Читать книгу Wedding Date With The Army Doc - Lynne Marshall - Страница 10

CHAPTER THREE

JACKSON TOSSED HIS keys onto the entry table in his Westlake condo, thinking a beer would taste great about now, but knowing he’d given up using booze as an escape. It had cost what had been left of his marriage to get the point across.

A long and destructive battle with PTSD had led to him falling apart and quitting his position as lead surgeon at Savannah General Hospital just before they’d planned to fire him three years ago. The ongoing post-traumatic stress disorder had turned him into a stranger and strained his relationship with his teenage sons, frightening them away. It had also ensured his wife of twenty years had finally filed for divorce.

He’d lost his right lower leg in an IED accident in Afghanistan. It had been his second tour as an army reservist. He’d volunteered for it, and for that his wife had been unable to forgive him. She’d deemed it his fault that the improvised explosive device had caused him to lose his leg. He’d returned home physically and emotionally wounded, and, piled onto their already strained marriage from years of him choosing his high-maintenance education and career over nurturing their life together, she couldn’t take it.

His fault.

Their marriage had been unraveling little by little for years anyway. High-school sweethearts, she’d then followed him on to college. His grandfather used to tease him that she was majoring in marriage. Then they’d accidentally got pregnant the summer before he’d entered medical school. With their respective families being good friends, there was no way he could have let her go through the pregnancy alone. So he’d done the honorable thing and they’d got married right before he’d entered medical school.

It hadn’t been long before they’d realized they may have made a mistake, but his studies had kept him too busy to address it, and the new baby, Andrew, had taken all of her time, and, well, they’d learned how to coexist as a small family of three. In his third year of medical school she’d got pregnant again. This time he’d got angry with her for letting it happen when he’d found out she’d stopped taking birth control pills. Evaline had said she wanted kids because he was never around. And so it had gone on.

Then at the age of twenty-seven and in the second year of his surgical residency, he’d signed up for the army reserves. One weekend a month he’d trained in an army field medical unit, setting up mobile triage, learning to care for mass casualties. When he’d finished his surgical residency and had been asked to stay on at Savannah General, his wife had thought maybe things would get better. But he’d started signing on with his reserve unit for two-week humanitarian missions for victims of natural disasters at home in the States. Soon he’d branched out to other countries, and when he’d been deployed to Iraq, Evaline had threatened to leave him.

He’d made it home six weeks later in one piece, his eyes opened to the need of fellow US soldiers deployed in the Middle East, and also finally accepting the trouble his marriage was in. They seeked out marriage counseling and he’d focused on working his way up the career ladder at Savannah General, and things had seemed to get better between them. He’d stayed on in the army reserves doing his one weekend a month, catching hell from Evaline if it fell on either of his sons’ sports team events, but he hadn’t been able to pick and choose his times of service. They’d limped on, keeping a united front for their boys and their families, while the fabric of their love had worn thinner and thinner.

Then, after a brutal series of attacks on US military personnel, they’d needed army reserve doctors and he’d volunteered to be deployed to Afghanistan. He had been one week short of going home when the IED had changed everything.

His fault?

He’d come home, had hit rock bottom after that, then eventually had got help from the veterans hospital, and had spent the next year accepting he’d never be the man he’d once been and cleaning up his act. He’d been honorably discharged from the army, too. But the damage to Evaline and his sons and his reputation as a surgeon had already been done. She’d filed for divorce.

As time had passed his PTSD had settled down and he’d felt confident enough to go back to work. That was when he’d figured there wasn’t anything for him back home in Georgia anymore. His wife had divorced him. His oldest son had wanted nothing to do with him. So since his youngest son would be attending Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, he’d sought employment in the area, hoping to at least mend that relationship. St. Francis of the Valley Hospital had been willing to give him a chance as a staff surgeon. With less responsibility, not being the head of a department but just a staff guy for a change, not having to deal with his ex-wife and her ongoing complaints anymore and enjoying the eternal spring weather of Southern California, his stress level had reached a new low.

Until today, when he’d had to tell his friend Jim Gordon some pretty rotten news—that he had metastatic cancer—and they both knew there’d be one hell of a battle ahead. Then, in a moment of weakness, seeing the distress Charlotte Johnson had been in, he’d let his gut take over and he’d moved in to comfort her. But it hadn’t worked out that way, because he’d played with fire. He knew he’d thought about her far, far differently than any other colleague. That he’d been drawn into her dark and alluring beauty while sitting across from her, looking at patient slides, for the last year. Come to think of it, could he have been any slower? How long had he had a thing for her anyway? At least three-quarters of the last year, that was how long.

Could he blame himself for kissing her when she’d fit into his arms so perfectly, and she’d shown no signs of resisting him? Still, it had been completely improper and couldn’t happen again because he wasn’t ready to have one more woman reject him because his lower leg had been replaced with a high-tech prosthetic. Maybe it wasn’t sexy, but it sure worked great, and he’d been running five miles a day to prove it for the last two years. In fact, he’d never been in better condition.

Ah, but Charlotte, she stirred forgotten feelings, that special lure of a woman that made him want to feel alive again. Something about her mix of confidence on the job and total insecurity in a social setting made him hope what they had in common might be enough to base a new relationship on. When he’d kissed her, because of her response, he’d got his hopes up that maybe she felt the same way. But she’d stopped the kiss and an invisible barrier had seemed to surround her after that. He’d pretended everything had been fine when he’d walked her to her car—he hadn’t noticed her need to be left alone—but the message had got through to him. Loud and clear.

He wandered into his galley kitchen and searched the refrigerator, hoping there might be something halfway interesting in the way of leftovers. He grabbed a bottle of sparkling water and guzzled some of it, enjoying the fizzy burn in his throat. Today he’d kissed the woman who held his interest more than any other since his high-school sweetheart. That was the good news. The bad news was he knew he couldn’t do anything further about it. Her invisible force field wouldn’t let him through, and if that wasn’t enough, his boatload of baggage held him back.

Out of curiosity, though, he did have one little—okay, monumental—test for Charlotte, one that would really determine her mettle before he totally gave up.

* * *

Saturday was the annual charity fund-raiser five-and ten-kilometer run for St. Francis of the Valley trauma unit. Charlotte had signed up a while back and had forgotten to train for it, but she showed up anyway in support of the event. What they’d neglected to tell her was that this year they’d added zombies. Someone had got the bright idea to raise more money by getting employees to pay professional makeup artists, who’d donated their time for the event, to be made up as the undead. The sole purpose, besides getting their pictures taken, was to chase down the runners and tag them with washable paint, and hopefully improve some personal best times for some participants in the process.