Italian Doctor, Full-time Father

“He’s on his way. Says he’ll be here in fifteen minutes. And we don’t have another doctor in the building at the moment.”

A long, quiet pause on Marianne’s end spoke the words the woman did not say. It was Catherine’s responsibility to go greet Dante. Catherine knew that, and her secretary knew that. Of course, Marianne wouldn’t say it, but she didn’t need to. “If he’s not here in fifteen minutes, I’ll go and see to Mr Baldassare.”

“Very good, doctor,” Marianne said, clicking off.

Catherine leaned forward, studying the outside of Dante’s folder. She was drawn to read more about him, and her fingers even skittered their way across the desk, latched onto the folder and pulled it back towards her, inch by inch, across the glossy mahogany top. She’d already read the routine information—height just over six feet, weight one hundred and ninety pounds. “You haven’t changed much,” she whispered, still refusing to take another look, specifically at the line indicating spouse. The truth was, she didn’t know. The bigger truth was, she didn’t want to know. She’d seen that he still lived in Tuscany. She’d also seen that he listed his occupation as race-car driver. Not medical doctor. But she hadn’t looked at anything filled in under family.

Her fingers played across the top of the file and just as she’d decided on pushing it away so she wouldn’t be so tempted, Marianne buzzed.

“Dr Rilke just called in.”

“And?”

“He’s stranded. Car trouble. He said he’ll call for a mechanic and be in as soon as he can, but that it won’t be for quite a while.”

Catherine balled her fist and gave a little slam to Dante’s medical folder. Now she’d have to go and see Dante. No getting around it. “Ask him if we could send the clinic car to fetch him.” A suggestion made from sheer desperation, and a rather pathetic one at that. But desperate times called for desperate measures… Catherine knew all about that.

Something else she knew was how silly she was being about taking a look in the folder. She was the medical director here, for heaven’s sake. It was her duty to know her patient. Her duty to know every patient in Aeberhard Clinic. After all, she could practically recite Mr Newlyn’s family tree by heart, and call off the last four surgeries performed on Mrs Rakeen. She knew the names of Mr Gaynor’s three grandchildren and had intimate details of how to contact each of Mr Salamon’s four ex-wives. All from studying the charts. So this was ridiculous, thinking of Dante as anything but a patient.

Opening her balled fist, Catherine flipped back the cover of the folder and began reading. The first page was chock full of all the routine information she’d read before. The second page was about Dante’s medical history, which she’d also read earlier. Most of it sketchy, though. At the very bottom her eyes caught on the section where Dante had listed past surgeries. Appendectomy ten years previously. Damn, she didn’t want to remember that. Not the surgery itself, but the scar. How many times had she kissed that scar?

Fighting back that image, she kept on reading. More routine facts, financial information connected to how he could cover his bill, that kind of thing. Then, on the last page, she came to what she hadn’t wanted to read—family contact information. Not that she cared if Dante was married, because she didn’t. Yet it felt funny. An intrusion to which she wasn’t entitled. Or one that would dredge up some of the plans they’d made that would have put her name there on that page as his spouse.

“Stop it,” she whispered, drawing in a steadying breath. “One ex-fiancé pops up and look how you’re acting.” Her heart hadn’t even skipped a beat six months ago when Robert had called to ask her to sign a property settlement document she’d overlooked during the divorce. Yet look what she was doing over Dante. Going positively crazy! And she didn’t know why. That’s what troubled her. Dante was just another patient…granted, he was one she’d slept with and almost married, but he was still just another patient. She wasn’t in love with him. Hadn’t been for a good long time. So maybe this was simply an overreaction to the very hard life she was living right now. All work, no play. And no meant absolutely no, none, nada, not a drop of play not even for a minute. At least, not in the past year…or past two years, if she counted her marriage.

So, in an effort to prove to herself this silliness wasn’t as much about Dante as it was about herself, Catherine forced herself to finish reading the admission papers. The next few lines were all routine information. Same with the next few after that. Then she came to the next-of-kin section, and that’s where she stopped. There, in Dante’s own handwriting, was the name Gianni Baldassare. Age eight. Listed as Dante’s son.

“His son?” she whispered, shaking her head, then going back for a second look to make sure she’d read it correctly. Which she had, and that didn’t make any sense at all. If Dante had an eight-year-old son, that meant Gianni would have been three when she and Dante had been engaged.

She’d been engaged to marry a man who had a son, and he hadn’t mentioned it? Just like Robert hadn’t mentioned his plan for a stay-at-home wife?

“How could he have…?” she whispered, still stunned by the fact that Dante had asked her to share his life but had failed to include her in a very important part of it. She would have been a mother after some fashion yet he’d never bothered to tell her?

Of course, that proved solidly that she hadn’t known him, didn’t it? The evidence of that was in the photo—one she’d seen published in a sporting magazine a month after he’d gone home to be with his family. Dante in the arms of another woman, while Catherine had still been wearing his engagement ring. Full color, full page, that full Dante smile she’d thought had been only for her while that blonde in his arms looked on adoringly.

Catherine shut the folder, too dazed by what she’d just read to think, and buzzed Marianne. “Any word on Dr Rilke’s arrival?”

“Sorry, doctor. I offered to send a car, but he doesn’t want to abandon his car on the road. He asked me to tell you that he’d be in once he got his car towed to the garage.”

Catherine was seeing the handwriting on the wall now. No Rilke meant she had to go. Had to get Dante settled in herself. No more putting it off. “I don’t suppose he knows how long that will be.”

“He’s hoping within the next hour or two.”

Clinic policy was nagging at her now. This was an expensive facility, very small, very exclusive, with the best physicians and the best accommodations in the world. More like a resort than a medical treatment facility. People who paid to be here expected their doctor in attendance immediately. Dante wouldn’t be an exception. “Call the floor nurse and tell her I’ll be down to see Mr Baldassare in five minutes.” Five minutes, five hours, five years…it really didn’t matter. She had to do it. That’s all there was to it. Once, five years ago, she’d donned sturdy armor when she’d kicked Dante out of her life. Now she only hoped she had some of that armor left over, because one thing was certain. Dante Baldassare did know how to get to her. That was evidenced in the half-moons her fingernails had just dug into the palms of her hands when she thought about him.

“No, I don’t want to be here. Why the hell couldn’t I have just gone home, put my foot up and healed there?” Spent the mornings looking out the window and afternoons listening to Gianni learn to read. Not a bad way to pass the time during this imposed holiday, as he preferred to think of it.

“You know why, Dante,” Cristofor Baldassare said, tucking his brother’s suitcase into the closet. “Because you won’t heal there. You’ll find a way to do everything your doctors told you not to do, and injure yourself again. Again! Like you did last time you came home to recover. You’ve got a good chance to fully recuperate for the start of the next racing season if we let someone else take charge of you.”

He gave his older brother a toothy grin. Separated by fifteen years, with Dante the older at thirty-five, the two of them bore no family resemblance to each other. Dante’s classically handsome Italian looks, as well as his dark and brooding attitude, were in stark contrast to Cristofor’s sunny disposition, fair-skinned complexion and blond hair, a remnant of his great-grandmother’s Scandinavian blood. “And I’m not going to be the one to go against Papa on this, Dante. If you want to argue with him about checking out of here and going home, that’s fine, you can argue. But I’m staying out of it.” He threw his hands into the air in mock surrender. “Your decision entirely.”

Dante ran an irritated hand through his hair. Papa’s expectations and demands were a force to be reckoned with in the family, especially as his father wasn’t allowed to be as physically active since his heart attack, and right now he didn’t feel like reckoning with the man. Besides, he understood his father’s concern over his condition. One son already dead, and now another one seriously injured. As a father himself, he knew what his own parents were feeling. So, out of respect, he’d go along with this inconvenience for a while, stay here, take a rest, submit to physical therapy.

“OK, so I’ll let it go for now. You don’t have to go against Papa. But I’m not staying long. A week or two at the most, until I know what I need to do to get full movement back and build up my muscles. Then I’m coming home.” Two weeks without Gianni—it was already killing him.

Who’d have ever thought he could get so attached to another person? But Gianni was his heart and soul and the separation was pure torture.

“Let’s wait for a week or two before we make any decisions, OK?” Cristofor said.

“We? Since when is this a we decision? Have I ever let my baby brother make decisions for me?” Laughing, Dante picked up a spare pillow and lobbed it across the room at Cristofor.

“It became my decision when Papa told me to make sure you do what you’re told.” He caught the pillow and threw it back. “And I’m not about to cross him, Dante. He’s under too much stress already. He doesn’t need more.”

The pillow hit Dante square in the face, and he threw it right back, but Cristofor deflected it and it went sailing at the door just as the door opened and someone stepped in. A woman…a woman who wasn’t quick enough to avert the flying pillow. She took the hit square in the chest, then stepped back, shocked, not injured, clutching the pillow to herself.

Cristofor turned red-faced, while Dante wiped his eyes and forced himself to stop laughing. Then he turned to her to apologize. “I’m…” His voice broke, and he stopped. Swallowed. Drew in a deep breath. “Catherine?”

“Dante,” she said, without inflection.

Her voice was the same, yet different. Fuller. A little throatier. “What…? Um…I didn’t know you were here.” Her fixed stare on him was cool. Not friendly, not unfriendly. Not affected in any way, which surprised him because he remembered her eyes as warm, and the stare she’d always given him provocative. But not now. He stared for a moment, trying to find a bit of the old Catherine, but none of it was there. “I didn’t see your name on the literature.”

“My name is at the top of the literature, actually,” she said, dropping the pillow onto the plush easy chair by the door.

As if to prove her wrong, Dante grabbed up the packet of information he’d been given pre-admission, and took a look at the staff roster. But what he saw wasn’t Catherine Brannon. It was Dr Catherine Wilder. Which meant she’d gotten married. He hadn’t expected that. Of course, he didn’t have the right to that expectation, did he? Didn’t have the right to anything where Catherine was concerned. Not even to think of her.

Dante looked up at Catherine again. “I didn’t know.” And that was the truth. Sure, the fact that he’d be under the care of a rehab doctor by the name of Catherine had possibly persuaded him to choose this clinic over several others, for no particular reason other than a little sentimentality. Yet he’d had no reason to suspect that his Catherine would be the Catherine in the brochure. But, damn, if that hadn’t turned out to be, well, he wouldn’t go so far as to say good. Maybe interesting?

“And if you had known, would you have chosen Aeberhard?”

He was still surprised by the turn of events. “It’s the best in Europe, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she answered, “it is.”

“Then I would have chosen it.” Easy to say, but he wasn’t sure. Catherine was good. He knew that. But having the doctor in charge of his medical care falling into the line of past lovers? Well, he’d expected to be bored out of his mind here but, if nothing else, the next couple of weeks should prove to be interesting.

“Small world, isn’t it?” she said, shifting a quick glance at Cristofor.

“Smaller than we’d ever guess,” Dante responded, also shifting his glance to Cristofor. “My brother,” he said, nodding in Cristofor’s direction. “Cristofor, this is Catherine Brann—Wilder. Dr Catherine Wilder. We were…colleagues, back in Boston.”

Cristofor looked first at Dante, then at Catherine. Then smiled. “He never told us he had such a beautiful colleague,” he replied, turning on his typical ladies’-man charm, something that had never, until that very moment, bothered Dante.

“And he never told me he had such a handsome brother,” she answered, duplicating Cristofor’s charm with a warm smile. “Or, actually, any living brother at all.”

Dante cleared his throat. “I don’t recall you ever asking.”

The warm smile she had for Cristofor went stone cold as she turned to Dante. “Even if I had, would you have told me? You weren’t exactly open about things, were you? Open, or honest?”

“Why do I get the feeling there’s more going on here than meets the eye?” Cristofor asked.