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  He addressed Blue the way he would any of his adult patients. He sensed the boy expected that. Welcomed that. “How are you doing?”

  Blue sat up a little straighter. “Okay.” It was obvious that the boy tried very hard to put on as brave a front as his sister had.

  “They just came to cross match his blood. Took a whole bunch of it from him and he didn’t even cry, did you, Tiger?” Raven affectionately feathered her fingers through her brother’s black hair. Every movement, every look, showed Peter how proud she was of the boy.

  Blue merely moved his head from side to side. “I don’t cry,” the boy told him solemnly.

  Peter raised his eyes to look at Raven. “Ever?”

  “No, he doesn’t,” she said. At times, this worried her, but for the most part, Blue was a source of never-ending sunshine in her life and she felt blessed.

  Peter could only shake his head in wonder. “My father would have loved having you.”

  The personal revelation surprised her. And gave her just a sprinkling of hope. Some of the biggest battles were won an inch at a time. The word “battles” linked up with another and she looked at Peter.

  “Was your father a Marine?”

  She hadn’t even bothered with the nebulous term of “soldier.” He would have, presented with the same evidence.

  Picking up Blue’s chart, he quickly scanned it, then returned it to where it was hanging from the end of the bed. “How did you know?”

  She shrugged. The neckline that was all too wide slipped from her shoulder. She pushed it back into place. “Lucky guess.”

  He forced his eyes away from the creamy white expanse of her neck and shoulders. Looking into her eyes was no improvement. They were much too blue, made him drift and lose focus. He couldn’t afford that right now.

  Couldn’t afford it at any time.

  He turned his attention back to Blue and dispensed a little more information for the boy’s benefit. “After this is over, you’re going to have to lie on your stomach for about a week.” Most kids would probably balk at remaining immobilized that way, he thought.

  Blue merely nodded his head. “I know.”

  He sounded like someone four times his age, Peter thought. “How do you know?”

  Blue’s eyes shifted toward his sister. “Raven told me.”

  Leaning against the raised side railing, Peter transferred his question. “All right, I’ll bite, how did you know?”

  “I’ve been doing a lot of reading up on the subject,” she told him. Optimistic though she might be, there was no way she was going to blindly allow anything to be done to her brother without first knowing every single ramification involved.

  Peter nodded his approval.

  Behind them, the door opened and a matronly looking nurse entered. “I’ve got to give him his medication,” she told Raven before flashing an encouraging smile at Blue. “It’s going to help you fall asleep.”

  Looking almost like a little old man, resigned to his fate, Blue put out his bare arm, waiting for the inevitable sting of a needle. The nurse laughed. She held out a little white cup. Inside was a tiny yellow pill. “No, this you swallow.”

  Blue’s face immediately brightened. “Good.” His eyes shifted toward his doctor. “I really hate shots,” he confided.

  Peter merely nodded. “Not my favorite thing, either,” he allowed. He glanced at his watch. It was almost time. He had to get upstairs to prepare. “I’ll see you in surgery.”

  “Okay,” Blue called after him.

  Raven caught up to him just before he went through the door. “Where’s the chapel?” she asked, almost breathless. It was as if the impact of what was about to unfold was hitting her. He fought the urge to comfort her.

  “It’s just outside the Intensive Care Unit,” he told her.

  “Appropriate,” he heard her murmur as she withdrew to join her brother.

  Funny, all this time, he’d never thought of that before.

  If she knotted her fingers together any tighter, she might never untangle them. Raven could feel her heart pounding inside her chest, threatening to break out. She didn’t know how much more of this she could take.

  The surgery was running longer than it should have. Much longer.

  In trying to prepare for everything, she’d consulted three different medical books as to the procedure and the length of time that it would take. Given the nature and location of the tumors, the consensus was that the surgery should take approximately four hours.

  More than five had passed.

  She tried to tell herself not to worry, that Peter was just being careful. The surgery wasn’t something to race through and she was sure he wouldn’t try to beat his best time. He was taking precautions, just like any good surgeon would. Wasn’t that why she’d come to Sullivan in the first place? Because he was good? Because his reputation was excellent?

  She could feel tears filling her eyes. It wasn’t the first time. She blinked them away.

  Concern continued to nag at her, growing larger and more unwieldy as each minute passed. She looked at the big clock on the wall at the end of the corridor. Each second dragged by.

  It was taking too long.

  The words echoed in her brain like some kind of a warning. A premonition of dire things to come.

  She was making herself crazy.

  What if something had gone wrong? What if Blue was paralyzed and Peter didn’t know how to come out to tell her? No, he’d tell her. He’d do it the way they ripped off Band-Aids, in one swift movement.

  What if they’d sent the tissues to be analyzed at the lab and had gotten back a result that pronounced the tumors to be malignant?

  Her mind raced from one dark scenario to another, each one more terrifying than the last. She struggled vainly to get her thoughts back in balance.

  Why weren’t her parents here? She needed them here with her to make this bearable.

  Her parents had always taught her to have a good outlook about everything, to see the positive side. But her parents were gone, taken from her just as she was about to embark on her first real journey of consequence. Sending her entire life veering off in a completely different direction. One moment she was a young woman with a supportive family and the whole world open to her, the next she was an orphan. An orphan with a two-year-old to take care of.

  Not only that, but she’d suddenly inherited her parents’ company, something she was only familiar with in the most cursory of ways. Overnight over a thousand people were counting on her for their very livelihood. It had been a hell of a thing to be saddled with at twenty-two.

  This was worse.

  Waiting to find out what was going on in the operating room less than a hundred feet away was undoing her.

  She had begun the vigil by going into the chapel to pray. That had lasted for a little less than an hour. Feeling as if she’d worn out her knees, she’d gone to the visitors’ lounge to wait for news. But there were too many people there, talking, laughing, trying to distract one another. Being around them just made her edgy. She’d remained in the lounge as long as she could, then left.

  Taking the elevator, she’d returned to the third floor, where Peter was holding her brother’s fate in his hands. She followed the signs to the operating room and for the past hour she’d been out here in the hall, standing or pacing—waiting.

  Life around her moved in slow motion, as if it belonged to another universe that only marginally touched her own.

  The hospital personnel who walked by looked at her curiously. One of the orderlies stopped to ask her if she was lost. She shook her head, demurring.

  But she felt lost. Lost and alone.

  This’ll pass, she promised herself silently. Raven only prayed she was right.

  What if? kept echoing in her brain.

  As the sixth hour approached, she had lost track of the amount of deals she’d made with God. Deals that hinged on some kind of sacrifice on her part if only He’d let Blue come out of this surg
ery alive and well.

  Pacing from one end of the hall to the other, her feet gained momentum as her concern mounted. It escalated until she was almost a swirl of color. And each time she passed the double doors through which her brother had been taken, she stared, willing them to open. Willing the surgeon she’d placed her faith in to come out and tell her that everything was all right. That there was no need to worry like this.

  The doors remained closed.

  Her agitation increased.

  As she turned away for the umpteenth time from the doors, she walked directly into George Grissom, hitting her face against his massive chest.

  The big man took a step back, as if alarmed that he had hurt her. “Are you all right?”

  Numb not from the encounter, but from worry, Raven was aware of nodding. “As well as can be expected. He’s still in there.” The words came out in a whisper.

  The hospital administrator eyed her nervously. It was obvious that he’d been looking for her. “Ms. Songbird, what are you doing here?”

  She blew out a long, ragged breath, looking at the closed doors accusingly. “Waiting.”

  “Yes, I understand.” He began to take her arm to direct her toward the elevator. “But wouldn’t you be more comfortable downstairs in the visitors’ lounge?”

  Comfortable was not a word that meant anything to her anymore. “I was there for four hours, Mr. Grissom. I couldn’t stay there any longer. And right now, I don’t think I could be comfortable anywhere.”

  His expression was understanding as he nodded. “He’s one of the best neurosurgeons in the country.”

  “I know.” That was the only reason she wasn’t crawling out of her skin by now. But she was getting close.

  “Perhaps you’d like to have something to eat?” George suggested hopefully. “We could—”

  Shaking her head, she pulled back. “No, thank you. Really.” The smile she offered was grateful but firm. “I understand that you’re trying to get my mind off what’s happening in there, but you can’t.” And then she paused, thinking. “But there is maybe something that you can do for me.”

  “Name it.”

  “Is there any way to call in there to find out if everything—” Her voice hitched. She tried again. “If everything’s all right?”

  “There is a phone in the operating room,” he acknowledged, although his expression told her that he doubted the wisdom of calling right now. She knew she was being impatient, but after nearly six hours, she felt as if she was coming perilously close to falling apart.

  Sympathy entered George’s deep gray eyes. He looked around for the nearest phone. “Why don’t we go to the nurse’s station and…”

  Whatever he was about to suggest faded away unsaid. The outer doors to the operating salon opened before he could finish. A tall man dressed completely in green livery walked out, his face still covered with a surgical mask.

  She would have recognized his eyes anywhere.

  Raven was at Peter’s side in less than a heartbeat, firing questions at him before he could even strip away his mask.

  “Is he all right? Is Blue going to make it? Will he be able to walk?”

  Peter felt drained. He’d performed longer surgeries, but none that had ever mattered as much to him as this one had. The sensation still mystified him. He didn’t like feeling as if he had everything riding on the outcome of a surgery. In his opinion, that only impeded his skills and could wind up jeopardizing the whole outcome.

  But he hadn’t been able to bank the feeling. In the end, he’d been forced to work around it.

  “He’s going to make it,” he assured her. “We got them all.” He heard George sigh with relief.

  “I’ll leave you two alone,” George said as he began to withdraw.

  “What about his legs?” She wanted to know. “Are they affected?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see what happens once the swelling on his spinal cord goes down, but there’s every indication that he’ll be able to walk.”

  Thank you, God. Every deal I made, I’m good for it. “And the tumors?”

  “There were five, not four,” he told her. One had hidden behind another, giving the false reading. “Initial pathology says they’re benign. But we have to do further testing.”

  Raven heard what she wanted to.

  Benign.

  And Blue would walk. He wouldn’t spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Blue was going to be fine.

  Relief shot through every part of her, drenching her, weakening her so that she thought her legs would cave under her.

  With something that sounded very much like a whoop of joy, she threw her arms around Peter and kissed him. Kissed him long and hard with feeling that came from within the depths of her very soul. The anxiety that had been building within her these past six hours leeched out, leaving in its place an overwhelming energy that had absolutely no place to go.

  Except to her lips.

  To his surprise, Peter laced his arms around her and didn’t just allow Raven to kiss him, but kissed her back. The surgery had taken a great deal out of him, as well, and now that it was over, now that he’d successfully removed the five tumors that had attached themselves to the boy’s spinal column, he felt nothing but a breath-stealing relief.

  Kissing her did nothing to restore his breath or his brain function. But it certainly made the rest of his body feel good.

  Chapter Eight

  Peter could feel things waking up within him, things that had been declared legally dead two years ago. Things he was stone-cold certain he would never feel again. But then Raven had kissed him the other night.

  And here he was now, experiencing the sensation of capturing lightning in a bottle. He was the bottle, she was the lightning.

  And there was even more feeling this time than the last. When she’d kissed him before, he’d felt a warmth, a compassion radiating from her. This time, he felt passion vibrating between them. Passion and a surge of something that hadn’t been there before. It very nearly swept him off his feet.

  He had no idea that he was capable of reacting at all, much less like this. The realization that he wanted her, really wanted her, burst upon his consciousness. Scaring the hell out of him.

  Pulling back, he looked down at Raven, more shaken than he wanted to admit to. “You’ve got to stop doing that.”

  “Okay.” The answer was issued on a breathless wave. He didn’t believe her for a second.

  “Am I interrupting something?”

  Peter didn’t have to turn around to know who the deep, gravelly voice belonged to. He’d heard it often enough in the last ten years. Fighting hard to reorient himself to his surroundings and to pick his brain up out of the pile of mush it had fallen into, he was surprised to find his one-time teacher and mentor standing behind them in the corridor.

  Dr. Harry Welles was now the chief of surgery at Blair Memorial. Originally, the man had offered him a position once he’d finished with his residency at Aurora General upstate. He could think of nothing better than to work for and with a man he respected more than anyone else in the field of medicine. After Lisa and Becky’s deaths, he had come completely unglued. Withdrawing into himself, he didn’t leave his house, didn’t go out at all. It was Welles who had dug him out of that all-consuming rubble of despair.

  Two weeks after his self-imposed exile from life, Welles had come to his house. He’d all but broken the door down. The man had arrived bringing not kind words but a kick in the rear to make him come around. As he’d stared at the surgeon blankly, Welles had informed him heatedly that he had a gift and that to waste it, to cheat others of it, would be not only a crime, but a sin. He had an obligation to the rest of humanity to make use of that gift. Pouring hot coffee and hotter words into him, Welles had made him come around.

  Peter looked at the man now. Prematurely gray, Welles lived and breathed Blair Memorial. Not a surgery was scheduled or performed without his knowledge and his inherent interest.

&
nbsp; “No,” Peter muttered, stepping back from Raven. “You’re not interrupting anything.”

  Welles’s brown eyes took in Raven before fixing themselves back on his protégé. It was obvious that he thought otherwise, but would refrain from saying so. “How did it go?”

  Peter blinked. Was Welles asking him about kissing Raven? “Excuse me?”

  Welles’s small mouth curved just a hint as amusement glinted in his eyes. “The surgery. On the Songbird boy,” he qualified, enunciating each word slowly, like someone talking to a person who had just woken up from a long sleep. “How did it go?”

  “We got the tumors,” Peter informed him, struggling to regain his matter-of-fact manner. Kissing Raven and then being caught by the chief of surgery had addled his brain just a little. It took him a moment to recover.

  Nodding, Welles looked genuinely pleased as he glanced toward Raven. “All four?”

  Raven listened to the interest in man’s voice. She was right, she thought, in coming here.

  “Five,” Peter corrected. “One tumor was hiding behind the others. We missed it in the CAT scan.”

  “Happens. Not that often, but it happens. Glad you’re on your toes,” Welles commended. He raised one somewhat shaggy eyebrow. “Benign?”

  Peter stole a glance toward Raven. She was holding her breath. Did she expect him to say something different to his superior than he had to her? “First reading says they are.”

  “Excellent,” Welles said with feeling. “Keep me posted.” He clasped his hands behind his back like a fabled professor from another century rather than a man whose fingers were still known to perform magic in the operating room. “Carry on,” he instructed as he began to walk away. This time the smile on his lips was even broader.

  Raven moved a little closer to Peter so her voice wouldn’t need to carry. “Who was that?”

  He was acutely aware of her proximity. “Dr. Harry Welles. He’s the chief of surgery here, has been for almost ten years.” He watched the man round a corner and then disappear. “Brilliant surgeon.”