Читать книгу The Doctor's Former Fiancee - Caro Carson - Страница 9

Chapter Two

Braden tapped his fingers impatiently on the conference room’s table while a senior resident fumbled with the projector for her laptop. She’d told him three times that Dr. Montgomery, Braden’s former faculty adviser, had asked her to present the study’s midpoint data.

When the laptop’s screen was finally, successfully projected on the wall, Braden took advantage of that awkward moment before the young doctor clicked on the icon that would start the slide show. He’d become an expert at gathering all kinds of intelligence in those seconds. File names that looked personal indicated that any PLI-provided laptops were not being used strictly for research. The name of any file often indicated how many versions existed. Always, Braden would note the amount of total slides before the first one ballooned up to fill the full screen—in this case, slide one of forty-three.

Forty-three.

Death by PowerPoint. It looked as though this resident planned to make it a slow, painful death.

Braden would cut it short after a polite amount of slides had passed. He’d already received the raw data from the midpoint of this study. He’d done the statistical analysis himself. While there was some trend toward the treatment group having a better outcome than the placebo group, there was no statistical difference. Plaine Labs International was not going to sink another 1.2 million dollars and another eighteen months of time into this study, not with such weak results at the midpoint.

It was a shame, because Braden had a soft spot in his heart for the subject: a new medicine for migraines, something his father had suffered from. The man had been a force to be reckoned with, but Braden had been awed as a child at seeing his indefatigable father laid low within moments of a migraine’s onset. This particular molecule wasn’t going to work, though. It was time for PLI to cut its losses and move on.

Time to kill someone’s dream.

The door behind him opened with a hard push, and the PowerPoint physician looked up from her laptop and exhaled in relief. “Ah, Dr. Donnoli is here—our new department chair. She’ll be able to field any questions after the presentation, I’m sure.”

Dr. Donnoli? Dr. Donnoli was in West Central Texas Hospital? It couldn’t be. She was in Washington, D.C., adding more impressive credentials to her curriculum vitae. He knew, because he knew where all the key research physicians in America were. But he swiveled his chair to look, and it was her.

The beautiful-est girl in the world.

Damn it all to hell.

* * *

Lana crossed the beige carpet to the conference table, taking care to walk as if she were as confident as she hoped she looked in her high heels and her dark blue coat dress.

“Dr. Donnoli?” A young woman in a lab coat addressed her. “Would you like to make the presentation to Mr. MacDowell?”

MacDowell? Lana’s gaze darted from the woman to the man in the dark suit. He’d been sitting with his back to the door when she’d walked in, but now he was facing her. Braden MacDowell. Her Braden MacDowell.

For a moment, she was frozen. Confused. It was as if being in this hospital had not only refreshed all her memories, but actually conjured her ex-fiancé in the flesh. Quite a magic trick—an unwelcome, unwanted trick of the mind.

Her administrative assistant, a compact ball of energy one would hesitate to label “elderly,” burst through the door behind her.

“Sorry I’m late,” the gray-haired Myrna said. “Oh, good. I see you’ve got that projector working.”

Lana barely processed the words. Every brain cell was occupied with Braden. He looked just the same. It took only one glance for her to recall the feel of his skin, every angle of his jaw, the texture of his dark hair sliding through her fingers. Myrna kept talking as she placed notepads around the table. Lana was grateful for the valuable seconds it provided to regain her composure.

“You must be the president of Plaine Labs,” Myrna was saying, making small talk and saving Lana. “Cheryl called me this morning to say you’d be here. I didn’t realize you were already in the building. Welcome to our conference center. May I introduce our new chairperson, Dr. Lana Donnoli?” She gestured at Lana. “Dr. Donnoli, this is Mr. Braden MacDowell.”

Braden stood and nodded at Lana politely. Impersonally. How did he manage it? Was she nothing more than a past memory, an old college girlfriend?

“Dr. Donnoli,” he said, and the bored formality in his voice went straight to her heart. And it hurt.

That he could still have that kind of power over her, six years after leaving her behind, made her angry. She extended her hand to shake his, determined to show him the professional she was, not the heartbroken girl he probably remembered sobbing over a phone line.

“Mr. MacDowell?” she asked, with a skeptical lift of her brow. “Isn’t it Dr. MacDowell?”

“I don’t use the title.” He shook her hand firmly, once, and let go.

“Why not? You earned that much.” She knew she’d made it sound as if it wasn’t much at all.

“I’m well aware that it’s an academic title only. Since I don’t practice medicine, I don’t choose to use it.”

Myrna stopped in the middle of placing her pens. “Do you two already know each other?” She sounded a little confused, and a little hopeful.

“Not at all,” Lana said tersely at the same time that Braden said, “Very well.”

“Ah,” Myrna said, looking confused but obviously too smart to explore that topic further. Instead, she gestured toward the senior resident, who was standing by her laptop, finger poised on the enter key. “This is Dr. Everson. She joined our department this month.”

“My card,” Braden said, offering Lana a small rectangle of pressed linen paper.

“Thank you.” She should have offered him her card, of course, but she hadn’t had a chance to get any made. Instead, she asked the very young-looking Dr. Everson to please begin the presentation and took a seat directly across from Braden, on the opposite side of the narrow table.

As the resident began with slide number one, Lana glanced down at the card in her hand. The initials of the corporate giant formed the familiar PLI logo in gold and burgundy ink. Very expensive ink, as she recalled from the days she’d spent at stationery stores, choosing wedding invitations. She and Braden, up to their necks in med school student loans, hadn’t been able to afford colored engraving like this. They’d planned to send their wedding invitations in plain, formal black ink, like his name on this business card:

Braden MacDowell, M.D., MBA

President of Research and Development

His business card was very impressive, if one admired money-making over life-saving. She did not. She never had. It had crushed her when Braden had decided he did.

Lana pretended not to look at Braden as he patiently listened to the resident explain slide number two. Braden’s tie was a subtle symphony of colors on silk. His watch was worth as much as her worn-out car, she was certain. But his face no longer reflected enthusiasm for life, and his mouth no longer lifted in an easy smile. Chasing the almighty dollar had not been a happy way for him to spend the past six years, apparently.

Lana had made the right choice by breaking their engagement. She could not have been the right wife for this executive. He’d been heading in that profit-driven direction then; she wasn’t going to regret it now.

No—she was going to ignore him for the duration of the PowerPoint presentation, because she needed to read every slide and learn all she could about this study. Her one goal, her only goal, was to keep PLI’s funding coming into this hospital.

She slid another look at his painfully familiar profile. He was handsome, classically handsome, but her eye went to the imperfections, the ones she’d known and loved. His eyes had some crinkles at the corners, as they’d had even six years ago, from a youth spent ranching in the relentless Texas sun. His chin had a scar from being cut open too many times for him to recount them all to her. Being thrown from a horse. Getting sacked in high school football. Attempting some prank with his brother. He looked like an urbane city man now, a business tycoon in a Savile Row suit, but that scar on his chin revealed the man he’d been. Lana knew him, under that suit.

Under that suit, he was...

Warm skin and hard muscle. Every inch of him.

For God’s sake, Lana. You’re the department chair. Pay attention.

More than a million dollars were at stake. West Central was counting on her to achieve one simple goal: renew PLI’s contract.

Perhaps she ought to set a second goal. She was going to keep her heart well guarded from the dreamy Dr. MacDowell.

* * *

“Thank you for that thorough presentation,” Lana said.

She would coach Dr. Everson later about making her presentations less lengthy. In front of PLI’s president, however, Lana would point out only the positive for the sake of West Central Hospital. Thankfully, the study in question had turned out to be for a medicine she’d also been studying in Washington. Lana felt a little more secure in her knowledge. “It’s exciting that pentagab has met the midpoint goals.”

Which meant it’s exciting that we’ll be extending our contract with PLI.

“I regret that PLI will not be continuing this study.” It was the first thing Braden had said in forty minutes. Lana heard that familiar voice, still masculine, but no longer infused with affection for her. It took a moment for his words to sink in through the miasma of emotional memories.

“You’re not continuing this study?” she asked. “But this drug shows such promise.”

“I don’t believe it does.”

“But the numbers—let’s go back to that last graph—”

“The graph looks impressive, yes, but it’s just drawn cleverly. The raw numbers make the treated group appear to be doing better than the placebo group, but where is the p-value? There is no statistical significance.”

Startled, Lana looked at the screen. The bar graph looked straightforward, but sure enough, the standard line that stated the p-value between the groups was missing. The p-value was a mathematical calculation used to determine if the difference between two groups mattered. If one hundred patients responded to a medicine but ninety patients responded to a placebo, that ten-patient difference was not really a difference. Not in the world of science.

“The statistical analysis was on another slide,” she said, stalling for time. It was on one of forty-three slides. Lana flipped through her paper copies of the PowerPoint presentation, doing some frantic speed-reading. “Here it is,” she said with relief. “P equals point-zero-five. Statistically significant, and it looks like the data are trending toward a more robust end point.”

Still, she’d have to ask Everson why the p-values hadn’t been clearly listed on the graph itself, where they typically were in medical studies.

“Those numbers are wrong,” Braden said in a tone as certain as if he’d said the sky is blue.

“How can you say that off the top of your head?”

Braden only raised an eyebrow.

Of course, he knew that she knew he was a math whiz. He probably could look at a bar graph and come up with a p-value without touching a calculator, let alone performing a page of equations.

“Never mind.” Lana turned to Dr. Everson, who was looking younger and less reliable by the minute. “Who prepared these slides? Who ran our numbers?”

“Uh, well, I was instructed to do some preliminary work, and then Dr. Montgomery finalized it.”

Dr. Montgomery, who couldn’t stay one more hour to take this meeting. Lana had a sinking feeling. Had Dr. Montgomery been so desperate to keep this funding that he’d do something unethical? Surely not. This had to be an honest mathematical error. An error that just happened to be in their favor.

One that, had it gone unchallenged, would have kept more than one million dollars coming into the hospital.

How badly in debt was her department? How hard would the cancellation of this study hit them? Her?

She was determined not to find out; she was going to save this study.

“Myrna, Dr. Everson. If the two of you could excuse us, I’d like to take the rest of this meeting one-on-one with Dr. MacDowell.”