Body Search

He’d known it would hurt her to learn he was a fraud. He’d imagined how the disappointment would cross her face, and how she would rally quickly and try to pretend his past didn’t matter when they both knew it did. He’d known all that.

What he hadn’t known was how hard it would be to admit that it had all been a lie.

He sighed and tried to make the first cut a clean, lethal one. “That’s what you were supposed to think, Tansy. That’s what everyone thought.” When she didn’t answer, he took the flashlight, clicked it on and gestured back to the house. “Let’s go inside.”

But as they walked in silence, Dale realized he didn’t want to talk about it. He didn’t know what to say. They entered the kitchen and Tansy returned the flashlight to the box Libby had left.

After a moment, she turned to him. “Just tell me this, Dale. Who the hell are you?”

He opened his mouth to answer, but nothing came out. At Boston General, he knew who he was. On assignment, he knew. But on Lobster Island?

He had no idea.

THE SILENCE STRETCHED until Tansy began to doubt Dale was going to speak at all. Then she saw his eyes flickering the way they did when he was mentally flipping through diagnoses and treatment options. He was trying to choose an answer.

“Never mind.” She held up a hand to stop the lie. It would be one of many, she now realized, just as she now understood that the man she’d fallen in love with was nothing more than a figment of her imagination. Like mother, like daughter. Whitmore women fell for the schemers. She took a hurting breath that barely moved the stone-heavy pressure on her chest. “Tell me the truth or nothing, okay, Dale? You owe me that much.”

When he remained silent, she nodded and hid the disappointment down deep, alongside most of the memories of her father. “Fine. I’ll check the lab equipment and see what’s salvageable. You shower, and then we can head for the motel clinic. The sooner we solve this outbreak, the sooner we can get out of here.” The sooner she could request to be transferred away from Boston. Away from Dale.

She would not repeat her mother’s mistakes.

When he didn’t answer, she turned toward the salt-encrusted cases piled in the hallway.

“Tansy.” His quiet word brought her up short, but she didn’t look back. She didn’t want to see his gleaming blue eyes. Didn’t want to remember how his features had been mirrored in the faces of those two boys out in the lane.

Didn’t want to think that she’d once imagined their sons looking just like that.

“It’s okay, Dale,” she finally said. “I can handle it.” She crouched down near the pile of equipment and waved at the stairs, hiding her face so he wouldn’t see the hurt. “Go shower. We need to see our patients.”

The job. Concentrate on the job. Medicine gave her control. Research told her the truth.

Dale didn’t.

He headed for the stairs, pulling the bulky sweater off over his head as he walked. He stopped near her in the narrow hallway, and Tansy was enveloped in familiar warmth. Only this time, it was laced with something new. Something hotter and harder than the pull she’d felt toward Dale Metcalf, playboy, or even Dr. Metcalf, field researcher.

Her whole relationship with Dale had been based on a lie, yet she still wanted him.

Afraid if she looked into his eyes he’d see the hunger, she stared straight ahead at the place where the sinew and bone of his shoulder gave way to the hard planes of his chest. The scorpion tattoo, blurred with time, dominated her view.

Only it wasn’t a scorpion.

She reached out a finger and traced the curve of a tail, the pair of wicked hooked claws. “It’s a lobster.”

Dale sucked in a breath when she touched him, and his body went rigid. “Aye. It’s a lobstah.”

And his voice was pure Island.

Startled, she looked up at him. Trapped in the potent blue of his eyes, she didn’t move when he stepped closer, crowding her. Tempting her.

“You want to know who I am, Tansy?” He leaned close so he was almost whispering in her ear. “I’ll tell you who I’m not. I’m not a prep-school boy, and I’m not a gentleman.” She quivered as his words ran across her bare neck and heat coiled in her stomach.

She could turn her head just a fraction, and their lips would touch. She could run and never look back.

In the instant before she made the decision, he made it for her. He stepped away. His muscles were corded with tension and he gripped the banister like a lifeline. “Check the equipment, we leave in ten minutes. And remember, I’m not the Dale Metcalf you thought you knew. The next time I have you up against a wall, I’m not going to back away.”

Though the image churned her stomach into sharp, sizzling knots, Tansy rounded on him as he climbed the stairs. “Don’t even think you’re calling the shots here, Dale. I won’t stand for it. I could have died in that plane crash. Don’t you think that entitles me to know what the hell is going on?”

“No,” he snapped back from the second floor. “I think it entitles you to a one-way ticket home the second I can arrange it. I knew I shouldn’t have let you come with me.”

“Let me?” Her voice climbed several octaves, though she wasn’t sure why she was fighting the idea. She should want to escape the island. To escape Dale and the insane pull he exerted on her. “Let me? Nobody let me do anything, Dale. This is my job, and—”

The slam of the bathroom door cut her off.

“Oooh,” she said, popping the first of the cases open. “Jerk.”

All her life it had been this way. Her father had shared his wealth freely with his only child—as well as his mistresses—but he’d expected her to marry well and bring her husband into the family business. Her mother had nodded and smiled in public, then gone through his pockets at night, weeping over the matchbooks and hotel receipts.

For all Tansy knew, she still did.

They’d been horrified when Tansy had used part of her trust fund to pay for med school and donated the rest to HFH. She’d met Dale on her first assignment. He’d shoved a field pack at her and said, “Dale Metcalf. Glad to have you here. There are two little girls trapped under a beam in the second house on the right. Don’t slow me down.”

And though she’d later learned—or thought she had—that he came from the same social stratum as her parents, Dale had never coddled her, never expected any less of her than he did from the male doctors. At first, it had been a relief. Then an annoyance when she realized it was because he never let anyone past the brittle outer shell of false charm.

Never let anyone inside.

“Well,” she muttered, glancing again at the dark squares of wood on the walls, wondering what story the missing pictures might have told. “I’m inside. Sort of. Now what the hell do I do?”

“Is this a private conversation, or may I intrude?”

Tansy screeched and spun toward the voice, jerking her hands into the attack position she’d been taught before her first overseas assignment. Go for the eyes and the crotch, the instructor’s voice shouted in her head. Use any weapon you can find!

The stranger stumbled back a pace and held his hands up. “Whoa, whoa! Easy there.”

She froze, vibrating with a tension she hadn’t consciously recognized. Then again, her reaction was understandable. Alice had fallen down the rabbit hole, into the ocean, and come out somewhere on an island populated by Dale Metcalf clones. It hadn’t been a banner day up to this point. Considering their next stop was a makeshift clinic where people were dying of a nonfatal disease, she had little hope of it improving.

Especially not with a stranger standing in the kitchen.

She glared at the tall, silver-haired man, and was almost surprised to see that his eyes were brown, not blue. She relaxed a fraction, though she kept her weight on the balls of her feet as she’d been taught. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

The water cut off upstairs. She raised her voice and called, “Dale? We have company.”

The stranger’s eyes glinted with approval. “Smart of you, though not necessary. I know you’re not alone. I’ve come to give you and Dale a ride to the clinic.” He held out a hand. “I’m Walter Churchill.”

Of all the characters she’d met so far in this not-quite-Wonderland, Churchill was the biggest surprise. Cultured, elegant, and turned out in a charcoal suit and burgundy tie, he would have been right at home in one of the chichi clubs in the Theater District near Boston General. He also acted as though she should know him.

Then again, she probably would know him if Dale had told her the truth about his past.

Stifling the flash of resentment, she shook the proffered hand. “Dr. Tansy Whitmore. Pleased to meet you.” I think.