I met Dr. Knowles gaze head-on. I wouldn’t tell him to fuck off, which was what I wanted to do, but I wouldn’t submit either. I’d stay professional, keep things public.
I’d had my ass pinched in the past. I’d been propositioned. I’d been the focus of bets, of who could bed the smart chick. I’d learned the hard way at an early age. The guys at Harvard had pretty much avoided me since I’d been jailbait. Being a freshman at fourteen had seen to that. But medical school had been different. I’d been legal and fair game. Fresh meat.
I looked him in the eye. “We can discuss this further at the nurses’ station,” I repeated. I’d had years to project a calm facade, and I put it in place now. “I’m sure the others will be interested in whatever experiences on the transection or suturing you have to share.”
With that I fled, tried to calm my racing heart as I leaned against the high counter. I didn’t talk with anyone in the ER—they were busy working—and waited, held my coat in my arms as goose-down armor. After a few minutes Dr. Knowles finally came out of the lounge but turned away from me and down the hall. He didn’t even glance my way. I went to the phone, left a voice mail with HR about the incident so it was documented, but I doubted it would do any good. He wasn’t backing off.
4
HARDIN
* * *
“You okay, Sam?” I set my hand on her wrist, rubbed my thumb back and forth over her bare skin. So fucking soft.
She blinked, then pushed those sexy glasses up her nose. She’d gone off in her mind somewhere, even missed the fact that she’d finished her drink. I flagged down the waiter and indicated we wanted another round.
“Sorry, I’m fine.” She gave a quick smile, raised her glass to her lips and realized it was empty.
“You were telling us about going to college at fourteen.”
The waiter arrived with our drinks, and I pushed the second vodka cranberry toward Sam. She took a big swig before she replied.
“Right. Fourteen.”
“That must have been hard. Homesick a lot.”
She blinked. “Homesick? Of course not. My parents discovered my abilities when I was three. I never went to school, being homeschooled by a variety of tutors they thought would push my abilities. Piano. Violin, you name it. I was raised by the tutors, by the housekeeper. My parents were never home.”
What the fuck?
“Why not?” I asked.
“My father runs a multinational oil company out of Houston. My mother was a trophy wife. I was not what they expected, being able to do quadratic equations and speak two languages fluently by the time I was four—being bilingual because the housekeeper was Swedish. They couldn’t take me places because they said I embarrassed their friends and colleagues with being too smart.”
She spoke fluent Swedish, and her parents needed a serious fucking talking-to. She wasn’t a simple blonde to pick up at a bar.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Mac murmured, his fingers white around his beer bottle.
She took another sip of her drink, and while she was sharing shit that made me want to track down her parents and knock their heads together, she was relaxing. Her body, beneath those god-awful scrubs, lost all that tense energy. Her cheeks were flushed a pretty pink.
To say I was becoming more protective of this woman by the minute was an understatement. Who the fuck was raised by a housekeeper and tutors? My brother and I had grown up with two loving parents. We were a Norman Rockwell family and all that. Who the fuck went to Harvard at fourteen? I wanted to hug the child she’d been, beat up any of the college fuckers who’d thought about her young pussy.
“If I said Harvard was easy, would you hate me?” she asked, then bit her lip.
“Easy?”
“I’m pretty smart,” she replied.
No fucking kidding. I was trying to picture her as a young teenager—a girl—at Harvard. Books and lectures would have been safe for her. The rest?
“So you’re smart, like you said. That doesn’t define you,” I told her.
She looked at me as if I all of a sudden spoke in Swedish. “Actually it does.”
I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t. I’m not stupid, but I’m not a genius either. No one thinks of me as the average-IQ guy.”
“That’s a reasonable statement,” she said finally. “What do you do, then, that is noteworthy?”