Winning Back His Doctor Bride (6 page)

And yet she did. That line of guilt ran from her to each man, and she wasn't sure which side made her feel worse.

Neither. And her mind should be on Leo right now, who needed her help.

“Let's get him to an exam room.” Adam stretched his palm toward the boy, who, seated in a wheelchair, hesitated for a split second and then placed his small hand in the other man's. With kind eyes and tightly curled brown hair, the orthopedic surgeon had worked with children before. It was there in the easy grip of his fingers, in the way his right shoulder stooped low so Leo's arm wouldn't be stretched too high by the difference in their heights as Mila pushed the wheelchair.

Mila smiled, despite herself. Whereas James had seemed vastly uncomfortable in the boy's presence, Adam was a natural. Judging from the gleaming gold band on the man's left hand, he might even have children of his own at home.

They got Leo up on the exam table, and while a nurse worked on getting the boy's vitals, Adam rolled the bottoms of the child's threadbare jeans up a few inches to get a better look at his feet and ankles.

His jaw tightened as he examined the twisted appendages and slid his gloved hand along the outside edges of Leo's feet. “They're both fixed in the varus position.”

Mila knew that there were two main forms of club foot, equinus—when the toes were pointed toward the ground—and varus, when the bone malformation caused the outer portion of the foot to swivel downward, forcing the toes toward the center. “I haven't seen him walk yet. I'm not sure if he can.”

“You may not have seen it, but he does.” Adam gestured her closer. “See this callusing over the tarsal and metatarsal? He walks on the edges of his feet.”

“Wow. It should have been corrected when he was a baby.”

Adam shrugged. “I've seen more of these cases in developing countries than here in the States, where corrective surgery is the norm. Maybe his folks couldn't afford it. Or maybe they immigrated here from somewhere else.”

“He only speaks Spanish, from what I've seen. And he said his uncle left him at my clinic. The authorities are still trying to locate him.”

The surgeon rubbed a hand behind his neck. “I can fix his feet. But we'll need permission from someone before I can do anything.”

“I'm scheduled to speak with a social worker tomorrow. Surely they'll make a way, even if we can't find the uncle. He can't stay like this.”

“I've done a few pro bono cases that have come through the courts when the system's doctors were inundated and couldn't get to them.” He gave the boy's shoulder a squeeze. “I'll be happy to help in any way I can. Just get me the release forms.”

“I'll get to work on it.”

James pushed through the door, his arms loaded with packages. Not from the local store but from one of the upper-end clothing chains in the area. The orthopedist's brows went up, bland amusement sliding through his eyes. “Doing a little late-night shopping, James?”

“Sure. That's what I normally do with my free time.”

His voice was a little sharper than she'd expected it to be, and she blinked up at him. Maybe he really had minded going to the store. She could have asked Tyler to go, but since they were no longer an item, she hadn't felt right doing so. She didn't want to give him any false hope.

So why had she been okay with asking James? Maybe because she hadn't been worried about him getting the wrong idea. He'd been the one to break off their engagement, not her, so he wasn't likely to want to rekindle anything at this late date.

And neither was she.

Oh, maybe she'd taken one look at that rugged face and piercing blue eyes and had seen stars for a second or two. But that had been pure fantasy. The real-life version of that relationship had gone up in smoke. And if she were stupid enough to harbor any ideas, she'd better snuff them out now because the man hadn't wanted her back then, and he undoubtedly didn't want her now.

Adam filled James in on what surgery to Leo's feet would entail and how long it and the ensuing recovery would take, while Mila peered into the bags of clothes.

Hmm. Superheroes. She never would have pegged James for a superhero kind of guy, although he was aloof and secretive. And he never snatched at publicity. In fact, he'd always shunned it while they'd been together, even though reporters had dogged his every step back then.

Was it because he hadn't wanted to be seen with her?

He'd asked her to marry him, for heaven's sake.

And yet he hadn't been able to go through with it in the end. How humiliating it had been to see cringe-worthy pictures of herself beneath headlines that had screamed things like “scorned” and “dumped.” She'd fled to Brazil to get away from the onslaught...and the pain.

Pulling her mind from the past, she ripped open the packages, instead. “I wish we could run these through the washer before putting them on him, but I guess it's better than staying in the filthy things he has on now. I'd like to get him to a room and get him cleaned up, if we can.”

James pulled his cell phone from his pocket and made a quick call. “Okay, mark the suite as occupied. Oh, and, Stella, make sure you have an extra trundle bed set up.”

Good, he was taking her at her word that she wanted to stay in the room with Leo.

“Yes, I'm aware that the room already has one. I need an extra, in case there are any problems.”

“Problems?” The panicked word slid from her mouth before she could stop it.

Adam, as if sensing a storm was brewing, gave a quick wave. “Let me know what happens with the social worker, or if there's a problem during the night. I'm on call.”

She mouthed, “Thank you,” to him, still trying to wrap her head around the bombshell James had just dropped. Why on earth did he need an extra bed? Did he think she couldn't handle one small child on her own?

As soon as the specialist was out of the room, she turned toward him. “I don't understand.”

“You don't know this child or what he's like. It's just for one night, to make sure things run smoothly.”

Smoothly? He was making Leo sound like he was just another chart to be dealt with.

As if realizing he needed to clarify matters, he said, “If it's true that his uncle dropped him off, the boy is bound to be frightened. He might even try to run away or the uncle could show up, which could cause legal problems for the clinic if the Department of Children and Family Services comes by tomorrow and the child has disappeared. I thought we could take shifts and watch him. See how he does.”

Okay, so that made sense. Although she wasn't sure how he expected a three-year-old to sneak down the hallways unnoticed and make a daring escape. But he could get lost. Or hurt. Or someone could appear, claiming to be one of his parents.

At least James's reasons for staying with them were now perfectly clear. It had everything to do with protecting the reputation of his precious medical center.

And nothing to do with her.

* * *

She heard something.

Cracking her eyelids, Mila found a dark, silent room.

Not her bedroom.

Lying there for a moment, she waited for her vision to adjust.

Another murmur of sound.

Leo! She was in a hospital suite. Rolling to the side, she almost tumbled off the narrow cot until the events of the previous evening came flooding back to her. The boy. His damaged feet. James's insistence on spending the night with them.

She somehow managed to get her legs beneath her and staggered upright as a quiet sniffle and whisper slid past her.

Yanking down the T-shirt she'd retrieved from her apartment, she tiptoed toward the sounds, hoping she could get there before Leo woke up James. If she could do that and leave the lights off, she would.

More snuffling, and then a deep sigh.

She could finally see enough to make out the cot where James had been.

It was empty.

She relaxed. Maybe he'd decided not to stay after all. If he'd had as difficult a time getting to sleep as she had...

Well,
her
stupid insomnia was due to having James sleeping in the same room.

She made her way toward the hospital bed, almost reaching it before she realized there were two figures there.

Her heart squeezed so tight she almost couldn't breathe. There in the bed was James, eyes closed, one arm loosely draped around Leo, keeping him from falling off the edge. The boy, dressed in the new set of superhero pajamas, was half-sprawled across her ex's chest. Tears pricked her eyes.

Their future could have looked exactly like this, only she would have been in the bed beside James, and Leo would have been their son.

She had to blink several times to get the chaos swirling within her to settle down enough to move closer. Leo must have woken sometime during the night. James had evidently heard him and she hadn't and he had gone to him.

Since it looked like one of Leo's hands was clutching James's shirt, rather than his ratty blanket, he probably couldn't ease away from him.

How long had they been here like this?

From James's posture, it had been a while. His right arm was curled beneath his head, as if using it for a pillow, since the actual pillow was on the boy's side of the bed. Except Leo wasn't using it. He was using James's chest instead.

She crept closer, fascinated, just as she'd always been, by how her ex's face looked as he slept. His lashes made slight shadows beneath his eyes. The furrow of concentration he normally had between his brows was softened in sleep, and just the slightest hint of a depression remained.

She should go back to bed and leave them alone, but she couldn't. It wasn't fair to let him shoulder the burden when she had been the one to insist on staying with him in the room.

So she leaned down, close to his ear. “James,” she whispered.

His lids flicked open in an instant, all traces of sleep gone. Blue eyes sought out hers and the arm holding Leo to him tightened slightly.

The frown was back. “You okay?”

“Yes.” She nodded to the sleeping boy. “Did he wake up?”

“He had a nightmare.”

There was something about whispering with James in the dark that made her swallow. How easy things had once been between them, and how simple they'd seemed.

In reality, nothing had been simple. They'd known each other for too short a period of time to commit to staying with each other forever. She'd known almost nothing about him and yet she'd planned on spending the rest of her life with him.

An ocean of hurt welled up inside her, making its way to her eyes once again.

James didn't miss it. Then again, he didn't miss much of anything. His arm came from beneath his head and he snagged her wrist. “Hey. Are you sure you're okay?”

“Yes.” Her voice betrayed her, though, even at a whisper.

“Mi.” He eased out of the bed, leaving Leo asleep, and his hand moved from her wrist to the hair falling over the left side of her face, coaxing it behind her ear. The soft touch made her shudder. Before she could move away, though, his fingers continued from her ear, curling around until they reached her nape. He paused.

Then his head came down, lips brushing against hers in a soft kiss that broke her heart.

“I'm sorry,” he murmured. “For everything.”

Sorry.

An admission of guilt but nothing else.

A word rolled through her, bouncing around like a giant ball that had been trapped in a small room for far too long. There was no exit unless she made one. But, try as she might, her pride wouldn't allow her to ask the one question that had haunted her for six long years: why?

CHAPTER FOUR

J
AMES
 
FELT
 
AS
 
if he'd been kicked in the skull by a donkey.

Exhausted, and with a pounding head to boot, he'd been forced to take a couple of painkillers. Something that went against the grain, after dealing with his mother's addiction problems. Problems that had probably contributed to Freya's own addiction to controlling her food. Thankfully, his sister had overcome those issues and was now leading a happy, healthy life.

He paused outside the door to the exam room, bracing himself for his “emergency” patient, Peggy Smith, better known as Patricia Stillwell, award-winning actress. It was always an emergency, it seemed, whenever she stepped into his office. With raven hair and thick dark lashes, she'd been compared to Elizabeth Taylor on several occasions.

She also won the award for being his most difficult patient, obsessed with maintaining an ageless appearance that was not realistic. He'd talked her out of many a procedure, using a computer manipulation program that showed her what the results would be. And when putting up before and after images didn't work, he then resorted to showing her what she would look like ten years down the road. So far it had worked, but he knew the day was coming when she would no longer be willing to listen and would start demanding he comply. When that day came, he would refer her to another doctor.

He was pretty sure she wouldn't go quietly but would trumpet some ugly rumor about him to the tabloids to make him pay. She'd done it with her primary care physician when he'd refused to prescribe her a heftier dose of sleep aids. That doctor had wound up in the divorce courts by the time Patricia had finished with him.

It was just as well that he had nothing to destroy as far as romantic ties went.

He pushed open the door without bothering to look at the chart. The sight that greeted him, however, was not Patricia Stillwell, petulant actress. It was the tearful, scrubbed-clean face of a terrified woman.

Holding a bloody towel up to her cheek, she looked devastated. And slightly out of it.

James did flip open the chart at this unexpected turn of events. “What happened?”

“I...slipped...in the shower.” Patricia's voice was uneven. Not slurred, exactly, but there was an odd tremor to it. “Cut my cheek a little.”

He punched the button for the nurse. Unlike what he would have expected from the actress, she didn't once mention her appearance or ask about scarring. That made him even more uneasy.

“Who brought you in?” He'd seen no one waiting in the hallway, not even her current love interest who was also an A-list actor.

“Allen.” Patricia wouldn't quite meet his gaze. “But he had a casting call and had to drop me off at the back entrance to the clinic.”

Another warning flag began fluttering in his head. Allen Claremont had a reputation for losing his temper both on the set and with his fans and paparazzi. He'd been arrested on assault charges on a couple of occasions, but the charges had always been dropped. “Let's take a look.”

When the towel came down, James caught his breath. This was no “little cut.” Neither was it the jagged split he would have expected from a hard fall, but a clean, straight, slice that ran from the corner of her mouth up the side of her cheek. Blood immediately gathered along the wound. He swore under his breath and grabbed a sterile gauze dressing, ripping it open and pressing it to the injury to slow the bleeding.

He didn't hold back the question, didn't even consider doing so. “Did Allen do this?”

“No! Of course not! If the press even suspects, it'll ruin him.”

The answer had come much too quickly. As if she'd been rehearsing the words. The nurse came in before he could ask anything else, and Patricia's shoulders slumped.

“I'll need to flush it and test your nerve function.” He hesitated to go any further, but she needed to know that this wasn't something that he could wave a magic wand over. “This is a serious injury. The placement makes hiding it more difficult. And if there are nerves involved, we'll need to call in Damien Moore, our head of reconstructive surgery.”

“I'll be able to go back to work, though.”

That strange slur was still there. The arm holding the cloth to her cheek had obscured some of her mouth movements, but James was worried. There was an abundance of nerves and vessels in the cheek. If the cut was deep enough, it could affect muscle function.

“Of course you will.”

But at forty-five, she'd already complained that the quality of the roles she was being offered had declined. This injury could be life-altering for her.

Allen, in his thirties, was almost a decade younger than Patricia. He was a sought-after actor in romantic comedies, for sure, but he was still climbing the ladder. There was talk that he was using Patricia's success as a way to boost his own, using her contacts and prestige to cement his position. If what he suspected was true, though, Patricia needed to report him.

But would she?

“I need to leave without the paparazzi wondering why I came here.”

The clinic valued the privacy of its patients because James insisted on it. With that in mind, one of the first things to go in had been an enclosed entrance where drivers could pull up and drop off occupants and then slide back out without anyone being able to see, thanks to a stone wall that faced the street. The result was a blind spot where it was virtually impossible for photographers—or anyone else—to spy on the comings and goings of patients.

That reminded him. He'd won a small victory this past week with the board of directors. He'd convinced them that Bright Hope should have an entrance inside the main part of the clinic. The argument that those patients had as much right to privacy as The Hollywood Hills Clinic's own patients did had evidently held water. They'd scrapped the plans to permanently close the door that connected the two wings. The clinics would now be linked in every sense of the word.

“That won't happen for a while. We need to clean out the wound and check for damage to the structure of your face.”

“Can't you put some of your famous tiny stitches in and make it go away?”

This wasn't going away. Not completely. It would leave a scar. Maybe it wouldn't be noticeable to the cameras of the paparazzi but it would be there nonetheless.

Kind of like the scar he carried around? It wasn't an external scar but he still felt the pull inside him when his heart got too involved with a patient. That warning tug that told him to take a few steps back.

“Stitches, yes. But we're going to have to do it under anesthesia. It'll take a couple of hours, and I'd feel better if you stayed overnight.”

Her eyes widened. “But Allen—”

“Will be fine. And if you're lying to me about his part in this, then you need to wise up and put some distance between you. Do you want him doing this to someone else?”

“He won't. I know he won't.”

That was the closest to an admission he was going to get. “How do you know?”

She shrugged an overly thin shoulder. “I just do.”

Because he'd told her he was sorry? That he'd never do it again? He could remember his father promising the same thing to his mother after each infidelity.

Maybe Allen—unlike Michael Rothsberg—meant it. After all James meant it when he said he wasn't having children. And so far he'd kept that promise. But life was full of unknowns. He hadn't expected Cindy to claim she was pregnant and force him into a decision he'd never expected to make.

He sighed and shook his head. “I want you to think about something while I set up for surgery. If that cut had been three inches lower, we might not be talking about restorative surgery. We'd be fighting to save your life. Next time you might not be so lucky.”

James took that “next time” philosophy to heart in his own life. He always, always used protection, no matter how insistent his current partner was that she was clean and on birth control. You never knew what someone was capable of.

Like Cindy.

Or his father.

The bastard.

Evidently Patricia was opting to learn about personal failings the hard way. As difficult as she was as a patient, he didn't like knowing someone had purposely tried to destroy her life. And for an actress, a maiming slash to the face was to strike at the heart of how she made a living.

But who knew what went on in the heads of some of these celebrities? He certainly didn't claim to know his famous parents, whose public meltdowns had probably kept half the tabloids in America in business. His mom's repeated stints in rehab had probably done the same for the other half. He barely had contact with them anymore.

“Think about it,” he urged.

Patricia's chin wobbled, and her hand went up to the gauze pad covering her damaged cheek. “I will.”

A muscle contracted in James's jaw. “What do you want us to do if he comes to visit?”

“I don't know.” Her eyes closed for a second. “Can I decide that after I wake up from surgery?”

“Yes.” It was the best he was going to get for the moment. “I'll put a no-visitors order on your chart.” Which he did even as he spoke, pushing a button on his tablet and checking the appropriate box on Patricia's chart, quickly typing what he wanted done and when. The tablets were connected to a central system that would flag the next available surgical suite and reserve it, along with his team. Then he called Damien and asked if he could come in and give him a second opinion.

The other surgeon promised he could be there in twenty minutes.

While he waited, he gave Patricia a local injection of lidocaine with epinephrine to numb the wound and slow bleeding and flushed the area with saline, examining the edges of the laceration with his magnifying headset. Thank God, she wasn't dealing with full tissue laceration as the wound didn't penetrate the mucosal or muscle tissue, but it was deep enough that he would have to do the repairs in layers. He mentally calculated fifty stitches on the surface and absorbable suture material inside the wound.

He noticed that as she'd talked, that slight defect in her speech had cleared up. Maybe it had been caused by stress, rather than nerve damage.

A knock on the door pulled him from his work and he sat up, tipping the loupes to the top of his head. He glanced at his tablet. Maybe one of the surgical suites had come available sooner than they'd expected.

Nope. The projections still put them at an hour out. Luckily the face had an overabundance of blood vessels, so there was a longer window for repairs than for some other areas of the body, where the lack of blood supply created a need for quick intervention.

He glanced at the nurse. “Can you stay with her for a minute?”

Patricia grabbed his hand. “You're not leaving me, are you?”

His heart went icy. Those were almost exactly the same words Mila had used on the last night they had been intimate. He'd gotten out of bed almost immediately, guilt eating him alive. She'd known something had been wrong and had tried to get him to talk.

You're not leaving me, are you?

He'd denied it at the time, even as he'd known he was indeed going to leave her. He'd fallen into bed with her in despair, days after Cindy had told him he was going to be a father. He'd meant to talk, not have sex, but once the deed had been done, it had been easier to play the denial game than to have it out with her. Then it had been too late. He'd broken things off just as he'd learned that the tabloids were going to break a story about how he and Cindy had been seen together at a hotel days earlier—when she'd told him she was pregnant.

And then his father had...

Not the time, James.

This wasn't about him. It was about Patricia. “I'm not leaving. I'll be right back.”

When he opened the door he swallowed hard.

The woman he'd just been thinking about was standing there, worry in her hazel eyes. “What is it? Leo?”

He stepped into the hall and closed the door behind him.

She nodded. “They think his uncle has fled to Mexico. All they found at his apartment was a note saying the boy's parents had been killed by one of the drug cartels and that he wanted a better life for Leo than what he could get in his home country.”

Her face was as white as a sheet. Mila had told him her parents had been murdered when she'd been a child and that her aunt had lied to her for years about how they'd died. Was she remembering that?

Gripping her hand in his, he lowered his voice. “I'm so sorry, Mi. Are you okay?”

“What am I going to tell him?”

“Nothing, for now. He's only three years old.” He took a step closer. “If you're thinking about your parents, this isn't the same thing. You were older and your aunt
never
told you the truth, and she should have. Just not when you were Leo's age.”

“Maybe. But after a while it becomes easier to let the lie stand than to have the courage to do what needs to be done. I don't want his trust destroyed like mine was.”

A shot of hot bile stormed James's throat. He'd done exactly that with Mila. Destroyed her trust. And, yes, it had been far too easy to let the lie stand. Even now.

“Was his uncle abandoning him a better choice? I don't think so.”

Hell. Why did every word out of his mouth seethe with accusation? But not at the wayward uncle. At James. At what he'd done six years ago.

He'd wanted Mila to have a better life than what he could give her. To do that, he'd done much the same thing as Leo's uncle had. And Mila's aunt. He'd lied to protect her.

From the angry flash of her eyes he wondered if she knew what he'd done six years ago. If so, there was no plastic surgery known to man that could repair that particular scar. It was far too old and covered too great an area. He'd thought cutting things off with her would leave a clean line...an easy fix.