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The elevator car arrived, and Cate ignored it. “Joan Cunningham is my birth mother.”
The moment she told him, she upbraided herself. She had no idea why she’d just shared that. No one else down here knew the mission she’d set out on. She hadn’t even mentioned it to her partner. Her acquaintances would think she’d simply just wanted a change of venue after her mother died. It went against her natural grain to share anything but the most trivial of information. Even Jeremy had had to prod her repeatedly before she had told him what she was really looking for.
Christian looked at her very skeptically. Granted, Joan Cunningham hadn’t been his patient long, just for the past two years, but she seemed like a fairly open woman. By her second visit, he knew the names of her three children. The Christmas card he’d received from her last December had carried their likenesses. None of them had been this woman. Joan had never mentioned having a fourth child.
“Are you sure?”
Damn it, she was going to cry again. What was the matter with her? She’d thought that she’d used up the last of her tears at her mother’s funeral. There shouldn’t have been any moisture left inside her, not after all the tears she’d shed over her mother and over Gabe. Where was all this water coming from?
Cate sighed, jabbing her index finger at the elevator keypad again. “Right now, I’m not even sure if the sky is blue.”
The woman before him looked pale and shaken. His main concern in Joan’s room had been getting her away from his patient. Now that he had, he should just let her go on her way. But there was something about the look on her face, especially in her eyes, that kept him from murmuring some trivial phrase and walking away. He saw pain there. It held him fast.
Christian glanced at his watch. He had a little time before his first patient was due. With his office located on the hospital premises, he didn’t have far to go. He made up his mind.
“Why don’t you come this way with me?” Without waiting for her to answer, he took hold of her arm, about to lead her over to the nurses’ lounge.
Cate interpreted his actions in her own way. “Don’t worry, I’m not about to cause any trouble.” Moving her arm out of his hold, she began to dig through her purse. A minute later, she produced her wallet and opened it to her ID. She held it out to him. “I’m a special agent with the FBI.”
Just like Lydia, he thought, although he refrained from saying so. Small world. “Then this was bureau business?”
“No, it’s private, like I said.” She looked down at his hand. He’d taken hold of her again. Was he afraid she was going to go running off to Joan’s room? “You’re holding my arm again, Doctor. I told you, I’m not about to cause any trouble.”
His expression didn’t change. She didn’t like the fact that she couldn’t read it. “Then you’ll come this way.” He began walking.
There were a hundred different ways to separate herself from him. For the moment, she employed none of them. Curiosity had gotten the better of her. “Which will lead me where?”
He brought her to a door and indicated the sign. “To the nurses’ lounge.”
As far as she knew, only nurses were allowed in the nurses’ lounge. She’d had a friend at one of the local hospitals in San Francisco who’d been very territorial about the small room that bore a similar sign.
“I’m not about to change professions,” she quipped.
The half smile that came to his lips intrigued her. She wondered what he looked like when he actually allowed his mouth to curve. Some people had smiles that were better left unused, others had the kind that lit up a room. She had a hunch that he leaned toward the latter.
“They have coffee there,” he told her as he pushed open the door.
“And you’re prescribing a cup?”
“That—” he continued to hold the door for her, waiting “—and maybe a slight change of attitude.”
She looked at him sharply as they crossed the threshold into the lounge. The room was small, no bigger than nine by twelve, and for the moment, empty. A few chairs were scattered around with no apparent pattern in mind.
The doctor walked over to the small table where a pot of coffee sat on a burner. The pot was half full.
And she felt half cocked. Where did he get off, judging her?
“What would you know about my attitude?” she asked. It took effort to keep her anger under wraps.
After pouring the coffee, Christian turned around to face her. “Not a thing,” he admitted, his expression still giving nothing away. “How do you take it? The coffee,” he prompted when she made no answer.
Cate pursed her lips. She supposed she had nothing to lose by accepting the cup of coffee. She hadn’t eaten since this morning and that had only been a piece of toast. “Black.”
Nodding, he handed her the cup. He took coffee the same way, the way he took life. Unadorned. “Anything else I can get you?”
Taking the cup from him, a slight smile curved her lips. “The truth would be nice.”
He took half a cup of coffee for himself, then placed a dollar into the empty coffee can beside the pot. “Truth is all relative.”
Cate rolled her eyes. Philosophy, that was all she needed. “Oh, please. What is that, Zen?”
His shrug was careless. He lifted the cup to his lips and drank before answering. “Navajo.”
Cate looked at him sharply. A Native American. Like Lydia’s husband. There was a resemblance, she realized. The same rugged planes and angles making up the face, the same high cheekbones and straight, almost blue-black hair, worn a little long, no doubt in tribute to their heritage. The only thing that threw her was that she would have expected his eyes to be brown or almost black. They weren’t.
“You have blue eyes.”
Christian shrugged casually. “Yes, I do.” His mother’s father had been only half Navajo. The other half had been an Italian woman who hailed from the northern region, where Italians were fair-skinned, fair-haired and blue-eyed, unlike their Sicilian brethren to the south.
The doctor looked comfortable in his own skin, she decided. And why shouldn’t he? Life probably held no surprises for him, threw him no curves out of nowhere. “I take it you know your family history?”
Christian thought it was rather a personal question, but given the situation, he allowed for it. When they were both younger, his brother had had no use for stories of the Dine, which was the name the Navajo gave themselves. At the time, heritage hadn’t meant anything to him. In one of the few times that he could remember, their mother had grown stern and laid down the law to him. He was to learn and be proud of who and what he was. The lessons had stuck.
He nodded. “Yes, I do.”
She laughed softly. He heard no humor in the sound. “That makes you one up on me. I thought I knew mine—until a month ago.”
As she spoke, he studied her. He had the impression that she ordinarily kept rigid control over her reactions. When people like that finally let go, it was a fearsome thing to witness. He wondered if she had some sort of a release valve.
“What happened a month ago?” he asked.
She pulled her shoulders back, as if bracing for a blow. “I tried to donate blood for my mother and the lab technician told me that mine wasn’t compatible with hers.”
Since he was a doctor, he honed in on the part of her statement that was most relevant to him. “What was wrong with your mother?”
“Leukemia.” The momentary hesitation and the slight press of her lips together was his only hint at the extent of her inner turmoil. The woman took a breath before she continued. “She died a little more than a week after that.”
“I’m sorry.” The words were not said automatically. Christian meant them genuinely. He had never learned how to separate himself from the sting of death, and though it made things difficult for him, he hoped he never could. If he were anesthetized to loss, it would rob him of his compassion.
Cate tried to shrug nonchalantly and couldn’t quite pull it off. The wound her mother’s death had caused was still too new, too raw. Even when she was angry with Julia Kowalski for the secret she had kept too long, there was still this huge hurt in her heart that her mother, the woman she’d loved and cherished, fought with and learned from for twenty-seven years, was gone. The thought, too, that she was no longer anyone’s child, but an adult in every sense of the word, was still new, still unwelcome.
“Yes,” she said quietly, “me, too.”
“Did your mother make a deathbed confession before she died?”
The irony of that still got to her. “She wouldn’t have even made that if it hadn’t been for the blood incompatibility.”
Not for the first time, she thought about how Julia Kowalski might have gone to her grave with the secret and she would have never known the truth. And subsequently she would have been at peace instead of feeling betrayed.
Maybe the truth was highly overrated. But now that she’d begun this, she couldn’t back away. She always needed to know. Everything. That had always been both her failing and her strength, the need to know, to fit in every piece of the puzzle.
Cate looked at him, her eyes capturing his. “How would you have liked to wake up one day to discover that your whole life was a lie? That you weren’t who you thought you were? That your parents weren’t your parents, that you weren’t a hundred percent Polish with just a hint of French, but God only knew what?”
Her eyes were stinging again. When was she going to get over this? she demanded silently. When was her anger going to burn away the tears?
“Do you have any idea how many stupid Polish jokes I had to endure while I was growing up? And I did it all for no reason. I’m not Polish. There was no great-great-grandmother who was an impoverished French countess. There’s nothing but this huge question mark,” she added.
She had an energy about her when she became animated. He found it difficult to look away. “So you’ve set out to erase that. The question mark in your life. What makes you think Joan’s your mother? Did your adoptive mother tell you?”
“No.” Cate’s mouth curved ever so slightly in a self-deprecating smile that did not reach her sad eyes. “I tracked her down. It’s what I do.”
And at least that much she was sure of. She was sure of her abilities. Everything else was up for grabs.
“Then you are sure.”
The deep baritone voice echoed in the room. Cate set down the coffee cup. There was a restlessness stirring within her. Cate attributed it to her less-than-successful encounter with her birth mother and was annoyed with herself. She usually had better control over herself than that.
She was also vaguely aware that the stirrings became more pronounced when Joan’s doctor was looking at her. It had been a long time since she’d even noticed a good-looking man.
Cate shifted in her seat. It did no good. She felt as uncomfortable in her own skin now as she did a moment ago. “I’d need a DNA test to be positive, I suppose. But Mrs. Cunningham didn’t exactly look inclined to submit to one of those.”
He could only imagine how having one bombshell after another dropped so quickly must have affected Joan. “This isn’t a good time for her.”
She looked at the doctor for a long moment. He hadn’t told her before when she’d asked, but the boundaries had changed. She tried again. “Why is she here?”
He was surprised that he was actually tempted to tell her. Christian attributed the momentary lapse to the sad look in the young woman’s eyes. A look he doubted if she even knew she possessed. A look he was particularly vulnerable to. But vulnerable or not, there were ethics to adhere to. “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that.”
Cate blew out a breath, banking down frustration. “Doctor-patient privilege, yes, I know all about that stumbling block.” If at first… She tried another approach. “What kind of a doctor are you?”
“A good one, I’d like to think.”
The hint of amusement in his eyes got to her for a second. It was almost as if there’d been a tiny tidal wave in the middle of her stomach. The meeting with her birth mother had really shaken her up more than she was willing to admit. She focused on fact finding, something she usually did well.
“From the sound of it, at least a slippery one. Normally I’d attribute that kind of an answer to a shrink, but psychiatrists generally don’t walk around with stethoscopes slung around their necks—unless they’re into shock therapy,” she added dryly.
The seconds ticked away and he had to be getting down to his office, but something about her made him linger just a few minutes longer. He saw no harm in telling her his discipline.
“I’m a gynecologist.”
Her mind quickly flipped through the conditions attached to his specialty. “Only two things would have a woman as upset as Mrs. Cunningham looked even before I told her who I was. A change-of-life baby…” Her voice trailed off as something far worse occurred to her. “Oh, God, it’s cancer, isn’t it?”
He saw distress before she could mask it. He thought of what had to be going through her head. To find her birth mother, only to think she was losing her again. It made him want to tell her that things were being handled. But to say that, he would have had to admit that there was something wrong. And his allegiance was to his patient, not the blonde sitting beside him.
Christian shook his head. “I can’t tell you.”
She hated not knowing, hated being shut out. Frustration had her fisting her hands in her lap. “What can you tell me?”
“That if this is on the level and for some inner peace you need to have Joan accept you as her daughter, that you take this slowly. Let her get used to the idea,” he advised.
That would be his approach, it always had been. Slow and steady. Only once in his life had he jumped in with both feet, and that was to threaten Alma’s father to keep away from her.
“If Joan is your mother the way you say,” he added as he saw the protest rise to her lips, “she probably thought she’d never see you again. She certainly didn’t expect you to pop up on what she undoubtedly feels is one of the darkest days of her life.”
Was he doing that on purpose, teasing her with information he wouldn’t give her? No, she doubted that. Gut instincts told her that this was a man who didn’t tease. Too bad. The thought came from nowhere and she had no idea why it materialized in her brain. She began to entertain the thought that, just possibly, she was going a little crazy. Who could blame her?
Cate sighed, regarding him a moment in silence. Wondering what made him tick. Wondering what she could use to her advantage. He seemed nice enough, or else why would he be here, talking to her now? But his allegiance was clearly to his patient. “You won’t tell me if I guess right, will you?”
“I took an oath.”
“To what, torture the bastard daughters of your patients?” This time, Cate was certain she saw a hint of a smile quirk his lips.
“No, to keep my patients’ confidences just between us.” Christian debated for a moment, then decided to tell her the little that he could. “I will tell you this, though. Joan never mentioned having another daughter besides Rebecca.”
The laugh that left her lips was completely without humor. Her eyes challenged his. They were flashing with barely suppressed anger. He had to admit, the sight was compelling.
“And you would tell me if she’d filled out on her patient history form: ‘Gave away one daughter because I wasn’t ready to be a mother yet.’”
In her position, he was pretty sure he would have felt the same. But he wasn’t in her position. And his position was to guard Joan’s privacy. “If she had, I wouldn’t say anything. But since she hadn’t, I can tell you. I can also tell you that maybe you should think about signing up for an anger-management class.”
And who the hell was he to tell her what to do? She could feel her temper rising dangerously close to the surface. Cate squared her shoulders. “I can manage my anger just fine, thanks.”
Instead of getting up and walking out the way she’d expected him to, her mother’s doctor took her wrist and placed his fingers against her pulse. Her anger square-danced with a strange surge of warmth that washed over her.
“That’s not what your pulse is saying.” His eyes held hers. “It’s accelerated.”
Cate yanked away her wrist. The warm feeling stayed, but it was being smothered by a wave of anger fueled by indignation. “Maybe that’s because a good-looking man is holding it.”
Christian took it as a sarcastic remark. If there was the tiniest part of him that reacted, he attributed it to a trying morning, nothing more. He’d hoped that Joan’s tests would have returned negative from the lab.
“You have better control over yourself than that” was all he said. He took his cup, rinsed it out and placed it on the counter again. “I’ve got to go to my office.” After drying his hands, he put back the towel and saw that she was staring at him. “What?”
His comment about her having better control over herself than that left her momentarily speechless. Rallying, she searched for something plausible to say. Cate glanced at the mug draining on the counter. “I never saw a man rinse out his own cup before, that’s all.”
He had a feeling she was lying, but he went along with it. “Part of being allowed to use the nurses’ lounge. I remove all traces of having been here.”
“Except for the money you leave in the can.” She nodded toward it.
“Except for that.” It occurred to him that maybe the woman needed more time to pull herself together, although she didn’t look it. But he was the first to know that the exterior didn’t always give away what was happening beneath. People thought of him as stoic and he was anything but. It was only a role he took on. “You can stay here as long as you like,” he said as he began to open the door.
But Cate was already on her feet. She quickly rinsed out the cup he’d given her and was beside him in less time than he would have thought possible.
“I just took a few hours of personal time to try to resolve this.” The expression on her face was contrite. She realized that something this huge required more than “a few hours of personal time.” “I need to be getting back, too.”
Christian held the door open for her.
“Thanks,” she murmured. “For the coffee and the talk.”
“Even if it wasn’t fruitful?”
“Everyone’s got their own interpretation of ‘fruitful,’” she replied.
He couldn’t quite read the smile on her face. He supposed that was why the word enigmatic was created.
They parted in the hallway. He had a feeling deep in his gut that this wasn’t going to be the last time he saw her. The FBI special agent didn’t strike him as the kind of woman who gave up easily. She reminded him a great deal of his sister-in-law.
Christian hadn’t lied about needing to get to his office. He had patients scheduled all morning. But the first up was an annual exam with Sally Jacobs, who’d had no particular complaints when she’d made the appointment with his nurse. Christian decided that the annual exam could wait a few minutes.
Instead, he went back to Joan’s room to check on her. He wanted to see if the sedative had taken hold yet and if she was doing better than when he had left her.
Knocking once, he opened the door when he heard the muffled, “Come in.”
Joan was sitting up in bed, shredding a tissue into a hundred tiny pieces. Out of habit, Christian picked up the chart hanging off the edge of her bed to see if the right dosage had been given. There had never been any mistakes of major consequence at Blair Memorial, just a few minor inconveniences. Delays in lab results, a food menu lost, things of that nature. Nothing to warrant any anxiety. Checking the chart was a pretext.
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