A stolen moment...

A lifetime together?

Three years ago, single mom and nurse Lacey lost her husband in the same IED blast that left his best friend, ER doc Scott, with an injured leg and survivor’s guilt. Thrill seeker Scott’s sworn to always be there for cautious Lacey... And on one fraught night shift, this leaves them entwined in an electrifying kiss—an impulsive encounter that has him longing to keep her in his protective embrace always...

DEANNE ANDERS was reading romance while her friends were still reading Nancy Drew, and she knew she’d hit the jackpot when she found a shelf of romances in her local library. Years later she discovered the fun of writing her own. Deanne lives in Florida, with her husband and their spoiled Pomeranian. During the day she works as a nursing supervisor. With her love of everything medical and romance, writing for Mills & Boon Medical Romance is a dream come true.

Also by Deanne Anders

From Midwife to Mummy

The Surgeon’s Baby Bombshell

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.

Stolen Kiss with the Single Mum

Deanne Anders

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-0-008-90225-4

STOLEN KISS WITH THE SINGLE MUM

© 2020 Denise Chavers

Published in Great Britain 2020

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

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This book is dedicated to all the hard-working emergency room nurses, physicians and techs I have the privilege to work with. You amaze me with the care and dedication you show every day. You have one of the hardest jobs in the hospital, but you make it look easy.

Also, a special thanks to CAPT David Olson USNR (ret), for founding the Combat Wounded Warrior Challenge, and to his wife Teresa for her work with the veterans. Your work lives on with the veterans you touched.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

EPILOGUE

Extract

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

FOUR O’CLOCK IN the morning could be considered the witching hour in any ER, Lacey was sure, but for a hospital smack-dab in the middle of New Orleans, where voodoo and ghost stories were the norm, it seemed especially true.

Not that she really minded the unusual assortment of patients who seemed to find their way into the emergency room at that time of morning. If nothing else it definitely helped pass the last few hours before the sun started peeking through the windows—the first sign that the next shift would be there soon.

Unfortunately, the early-morning hours hadn’t seen their usual influx of eclectic patients today, and now the hours till shift-change had begun to drag.

“What’s he looking up now?” the young unit coordinator asked.

Lacey looked over to where Scott Boudreaux, one of the on-duty ER doctors, sat studying his computer screen.

“Planning his next adventure, I’m sure,” she said.

Lacey had never understood the man’s desire to put himself at risk for the thrill of survival, but she had learned she might as well keep her concerns to herself. Hadn’t she had almost the same conversations with her husband when he had been alive? And what good had it done her?

The two men had always been more than she could handle, with neither of them ever listening to her concerns. Then they’d both volunteered for that last deployment to Afghanistan and now Ben was gone.

There had been a time when she had blamed Scott for her husband’s death, though she had known even then that it was stupid to think that way. Ben had wanted to return and help the injured soldiers on the field as much as Scott. The two of them had been like two peas in a pod through medical school, and she had finally learned to accept their adventures together, thinking the two of them would be safe as long as they were together.

She’d been wrong.

Scott had been lucky to come out with only an injury to his leg after an IED had exploded, but he’d been left with this need to always prove himself. She just couldn’t understand why he felt he had to spend his life searching out thrill after thrill. Just the experience of working in the emergency room alone gave her all the taste of adventure that she needed. Add to that the trials of being a single mom and she had all the thrills she could handle.

“The next Extreme Warrior trip is only a couple weeks from now, and I think the winter trip to Alaska is pretty much planned, so he’s probably working on the spring trip.”

“There’s a rumor that they’re going to hunt Sasquatch next,” the unit coordinator said.

Lacey laughed at the idea of a bunch of war veterans trying to hunt down the mythological hairy creature.

“Now, that would be extreme,” she said, then looked over to Scott to see his reaction.

“Y’all know I can hear you, right?” Scott said as he glanced over to the two of them and then winked.

The UC let out an audible sigh and Lacey couldn’t help but understand why. With his longish blond hair curling around his collar and those unusual gray-green eyes that she had always found to be seductive, he’d broken more than a few of her co-workers’ hearts.

“And I’m adding the Sasquatch hunt to my list of possibilities.”

Lacey laughed again when the UC’s mouth dropped open. Though she knew Scott had meant to tease the girl, she wasn’t sure that he wasn’t totally serious. He lived to come up with new ways to challenge the group of veterans he worked with. The whole bunch of them were crazy as far as she was concerned.

When Scott had come back from Afghanistan without Ben he’d been just as lost as her. The two of them had struggled through that time together, and when he had first brought up the idea of starting the Extreme Warrior program that he and Ben had been planning before Ben’s death she had been supportive.

He’d had no idea how fast the program would grow, with more and more veterans attending the meetings and applying to go on the extreme trips that Scott planned. Now, with the fast growth of the program, Scott was looking for some hands-on help, and had begun pressuring her to join the group.

Though she knew Ben would want her to help his friend in any way she could, in her heart she knew it was Ben who should have been there to help Scott, not her. The memories of sitting around the table with the two of them as they made plans to serve the military veterans in the New Orleans area just reminded her of how much of life Ben had missed out on.

The thought of her husband’s death took all the humor she’d felt minutes ago out of her. She’d planned her life so carefully. She’d seen her mother struggle as a single mom, after Lacey’s father had walked out on them, and she had sworn then that she’d make a different kind of life when she grew up.

So she’d gone to college and gotten the nursing degree that had allowed her to live independently and she had been happy. Then she’d met Ben, and had known right away that he was a man she could trust her heart with.

When she had married him the thought that she might lose him had never entered her head. He’d been a doctor, not a soldier. He hadn’t been supposed to die so young. He hadn’t been supposed to leave her with a four-year-old son who couldn’t remember his daddy.

The radio on her desk went off and the voice of one of the city’s emergency medical technicians began spitting out information concerning the patient they were transporting.

“Patient is a fifty-four-year-old male suffering from multiple injuries, including a laceration to the head. No loss of consciousness after a car versus light post MVA. Vital signs are: heart-rate in the one-tens, BP one-sixty-five over ninety and respirations twenty-four, with an oxygen saturation of ninety-two on five liters oxygen. ETA ten minutes, and arriving with New Orleans Police Department officer on board.”

She looked at the room’s tracking board, then hit the button on her radio. The EMTs hadn’t called the patient in as a trauma, and the patients vital signs were stable, so she didn’t want to tie up a trauma bed unnecessarily.

“Room Thirty-Two on arrival,” she said, and then got up to get the room ready for the new patient.

“Am I getting a patient?” asked Karen, one of the RNs who regularly worked the night shift, as she walked by.

“No, I’m going to take this one,” Lacey said.

The night had been dragging, and the fact that a police officer was aboard the ambulance with the patient might prove to be interesting. She wouldn’t mind a little excitement to help the last hours of her shift pass by. She’d spent too much time tonight thinking about things she couldn’t change.

At the sound of Lacey’s laughter Scott pushed back from his desk and looked down the hall to where she stood with one of the other nurses. Unlike the high-pitched giggle of some of the women he had dated, Lacey’s laugh had always been genuine.

It had been her laughter that had caught his attention the first time he’d seen her. With her head of dark red hair thrown back and her bright green eyes shining with humor, she’d been a vision. Never had he seen someone actually glow with happiness till that night. He’d known then that she was one of a kind, and only the fact that his best friend had laid claim to her first had kept him from pursuing her.

But she wasn’t the same woman she’d been then. She was older now, more mature, yet still just as beautiful as the first day he had set eyes on her. Life had knocked her down with Ben’s death, but she’d managed to get back up. It had been hard, and there had been a time when he had thought he would never hear her laughter again, which only made the sound of her laugh sweeter to his ears now.

If only his best friend was there to hear it.

As it always did when he thought of Ben, guilt slammed through him. He’d never understand why it had been him who had made it home and not Ben, who’d had a wife and son waiting for him. He knew it should have been Ben who had survived.

Watching as Lacey continued walking down to the back of the unit, he wondered if she ever thought the same thing. Did those thoughts haunt her as they did him?

Turning back to his computer, he pushed thoughts of his friend’s death to the back of his mind so that he could return his focus to work. After checking the lab work on the elderly patient who was next to be seen, he picked up the man’s chart and headed down the hall.

Lacey had just gotten the room stocked with the suture supplies she thought Scott would need when the ambulance crew rolled in with their patient, and a tired-looking police officer on their tail. The smell of alcohol hit her before she could even get a glance at the patient, which was enough to explain the presence of the officer.

“Thanks, Larry,” she said to one of the techs as he came in, and they both assisted the EMTs in transferring the man over to the stretcher. The patient remained unresponsive as they moved him. Whether that was from the accident or the alcohol intoxication she couldn’t tell.

She hooked the patient up to all the monitors and noted that the man’s heart-rate and other vital signs appeared to have deteriorated from when she had gotten the initial report. She began checking the man’s body for injuries. There was a cut above his right eye that oozed blood. It would need a few stitches. But her real concern was the possibility of a traumatic head injury due to whatever the man had hit his head on during the MVA.

She mentally moved the man to the top of the list of patients who needed to go to Radiology to get a CAT scan. They’d need his chest and abdomen scanned as well as his head.

“You said he didn’t lose consciousness at first?” she asked the EMT who’d remained in the room, and was now filling out the needed paperwork.

“Not that we’re aware of. He was awake when we got there. He passed out on the way here,” he said. “His alcohol level has to be at least in the three hundreds.”

She walked back over to the stretcher and rubbed the man’s sternum hard enough to get a response. The man moaned and one bloodshot eye opened. He looked around the room, moaned again, and closed the eye. So he did respond to pain. But still those vital signs bothered her.

“Name?” she asked.

“James Lyons,” the EMT read off his paperwork, then tore the form from his pad, handed her a copy, and walked out the door.

She looked over at the police officer who had taken a spot by the door.

“What are you charging him with?” she asked him.

“DUI,” the man said. “Along with property damage and driving with a suspended license. He swiped the side of a car before he hit the light pole. It’s not his first DUI. He served time for his last one. If someone had been sitting in the car he sideswiped they’d be dead now.”

“Mr. Lyons, can you hear me? I need you to wake up for me.”

This time the man opened both his eyes. Hopefully his unresponsiveness earlier had more to do with his alcohol consumption than injury. Or the man could be playing possum instead of dealing with the police officer in the room. She didn’t have enough information to know yet.

“Do you hurt anywhere?” she asked as she shone a light into his eyes. His pupils were reactive, but she still felt there was more to his injuries than what she was seeing.

The man moaned, then grabbed his left side and looked over to the corner, where the cop was now sitting. Looking at the monitor, Lacey noticed that his oxygen saturations had dropped again, and his respirations had increased too. Pulling her stethoscope from around her neck, she placed the chest-piece against his chest and listened He was definitely moving less air on the left side.

“If you can get a line in for me, Larry, and draw the standard labs, I’d appreciate it. I’ll go get some orders from Dr. Boudreaux and then we’ll get over to CT,” she said, as she turned the patient’s oxygen up, then started out of the room. “And can you keep an eye on those vitals too? If there’s any change just call me on my radio.”

Not seeing Scott at his desk, she went in search of him in one of his patients’ rooms and found him sitting on a stool having a conversation with an elderly man. The man’s hair was pure white, his body thin and bent with age, but his smile lit his wrinkled face and his eyes sparkled with pleasure.

“Lacey, come in here,” Scott said when he saw her. “I want you to meet Lieutenant Hines. He was in Europe in World War Two.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Lieutenant Hines,” she said to the elderly man, who seemed to be embarrassed from all the attention he was getting.

“It’s Frank, Miss Lacey,” he said. “My days of being a lieutenant are long gone.”

“It’s nice meeting you, Frank,” she said.

She hated to interrupt Scott, but she knew he would be tied up here for a while, talking to and examining this patient. She needed to get her new patient to CT as soon as possible, and with the increase of his oxygen needs she didn’t have time to wait till he was finished.

“Can I speak to you for a minute, Dr. Boudreaux?” she asked.

“Sure. I’ll be right back with you,” Scott told the elderly patient before he left the room with her.

“The man’s almost one hundred years old, but his mind is sharp. The things he saw were amazing,” Scott said.

“What’s he here for?” she asked as they moved away from the door.

“Blood sugar was reported low at his assisted living home. It’s coming up, but his electrolytes are off so I’m going to admit him and get those corrected. He lost his wife over ten years ago, and they never had any children, so he’s alone except for a niece who lives in California,” Scott said.

He couldn’t have been in the room more than fifteen minutes, but he already knew the man’s life history. It never failed to amaze her how he could get people to talk to him. When depression had all but consumed her after Ben’s death, and she’d been at her lowest, not only had Scott gotten her to a counselor, he’d sat beside her for hours and just let her talk. It was a gift that made him not only a good doctor, but also a great friend.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt, but I’ve got a patient who just rolled in and I’m thinking he possibly should have been trauma-alerted. I’m putting in orders for the usual labs, but he’s got a laceration on his forehead that’s going to need some stitches and I’ve ordered a scan of his head. Can you take a look at him for me?” she asked.

“Why do you think he should have been trauma-alerted? His head injury?” he asked.

“Maybe. He’s requiring more oxygen than he needed when the EMTs arrived,” she said. “He’s heavily intoxicated, but there’s something else going on too.”

“Order a portable X-ray for me. I’ll be finished here in just a minute and then I’ll head straight there.”

She watched as he returned to the elderly man’s room. She noticed that his limp was more pronounced than it normally was, but she wasn’t surprised as this was the last of seven straight days on duty. The injury to his leg that he’d received in Afghanistan hadn’t slowed him down a bit, and he had never let it stop him, but sometimes she wished he would. She’d have a lot fewer gray hairs if he’d slow down and quit running around the world chasing the next thrill.

She turned back toward her patient’s room as she called on her radio to have the X-ray tech come down.

Scott reviewed the vital signs on the monitor, then walked over to the man lying on the stretcher as Lacey laid out the chest tube kit. While the CT scans had ruled out any brain injury, they had shown a significant pneumothorax, proving Lacey had been right to be concerned about the patient’s vital signs changes and his decreased breath sounds.

Not that it surprised him. He’d been working with her long enough now to know he could trust her instincts.

“Mr. Lyons, I’m Dr. Boudreaux. You have several rib fractures from the accident and one of them has punctured your left lung, which is affecting your breathing. I’m going to need to insert a chest tube.”

The man didn’t seem to be paying much attention to what he was saying. Instead he seemed to be more interested in Lacey and the tray of instruments that she was setting up.

“Don’t let those instruments scare you. I’m going to inject some lidocaine to numb the site on your chest where I’ll insert the tube. You shouldn’t feel anything,” he said, and he turned toward the sink in the room and began to wash his hands.

Something crashed behind him and he turned back, expecting to see that Lacey had bumped into the stand that held the instruments. Instead he saw the patient he’d just been explaining the procedure to standing beside the bed, holding Lacey against him. The glint of steel caught his eye and he realized that the man had a scalpel in his hand.

As if he had just stepped through a time warp, he was suddenly thrown back into the war zone of Afghanistan, standing in the quickly thrown-up field hospital...

There was chaos everywhere he looked as nurses and doctors worked on the wounded who had just arrived. He looked up and saw Ben standing in front of him. Another man held a knife to his throat while he shouted to them in a language Scott didn’t understand.

Ben told him that the man had an IED, and then he watched as suddenly Ben went down and everything exploded.

He heard screams coming from all around him, and knew one of the screams was his own. A piece of metal had torn into his leg as he was thrown under one of the operating tables.

Then he heard only silence, and it took a moment for him to realize that the blast of the explosion had damaged his ears.

He crawled through the rubble, dragging his injured leg behind him as he looked for Ben. He could see the wounded as they cried out for help, but still could not hear a sound.

He made it over to where his friend lay, pulling him into his lap and propping the two of them against the side of a turned-over table. As tears rolled down his own face he tried to wipe away the blood from his friend’s face.

Ben turned, his eyes no longer bright with life, And Scott watched as his friend worked laboriously to speak, concentrating on the movement of his friend’s lips as he slowly formed words.

“Lacey and Alston,” his friend said. “Take care of them for me.”

“Always,” Scott answered before his friend’s eyes closed for the last time. “Always.”

The tray stand crashed to the floor and just as quickly as he’d disappeared into the nightmare that still haunted his sleep he was back, watching as the man, now totally out of control, wrecked his emergency room and threatened his best friend’s wife.

He took a deep breath and tried to slow his speeding heart. He didn’t have time to deal with his own demons now. He had to get this situation under control before Lacey was hurt. He wouldn’t let Lacey or Ben down again.

“Whoa, man, you don’t want to do this,” Scott said as he slowly approached the wild-eyed man.

The man’s trembling hand tightened around the scalpel he held against Lacey’s throat.

Scott stopped moving and held up his hands with his palms facing forward, showing the man they were empty, letting the man know he wasn’t a threat. He had to find some way to get through to this guy before he hurt her.

He looked from the man’s hands to Lacey’s pale face. She’d gone so still he wasn’t sure she was even breathing. Her green eyes were wide with a look of fear that he was only too familiar with. He’d seen it on a countless number of injured soldiers. He’d seen it on Ben’s face just before that insurgent had detonated the bomb he’d been wearing. It killed him to see it on Lacey’s face now.

Then her eyes caught his and her lips moved.

Alston, she mouthed, and the word was as plain to him as if she had spoken it. Take care of Alston.

No. He couldn’t live through this again. Nothing was going to happen to Lacey. He wouldn’t let it.

Did she think he was just going to stand there and let this guy hurt her? Kill her? He’d lost too many people in his life already. He would not lose Lacey. There had to be a way to get this man to let her go.

“Look, I don’t know your story,” he said to the man as he moved an inch closer, “but I do know that woman you’re holding, and I know that whatever is going on that has driven you to do something like this is not her fault.”

Scott slowly moved closer to the man. The police officer who had been with them earlier took a step into the room from the other side, causing the man to jerk Lacey up closer to him as he tightened his hand around the scalpel at her throat. One slice to her jugular and she’d bleed out before Scott could save her.

“Don’t come any closer. I don’t want to hurt her, but I’m not going back to jail,” the man said. “I want a car outside in fifteen minutes or...”

Scott watched as the man struggled for breath. Was his color a bit cyanotic? If he could keep the man talking long enough he’d pass out with hypoxia. Only that would still leave the sharp scalpel dangerously close to Lacey’s neck when the man went down...

“Do you see how short of breath you are? You need to stay here in the hospital so that we can treat you.”

“She’s a nurse.” The man gestured with the hand that held the scalpel. “She can take care of me.”

Scott had to get through to this man now. It would help if he knew something about him, but he only remembered the basic information. He couldn’t even remember the man’s name now. All he knew was that Lacey was in danger and he was going to have to get her out of it without her being hurt.

He watched as the man’s hand began to shake again. He had to do something—and now. He would not lose someone he cared about again.

“Her name’s Lacey and she’s one of the best nurses I’ve ever worked with,” Scott said as he moved closer.

He made himself look the man in the eyes, all the while thinking about the sharp scalpel lying against Lacey’s neck. His instincts told him to grab her and run, but his training told him that would put her at risk. He had to talk this man down if he was going to have any chance of keeping her safe.

“She’s caring and professional and she treats everyone with respect, no matter what their background. But you’d already know that, wouldn’t you?” Scott said.

The man’s eyes left his and he looked down at Lacey.

Scott took another step—a larger one this time. “She’s also one of the best moms I’ve ever known. She does that thing where she leaves notes in her son’s lunchbox. Not mushy notes. The kid’s eight and she knows better than that. Instead she writes down corny jokes that he reads to his friends every day at lunch,” Scott said, and made a sound as close to a laugh as he could manage.

Yep, there’s no threat here. I’m just a simple doctor having a conversation with his patient...

The man had gone quiet now, though whether it was from listening to him or from the lack of oxygen going to his brain Scott didn’t know. But as the scalpel had moved a fraction of an inch away from Lacey’s neck he really didn’t care which.

Scott saw the police officer behind the man moving closer. The officer had his Taser out, but he wouldn’t be able to use it until Lacey was free. They had the man boxed in now—he wouldn’t be leaving with Lacey—but they didn’t want him to realize that yet.

“The boy lost his dad in Afghanistan, so Lacey’s the only parent he has. He’s got his momma’s red-haired temper, but he’s a good kid and he needs his mom,” Scott said, and took one more step closer to Lacey.

She was within arm’s reach now. The officer behind the man nodded his head. It was time for this to end.

“Like I said, I don’t know your story, but I do know that whatever or whoever you have a problem with, it’s not Lacey’s fault. Let her go and we can talk. Please,” Scott said, as he held out his hands toward the man, “just let her go.”

“I don’t wanna hurt nobody,” the man said, his voice slurred and tears filling his eyes. “I just wanna go home.”

The officer behind the man nodded one more time. It was now or never.

Scott reached out his hand for Lacey’s, felt it tremble as she laid it in his, and with one motion yanked her into his arms.

Police and Security surrounded the man as his body collapsed and convulsed from being Tasered.

CHAPTER TWO

LACEY CLUNG TO SCOTT. Nothing had ever felt as good as being held safe in his arms right then. She’d heard many a trauma survivor talk about having their lives flash before them, but she’d never experienced anything like that until now. With the sharp edge of the scalpel lying against her neck, fear had taken over her body, and with it had come the knowledge that she might have seen her little boy for the last time.

The adrenaline rush she had experienced earlier was gone now and her body had started to tremble. She looked around the hallway Scott had pulled her into. Had it all been real? Her body wanted to crumple there on the floor and curl into itself, protect her from the fear that was flooding through her.

She remembered another time when that had happened—when the chaplain from the base had told her about Ben’s death. She’d sunk to the floor that day and had never wanted to get up. She’d had to fight her way up every day after that, taking it one hour at a time, then one day, one week. At first she had failed more than she’d succeeded, but with counseling, and support from her family and friends, she’d finally gotten to where she was today.

The possibility of becoming that broken woman again scared her more than that scalpel against her neck.

She gave her head a hard shake and pushed away from Scott. “I need some air,” she said, then headed for the exit door.

Outside, the sky was still dark, but from where she stood she could see the city starting to come to life. Lights began to come on all around her as the early shift workers began to prepare for the day.

She leaned against the wall that enclosed the roof and for the first time in her life wished for a cigarette to hold in her shaking hands. The façade she had held on to until she’d been able to make her escape fell, and with it the tears she could no longer hold inside.

Alone in the dark, she let the tears fall as she stared out into the city. She couldn’t let anyone see her like this. She had her reputation as a hard-nosed ER nurse to uphold. Laughter broke through her sobs. Some kick-ass nurse she had turned out to be.

“Lacey?”

She heard a voice call into the shadows where she hid. She mopped at the tears with the sleeve of her jacket, but she didn’t answer—couldn’t speak at all while she worked to hold the sobs inside her. What would Scott the mighty thrill-seeker think of her hiding in the dark, crying like some scared little rookie nurse?

She wiped at her tears again as Scott walked into her hiding place and then pulled her into his arms. The dam broke and she let the tears and the sobs take over.

“I was so scared,” she said, speaking between sobs against his shoulder. “If something happened to me... Alston would be all alone...”

“It’s okay,” Scott said. “You’re okay.”

She knew that, but still she cried.

“I know. It’s just...” she said.

Scott’s hand ran up and down her back, his touch soothing her. Her body began to relax, her breaths becoming less ragged and her heart-rate slowing. Scott whispered in her ear, sweet sounds that calmed her fears. She was safe here with him.

She knew she needed to move away from him, in case someone saw them and took what was simply the act of comforting a friend as something less innocent, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t leave the warmth of his body. A body that was strong and safe...one that fit so perfectly with hers. A hard body that was starting to send all kinds of tingles through hers.

Wait. Something was wrong. This was Scott. Her friend. Her late husband’s best friend. There could be no tingles between the two of them.

Lacey started to push away, but Scott only pulled her closer. One of his hands cupped her face, turning it up toward him, his green-gray eyes captured hers filled with desperation.

“I would never let anything happen to you, Lacey,” he promised as he looked down at her.

She knew he was going to kiss her a second before he lowered his head. She could have turned her face, could have pushed away from him, but his eyes—so earnest—seemed to hold her in place until his lips were on hers and then it was too late. There was no fighting the warm touch of his lips as they met hers.

She had felt so cold and alone before Scott had found her. Now the heat from his body drove the cold away and his arms around her reminded her that she was no longer alone. Her mouth opened and his tongue swept in, scattering all reason from her mind as desire crowded out the fear that had held her prisoner earlier.

In the back of her mind an alarm warned her. But of what she could no longer remember. Right now there was just her and this blessed kiss, which reminded her that she was alive and safe as long as she remained in the strong arms that held her.

She tasted of sunshine and hope and everything that he had been afraid of losing as he’d watched her stand there so still with that scalpel held against her throat. If that man had hurt her...if he had lost her...there would have been no hope left in his life.

He poured everything he had into the kiss, trying to reassure himself that she was real, that she was alive and safe. Her body relaxed into his, melting into him, and then he felt himself harden against her and realized he had taken things a little too far. What had started out as a need to confirm that Lacey was alive and safe had turned into a desire that he had never let himself acknowledge before.

He felt her stiffen against him and knew she had felt the change too. He eased out of the kiss, withdrawing slowly until there was a small sliver of space between them.

She blinked up at him with eyes that went from startled to horrified in a second then stared at him as if she had never seen him before.

But then she had never seen this side of him, had she? Even though the two of them were close, they’d always been careful to keep their relationship free of anything that could be interpreted as something other than friendship.

“This never happened,” Lacey whispered, then backed away from him.

“Wait,” he said as she continued to put space between the two of them. “We need to talk.”

“No, I have to go. I’ve got patients. I need to call the lab.”

He started toward her as she stumbled, but she held her hands up to stop him.

“Don’t. I just need to go,” she said, and she turned away from him and hurried toward the stairs.

He watched as she all but ran from him. What had he been thinking? He’d crossed that invisible line that lay between friends and lovers—a line that no one ever crossed without there being consequences to their relationship. A line he had never dreamed he would cross.

For the second time that day time stood still for him—except that this time, instead of a nightmare, it had felt more like a dream come true.

But nothing could happen between him and Lacey. He’d promised her husband that he would take care of her and Alston and that promise had never included anything but friendship. A friend didn’t make moves on his dead friend’s wife. That was just not done.

He turned east and watched the sun as it rose across the sky, creating a work of art with its blend of pinks, purples and blues that no human artist could ever truly copy. The night was over and a new day was beginning. Each day was as unique as its sunrise, and he’d learned the hard way that no one knew when a day began how it would end.

He lived his life with the motto that you had to live each day as if it was your last. There were no promises of tomorrow. You had to make the life you wanted now, because today was all you could count on till the sun began to rise again.

Only sometimes life came with unexpected complications that you weren’t prepared for—and the kiss he had just shared with Lacey was one big complication.

He headed back to the ER. Maybe he should have fought off the need he’d had to kiss Lacey, but he’d needed to reassure himself that she was alive and with him at that moment.

He’d explain it to her. They’d been friends for a long time and he would never have purposely done anything to threaten that friendship. Surely she wouldn’t let one kiss in the heat of the moment ruin what they had between the two of them? They were both adults and it had only been one kiss. Just one kiss.

But what a kiss it had been.

Lacey tried to pay attention to the convoluted story her eight-year-old was telling her, but her mind kept wandering back to the last shift she’d worked. She’d been able to throw off the fear that had seized her the night before after she’d gotten some sleep, thank goodness. And she’d mostly managed to file the experience with the intoxicated patient in the back of her mind, with all the other memories she hoped to forget someday.

Now she found that it wasn’t the fact that she had been held hostage with a cold scalpel against her neck that occupied her mind. Instead it was what had happened later, between her and Scott. What had he...she...they been thinking?

They’d both been recovering from a flood of adrenaline. They’d both been scared and had needed reassurance that the two of them were safe. She could even have pushed the line a little, with the two of them sharing a hug, a kiss on the cheek, but that kiss...

That hadn’t been the kiss of two friends, sharing their fear of what might have been. No, that kiss had definitely not been a kiss between two friends.

The feel of her fingers against her lips broke through her daydreaming and she jerked them away. Scott would be here at any minute, to take Alston to soccer practice, and she didn’t need him to think she was obsessing over a kiss that had meant nothing to either one of them.

“And then Ms. Little told me to leave the class and never come back,” Alston said.

“What?” she said.

She caught the glass of milk her hand had hit before it toppled over, then sent her son her most intimidating Mommy stare.

“Alston Benjamin Miller—what did you say?” She watched as Alston’s face broke out into a grin.

“Gotcha!” he said, then jumped down from his seat and began dancing around in a circle, making sounds that reminded her of an injured cow.

Marching around the corner of the counter, she grabbed her son up in her arms and squeezed. He was her life, her everything. If anything ever happened to him...

She squeezed him tighter as he made fake choking sounds. He looked up at her and she thought her heart would stop. He’d been born with her red hair and green eyes, but that mischievous smile with its pair of dimples had come straight from Ben. He was growing up so fast and there was nothing she could do to slow the time down.

She gave him another squeeze, then put him back down. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I should have been paying more attention.”

“It’s okay,” Alston said.

“Tonight we’ll order pizza and you can tell me the whole story again.”

The doorbell rang, which sent him running for the door.

“Slow down!” she called after him.

She caught herself questioning her choice of shorts and an old hospital T-shirt. What was wrong with her? One kiss with a man and all of a sudden she was making a fool of herself. This had to stop now. She’d been kissed many times before she’d met Ben.

But you’ve haven’t been kissed since Ben.

Her mind froze on that thought. Was the problem she was having with the memory of kissing Scott as simple as that? If so, then this strange quiver she had in her stomach at the thought of seeing him would surely go away soon.

She had just loaded the last glass into the dishwasher when Alston and Scott came into the room.

“Hurry and grab your shoes,” she said to her son. “You don’t want to keep Scott waiting.”

She tried to make her eyes look up at Scott, but instead she busied herself wiping down the counters. She turned her back to him to clean the stove top, and then stopped. She was acting like an immature teenager instead of the mature single mom that she was.

Turning around to face Scott, she pasted her most friendly smile on her face—the one she used when a patient was really annoying, but she knew she had to play nice.

“You okay? I’m sorry that happened yesterday,” Scott said as he moved over to where Alston had dropped his soccer bag. He grabbed the bag, then moved to the counter. “I started to call last night, to check on you, but I didn’t want to wake you. I figured you’d have had a hard time sleeping. I know I did.”

Did he really want to talk about this now? Where did they start?

You shouldn’t have kissed me?

I shouldn’t have kissed you back?

What did he mean, he’d had a hard time sleeping? Had thinking of that kiss kept him awake like it had her? Did he have the same strange quiver in his stomach that she had? And he wanted to talk about it now? No, that couldn’t be what he meant. They had to put that kiss behind them. They had a great relationship and they couldn’t afford to lose it.

“We can’t do that again,” she said, then squeezed her eyes shut. Why couldn’t her mouth get on track with her mind? She took a deep breath, then opened her eyes. “What I meant to say is that I think it would be best if you didn’t kiss me again.”

“Um... Lacey, I was talking about that patient grabbing you and trying to take you hostage,” Scott said, his eyes now looking away from her.

Of course he was talking about the patient with the scalpel. He probably hadn’t given the kiss they’d shared another thought. The man probably went around kissing women all the time. What would one kiss shared with a friend mean to him?

They both looked up as Alston came back into the room.

“Why’d someone grab you?” Alston asked, hands on his hips as if he was preparing to interrogate her.

Scott gave her a guilty smile, then ran his hand over her son’s ginger hair. “Nothing for you to worry about,” he told the boy, who was now making a show of studying the two of them.

“If someone hurt my mom I’ll punch them in the nose,” Alston said, and he brought his small fist up and shook it.

She watched as Scott’s lips twitched and they both held back laughter.

“Mikey said his big brother punched his sister’s boyfriend in the nose. He said there was blood everywhere. Mikey’s mom got mad about the blood and made his brother apologize to the jerk.”

“Jerk?” she asked.

“Yeah, that’s what Mikey called him. Was it a jerk that grabbed you?” he asked her.

“It was definitely a jerk,” Scott said. “But the cops took care of him so you don’t need to punch him.”

She could see that her son was ready to argue the point and she wasn’t prepared for that now.

Alston took his position as the “man” of the house very seriously. He’d begun by taking out the garbage, though at first that had been more of a mess than if she had done it herself, but she’d known it made him feel like he was helping out so she’d watched him drag the trash bag out through the back door and then hurried to clean up the mess he’d left on the floor before he could return and see it.

“Y’all better get going or you’re going to be late for practice,” she reminded the two of them.

“Let’s go,” Scott said, and he wrapped his arm around her son’s shoulder as they headed for the door.

“Oh, and about that other thing... If you want to talk about it later we can,” Scott said, though from the tight expression on his face she knew he would prefer not to talk about it.

“There’s nothing to talk about. Everything’s good. We’re good, right?” she asked, and held her breath waiting for his answer.

“Yeah, sure. We’re good,” Scott said, and he hurried out the door with her son without looking back at her.

She took in a deep breath as the front door shut. The man was certainly not going to make this easy for her. And it was entirely that kiss’s fault.

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