Home To The Doctor

“Get my medication. It’s in the bathroom.” He rasped out the order.

She didn’t take any offense at the rude demand; pain changed everything. “Of course,” she said, “but first, let me get you up off the floor.”

She scooted closer and reached out to him. She might only weigh a hundred and ten pounds at the most, but she was used to lifting patients twice her size. She’d guessed he was around a hundred and ninety pounds, maybe six feet two or three inches tall. She hadn’t seen Ethan Grace for years, but she had no doubt she was helping the man who owned all of this. And that man didn’t have a smudge on his upper arm but a tattoo, which surprised her as she looked at the four-inch-long dagger with a snake twined around it. Beneath it was the script “Do It.”

When she touched the tattoo, he jerked at the contact and his eyes flew open. Deep brown eyes, almost black. He looked confused, then said in a tight voice, “What in the hell?”

His dark brown hair was clinging damply to his flushed face that seemed all sharp angles and his jaw was shadowed by the beginnings of a new beard. He looked strong and capable, but she knew that even the strongest man couldn’t help himself when pain took over. She tried to be reassuring as she said, “Okay, we can do this,” while carefully straddling his legs and attempting to push her hands under his arms.

His skin was hot to the touch. No wonder he had the doors wide-open. She needed to get him in bed, then find the medication he mentioned.

“Mr. Grace, I’m going to get you up and onto the bed.” She braced herself, took a deep breath and pushed as hard as she could with her legs. But nothing worked.

Even with his dead weight, she could have lifted him, but he barely moved up before his momentum pulled her back and toward him. She felt her feet slip on the hardwood floor, and in that moment, she knew that she was going to fall onto him.

Deliberately she let go of him and threw herself to her right as far as she could so her legs wouldn’t make more contact with him than they already were. She tumbled to the floor, hitting her shoulder hard, but as she landed she knew that she’d managed to keep off of his legs.

She twisted to look at him, saw those black eyes on her. She was sitting on the floor by Ethan Grace, in a guest house and trying to figure out how to get him into bed.

ETHAN WASN’T SURE what the hell was going on. It seemed that there was a woman with him, a stranger, almost sitting on top of him and calling him Mr. Grace. This small redhead wasn’t Natalie. No, Natalie was in L.A. on a case. Or maybe she was in Europe. He couldn’t remember. And Natalie never would have worn a sweatshirt and jeans and certainly wouldn’t have called him Mr. Grace. His mind was so damn foggy from the pain. Then the woman was pulling him, making pain shoot up his leg, making him almost nauseated.

She was suddenly gone as if she’d fallen off the edge of his world, and he was back on the floor surrounded by the throb of bone-deep pain. No, she was still there, close by, talking in a breathless voice. “I’d say that didn’t go well.”

What hadn’t gone well? He frowned, then she was in front of him again, crouching over him, her hand on his forehead, her fingers pressed to the hollow of his throat. “You have to get into the bed,” she was saying. “And you have to help me.”

Forget the bed. “Who are you?” he muttered, each word causing him more agony.

“I’m a doctor,” she said.

He closed his eyes tightly, trying to control his pain, as well as blot out the weirdness of what was going on in front of him. He had to be hallucinating. A doctor? With flaming-red hair? A doctor in some sort of sweat outfit? A doctor who’d been trying to sit in his lap? Ethan forced himself to open his eyes again and focus. “How?” he said, intending to ask her how she got here.

But she said, “Tons of medical school and hard work.” He couldn’t have smiled to save his life. “Now, you have to help me get you into bed.”

Sure, and he could fly if he jumped off the deck, he thought. He couldn’t move, let alone get onto the bed. If he even tried to sit straight, the pain increased. “No, I…”

She was standing over him again, and he tried to focus on her, but his vision was blurry and the world had a halo of gray around everything. “I’ll help you, but you have to help me,” she said, and her hands were on him again, at his chest, slipping under his arms. “Push as much as you can and try to lean toward me.” He realized her cheek was against his, and her mouth was by his ear. “All right?”

Before he could agree or disagree, she was actually lifting him up. He was amazed that this tiny person who was supposed to be a doctor managed to get him into the cool linens of the bed. Pain burned through him when he hit the sheets, but the next instant, it eased and he found he could actually breathe. Was he doing it all himself, or imagining the doctor was doing it for him? Had he hallucinated the whole thing? Catching his cast on the plant, the fall, then trying to get inside, another fall, then this woman sitting in his lap?

“It’s okay,” she whispered from somewhere above him, but he couldn’t even muster the strength to open his eyes for a moment. “It’s okay.”

His good leg was being raised onto the bed, then his broken leg was miraculously positioned on the bed, too. The pain was circling him now but no longer cutting in to him. He kept breathing as evenly as he possibly could. He didn’t move until he felt a hand on his forehead, a soft touch that was gone quickly. “Where’s your medication?” she asked him.

Without opening his eyes, he muttered, “Bathroom.”

He could sense the emptiness where she’d been or where he’d imagined she’d been when she left. Just when he thought he’d lost it, that there was no one here but him, the red-haired doctor was back. She slipped a hand under his neck and shoulders, helped him up a bit, then said, “Open your mouth, Mr. Grace.”

“Ethan,” he mumbled right before he did as he was told and felt two pills fall onto his tongue. Then the coolness of a glass rim was against his lips and cold water slipped down his throat.

She lowered him gently onto the bed, and in a moment, she was speaking to him. “Put your arms around my neck. Hold on and let me maneuver you up and back so I can adjust your leg.”

When he opened his eyes, the blurred image was breathtaking. Brilliant hair, blue eyes, hands on his shoulder, her breath brushing his clammy skin. Put his arms around her? He didn’t hesitate. He slipped his hands onto her shoulders and behind her neck. He felt her hair brush his bare skin as she shifted, practically hugging him to her with one arm.

He heard her whispering over and over again, “Just a bit farther, just a bit, just a bit.” He felt his hands start to slip, and he tried to get a new grip on her, but it didn’t work. His hands balled up her sweatshirt, and she was falling toward him, the way he’d thought she had on the floor. But this time she didn’t just disappear to one side; she landed on his stomach and chest. The scent of flowers seemed to be everywhere, and the weight of her on him wasn’t painful at all.

If it all was a hallucination, it was one hell of a hallucination, he thought. She slipped away from him again. He didn’t have the strength to reach out for her this time. It was all he could do to open his eyes and look up to find her bending over him. “The pills should work quickly,” she said in a soft voice that seemed to drift around him.

“Where…” He licked his lips. “Where did you come from?”

“The beach. I was walking.” The words echoed in the room as if bouncing back off the fog that was creeping into his line of vision. “I heard the crashes and thought you needed help.”

Help? That fog was creeping closer and closer, the way it had off the sound so many times. But he was in the guest house. And there was a woman with him. Not Natalie. Standing over him, with the gentlest voice and touch.

He closed his eyes again when it became too hard to keep them open. “I fell,” was all he could get past his lips.

“I heard,” she murmured as her hand touched his forehead, smoothed back his hair. “Can I call someone?” Her voice seemed farther away and muffled now.

“No,” he said. “No.” He settled deeper into the grayness. “Just need sleep.”

There was no voice now, and he had that same feeling that he’d had before, that empty sensation when he knew he really was alone. Whatever had happened, it was done. Whatever he’d dreamed or hallucinated was gone. The woman, whoever she was or hadn’t been, wasn’t there, and he fell into a sleep that came in a rush of relief from the pain.

Chapter Two

Ethan woke slowly and did what he had done every morning since his accident—he kept his eyes closed, measuring the pain to test the levels of discomfort he’d be facing that day. This time he felt a dull throb that ran the length of his injured leg, from his foot to his hip, but it was bearable. Then he remembered the fall and the aftermath. He opened his eyes to glance around the bedroom in the guest house, where he’d moved to from his suite in the main building basically to avoid the confusion of the preparations for Joey’s wedding reception.

He’d been tired of the chaos everywhere, and had yet to understand why so many people were needed to pull off a party that would last for two or three hours tops, two weeks from now. He’d do anything for Joe, but enduring the insanity all around him while he was healing and trying to work hadn’t been possible. So he’d taken over the guest house on the bluffs.

And regretted ever driving himself in the Jaguar. He should have waited for James Evans, his assistant and friend for the past ten years, to come back from a late-day appointment. Then Ethan wouldn’t have been outside his corporate building when a car swerved to miss a pedestrian and broadsided him as he’d pulled out of the underground parking and onto the street. The speed hadn’t been great and the Jaguar had been heavy enough to take the impact, but if he hadn’t gotten out right away to check the damage, he wouldn’t have gotten pinned between the two cars. The other driver had jumped out of his car and forgotten to put it in Park. Before Ethan knew what was happening, he had a broken leg.

“You’re pretty lucky to get out of it with a simple fracture,” his doctor had told him. When Ethan had challenged Doctor Maury Perry’s definition of lucky, the man who had been his physician for over ten years had shrugged philosophically. “You’re alive, it’s a clean break and you won’t be off your feet too long. You’re damn lucky, Ethan.”

Ethan had never bought in to the idea of luck. If luck had been involved, there wouldn’t have been an accident. He exhaled, assured that the pain wasn’t going to get worse any time soon, and twisted his head to see his medication and a half-full glass of water by the bed.

An image flashed in his mind of someone lifting him, giving him pills and cold water. Then he remembered. Tripping. Falling. The pain exploding. Almost crawling into the house. The table and chair crashing to the floor, the lamp breaking. The red-haired woman coming to him out of nowhere, helping him, sitting on top of him. Or maybe not. Maybe he’d dreamed it, or maybe the pills had made him hallucinate. But he wasn’t imagining being in bed with his broken leg raised on a couple of pillows. And his prescription and water were right by him.

Had the doctor done that?

He raised himself carefully on one elbow to look around. He was sure the chair had fallen over, but now it was sitting by the door, right along with the side table. The only clue he had that the accident had happened at all was the missing Tiffany lamp, which he remembered shattering.

He glanced at the French doors. They were shut. He checked the clock by the bed. Six-thirty. The light coming in the back windows was dull and gray, and he could see the rain streaking the glass. He reached for the service button Jim had rigged on the side of the headboard, the button he’d been trying to get to last night when he’d passed out on the floor by the bed. He pressed it, then fell back into the bed and closed his eyes. His leg was throbbing steadily, and he felt confused. He hated both sensations, but more than that, he hated not knowing exactly what had happened the previous evening.

In less than five minutes, James came striding into the guest house. The man was large, matching Ethan’s six-foot-two-inch frame, but outweighing him by a good thirty pounds. James wasn’t given to much physical activity unless it was a rousing game of chess, but he always wore running shoes. He was dressed as usual in a casual polo shirt, dark slacks and white sneakers. He brushed his prematurely gray hair straight back from his square face, and his pale blue eyes flicked over his boss as he came closer to the high bed.

“Good morning, sunshine,” he said with a gusto that grated on Ethan’s frayed nerves. “How are we doing today? Or should I say, who are we doing today?” He didn’t wait for a response. “Ginnero is waiting on your decision on the money, and if you could, let Bruce know what you are going to do about approaching the Wakefield Group. He’s in Mexico now.” James was invaluable, never forgetting anything, yet dealing with the business in an almost offhanded manner. “You really need to put these people out of their misery, boss.”

“Later,” Ethan murmured and gingerly pushed himself up, feeling a twinge in his leg when it slipped off the pillows that had been supporting it. He grimaced but kept moving to sit up against the headboard.

James proceeded to stuff pillows behind Ethan’s back, then adjusted the ones that had been under his injured leg. “Good idea to elevate your leg,” he said as he stood back. “Isn’t that what the doctor said to do, along with resting as much as you can?”