Marie Ferrarella - M.D. Most Wanted

“His job is to protect me from kidnappers, not people I choose to be with,” London told him. “I still have some say in my life.” She walked into the elegant apartment, flipping on the lights. Reese followed her in. “I made it clear that he’s to perform his ‘duties’ tonight at a distance. Besides—” turning around, she watched him close the door “—I told him I’d be safe with you around.”

Reese wasn’t altogether sure about that.

He picked up a strand of her hair. The softness unsettled him. Aroused him. “And what’s to keep you safe from me?”

She raised her eyes to his in a clear invitation. “Who says I want to be safe from you…?”

www.millsandboon.co.uk

earned a master’s degree in Shakespearean comedy, and, perhaps as a result, her writing is distinguished by humor and natural dialogue. This RITA ®Award-winning author’s goal is to entertain and to make people laugh and feel good. She has written over one hundred books for Silhouette, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide and have been translated into Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, Japanese and Korean.

To

Dr. John G. Miller,

who answers all my questions,

and

is the perfect example of everything

a doctor should be

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

There were some days that Reese Bendenetti felt as if he just hit the floor running.

This was one of those days.

He’d been up, dressed and driving before he was fully awake. Normally punctual, Reese was running behind, thanks to an asthmatic alarm clock that had chosen this morning to make a sound more like a cough than a ring when it went off. The sound had barely registered in his consciousness, and he’d fallen back to sleep only to jerk awake more than half an hour later.

When it came to getting up, Reese had been cutting time to the bone as it was, setting the clock to give him just enough leeway to shower, shave and have breakfast—provided he moved at a pace that could easily be mistaken for the fast-forward speed on a VCR.

That had been before his fateful early-morning encounter with the “little alarm clock that couldn’t.” Consequently, the shower had lasted all of two minutes, his hair had still been wet when he’d gotten behind the wheel of his ’94 ’Vette—the single indulgence he allowed himself—and his face was fated to remain untouched by a razor until he could find some time at the hospital in between rounds, emergency room patients and whatever else the gods chose to throw at him this morning.

Eating was something he couldn’t think about until he came within coin-tossing distance of a vending machine at the aforementioned hospital, Blair Memorial.

Reese knew he only had himself to blame. No one had made him become a doctor, no one had told him to go into general surgery or to specialize in internal medicine. Those had been his own choices. His mother, bless her, would have been satisfied if he’d become a part-time sanitation engineer. As long as he was happy—that was her only criterion. Rachel Bendenetti never placed any demands on him, only on herself.

But healing was the only thing that did make him happy. It was in healing others that Reese felt as if he were healing himself, renewing himself. Building a better Reese Bendenetti.

He never quite understood why, he just knew that making someone else’s life a little better, a little easier, always managed to do the same for him.

That was why whenever Lukas Graywolf, a cardiac surgeon, returned to the reservation where he’d been born and raised, Reese always volunteered to go along with him and provide services to people who would otherwise not be able to afford them. The way he saw it, the rewards were priceless. It had never been about money for Reese.

He’d been enamored with medicine ever since he’d applied his first Band-Aid. Almost twenty-five years later he could still remember the circumstances. After calling him a name, Janet Cummings had turned and begun to run away, only to trip on the sidewalk. She’d scraped her knee badly and it had bled. Without hesitating, he’d run into the ground-floor apartment he and his mother were living in at the time, gotten a Band-Aid and peroxide out of the medicine cabinet—the way he’d seen his mother do—and run back outside to come to Janet’s aid.

He never stopped to think that she deserved it because she’d been nasty to him, all he could think of was to stop the bleeding. Watching him, Janet had stopped crying. When he was finished, she’d shyly kissed his cheek.

Reese remembered lighting up like a Christmas tree inside. Janet had been six at the time. He’d been almost seven.

It was a feeling that he wanted to have again, and he did. Each time he worked on a patient.

Working on Tomas Morales’s perforated ulcer was a little more complex than applying peroxide and a Band-Aid to a scraped knee, but the feeling of satisfaction was still the same.

Taking off his mask, he tossed it into the hamper and sighed, bone weary. The operation had taken longer than he’d expected. As he ran a hand through his hair, holding the green cap he’d just removed in his other hand, his stomach growled. Fiercely.

“I heard that all the way over here,” Alix DuCane cracked. She was standing by the sink, putting lotion on her freshly scrubbed hands. The gloves she’d just taken off chaffed her flesh. If she wasn’t careful, she thought, she was going to wind up with skin like a lizard.

As if in response, his stomach growled again. One of the orderlies chuckled to himself.

Reese shrugged, tossing the paper towel he’d just used to dry his hands into the wastebasket.

“That’s what happens when all you’ve had for breakfast is a small candy bar.” It’d been stale at that, he thought. Hazards of war.

Having removed her own surgical cap, Alix shook out her short, curly blond hair as she crossed to him. “It was at least a granola bar, I hope.”

Reese grinned and shook his head. “Nope. Chocolate bar. Pure sugar in a sticky wrapper. I think the candy in the vending machine down the hall is melting.”

She tended to agree, having hit the machine more than once for an energy surge in the past week. Alix frowned in mock disapproval. “Shame on you, Dr. Bendenetti. What kind of an example are you setting for your patients? You’re supposed to know better.”

His shrug was careless, loose-limbed. The movement hinted that there was an ache there somewhere, waiting to emerge and make him uncomfortable. He needed a new mattress, he thought. And the time in which to purchase it.

But first things first. “Know where I can get a reliable alarm clock?”

Alix smiled to herself. She knew of several women on staff at the hospital, including two physicians, who would have been more than happy to volunteer to wake Reese up personally, any hour of the day or night. So long as they could occupy the space beside him in the bed right before then.

There was no denying it, Alix thought, looking at her friend with an impartial eye. Reese Bendenetti was one desirable hunk, made more so by the fact that he seemed to be completely unaware of his own attributes. To her knowledge, he rarely socialized. When he did, it was to catch a beer or take a cup of coffee with a group from the hospital. Never one-on-one, except with her, and theirs was a purely platonic friendship. They had a history together, going back to medical school. He’d known her when she was still married to Jeff. Before the boating accident that had taken him away from her.

Alix knew firsthand what a solid friend Reese could be. It seemed to her that it was one of life’s wastes that Reese didn’t have anyone in his life who could truly appreciate the kind of man he was.

Sometimes, she mused, dedication could be too much of a good thing.

But there was still time. Reese was young. And you never knew what life had in store for you just around the next corner.

“Is that what happened this morning?” she asked as they walked out of the room connecting two of the operating rooms. He raised a brow at her question. “I happened to see you peeling into the parking lot.”

Reese smiled ruefully. Driving too fast was a vice of his, and he was trying very hard to curb it.

But this morning there’d been a reason to squeeze through yellow lights that were about to turn red. He absolutely hated being late for anything, most of all his work at the hospital.

“My alarm suddenly decided to turn mute,” he confessed. “I woke up fifteen minutes before I was supposed to be here.”

She’d been to his apartment on several occasions and knew he lived more than fifteen minutes away from Blair Memorial.

“You can really fly when you want to, can’t you?” His stomach growled again. Rotating her shoulders, Alix smiled. “Join me in the cafeteria if you feel like it. I’m having a late breakfast myself. Julie was up all night, cutting a tooth to the sound of the Irish Rovers singing ‘Danny Boy.’” She’d played the CD over and over again in hopes of putting Julie to sleep. As it was she’d spent half the night pacing the floor with the eighteen-month-old. “In the meantime I’ll see if I can scrounge up a rooster for you.”

“You do that.” But instead of following her, Reese began heading down the corridor toward the back of the hospital. “I’ll see you downstairs in a few minutes,” he promised. “There’re some people in the E.R. waiting room I have to talk to first.”

She nodded. There was protocol to follow. She knew how that was.

Her own stint on the other side of the operating arena had been a negative experience. Reese had been there with her, to hold her hand when the surgeon told her that everything humanly possible had been done, but that Jeff had still expired. Expired. As if he’d been a coupon that hadn’t been redeemed in time, or a driver’s license that had been allowed to lapse. Each time she’d had to face a grieving family since—which mercifully was not often—she remembered her own feelings and tempered her words accordingly. Neither she nor Reese believed in distancing themselves from their patients. That’s what made them such good friends.

“I’ll save a bran muffin for you,” she called out to Reese.

He made a face. Bran muffins were just about the only things he didn’t care for. Knowing that, Alix laughed as she disappeared.

Reese continued down the hall to the emergency waiting room area. This was the part he liked best. Coming out and giving the waiting family good news instead of iffy phrases. Tomas Morales had been to his office late last week. Choosing his words carefully, Reese had cautioned the man that playing the waiting game with his condition was not advisable. Morales hadn’t wanted to go under the knife, and while Reese understood the man’s fear, he also understood the consequences of waiting and had wanted to make the man painfully aware of them.