pained her to utter that, Reese thought. “Like I said earlier, it’s my job. And if you really want to thank me, get better.” Finished, he began to walk out.

“I don’t like hospitals.”

The statement came out of nowhere. Stopping just short of the door, Reese turned around to look at her.

For some reason she suddenly looked smaller, almost lost in the bed. He remained where he was. “Not many people are crazy about them,” he acknowledged. “But they serve their purpose.”

She knew that. Knew that she’d probably be dead if Wallace hadn’t summoned the paramedics to get her here in time. But that still didn’t change the feelings that were clawing inside of her.

“My mother died in a hospital,” she told him quietly.

Reese took a few steps toward her bed. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

She barely heard him. Only the sympathy in his voice. She didn’t know doctors could be sympathetic. She thought they were supposed to be removed from things like death. “In Brussels. It was a car accident. She wasn’t even thirty.”

Each halting word brought the incident closer to her. Standing alone on a hospital floor with a large, black-and-white checkerboard pattern, feeling abandoned. Feeling alone. Watching a tall man in a white lab coat talking to her father. Watching her father’s proud, rigid shoulders sag. Wanting to reach out to him in her anguish, but being restrained by the woman who had been placed in charge of her.

Something started to make a little sense. “Is that why you—”

She wasn’t going to come up with any analogies. She had no death wish. She had a life wish. She wanted to find one. A life she could be content with, if not happy. “No, I was just trying to get away.”

He glanced toward the closed door. “From the jolly green giant?”

Wallace was harmless, even though he was an expert marksman and had been the head of security for Donovan Industries before being wooed away by her father when her old bodyguard had retired.

She shook her head and instantly regretted it. “From being London Merriweather, Ambassador Mason Merriweather’s wild daughter.” That was how her father thought of her, she knew. And how the headlines had once viewed her.

She didn’t seem so wild right now, Reese thought. She looked almost frail and vulnerable, although he had a feeling she wouldn’t appreciate that observation. “Simpler ways of doing that.”

The streak of rebellion that had become her constant companion since the day she lost her mother raised its head at his words. “Such as?”

Seemed obvious to him. “Such as you could do away with the wild part.”

Everyone seemed to have an opinion on how she was to live her life. “Will this lecture be itemized on the hospital bill, or does it fall under miscellaneous?”

He had better things to do than spar verbally with a spoiled brat who happened to be very, very lucky as well as extremely gorgeous.

“It falls under common sense.” Reese turned and once again began to walk away. “You might think about getting some.”

“I don’t like people who insult me,” she called after him.

He stopped by the door. “And I don’t like people who are careless with their lives. Especially when they have everything to live for.”

Where did he get off, saying things like that to her? He knew nothing about the pain in her life. Nothing about the emptiness. “How would you know that?”

Reese didn’t know why he was bothering. Except that she was his patient and she was in pain. Pain that went deeper than the lacerations and bruising she had sustained in the crash.

“Because most people have everything to live for, Ms. Merriweather. The alternative is rather bleak and, to my knowledge, completely nonreversible.”

With that he left the room.

Chapter 4

He’d almost lost her.

For a long moment, his soul troubled, he stared at the mural that dominated one wall of the small studio apartment where he lived. The mural was comprised of all manner of photographs in all sizes, both black-and-white and color. There were newspaper clippings, as well, though those were few.

His eyes lovingly caressed the face he saw before him. The photographs were all of the same woman.

London Merriweather.

London, the daughter of the ambassador to Spain. The daughter of the former ambassador to England. It was there that she was born twenty-three years ago.

Returning to the task that he had begun, he shook his head in mute sympathy as he cut out the latest clipping from the Times. It was a relatively small article describing the accident that had almost taken her out of his world. He had larger articles, and better pictures, but he kept everything, every scrap, every word, every photo. They were all precious.

Because they were all of her.

What kind of father names his daughter after a place he’s living in? he wondered not for the first time. After something that was associated with his line of work? Where was the love there?

It was simple. There wasn’t any.

Her father couldn’t love her the way he could. The way he did.

No one could.

He tossed aside the newspaper, smoothing out the clipping he’d just liberated from the rest of the page.

Very carefully he taped the clipping with its accompanying photograph in one of the last free spaces on the wall.

The mural was getting larger. It was taking over the entire wall.

Just like his feelings for London were taking over everything in his life. His feelings were evident in every breath he took, every thought he had. They all revolved around London, around his possessing her.

Loving her.

She was going to be his.

Some way, somehow, she was going to be his. He knew it, sensed it, felt it in his very bones.

He just had to be patient, that was all. Once she realized, once she saw how much he loved her, how he could make her happy, she would be his. And everything would be all right again.

He sat down in his easy chair and felt her image looking at him from all angles, all sides. He returned her smile, content.

Waiting.

The feeling of oppression hit Reese the moment he stepped off the elevator onto the top floor of the hospital tower.

He was already annoyed. He didn’t get that way often, but having his professional authority circumvented was one of the few things that was guaranteed to set him off. His orders had been countermanded by the hospital chief administrator, Seymour Jenkins, because Mason Merriweather had come in and demanded that his daughter be taken out of the ICU and placed in the tower suite that the head of London’s bodyguard detail had already reserved for her.

Granted, the woman was getting better and he was about to order the transfer of rooms himself, but he didn’t appreciate being second-guessed, or more to the point, ignored, because a VIP was on the scene making demands.

Seymour Jenkins didn’t ordinarily interfere in any of his doctors’ cases, which was what made this such a complete surprise.

He’d looked infinitely uncomfortable when Reese had burst into his office after having gone to the ICU and found London’s bed vacant.

“I would have understood if you’d needed the bed,” he’d told Jenkins. “But it was empty. Why the hell did you move my patient without first checking with me?”

A dab of perspiration had formed on Seymour’s upper lip. He’d run his hand nervously through the thin strands of his remaining hair. “The ambassador got on the phone himself—”

Reese watched the man’s Adam’s apple travel up and down his throat like a loose Wiffle ball.

“And what? He threatened to huff and puff and blow the hospital down if you didn’t instantly obey him and put her in the tower suite?”

Jenkins rose from his desk and crossed to Reese in an effort to placate him. He was more than a foot shorter than the surgeon. “Please, be reasonable. Look at it from my point of view. Ambassador Merriweather is an influential man, he has connections, and we’re a nonprofit organization—”

Why did things always have to come down to a matter of money rather than ethics and care?

Thinking better of approaching him, Jenkins decided to keep a desk between them. “I’ve never seen you like this,” the man protested nervously.

Even though not completely seasoned, Reese Bendenetti was still one of the finest surgeons on the staff at Blair Memorial, which was saying a great deal. The ninety-year-old hospital, which had recently undergone a name change from Harris Memorial because of the generous endowment from the late Constance Blair, prided itself on getting the best of the very best. The last thing Jenkins wanted to do, for the sake of the hospital’s reputation as well as for practical reasons, was to alienate the young physician. But neither did he want to throw a wrench into possible future contributions from the ambassador and any of his influential friends.

“There’s a reason for that. I’ve never been completely ignored before.” Reese leaned over the desk, bringing his face closer to the other man’s. “She’s my patient, Jenkins.”

The man drew himself up, finding a backbone at last, albeit a small one.

“Yes, and this is my hospital—and yours,” he pointed out. “Ambassador Merriweather is a former captain of industry.” Merriweather’s company had made its mark on the stock market before he had resigned from the board to take on the responsibility of a prestigious foreign embassy. “He hobnobs with kings and presidents, not to mention some of the richest people in the world. We can’t have him unhappy with us,” Jenkins insisted. “Besides, we’re not endangering his daughter with the transfer.” He’d made a point of checking the Merriweather woman’s record—after the fact. “You noted yourself in her chart that her progress is amazing. And we sent up monitors with her, just in case.”

Which in itself had probably required a great deal of juggling, Reese surmised. He had said nothing in response to the information meant to placate him. Instead he’d turned on his heel and walked out, heading straight to the tower elevators and straight to London’s floor.

Where the wall of noise hit him.

The area appeared to be in the middle of being cordoned off. Men in gray and black suits were everywhere. Reese looked sharply at the nurse who was sitting in the nurses’ station.

“What the hell is going on?”

The older woman turned her head and covered her mouth so that only Reese could hear. “Ambassador Merriweather’s landed, and from the looks of it, he’s brought half his staff with him.”

He could see that. That still didn’t answer the question. “Why?”

The woman shrugged her wide shoulders. This was causing havoc on her usually smooth-running floor. “Something about keeping his daughter safe.”

Reese felt his anger heighten. Maybe he was over-reacting. His quick temper went back to the days when he was growing up and was regarded as someone from the wrong side of the tracks, someone whose opinion—because his mother’s bank account was represented by a jar she kept in a box beneath her bed—didn’t count. But if his patient’s life was in jeopardy from something other than the injuries she’d sustained the other day, someone should have taken the time to inform him.

“What room did you put her in?”

The nurse didn’t even have to look. “Room one.” She pointed down the hall toward where the activity grew more pronounced. “The largest of the suites.”

He was vaguely familiar with it. He remembered thinking that the room was somewhat larger than the first apartment he’d lived in.

Reese nodded his head and made his way down the corridor.

Besides being on the cutting edge of medicine, Blair Memorial prided itself on being uplifting and cheerful in its choice of decor. The tower rooms were designed to go several steps beyond that. Here patient care was conducted in suites that looked as if they were part of an upscale hotel rather than a hospital.

Reese supposed there was no harm in pandering to patients who could afford to waste their money this way, as long as playing along didn’t get in the way of more important matters, such as the health of the patient.

As he approached suite one, a tall, unsmiling man stepped forward, his hand automatically reaching out to stop Reese from gaining entry to the room he was guarding.