Doctor's Orders

As she turned toward the combatants, Radcliff gave a low, bitter curse. The syringe hovered bare inches above his throat.

Before she could talk herself out of the mad plan, Mandy flipped the tiny safety off the spray and lunged, aiming the jet full in the other man’s face, above what she now saw was a surgical mask to match the gloves.

The stranger looked at her, his pale eyes locking on hers for a split second as the spray triggered.

At the last possible moment, the hooded man stepped back, relaxed his grip and yanked the syringe away. Radcliff staggered forward, twisting as he fell under his own momentum.

“Watch out!” Mandy cried as he sidestepped and righted himself right into the cloud of pepper spray.

Radcliff howled and reflexively grabbed for his face before redirecting and lunging for his opponent once again, but it was already too late. The masked and gloved man spun away, bent down to grab Mandy’s fallen purse and keys and bolted from the alley.

Streetlights silhouetted him briefly against the mouth of the alley as he skidded, hooked a right and disappeared.

Swearing, Radcliff lunged in pursuit, caromed off the Dumpster and spun into the opposite alley wall, where he doubled over, braced his elbows on his knees, and coughed through a string of bitter curses.

Mandy took two steps toward Radcliff and reached out a hand to help him, then froze again when she saw the spent pepper spray still clutched in her fingers.

His head came up. His watering eyes fixed first on the spray, then traveled up to lock on her. She expected him to bark at her, to snarl bloody murder as he might have done in the hospital.

Instead he exhaled in disgust. “Why am I not surprised?”

He shifted, leaned back against the wall, and reached inside his heavy leather jacket to pull out a cell phone. A single button connected him with whoever he was calling and his watery eyes remained fixed on Mandy as he said, “Stank? We’ve got a situation. Good news is that I’ve got some DNA for you. Bad news is, I’m not alone.”

THE NEXT HOUR or so was pretty much a blur to Mandy. The cops arrived a few minutes after Radcliff’s call, led by Detective James Stankowski, a handsome, dark-haired man whose youthful looks contrasted with his eyes, which were world-weary and cynical.

When Radcliff introduced them, the detective held her hand a moment longer than necessary and asked if she was okay, but before she was able to dredge up a coherent answer, Radcliff hustled her over to a team of paramedics and told her to stay put until he came back for her.

An hour, an ice pack for the bump on her head and a couple of ibuprofen later, she was feeling almost normal—except for the fact that she was surrounded by cops and flashing lights. She’d called Kim on a borrowed cell phone and halfway explained the situation. Only halfway, though, because she wasn’t entirely sure yet what exactly had happened. Who was that man? Why had Radcliff been there?

A crowd of curious onlookers had gathered near the mouth of the alley, and they peered in past a string of police tape. A crime scene team had set up powerful lights—the kind the road crews used for night work on the expressway—to illuminate the alley, which looked far smaller and seedier, somehow, than it had in the darkness.

Seated on the edge of an ambulance gurney she didn’t really need, Mandy watched the crime scene techs quarter and photograph the area. One stern-faced woman marked the position where the little canister of pepper spray had fallen when she dropped it. The woman picked it up and slipped it into a clear plastic evidence bag, and suddenly the entire scene took on a completely unreal shine.

“I’m dreaming,” Mandy said to herself. “I’m really back at work, crashed on one of the couches, dreaming about being in an episode of CSI: NewYork. This isn’t real.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, but this is as real as it gets,” Radcliff’s voice said from behind the gurney, startling her.

Mandy turned, then winced and touched her temple when the motion made the world spin. The weakness and the strangeness of it all must’ve made her more vulnerable than she’d thought, because when she saw him in the light, all she could think was hel-lo.

Over the past month, she’d seen him more than she’d wanted to, catching glimpses as he’d gone from meeting to meeting, or when he’d swung by the front desk of the E.R. to leave annoying notes about productivity and cycle time. She’d told herself she shouldn’t even notice him, that he was nothing to her now. And, after having only seen him in his starched white coat with The Boss written across the front, she’d almost convinced herself it was the truth.

But now, seeing him up close in his dark-colored tough-guy street clothes with a good dose of five-o’clock shadow, she was suddenly too aware of the strong angle of his jaw and the masculine hardness of his body, too aware of the leashed anger in his eyes.

Too aware that he’d just saved her life.

She had the sudden, undeniable memory of how it had felt to be pressed against him years ago, how they’d come together in heat and need and joy, and how everything else had ceased to exist when they were with each other.

A flush suffused her cheeks when she finally admitted that she’d been lying to herself for the past month. She hadn’t been aware of him because he was her boss, or because of their history. She’d noticed him because of him. Despite how it had ended, their time together had been amazing, and she’d never found the same sort of connection with another man since, damn it.

The realization sharpened her voice when she turned away from him and snapped, “Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

He was silent for a moment, long enough to have her worrying that he’d seen the flare of heat in her eyes. But he made no mention of it, only saying, “Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.” He moved around to stand between her and the crime scene, and then touched her arm, urging her down from the gurney. “Come on. We’re leaving.”

“It’s about time.” Resenting the sizzle that sparked at his touch, she yanked away and jumped down off the gurney too quickly, then swayed when the world took a sudden dip to the right.

“Easy there. I’ve got you.” He looped an arm around her waist, and this time when she tried to pull free he merely tightened his hold. “Don’t be stupid. It’s okay to lean sometimes.”

Since when? she thought with a snort at the memory of long-ago conversations that were suddenly too fresh in her mind. But she didn’t ask the question aloud, because she’d be damned if she went back there. It was one thing for a few memories to break through in a stressful situation, quite another to acknowledge the memories to the man who starred in them.

So instead, she said, “Where are we going?”

“The Chinatown police station. We’ll need to go over your statement.” The growl in his voice made Mandy aware of a subtle tension that vibrated through his body.

That, combined with too many other things not lining up, brought latent suspicions flaring to life. A slew of questions suddenly jammed her brain, but she held silent as he led her out of the alley and over to an empty patrol car and ushered her into the backseat, then motioned for her to slide over so he could climb in.

The moment he shut the door, a uniformed officer climbed into the driver’s seat, fired up the engine and pulled away from the scene, without a word spoken between the two men. The silent orchestration made Mandy nervous, made her feel as though some unclear fate had already been decided for her.

None of it made any sense. Why had Radcliff been following her? Why the massive police response for a mugging?

And why did the head of the BoGen Emergency Services Department have a police detective on speed-dial?

Making a desperate stab at organizing the questions that spun through her already rattled brain, she said, “Radcliff, what the—”

He held up a hand, cutting her off midquestion. “Not yet, okay? Stankowski will do a better job explaining. He’s meeting us at the station.”

But though there was a certain logic to that, she got the impression it wasn’t the real reason he’d cut her off. When his eyes flicked over to her and away in the glow of passing streetlights, she thought she saw a stir of something in his normally chill expression, making her wonder if he’d felt the faint shimmer of attraction sparking between them back in the alley.

Right. And he’s really been pining for you all theseyears, too, snapped her more rational side. Grow up.

Those last two words resonated from the memory of their last night together, making her lean away from him and stare out the window as she fought to reorient herself, knowing that no matter how much she might’ve wanted to romanticize what had happened between them, he hadn’t really wanted her in his life back then any more than he did now. That was fine with her, too, because he was firmly entrenched in the city and its largest hospital. She, on the other hand, was out of there the moment the Meade Fellowship came through.

“We’re here,” he announced as the officer pulled the patrol car to the curb outside the Chinatown police station. “Come on.”

Once the officer opened the rear door, Radcliff climbed out, then held out a hand and waited for her, as though he thought she might collapse, or maybe make a run for it. But she did neither, ignoring his proffered hand to climb out of the car under her own power and stalk up the carved granite steps leading to the police station, leaving him to follow at her heels.

She paused when she reached the main lobby, where a cross-section of Bostonians waited on padded benches, some chatting or reading dog-eared magazines, others glaring off into space.

“Through here.” Radcliff led her across the lobby, waving to the two uniformed desk officers, who were attending to a straggling line of people from behind the safety of a chest-high desk and a slab of clear, bulletproof Plexiglas.

The thought of someone walking into the lobby and shooting up a police station didn’t seem nearly as far-fetched to Mandy as it might have only hours earlier, and she suppressed a shiver as she headed down a short hallway in Radcliff’s wake.

Nearly to the end of the hall, past a rest room and several offices, Radcliff paused, opened a door and ushered her through into what proved to be a small conference room. The walls were lined with file-stuffed bookshelves, and a large table filled the center of the space, surrounded by a dozen or so utilitarian chairs. An American flag hung in one corner, adding a patriotic dash to the functional space.

There was a second door in the far wall, and before Mandy had gotten her bearings, it swung open and Detective Stankowski strode through.

As before, her first impression was of a darkly handsome man in his early thirties, maybe two or three years older than her. This time, though, she noticed that when his eyes flicked from her to Radcliff and back, the world-weariness in them shifted ever so slightly, giving her the feeling that she was missing something when he took her hand and once again held it a beat too long before guiding her to a chair. As she sat, he said, “Are you sure you’re up for this, Dr. Sparks? Parker says you took a pretty good crack to the head back in that alley.”

“She’s fine,” Radcliff broke in. He stepped in front of Stankowski to pull out the chair beside hers, forcing the detective to give way. “Let’s get on with this.”