Читать книгу Bachelor Doctor - Barbara Boswell - Страница 8

Operating room one was crowded with observers watching Dr. Trey Weldon, neurosurgeon extraordinaire, at work. The patient’s condition had been deemed hopeless until his referral to Dr. Weldon, who had offered a ray of hope in a daring yet promising experimental procedure developed by the gifted surgeon himself.

“It’s mobbed in here today,” a wide-eyed medical student murmured to no one in particular. “This is the hottest show in the entire med center. Everybody wants to observe the master at work.”

“Yeah. Dr. Weldon rules!” enthused another awestruck med student.

“Quiet!” A nursing student reprimanded the pair. “Dr. Weldon is speaking.” The name was said with hushed reverence.

Dr. Trey Weldon, in the midst of explaining the intricacies of AVMs or arteriovenous malformations—tangled or malformed arteries or veins in the brain that over time became dilated, exerting pressure or bursting—overheard the students and automatically lifted his eyes to meet the eyes of his chief scrub nurse, Callie Sheely.

Their gazes connected for only a fraction of a second, but it was long enough for Trey to see a flash of humor light those big dark eyes of hers. He knew she had overheard the students, too, knew that she was smiling beneath her surgical mask.

His lips twisted into a smile behind his own mask. He’d known Callie would find the students’ overexaggerated hype as amusing as he did.

There had been a time, not very long ago, when he wouldn’t have seen the humor in such remarks. Of course, he wouldn’t have considered the students’ adulation to be overexaggerated hype, either. Over the years he had grown so accustomed to lavish praise that he simply accepted it as a given.

Until Callie Sheely. From her he’d come to view certain things—like extravagant compliments—from a different angle. Trey thought back to that fateful time he’d spied Callie grinning in the background while some junior colleagues expressed their excessive admiration of him, to him.

When he asked her about it later, she’d snickered, unrepentant. It amused her to hear people fawn over him, she’d said. Listening to his minions try to outdo each other while shoveling the…praise, invariably gave her a hearty chuckle.

Minions? Shoveling? Trey well remembered his own astonishment at her frankness. No one had ever made such a remark to him before, and only Callie Sheely continued to make similar impertinent jests about him, to him.

But instead of being irked—Trey admittedly didn’t tolerate frivolity or nonsense very well—he had found himself seeing the humor. Sharing her amusement.

“Of course, they genuinely do admire you,” she’d also assured him, and Trey had found himself snickering, a rare event in itself. As a rule he did not snicker.

However, Callie’s warm assertion had touched a humorous, previously unstruck, chord within him. As if he cared whether he was admired by junior toadies, as if he needed anyone’s assurance about anything! The very idea was laughable.

And now whenever anyone laid on the compliments or the hero worship a tad too thick, he looked at Callie, and they would share a silent, mutual moment of mirth.

Trey continued performing the operation, explaining the procedure to his audience while he worked, all the while contemplating Callie Sheely’s irreverence toward his lordly reputation.

He had been blessed with the ability to think and do several different things simultaneously, while keeping each separate and exact. It was a gift he took for granted, having always possessed it.

He flicked his finger slightly, and Callie immediately handed him what he wanted, a small sharp scalpel, an instrument he’d redesigned and then had reduced to near doll-size for certain specific uses, today’s operation being one of them.

He rarely had to ask Callie for instruments during an operation, not unless an unforeseen complication occurred and he had to improvise on the spot.

Otherwise, she routinely remembered which one was used for what from previous operations, and when he was going to try something new, he would go over the procedure with her beforehand, taking her through it step by step. She filed away what he told her in her head, using the information to expertly assist him.

Trey admired her excellent memory and OR nursing skills as much as he did her unruffled calm under pressure. He had never worked so well with anyone before, never been so in sync with another person as he was with Callie Sheely during surgery. While in the OR, it was as if she were an extension of himself.

It was new to him, this kind of intuitive rapport. Certainly it had never existed in his personal life and still didn’t. Yet here in the OR he and Callie were as one, working together in uncommon unity and intimacy.

He lifted his gaze to meet Callie’s again. She had the most beautiful, expressive eyes he’d ever seen, a dark liquid velvet glowing with warmth and intelligence, alert with liveliness and—

“Any questions?” Trey deliberately interrupted his own reverie.

Lately, renegade thoughts about Callie Sheely seemed to strike him more and more frequently. Whether in the OR or alone in his apartment or chatting with colleagues anytime, anywhere, random images of Callie Sheely would suddenly pop into his head. He would find himself drifting off on a mental riff, mulling over her memory, her eyes, her humor.

Such thoughts had no place in a professional relationship, Trey reminded himself. And a professional relationship was the only type he and Callie Sheely had. The only kind of relationship they would ever have, and that was the way he wanted it, the way it had to be.

Still, his unexpected musings were beginning to bother him. After all, Trey Weldon’s finely honed mind did not drift into unfitting flights of fancy.

Except lately, when it did. And inevitably the disconcerting drift was Callie Sheely inspired.

“I repeat, any questions?” He heard the impatient edge in his tone.

Well, he was impatient, though not really with the students who remained silent, perhaps intimidated.

“So I can assume that everybody perfectly understands everything there is to know about AVMs and this procedure?” It was a short step from impatience to sarcasm, and Trey couldn’t resist taking it.

At last one of the med students dutifully piped up with a question. True, it was a stupid question, but then the kid was merely a student. Trey took pity on him and proceeded to answer in painstaking detail.

He determinedly put aside any more thoughts about Callie Sheely’s eyes. He refused to think about her marvelous memory or her invaluable OR skills, either. He particularly refused to ponder their intuitive rapport and the way her sense of humor had somehow infected him.

She was not getting under his skin, Trey assured himself.

They were colleagues. They worked together, nothing more. They weren’t even friends, because friends socialized outside the workplace, and he and Callie Sheely never saw each other except in the workplace.

And that was the way he liked it, the way he wanted it to be.

No, she was not getting under his skin.

Chief OR scrub nurse Callie Sheely listened to every word of Trey Weldon’s comprehensive explanation. As always the mellifluous timbre of his voice stirred her. Only Trey could sound seductive while discussing the complexities of AVMs and their variations, along with inventive ways to repair them.

Callie watched him work, anticipating what he would do next and what surgical instrument he would need, his voice keeping her focused even as it enthralled her. Excited her. Trey Weldon had the sexiest voice she’d ever heard, deep and masculine, mesmerizing, with just the slightest hint of an upper-class Virginia drawl.

If only he sounded like Elmer Fudd, she lamented wistfully. As a diversion Callie tried to imagine Elmer pronouncing arteriovenous. She had to do something to decrease the sensual effect Trey’s voice had on her.

It just wasn’t fair! Not only was her boss good-looking, brilliant and talented, but he had a voice that could net him a fortune doing romance-hero readings for books on tape. And she had to listen to it, to him, by the hour and was expected to remain completely immune to him and his powerful allure.

After all, Callie knew the rules. She was Trey’s coworker, his subordinate, actually, and she knew that was the only way Trey Weldon saw her. Would ever see her.

She viewed their situation as comparable to characters in the old Greek myths, which she’d enjoyed reading as a child on her biweekly trips to the Carnegie library. In those myths, gods who dwelt high in Mount Olympus did not consort with ordinary mortals. Just as upper-class scions like Trey Weldon didn’t socialize with working-class nurses from Pittsburgh. Like Callie Sheely.

Ancient and fanciful they might be, but those myths taught a necessary counterlesson to the fairy tales that Callie had also devoured as a child. In fairy tales, a scullery maid might land a prince, but not in real life.

Real life meant sticking with your own kind. Otherwise the result was culture clash, not romance.

Callie suppressed a sigh, wishing that Trey would lapse into silence so the music could be cranked up to full volume. The OR team took turns choosing what was to be played, and today’s choice had been Quiana Turner’s, the circulating nurse. That meant sassy girl singers, lively and loud and brimming with attitude, just what Callie needed to hear.

But Trey continued to explain what he was doing to the students, and Callie listened and watched as he skillfully wielded the tiny scalpel she’d handed him.

His technique was flawless. As always she was awed by his incredible dexterity, his seemingly effortless expertise. To use such a tiny instrument so effectively in one of the most crucial parts of the brain was true genius. She never tired of watching him perform.

Nobody else did, either. To say that Dr. Trey Weldon, Tri-State Medical Center’s extraordinarily gifted neurosurgeon, was respected by his peers, by his lesser colleagues, by the establishment powers that be and everybody else, was a pallid understatement.

Trey Weldon was a star, a “surgical supernova” to quote a dazzled science reporter from the local Pittsburgh newspaper. The article exalted Trey’s operating prowess and his impressive credentials, also mentioning the determination of the medical center’s administrators to recruit him eighteen months ago.

Callie had saved that article and read it from time to time, particularly when she felt herself in danger of forgetting just how far she was—and would always be—from Trey Weldon’s world. Beginning, appropriately enough, with their origins.

The Weldon family descended from landed gentry in colonial Virginia, whose fortune had been made generations ago while Callie’s forebears were still trying to eke out a living as peasants in the old country. And though different backgrounds often didn’t matter, Callie knew bloodlines meant a lot to the aristocratic Weldon family.

It would certainly matter to them that her blood was the wrong shade of blue—that is, blue-collar blue. She just knew it would, from what she’d gleaned from that newspaper article and some of the casual comments made by Trey himself.

The son of Winston and Laura Weldon—she’d learned his parents’ names from the article, too—had nothing socially in common with her, the daughter of Jack and Nancy Sheely, whose grandparents had left poverty in Ireland and Russia to live in poverty in Pittsburgh. Their brave move and hard work had eventually paid off for their children and grandchildren, but high society they weren’t.

The Weldons were and had been Southern aristocracy for a couple of centuries.

“Holding up okay?” Trey’s inquiry nearly startled Callie into dropping a gauze sponge. Thankfully, her reflexes were too sharp to permit such a lapse.

“Me?” she murmured, trying to suppress her astonishment.

Trey had ceased lecturing and was asking her a personal question. If she was holding up okay. That had never happened before.

She’d been with him in surgery for nine or ten hours straight without him once mentioning thirst, hunger, sore muscles—or even the need for a bathroom break. He didn’t acknowledge such mundane concerns, for himself or others.

“Sheely?” he prompted, and his brow furrowed with what might have been concern.

“I’m fine,” she said quickly. But she was perplexed by his unusual solicitousness. Did she look ready to drop or something? Or to drop something? He wouldn’t like that!

“Honest,” she added quickly.

Trey nodded his head and went on operating.

While others withered around him, Trey Weldon just kept on going.

“To watch Trey Weldon operate on a brain is to experience a virtuoso at the top of his game,” Jimmy Dimarino, a first-year general surgery resident—and on some days an aspiring neurosurgeon himself—often enthused to Callie.

Jimmy tried to attend as many of Dr. Weldon’s operations as he could, badgering Callie for scheduling information. As the chief scrub nurse on Trey Weldon’s handpicked OR team for the past twelve months, Callie knew what procedure was slated and when; she was also privy to the emergency schedule.

She shared the inside scoop with Jimmy because they went way back, to the bad old days of elementary school when they’d lived next door to each other. Somehow their relationship had survived a brief eighth-grade romance, too. These days, Jimmy’s long-term fondness for Callie had been elevated to outright admiration—due in large part to her access to Dr. Trey Weldon.

“The AVM has been repaired,” Trey announced. “We were able to avoid any undue disturbance of the surrounding brain tissue, so the patient’s recovery ought to be swift and unremarkable.”

He made it sound like a decree that would naturally be obeyed. Callie smiled behind her surgical mask, then lifted her eyes to see Trey looking directly at her.

For one seemingly endless moment, time stood still as their gazes met and held.

And then: “Fritche, close,” Trey ordered with a nod toward one of the residents. He moved away from the table amidst murmurs of praise and appreciation, even a smattering of applause.

Scott Fritche, a first-year neurosurgical resident, stepped up to close, a task often given to underlings to further their experience.

Callie stayed where she was, assisting Scott Fritche, handing him the necessary instruments, sponges and sutures, subtly guiding him, before he needed to ask for anything.

She’d worked with Fritche a few times before, during his general-surgery residency, preceding this one, before she had become a permanent member of Trey’s team. But she didn’t remember Fritche being quite as ham-handed as he was today.

“I swear it took Fritche longer to close than for Trey to perform the entire operation,” complained Quiana Turner, as she and Callie trooped out of the OR, tugging off their masks.

Callie smiled at Quiana’s exaggeration. “We’ve gotten spoiled, working with Trey,” she conceded. “He’s a tough act for anybody to follow, let alone a resident.”

“Fritche sure isn’t the hotshot he thinks he is,” Leo Arkis said, sneering.

Leo did the advance OR work for the Weldon team and also served as backup relief to Callie or Quiana when necessary. “Could that clod have done any worse in there, messing up sutures and dropping sponges like a flower girl tossing rose petals at a wedding?”

“That’s kind of harsh, Leo. Fritche wasn’t all that bad,” chided Callie. “He’s inexperienced and he was nervous but—”

“I wish we’d called Trey back in to watch that jerk at work,” Leo cut in. “It would’ve been a kick seeing the icy wrath of our boss freeze Fritche into a human Popsicle.”

Callie arched her dark brows. “Leo, I know how you feel about Fritche, but ratting on him to Trey is—”

She broke off in midsentence because Dr. Trey Weldon stood in the middle of the newly renovated lounge, which the trio had just entered.

He was pulling his scrub shirt over his head.

The sight of him stopped Callie in her tracks, rendering her speechless. Trey tossed the shirt aside and stood bare-chested, the strong, well-defined muscles of his chest and shoulders revealed in the fluorescent glow of the overhead lights. His green scrub pants rode low on his waist, displaying the flat belly, a deep-set navel and a sprinkling of dark, wiry hair arrowing downward.

In the year that she’d been working on his team, Callie had seen Trey Weldon in scrubs too many times to count. But she hadn’t seen what lay beneath them. Until this moment.

Her mouth was suddenly quite dry.

“God bless this new unisex lounge,” murmured Quiana, staring appreciatively at Trey. “Next, I hope they combine the locker rooms.”

“Ratting on who?” Trey asked, his eyes on Callie. “What are you talking about, Sheely?”

It seemed that he had overheard at least part of what she’d said.

Callie’s dark eyes widened, and she forced herself to concentrate. She knew Trey wouldn’t like what they’d been talking about, and she wasn’t eager to be the one to tell him about Fritche’s less-than-stellar-performance. Errors, in general, annoyed Trey, but an error in his operating room…yikes!

Trey Weldon didn’t make mistakes in the operating room, had not even come close to one during the entire year that Callie had been working with him. No, this wasn’t a conversation she cared to continue with him.

“Ever hear the old saying of All’s Well That Ends Well?” she asked hopefully. “Let’s just say it applies in this case.”

It was an optimistic approach, she knew. Trey had no patience with those who wasted his time by not supplying him with the answers he wanted. He was looking impatient now. Impatient—and shirtless and muscular.

“Sheely,” Trey was already verging on testy. He directed a blue-eyed laser stare at her. “Stop talking in riddles.”

Callie flicked the tip of her tongue nervously over her top lip. Why did he have to grill her while standing there, half-nude? The sight was wreaking havoc with her thought processes. “Well, uh—”

“I don’t know if you’d call this ratting, Trey,” Leo spoke up. “But Fritche screwed up in there today. I thought you ought to know,” he added righteously.

Trey’s face went dark as a sky before a tornado was about to strike. “Is my patient—”

“He’s fine,” Callie said quickly. “Fritche made a few mistakes, correctable ones. The patient is fine,” she affirmed. “We would’ve called you the second anything turned bad.”

“That’s not good enough,” Trey snapped. “I expect to be called the second before anything turns bad.”

“Luckily it didn’t even get that far because Sheely was right there before No-Opposable-Thumbs Fritche could do any damage,” Leo hastened to assure him. “Honest, there was no harm done, Trey.”

“Okay, then.” Trey gave Leo a fraternal slap on the shoulder. “I can always count on you to be frank and up-front with me, can’t I, Leo?” His slight smile instantly faded when he turned back to Callie. “What about you, Sheely?” Trey’s expression darkened further. “I want a word with you, Sheely. Now.”

His big hand cupped her elbow, and he walked her a few feet away, turning her aside, his six-foot frame blocking her view of the other two.

His hand stayed on her elbow, and Callie tried hard not to notice. Trey frequently touched her, placing his hand on the small of her back or on her shoulder when she preceded him through doors, curling his fingers around her wrist while enthusiastically describing something neurosurgical, cupping her elbow to guide her wherever.

She pretended to pay no attention to his touch because she knew Trey himself was oblivious to it, as oblivious as he was to her as an individual. As a woman. His touch was automatic and unaware, definitely nothing personal. He would clasp her wrist as one might grip a pencil, she knew that his hand on her back or her elbow was akin to him resting his palm on a railing.

There were times when she wished she actually were the inanimate object Trey Weldon considered her to be. It would be so much easier—on her nerves, on her senses. The warm strength of his fingers on her skin evoked sensations that were hopelessly, girlishly romantic. And embarrassing because it was all so futile.

Sometimes, alone in bed in the darkness of her room at night, Callie pondered the irony of the situation. That she—who had always been so sensible and practical, who’d never suffered any hopeless, girlish, embarrassing yearnings, not even as an adolescent, when almost everybody else did—would be struck with this acute crush at the mature age of twenty-six.

The situation appalled her. She had a crush on her boss! Worse, she was a nurse with a crush on a doctor. Might as well throw in their class differences too; the proletarian yearning for the lord of the manor. A triple cliché, and she was living it. What unparalleled humiliation! Especially since her crush was entirely unrequited.

Callie refused to kid herself, to even pretend that Trey gave her a thought outside the operating room. Of course he didn’t. And though she continually fought her feelings for him, his touch and his penetrating stare affected her viscerally.

There didn’t seem to be anything she could do about that, but she could keep it her most-closely guarded secret. Which she had, quite successfully.

No one, especially not Trey, ever had to know about the sweet, syrupy warmth that flowed through her at his slightest touch. Nor would she ever reveal the sharp ache that sometimes threatened to bring her to her knees when his deep-blue eyes looked into hers.

Except right now those blue eyes of his were hard and cold with anger. If any stare could freeze a hapless recipient into a human Popsicle, it would be the one Trey was directing at her at this moment.

Callie met and held his eyes, a sheer act of will on her part. And not at all easy because Trey Weldon had perfected—or maybe he’d naturally been gifted with—the art of nonverbal intimidation. Not that he was a slouch in the verbal intimidation department, either.

But Callie never crumbled or froze in response to Trey’s ire, verbal or non. Because she knew that Trey expected her to be as tough and unemotional as he was himself? Because she knew he needed her to be that way?

Callie nearly groaned aloud. She was doing it again, seeking evidence that Trey Weldon thought of her as something more than merely a set of rubber-gloved hands assisting him in the OR.

“I expect better from you, Sheely.” Trey glared at her in the coldly unnerving way that had reduced other recipients to tears.

But not Callie. She had once overheard him tell Leo, “Sheely is tough. She’s the only woman I’ve ever worked with who’s never cried. Not a tear, not once.”

It was untrue, of course, further proof of how little he knew about her. She’d wept over their saddest cases, her heart breaking for the devastated families of patients unable to be saved, even by Trey Weldon’s formidable skills.

But she’d never cried in front of Trey Weldon, not a tear, not once. Callie knew Trey’s remark to Leo was a high compliment indeed, and she intended to keep her record of tearlessness in his company intact.

“The patients deserve better from you, Sheely,” snarled Trey. “They deserve your best, and when you put anything else ahead of—”

“I put nothing ahead of our patients’ well-being. They get the best that I have to give, Dr. Weldon.” Callie tried to match his cold tones but couldn’t. His particular way of expressing anger through iciness was unique to him.

Which didn’t mean she couldn’t communicate her own anger in her own way. Nothing, nothing infuriated her more than to have her commitment to her patients and to her job disparaged. To have her professionalism questioned.

And for Trey Weldon to do so…when she’d worked so hard for him, for their patients… Callie let her own fury displace the hurt that sliced through her, deep and sharp.

Her voice rose, and her dark eyes blazed, her rage as hot as his was cold. “And as for Scott Fritche, he was simply nervous today, Dr. Weldon. Fritche is in his first year of neurosurgery, he is inexperienced and he was suddenly expected to perform in front of an audience of—”

“Stop making excuses for him, Sheely!” Trey cut in. He held her glare. “It’s unacceptable.”

Neither bothered to blink. Or to move. They stood locked in their own world, anything and everyone else excluded.

Callie pulled off her surgical cap and threw it into a tall laundry bin. Her ponytail, which had been stuffed inside the cap, tumbled free, the ends swiping the nape of her neck.

If you lose your temper, you lose. One of her dad’s adages popped into Callie’s head. Too late. She’d gone ahead and lost her temper, anyway. Now she might as well go for broke.

“Unacceptable?” she huffed. “So are you going to fire me?” It was a dare, a challenge. Callie held her breath.

“Here we go again!” Leo heaved a dramatic groan. He and Quiana had moved closer, the better to listen to every word that passed between Trey and Callie. “It’s like seeing a rerun on TV for the four hundredth time—you know every word of the dialogue. C’mon Quiana, let’s get some lunch.”

“Might as well,” agreed Quiana.

The two exited the lounge, heading for the cafeteria.

“The four hundredth time?” Trey looked bewildered.

“Not even close,” murmured Callie, a pale pink flush staining her cheeks.

Okay, she hadn’t gone for broke, she silently conceded. When she felt Trey was being insufferably imperious, she would respond by getting mad and inviting him to fire her.

The first time, it had just slipped out, and she’d waited in agony, expecting him to fire her outright. But he hadn’t, and then she’d said it again—and again and again—and by now she pretty much knew Trey wouldn’t fire her. Was absolutely sure of it, in fact.

But she hadn’t said it four hundred times!

“No, I am not going to fire you, but—” Trey broke off, suddenly looking almost comically astonished. “So that’s what Leo meant when he was talking about seeing a rerun for the four hundredth time and knowing the dialogue. He was talking about that ‘going to fire me?’ habit of yours.”

“Duh,” Callie muttered darkly. Trey would have to pick right now to finally decipher one of Leo’s stupid jokes. “And it’s not a habit. Leo overexaggerates.”

“Not this time, he didn’t. It’s true. You practically dare me to fire you, Sheely. Did it ever occur to you that sometime I might say yes and just go ahead and do it?”

“Oh, maybe the first three hundred times.” Callie was sarcastic. “But the last hundred times or so, I felt my job was safe enough.”

Trey’s dark brows narrowed. “Nobody talks to me the way you do, Sheely.”

“Is that a threat?” Callie squared her shoulders and lifted her head, trying to make herself as tall and formidable as possible. Unfortunately her five-foot, four-inch frame remained dwarfed by Trey.

“Don’t go nuclear, Sheely, it wasn’t a threat. It was simply a statement of fact. Nobody around here talks to me the way you do.”

“Well, no wonder.” She folded her arms in front of her chest in classic defensive position. Just because she had a crush on him didn’t mean she would permit herself to be crushed by him.

“You’re practically a god around here. Nobody can believe you actually chose to come to Pittsburgh when you could’ve gone to any hospital in the country. Needless to say, without exception, people speak reverently to you.”

“It seems that Leo isn’t the only one on this team who overexaggerates.” Trey looked irked. “And maybe you can explain why Pittsburghers are forever apologizing for the city. Why do they feel the need to put it down, especially if a nonnative says something complimentary about the place? Which brings us to, Why wouldn’t I actually choose to come here, Sheely?”

“Why would you choose Pittsburgh’s Tri-State Medical Center when you could’ve gone to Johns Hopkins or Mass General or Duke or places equally prestigious? Is that a rhetorical question or am I supposed to answer it?”

“You see, you just did it again!” Trey exclaimed. “Another putdown of your hometown. What’s with you Pittsburghers?”

“We don’t like bragging, so we don’t embellish. We simply state the facts—which is what I was doing,” retorted Callie. “You went to medical school at Duke and did your surgical residency at Johns Hopkins, then on to Mass General for your neurosurgery residency and fellowship. You could write your own ticket anywhere. Why would you come to—”

“Don’t forget to mention my exclusive New England prep school and my undergraduate bioengineering degree from MIT, Sheely.”

“Which enables you to custom design the surgical instruments that you—” Callie broke off and stared at him. “You were being ironically droll.”

“And that makes you gape?”

“More drollery?”

“Ah, your jaw drops even farther.”

“All right, I admit I’m stunned. For your to joke about your hallowed credentials is something like hearing a saint wisecracking about divinity.”

“Sheely,” he paused and frowned. “Don’t put me on a pedestal.” She had the usual misconception about the blueness of his blood, Trey realized, and her next words confirmed it.

“I don’t have to, you’re already up there. I expect you were born there—and you’re well aware of it, too.”

A man like Trey Weldon, brilliant, handsome, successful—a man like that, who had it all, had to be aware of his status, his desirability. And not only neurosurgically speaking. He was one of the most eligible bachelors in the city—in the entire state of Pennsylvania, not to mention his own native state of Virginia!

Callie herself had seen how women here at the hospital practically threw themselves at his feet. She and Leo and Quiana enjoyed countless jokes about that. At least, Leo and Quiana enjoyed the jokes. Callie’s laughter rang hollow in her own ears. Worse, she could only imagine how very sought-after Trey was in exalted social circles, far removed from the hospital grounds.

She took another long look at his bare chest, and fury abruptly flared within her. “And we aren’t in a…a gym!” she snapped. “Put on your shirt. Please,” she added, because, after all, she was talking to her boss.

Trey picked up the scrub shirt he’d dropped onto a chair and pulled it over his head, inside out. “I’m not following.” He gave an exasperated huff. “What on earth are we talking about now, Sheely?”

Scowling, he ran his hand over his brown hair, a dark-chestnut shade, always cut short for practical and hygenic reasons.

Callie caught herself wondering if his hair felt as thick and springy as it looked. It took a moment for her to remember what they’d been talking about. “We’re discussing your beyond-impeccable credentials,” she said edgily.

Trey gave a wave of his hand, visibly impatient. “Let’s get back to the real subject at hand, Sheely.”

Callie proceeded to describe in detail each of Scott Fritche’s minor but time-consuming mistakes. “It’s not an enormous deal, Trey, though Leo’s done his best to make you think it is. We’ve both watched other residents, with more experience than Scott Fritche, do far worse with no unfavorable results. So you see—”

“What I see is that Arkis and Turner were right. You really did save Fritche’s ass in there, Sheely. Not to mention our poor patient’s cranium.” Trey folded his arms in front of his chest, but the gesture wasn’t a defensive one for him.

Oh, yes, he was infinitely gifted in the body language of intimidation. However, Callie wasn’t intimidated. Instead, observing the way his muscles rippled when he moved his arms, studying the breadth of his shoulders, she was…aroused.

She was practically ogling him! Callie caught herself and quickly averted her gaze, fixing it on the poster tacked up on the wall beyond him.

It was an advertisement for the Hospital Auxiliary’s Annual Springtime Ball, a popular fund-raiser held in early April, when the region’s weather was still more like winter than spring, despite the calendar.

Unlike those charity balls sponsored by exclusive women’s clubs, where the price of admission was astronomically high, thus limiting the guests to the social elite, the Tri-State Hospital’s auxiliary set aside a large block of tickets at lower prices, affordable to the hospital staff.

Everybody from student nurses to interns and residents, from the hospital administrators and lordly attending physicians to various corporate benefactors, politicos and the local pillars of society, attended the Springtime Ball. Somehow, the eclectic mix worked. Each year the ball topped the previous one’s record for ticket sales and attendance.

Callie had gone every year since nursing school. Often with Jimmy, sometimes with other escorts, always friends. This year she’d made no plans to attend. She couldn’t seem to work up any enthusiasm for going.

Her eyes darted to Trey. He was glaring at her.

“Sheely, if it isn’t too much trouble, could you stop drifting off and at least make a pretense of staying on topic? That would be Scott Fritche who endangered my patient in the OR. Remember?”

Callie’s eyes, dark as onyx, grew round as saucers. “The patient wasn’t endangered, honestly.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth and took a deep breath. “I was right there, Trey, I knew what to do. Of course, I would’ve called for you the second before anything could have gone wrong.”

Trey straightened, looking even taller to her. “You know I expect my team to be like cogs in a perfectly run machine, Sheely. We simply can’t afford any mistakes and we can’t succumb to—”

“I know. And woe to the cog that slips, even slightly. Leo and Quiana and I—”

“This isn’t about you three, I know how good you are. You’re the best in the area. I watched you for six months before handpicking you myself for my team. But Fritche is another story entirely. If he’s no good, we’ve got to get him out of the neurosurgery program sooner rather than later, before he does irreparable harm.”

“Trey, before we go any further with this, maybe you should know that Leo holds a personal grudge against Scott Fritche. I don’t think I’d be exaggerating to say that if Leo could hurt Scott, he would. Oh, not physically. But he’d certainly settle for doing damage to Scott’s career.”

“Why?”

“Because Scott Fritche dated and then dumped Leo’s cousin Melina. She’s a student nurse here at the med center and was heartbroken when—”

“Sheely, this is not an episode of General Hospital. Please spare me the details of who’s dating and dumping who. I’m only interested in the welfare of my patients, and right now I’m trying to ascertain whether—”

“All right. Fine,” Callie said coldly. “Never mind gathering all the facts and coming to an informed conclusion. It’s clear that you’ve already made up your mind.”

“Sheely, you are—”

“I’m tired of talking about this,” Callie said, boldly cutting him off.

She turned and stalked from the lounge.

“Sheely, come back here.”

She ignored his command and stormed inside the empty women’s locker room. Mercifully, it had not gone the unisex route like the lounge. Each sex still had separate quarters to shower and change clothes.

Moments later a tall, pretty blond nurse joined Callie in an aisle of lockers, by the long bench positioned in the middle. “Sheely, Trey Weldon wants me to tell you that he has to talk to you. He said ‘right now.”’

Jennifer Olsen had been in the class behind her in Tri-State’s nursing school and currently worked in the obstetrics clinic, surrounded by expectant mothers. Jennifer made no secret of her ultimate goal, which was to have her own baby as soon as possible. Her more immediate goal, however, was to find a suitable man to marry and impregnate her. Preferably a doctor, with a sizable income.

At the same moment Callie wondered what Jennifer was doing up here in the women’s surgical locker room, Jennifer must’ve felt obliged to explain her presence.

“I came up to see if Karen wanted to go to the Squirrel Den tonight. There’s a bunch of us going.”

Callie knew Karen Kaminsky, an OR nurse who’d graduated in Jennifer’s class. “You must’ve missed her. She’s probably at lunch.”

“Oh. Hey, Sheely, you come to the Squirrel Den tonight, too, if you want, okay?”

Callie pictured the Squirrel Den, a relic from the city’s industrial dark age, a dank, smoky, gloomy place jammed with cheap old tables and booths. “Uh, thanks, Jen. I’ll try to make it,” she said politely. I just won’t try very hard, she added to herself.

“Sheely, about Trey Weldon, he—”

Callie sighed. “Tell him you didn’t see me in here, Jennifer.”

“But this place is too small for me not to see you. I wouldn’t want to lie to the man.”

“Certainly not,” Callie murmured dourly.

Without a doubt Trey’s credentials met, even exceeded, all of Jennifer’s requirements in a potential husband and father. Too bad, Jen, Callie thought darkly, you don’t fulfill the prerequisites for Weldon class status any more than I do.

Callie sucked in her cheeks and pointed at the window high above the lockers. “You can tell him I flew out that window on my broomstick. He probably thinks I’m capable of it. All I have to do is swap my surgical cap for my tall, pointy, black hat.”

“The doctor is always right, and when the nurse doesn’t agree, she’s a witch, hmm?” Jennifer was sympathetic.

“Exactly. Just a doctor-nurse disagreement. It’s nothing personal.” Callie felt the need to stress that.

Although a little voice in her head pointed out that she was taking her inability to influence Trey in the Scott Fritche matter very personally, Callie instructed the little voice to shut up.

“Well, since he’s waiting out there, I guess I ought to go tell him something.” Jennifer lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Sheely, rumors fly around here, but I’ve never heard any about you and Trey Weldon. Still, I’ll come right out and ask, and I hope you won’t take offense. Are you two involved?”

“In what? A blood feud? No, not yet.”

Jennifer giggled. “You know what I mean, Sheely. Are you and he, um, romantically involved?”

“No.” Callie’s heart lurched wildly. She would’ve liked to toss off a breezy quip about Trey being surgically gifted yet disabled in the art of romance, but the words stuck in her throat.

Because of the disturbing thoughts that flooded her mind.

For all she knew, Trey actually could be one of the world’s great romantics, passionate, sensitive and thoughtful—yet extremely discreet. Possibly, he kept that part of his life so secretive that only the woman who was the object of his desire knew that side of him.

What would it be like, to know that there was a deeply secret, romantic side of Trey? Oh, what she’d give to know!

Thoroughly flustered, Callie forgot to breathe, and then had to inhale sharply.

“Sheely?” Jennifer’s voice seemed to come from some other dimension. “Would you happen to know if Trey is going to the Springtime Ball?”

Callie jerked to attention. She was the one in the other dimension, a foolish one called fantasyland. Jen’s voice came from the real world, and Callie’s return to it was sharp and complete.

She heaved a small sigh. She was pathetic. Her hot, Trey fantasy, coupled with Jennifer’s query about Trey and the big dance, was so junior high school she wouldn’t be surprised to hear the bell ringing to change classes.

“I don’t know, Jennifer. He hasn’t mentioned the Springtime Ball.”

“I know it’s late, the ball is only two weeks away, but the guy I was going to go with had to cancel. He’s a lawyer and has some stupid conference that just came up.” Jennifer added quickly.

“I hate it when that happens.” Callie tried to sound sympathetic.

“And I already have a dress and I don’t want Joshua to think I’ll be sitting at home that night because he can’t make it. Maybe I’ll just go ahead and ask Trey Weldon to the dance. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, you know.” Jennifer smiled, a nothing-ventured-nothing-gained kind of smile.

Callie suppressed the urge to grimace. She fumbled with her locker combination, hitting the wrong number, having to start over again.

“See you later, Sheely,” Jennifer called brightly, gliding out of the locker room.

Callie yanked the top of her scrub suit over her head, while dropping the pants to the floor. The suit was at least three sizes too big for her.

“Don’t think you can hide in there and sulk, Sheely. You are going to listen to me.”

“Trey, Dr. Weldon, you can’t go in there!”

Callie heard the locker-room door open and slam hard against the tiled wall. She heard Trey’s voice, angry and frustrated, followed by Jennifer’s high-pitched protest.

But it happened so fast, in just a split second, that she didn’t have time to process all the information until Trey was standing directly in front of her.

And she was standing in front of her locker, clad only in her white cotton bra and panties.

Trey seemed to freeze in place. Callie gasped and reached for her scrub top. She instinctively held it in front of her, shielding herself from his startled blue eyes.

Jennifer shrieked.