Millionaire M.D.

“Ssh, ssh,” Winona kept crooning, but her heart was slamming, slamming. Feelings seeped through her nerves, through her heart from a thousand long-locked doors, bubbled up to the pain of naked air. She’d been abandoned as a child. She knew what an abandoned child felt like…and would feel like, her whole life.

A crinkle of paper slipped out of the basket. It only took Winona a few seconds to read the printed message.

Dear Winona Raye,

I have no way to take care of my Angel. You are the only one I could ask. Please love her.

Winona’s cop experience immediately registered several things—that there’d be no way to track the generic paper and ordinary print, that the writing was simple but not uneducated, and that somehow the mother of the baby knew her specifically—well enough to identify her name, and well enough to believe she was someone who would care for a baby.

Which, God knows, she would.

As swiftly as Winona read the note, she put it aside. There was no time for that now. The baby was wet beneath the blankets, the morning biting at the January-freezing temperatures. She scooped up the little one and hustled inside the warm house, rocking, crooning, whispering reassurances…all past the gulp in her throat that had to be bigger than the state of Texas.

God knew what she was going to do. But right now nothing mattered but the obvious. Taking care of the child. Making sure the little one was warm, dry, fed, healthy. Then Winona would try to figure out why anyone would have left the baby on her doorstep specifically…and all the other issues about what the child’s circumstances might be.

That fast, that instantaneously, Win felt a bond with the baby that wrapped around her heart tighter than a vise. The thing was, as little as she knew—she already knew too much.

She was already positive that the child was going to get thrown in the foster-care system, because that’s what happened when a child was deserted. Even if a parent immediately showed up, the court would still place the child in the care of Social Services—at least temporarily—because whatever motivated the parent to abandon the child could mean it wasn’t safe in their care. A change of heart wasn’t enough. An investigation needed to be conducted to establish what the child’s circumstances were.

Winona knew all those legal procedures—both from her job and from her life. And although she knew her feelings were irrational—and annoyingly emotional—it didn’t stop the instinct of bonding. The fierceness of caring. The instantaneous heart surge—even panic—to protect this baby better than she’d been protected. To save this baby the way she almost hadn’t been saved. To love this baby the way—to be honest—Winona never had been and never expected to be loved.

There were several coffee machines spread through Royal Memorial Hospital, but only one that counted. After he’d switched from trauma medicine to plastic surgery, Justin had generally tried to avoid the Emergency Room, but by ten that morning, he was desperate. Groggy-eyed, he pushed the coins into the machine, punched his choice of Straight Black, kicked the base—he knew this coffee machine intimately—and then waited.

He wasn’t standing there three minutes before he got a series of claps and thumps on his back. It was, “Hey, Dr. Webb, slumming down here?” and “Hi, Doc, we sure miss you” and “Dr. Webb, it’s nice to see you with us again.”

As soon as he could yank the steaming cup out of the machine, he gulped a sip. Burned all the way down. The taste was more familiar than his own heartbeat. Battery acid, more bitter than sludge, and liberally laced with caffeine.

Fantastic.

He inhaled another gulp, and then aimed straight ahead. Down the hall, through the double glass doors, was his Plastic Surgery/Burn Unit. The community believed that the wing had been anonymously donated, which was fine with Justin. What mattered to him was that in two short years, the unit had already developed the reputation for being the best in the state. He couldn’t ask for more. The equipment was the best and the technology the newest. The walls were ice-blue, the atmosphere sterile, serene, quiet. Perfect.

Nothing like the chaotic loony bin in the ER. Royal Memorial was a well-run small hospital, but a crisis stretched the capacity of its trauma unit—and the crash landing of the Asterland jet earlier that morning was still stressing the trauma team. Nobody’d had time to pick up towels and drapes. Staff jogged past in blood-and debris-stained coats. A kid squealed past him. A shrieking mom was trying to chase the kid. A nurse trailed both of them, looking harassed and taking mother-may-I giant steps. He heard babies’ cries, codes on the loudspeaker. Lights flashed; phones rang; carts wheeled and wheedled past. Somebody’d spilled a coffee; someone else had thrown up, so those stinks added to all the other messes and noises. Just being around it all made something clutch in his chest. Something cruel and sharp.

Justin loved his Plastic Surgery/Burn Unit. He made a difference in his Burn Unit, for God’s sake. He wanted nothing to do with trauma medicine anymore. Nothing.

He sucked down another gulp of sludge, and this time aimed down the hall and refused to look back…but he suddenly caught sight of the top of a curly-haired head coming out of a side room.

“Winona?” He wanted to shake himself. One look at her—that’s all it took—and his hormones line-danced the length of his nerves and sashayed back again. At least he promptly forgot his old hunger for the ER. “Win?”

Her head jerked up when she heard his voice. That was the first he noticed that she was carrying a baby—not that there was anything all that unusual about Winona being stuck with a kid in the Emergency Room. Her job often put her in the middle between a child and school or parents. But something about her expression alerted Justin that this was nothing like an average day for Win.

Her smile for him, though, was as natural and familiar as sunshine. “I figured you’d be in the thick of this,” she said wryly. “What a morning, huh? Were you out at the site of the crash landing?”

“Yeah, first thing. I’m not one of the doctors on call for something like that, but you know how fast news travels in Royal. I got a call, someone who’d heard there was a fire associated with the crash—so I hightailed it out there, too. I’ll tell you, it was a real chaotic scene. But any outsider was just in the way, so all I did was the obvious, help the trauma team get patients routed back here. Particularly those going into my Burn Unit.”

Her eyes promptly sobered. “I haven’t heard anything about how many serious injuries there were yet. Was it bad?”

Something had happened to her. Justin had no more time for idle chitchat than he suspected she did, but he kept talking, because it gave him a chance to look her over. His gaze roved from the crown of her head to her toes—the way the jeans cupped her fanny, the boots, her wildly tousled hair, the way her cheeks had pinked from the slap of a cold morning wind—none of that was unusual. But there was something different in her eyes. A fever-brightness. She stood there, rocking, rocking the bundle in her arms—the baby made no sound at all—but that liquid softness in Win’s eyes was rare. Vulnerable. And Winona just never looked vulnerable if she could help it.

A blood cart pushed between them, but he wasn’t about to stop their conversation just because all hell was still breaking loose. “Things could have been a lot worse. At least no one died. In a crash landing, that’s pretty much a miracle in itself. Robert Klimt—one of the minor cabinet members from Asterland? He was knocked unconscious, head injury—I don’t know how he is right now, I took care of some minor burns and left him to the neurologist. Pamela Miles was also on that flight—”

“I know, I know! She was headed overseas to be an exchange teacher in Asterland—did you see her, Justin? Do you know if she’s okay?”

“I didn’t take care of her myself, but I heard she was basically fine. Lady Helena, though—”

“Serious injuries?”

“Well, not life-threatening. Complicated break in her ankle. And once she’s done with the bone man, for sure she’s going to be mine. She did get some burns—”

“Oh, God. She’s such a beautiful woman.”

Justin couldn’t say more on Helena. For him to discuss a patient, any patient—he just never did. Not with anyone, even Winona. But he still hadn’t taken his eyes off her and didn’t want to give her the excuse to shoot past him. “Well, at this point, I think everyone on the flight’s been through here, checked out, even if they seemed to be fine. And the whole town was as shook up as the passengers on that flight, it seems like, because people were flooding in right and left.”

“You didn’t hear what caused the emergency landing, did you?”

On that he had to lift his eyebrows. “I was just going to ask you that, Ms. Police Officer. If anyone had answers, I figure it would be the cops first.”

“Well, normally I’d be elbowing my way to the middle of the mess from the start,” she admitted wryly, “but I got sidetracked.”

When she lifted the corner of the pale pink flannel blanket for him to get a peek, Justin finally figured out what the emotion was in her eyes. Fierceness. The fierce protectiveness of a mama lion for her cub, or a mama eagle for her eaglet. There was nothing strange about thinking of Win and motherhood, or of her wanting to be a mom, but it just hadn’t crossed his mind before what a major thing it might be for her. His knuckles—almost accidentally—brushed her hand when he touched the baby’s cheek.

“Don’t tell me anyone hurt this darling, or I’ll have to go out and kill someone,” he said gently.

Her voice melted. “Oh, God. Justin. That’s exactly how I felt. Isn’t she beautiful?”

Considering she was swaddled up with nothing showing but about two inches of face and some blond spriggy hairs, Justin was hard-pressed to use the word beautiful. On the baby. “What’s the story?”

“Her name’s Angel. I ran out my front door this morning, headed for the crash site—Wayne called me around seven in the morning—and there she was. In a basket on the doorstep. With a note saying her name was Angel and asking me, specifically, to take care of her.”

Justin felt his pulse still. “This isn’t the first time you’ve had to handle an abandoned kid,” he said carefully.

“No, of course not. But this baby’s so young that obviously I had to bring her here first. I’m sure you know the beat. This day and age, a deserted baby could mean drugs or AIDS or all kinds of things in the child’s background—so before we can do anything else, we have to know the state of the child’s health for sure.”

“And…?”

“And Dr. Julian gave her a terrific bill of health. Just under three months old, he thought.”

“So, the next step is…?” He was watching her face, not the baby’s.

“Finding the mother, of course. It’s not like Royal is that huge. And if anyone has a bird’s-eye view to kids in trouble, it’s got to be me in my job. So if anyone can track down the parents, I’ve got the best shot.”

“Uh-huh. And where will the baby go in the meantime?”

Her head shot up. Blue eyes blazed on his. “I spent years in foster care,” she said belligerently.

“I know you did.”

“The system’s overcrowded. Even in an area this wealthy, there’s no answer for it. Adoption is at least a possibility for a blond, blue-eyed baby—but not for this one, not for some time. Even if I run a hundred miles an hour and get answers zip-fast, there’s still no way to rush a—”