Lover Unleashed (Black Dagger Brotherhood 9)

The trouble was, as he went down the ramp into the parking garage, all that seemed hollow, somehow.

He was forty-five years old, with at least half of his useful life in the bin, and what did he have to show for it? A condo full of Nike shit and a job that had taken over all his nooks and crannies. No wife. No kids. Christmases and New Years and Fourths of July were spent at the hospital—with his mother finding her own way for the holidays and no doubt pining for grandchildren she’d better not be holding her breath for.

Christ, how many random women had he fucked over the years? Hundreds. Had to be.

His mother’s voice shot through his head: You’re just like your father.

Too true. His dad had also been a surgeon. With a wandering streak.

It was actually why Manny had picked Caldwell. His mother had been here at St. Francis as an ICU nurse, working to put him through his years and years of schooling. And when he’d graduated from med school? Instead of pride, there had been distance and reserve in her face.... The closer he’d become to what his father had been, the more often she’d gotten that faraway look in her eye. His idea had been that if they were in the same city, they’d start relating or some shit. Hadn’t worked out that way, though.

But she was okay. She was down in Florida now in a house on a golf course that he’d paid for, playing rounds of scramble with ladies her age, having dinner with the bridge brigade and arguing over who snubbed who on the party circuit. He was more than happy to support her, and that was the extent of their relationship.

Dads was in a grave in Pine Grove Cemetery. He’d died in 1983 in a car accident.

Dangerous things, cars.

Parking the Porsche, he got out and took the stairs instead of the elevators for the exercise; then he used the pedestrian walkway to enter the hospital on the third floor. As he passed by doctors and nurses and staff, he just nodded at them and kept going. Usually, he went to his office first, but no matter what he told his feet to do, that was not where he ended up today.

He was heading for the recovery suites.

He told himself it was to check on patients, but that was a lie. And as his head became fuzzier and fuzzier, he studiously ignored the fog. Hell, it was better than the pain—and he was probably just hypoglycemic from working out and not eating anything afterward.

Patient . . . he was looking for his patient. . . . No name. He had no name, but he knew the room.

As he came up to the suite closest to the fire escape at the end of the hall, a flush shot through his body and he found himself making sure his white coat was hanging smoothly from his shoulders and then doing a hand-pass through his hair to neaten it up.

Clearing his throat, he braced himself, stepped inside, and—

The eighty-year-old man in the bed was asleep, but not at rest, tubes going in and out of him like he was a car in the process of being jump-started.

Dull pain thumped in Manny’s head as he stood there staring at the guy.

“Dr. Manello?”

Goldberg’s voice from behind him was a relief, because it gave him something concrete to grab onto . . . the lip of the pool, so to speak.

He turned around. “Hey. Good morning.”

The guy’s brows popped and then he frowned. “Ah . . . what are you doing here?”

“What do you think. Checking on a patient.” Jesus, maybe everyone was losing their minds.

“I thought you were going to take a week off.”

“Excuse me?”

“That’s . . . ah . . . that’s what you told me when you left this morning. After we . . . found you in here.”

“What are you talking about?” But then Manny waved a hand in dismissal. “Listen, let me get some breakfast first—”

“It’s dinnertime, Dr. Manello. Six o’clock at night? You left here twelve hours ago.”

The flush that had heated him up whirlpooled out of him and was instantly replaced by a cold wash of something he never, ever felt.

Icy fear bowled him over and sent his pins spinning.

The awkward silence that followed was broken by the hustle and bustle out in the corridor, people rushing by in soft-soled shoes, hurrying to patients or rolling bins of laundry along or taking meals . . . dinner, natch . . . from room to room.