Janice Lynn - The Playboy Doctor Claims His Bride

Janice Lynn

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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Title Page The Playboy Doctor Claims His Bride Janice Lynn www.millsandboon.co.uk

About the Author Janice Lynn has a Masters in Nursing from Vanderbilt University, and works as a nurse practitioner in a family practice. She lives in the southern United States with her husband, their four children, their Jack Russell—appropriately named Trouble—and a lot of unnamed dust bunnies that have moved in since she started her writing career. To find out more about Janice and her writing, visit www.janicelynn.com

Dedication To my grandparents, Floyd & Janie Green

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

EPILOGUE

Copyright

Janice Lynnhas a Masters in Nursing from Vanderbilt University, and works as a nurse practitioner in a family practice. She lives in the southern United States with her husband, their four children, their Jack Russell—appropriately named Trouble—and a lot of unnamed dust bunnies that have moved in since she started her writing career. To find out more about Janice and her writing, visit www.janicelynn.com

To my grandparents, Floyd & Janie Green

CHAPTER ONE

DR. KASEY CARMICHAEL typed clinical data into the medical record on the hypertensive patient she’d just seen. When finished, she sent his prescriptions electronically to the in-house pharmacy of the Rivendell Medical Center.

Knocking on the open door, Dr. Jonathan Douglas stuck his blond head into the exam room. The pretty-boy doctor flashed baby blues and a row of pearly white teeth that had women swooning all over northern Kentucky. “You got a minute?”

Kasey shot a coolly professional smile at the physician she’d worked with for two years.

“I’ll be right there.” She hit “Save” and closed her patient’s file. Standing, she smoothed the crisp lines of the unbuttoned white lab coat she wore over her navy slacks and linen blouse.

She loved her job in the ambulatory clinic of the large multispecialty Rivendell Medical Center. Loved that it provided the opportunity to give back to the community, to help others the way she’d once been helped.

Rivendell’s sheer size gave her the opportunity to achieve the professional and personal success she craved. Success that dangled within her reach.

When Dr. Herbert stepped down from the board, Kasey was a shoo-in to replace him. Everyone said so.

Smiling, she stepped into the clinic’s hallway to see what Dr. Douglas was up to this time. Although an excellent doctor, he’d never held any appeal. Probably due to his tomcat ways reminding her of the men who’d constantly come in and out of her childhood in the form of her mother’s latest loser.

“What can I do for you, Dr. Doug—?” Her voice stalled, stuck in her rapidly tightening throat. Her gaze froze on the man standing with her colleague.

The room spun.

Please let her be hallucinating .

“Eric?” Her one-and-only-ever one-night stand stared at her with similar shock. Her pulse hit a rapid, brain-frying boil. “What—? How—? Why are you here?” she sputtered.

“Hello, Kasey.” Quickly recovering from his surprise at seeing her, his dark eyes glistened as if he’d stumbled upon the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. A huge smile split his handsome face.

A smile that stole Kasey’s ability to breathe just as it had on the night they’d met.

She took a step back, placed her hand on the door frame to steady her wobbly, turned-to-water legs.

“What are you doing here?” she asked again, feeling hazy.

“Funny, I was just going to ask you the same thing,” Eric answered in that smooth-as-silk voice that had whispered sweet praise to her two months ago. Recalling what else they’d done, Kasey struggled to remain on her feet. Her body threatened to slide to the floor in a gooey, deoxygenated pile of shocked, blue mush.

“You two know each other?” Dr. Douglas took a step back, his gaze flicking from Kasey to Eric.

“We’ve met.” Eric’s eyes narrowed as he regarded her, a mixture of suspicion and pleasure in his eyes.

“I’ve never heard either of you mention the other,” Dr. Douglas mused. For all his playboy ways, no one could accuse him of being slow on the uptake. No doubt her colleague had already worked out just how well she and Eric had known each other.

Probably because even though her brain was in embarrassed denial of Eric being here, her libido was dancing a happy jig of remembered pleasure.

Kasey wished the tiled floor would open up and swallow her. Anything to escape Eric’s predatory male look. Anything to escape Dr. Douglas’s knowing curiosity.

If word got out she’d had a one-night stand, the news would hurt her chances of being asked to join the clinic’s medical board. The older board members would look unfavorably on a potential member behaving in such a feckless manner. Even if her lapse of judgment had been on the night of her mother’s funeral.

Hadn’t she learned how quickly one could lose everything they held dear following the gigantic mistake she’d made with Randall Covington III? Oh, yeah, she’d paid dearly for that error in judgment.

Now her only one-night stand stood in her workplace.

Panic clutched at her throat, rendering her speechless.

This wasn’t really happening. History would not repeat itself. Not that she’d had a one-night stand with Randall. No, she’d given the bastard an entire year of her life. A whole wasted year where she’d dreamed of them being the perfect couple, having the perfect life together. Boy, had she been wrong.

About them being a perfect couple at any rate. With or without a man in her life, she was going to have the perfect life. She’d set goals and worked long hours to make sure they came true.

“When did you meet?” Delight sparkled in Dr. Douglas’s blue eyes.

“A few months ago.” Eric’s gaze bored into Kasey. Was he waiting for her to acknowledge the night they’d spent together? Did he really think she’d do that? Lord, she just wanted to forget that night had ever happened. Had spent two months trying to forget.

Unfortunately, forgetting the best sex she’d ever had wasn’t proving an easy task.

Images of that best sex flashed into her head like candid shots portraying the man standing before her in living color.

Hot, lurid, take-her-to-another-world best sex images.

Fire engulfed her face. She lifted her hand to fan the burn, realized what she was doing, and stopped.

“You met Eric and didn’t tell me?” Jonathan’s dark blond brow arched.

This wasn’t happening .

Kasey roped her uncooperative vocal cords into submission. “Why would I mention we’d met? He was just someone I met—” mere hours after laying my estranged mother in the ground “—and I didn’t know the two of you knew each other.” Because he and I really didn’t do a lot of in-depth talking .

Eric’s smile slipped. “Why indeed?”

She tried not to look at him, but an inner force compelled her. His chocolate eyes appeared thoughtful, as if he was trying to read her, to gauge how to take her response.

What would her sexy lover have said, done, had she still been in his bed when he’d awakened?

Hello, she’d been a one-night stand. No doubt he was grateful she hadn’t made a scene, that she had slipped out in abject humiliation prior to him waking that morning.

She was humiliated. She’d been the one thing she’d always sworn never to be. Easy. Like her mother.

She’d had one night of passion.

With a stranger.

A stranger she’d met in a bar and later accompanied to his hotel. A stranger who now stood in her clinic making a sham of her memories by looking so much better than she’d recalled.

Much to her abhorrence, she recalled way too much all too often.

God, he was gorgeous.

The strong, handsome planes of his face had surely been sculpted by a goddess intent on tempting mortal women with a glimpse of heaven. The sun had kissed his dark wavy hair with gold and his skin with a bronze hue.

At six-two or -three, he towered over her five-eight. Beneath his tailored suit, his shoulders stretched broadly, tapering into a trim waist and powerful, narrow hips. As he’d been the night they met, he was so well dressed that if testosterone didn’t ooze from every pore of his fine body she’d think he must be gay. But in vivid and exquisite detail, she knew testosterone oozed.

An image of his naked body over hers, melted into hers, popped into her mind, short-circuiting her nerve endings.

Kasey swallowed. Just as she’d done many times over the past two months, she forced memories of him from her mind.

Only how was she supposed to force him from her mind when he stood a few feet away, eyeing her as if he’d like to push her into the exam room she’d just stepped out of and pick up where they’d left off? Naked and tangled together with frantic desire. When her body was all too willing.

No. She didn’t want him at her workplace.

Didn’t want him anywhere near her.

She had a great life.

One that didn’t need a complication of his magnitude. No pun intended.

“This is interesting.” As the silence continued, a grin lifted the corner of Dr. Douglas’s mouth. “I call out my esteemed coworker to introduce her to my old university roomie, and they’ve already met.”

“Dr. Douglas is who you were supposed to meet that night?” Kasey asked, winced and slapped her hand over her mouth in the most giveaway oops motion a person could make.

Eric nodded, then turned to his old university roomie . “I met Kasey on the night you got hung up here at the clinic. We shared a few drinks, a few dances.”

A zillion amazing orgasms.

Heat slammed into Kasey’s body.

“Right,” she agreed on a breathless note, averting her gaze to stare at a body mass index chart stuck on the wall. “A few drinks and dances. No big deal.”

Eric had been a big deal.

A very big deal.

She winced. What was wrong with her? She was at work. She wasn’t supposed to be having a hot flush of sexual awareness.

That wasn’t who she was. She was calm, cool, collected Dr. Kasey Carmichael.

Dr. Douglas’s bushy brows rose so high they brushed the stylishly tousled hair atop his head. “You were in a bar? Had drinks? As in alcohol rather than a wheat-germ shake?” A new light shone in his eyes as he looked at Kasey. Possibly for the first time ever he was seeing her as a woman rather than the uptight doctor he worked with. “And you danced? Did I miss something?” He drew his brows into a V. “Like hell freezing over?”

Squelching the urge to growl at him, Kasey took a deep, exasperated breath. She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose to give her hands something to do.

Otherwise she might curl her fingers into a fist and punch his straight nose. “I happen to like wheat-germ shakes and, of course, I dance.”

Not well, but she could pull off the slow numbers she and Eric had swayed to without any problems. Usually too self-conscious to let herself relax, she’d moved in rhythm to Eric’s lead. On the dance floor and in the bedroom. He’d been perfect. And something she’d desperately tried to stop thinking about because Kasey was not like her mother.