Home Again

God, after all these years …

She sat perfectly erect, her upper body camouflaged by a lab coat, with only the barest hint of a forest-green sweater visible beneath the wide white lapels. Her face was magnificently emotionless, her wide, silver-green eyes utterly blank. No smile lurked at the edges of her full, unpainted lips.

For a second, an image flashed through his mind of a heartbroken sixteen-year-old girl standing at a barred window, her pale, slim hand pressed to the glass, her cheeks streaked with tears, mouthing his name.

He’d fallen in love with a candy striper with long brown hair and laughing, mist-green eyes, but there was no remnant of that girl in the woman sitting beside him. She was regal in her bearing, in the well-styled precision of her short, honey-brown hair, in the classical perfection of her face. The perfect physician in complete control.

Strangely, it pissed him off that she’d done so well for herself. He ought to have been happy—hell, he ought to have been proud of her—but all he felt was cheated and angry. As if all his memories of her were an invention. This woman couldn’t have been broken by his betrayal, couldn’t have cared for long. And obviously Daddy’s money had financed the best possible education.

“Angel,” she said in that barmaid’s voice he’d never quite been able to forget. “How … interesting to see you again.”

“You’ve done all right for yourself, Mad,” he said bitterly. More bitterly than he intended.

“Don’t call me Mad.” She gave him a completely professional smile and flipped open his charts. “They tell me you need a new heart.”

“It shouldn’t surprise you.”

“It doesn’t.”

He could feel the judgment radiating from her. That was all he needed—another pair of accusing eyes, another person judging him by some invisible standard and finding him lacking. “Look, Mad, I think we’d both agree, I should have another doc.”

“Yes, I do. Unfortunately, Allenford wants you to have the best.”

“So do I, but—”

“I’m the best there is, Angel. You’re lucky to have me.” She brightened. “But if you don’t want me, I’ll have you transferred to someone else.”

He felt a twinge of irritation. “You don’t want me as your patient?”

“Not particularly.”

“Then I want you,” he said sharply, regretting it the minute he said it. But he’d wanted to rattle her cage, shake up this woman he ought to know intimately and yet didn’t know at all.

She studied his chart. “Lucky me.”

The harsh tone of her voice seemed absurdly out of character for the polished, picture-perfect woman beside him. He couldn’t help himself, he laughed. “I guess little Mad has grown up.”

She looked at him, hard. “Med school will do that to a girl.” She turned her gaze from his face and studied the pile of charts on her lap. “You appear not to have changed at all, Angel.”

“That’s not true. I have to shave every day now.”

She didn’t crack a smile. “Your blood work looks good. Despite obvious alcohol abuse, all of your organs are functioning well. Now it’s a waiting game. Hopefully we’ll find a suitable donor in time. As you have probably been told, fewer than one percent of all accidental deaths make suitable donors. Brain death is extremely rare.”

&n

bsp; “So it’s a waiting game,” he said, feeling the anger rising. He told himself that she was his cardiologist—the person who held his life in her hands. But he couldn’t seem to stop the anger. She was the last person on earth who would give him a fair shake.

“If you improve substantially, you may be able to live outside the hospital—of course, you’re too sick to do that now.”

He couldn’t believe it. She sat there, talking to him as if he were a child, looking at him as if he were an insect. So damned doctorlike. As if she’d never known him before, never cared about him. He knew it was irrational to suddenly be furious, but he’d never been a real rational guy and he saw no reason to start. “No.”

That surprised her. She actually looked up from the paperwork and turned to him. “No? No, what?”

“No, Doctor Hillyard, I’m not going to lie here like a pincushion and wait for what you euphemistically call a ‘donor.’”

Slowly she set the charts down again. “Angel—”

“And call me Mr. DeMarco. You don’t know shit about me, lady. I’m not about to sit around hoping some perfectly nice guy gets broadsided by an eighteen-wheeler. That is what we’re talking about here, isn’t it? Somebody dies and I get a chance to live?”