Millionaire M.D. Read online

  She got the gist. The details didn’t matter. “Holy cow. How can I help?”

  “Truthfully, I don’t know.” Winona could well imagine Wayne squinting and rubbing the back of his head. He didn’t like trouble in his town. The way Wayne saw it, Royal belonged to him. Anyone took the crease out of those jeans ticked him off. “I’m calling from the scene. Everything’s a mess. This all just happened less than a half hour ago. First thing was getting everybody off the plane safely. Only a couple seem badly injured, the rest are just shaken. But what the hell happened, I don’t know. And I don’t want every Tom, Dick and curious Harry messing with my crime scene. It’s still dark. Only so much I can get done until daylight-”

  He was talking more to himself than to her. Winona knew how her boss’s mind worked. “So where could I be the most help? At the hospital? The plane site? The office?”

  “Here,” Wayne said bluntly. “You gonna kick me straight to Austin if I admit I just want a woman here?”

  “Probably.” Holding the phone clamped to her ear with one hand, she reached for the deodorant on the dresser and thumbed open the lid. Applying deodorant one-handed was tricky, but she’d done it before.

  “Well, then, you’re just going to have to kick me. To be honest, everything’s being handled that needs to be. It’s just, that ain’t good enough. Not for this. Dad blame it, we seem to have the makings of a major international incident. First, we have a plane that I’m told is top of the line, perfect, nothing can go wrong-but it still crash-landed. Then we have embassies calling. We have Washington calling. We’ve got fire trucks from Midland to Odessa joining in to help us. Then half the town-naturally-is starting to show up as the sun comes up, it’s like trying to stop an avalanche. Next thing the women’ll be bringing casseroles. It’s a madhouse. We got to find out what caused this plane crash and to do that, we have to get everybody out of here and get some kind of order. I just want my whole team here, that’s all. Even if-”

  “Wayne?”

  “What?”

  “Stop talking. Give me directions.” He did. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.” She hung up and started moving. Plucked white panties from the drawer, pulled them on, then hopped into low-rise, boot-cut jeans. She stood up, head scrambled. Not by Wayne’s call in itself. Maybe she was hired to work only with juveniles, but this wasn’t some big eastern city. This was Texas. People pitched in whenever there was a crisis, and no one gave a rat’s toenail over whether helping fit a job description.

  But a plane crash-landing was big news-and troubling. She knew every single face that had been on that flight-they’d all been at the Texas Cattleman’s Club gala two nights ago-and a few of them were personal friends of hers besides. Pamela Miles had been flying to Asterland to be an exchange teacher. Lady Helena had made herself known around town because she was the kind to involve herself in caring causes. On top of that…well, the whole world was troubling these days, but not Royal. Things just didn’t happen here. Sure, there were some thefts and squabbles and people who lost their screws now and then, but nothing unusual. Nothing happened there that would ever draw attention from outsiders.

  Suddenly she heard a sound-a sound odd and unexpected enough to make her quit jogging down the hall and stop for a second. The sound had seemed like a mewling baby’s cry-but of course, that was ridiculous. When she heard nothing again, she picked up her pace.

  In the peach-and-cream kitchen, she flicked on the light, started her espresso machine, then peeled back toward her bedroom, mentally cataloguing what she still had to do. She needed coffee, her hair brushed, an apple for the road, and yeah, something to wear above the waist. She never wore a uniform-if you were going to dress for success with kids, you wore jeans and no symbols or labels to put them off-but that wasn’t to say she could arrive at a crash site topless. There were times she fantasized about giving Wayne an attack of apoplexy-God knew her boss was a hard-core chauvinist-but not today.

  She pulled a sports bra over her head, burrowed in a drawer for an old black sweater…then jerked her head up again.

  Damn. Somewhere there was a sound. An off-kilter, didn’t-belong-in-her-house sound. A puppy crying? A cat lost in the neighborhood somewhere nearby?

  Silently, still listening, she straightened the sweater, pulled on socks, shoved her feet into boots, grabbed a brush. Her hair looked like a squirrel’s nest, but then that’s how it looked when it was freshly styled, too. A glance at her face in the bathroom mirror somehow, inexplicably, made her think of Justin again…and that dream in which his gaze had been all over her naked body.

  She scowled in the mirror. First, strange dreams, then strange sounds-she’d seemed to wake up in la la land today, and on a morning when she needed to be her sharpest.

  Swiftly she thumbed off the light and started hustling for real. In the kitchen, she poured coffee, then backtracked to the hall closet for her jacket, scooping up the stuff she needed: car keys, an apple, a lid for her espresso, some money for lunch. Almost the minute she finished collecting her debris, her feet seemed to be instinctively making a detour. One minute. That’s all she needed to check all the rooms and make absolutely positive that nothing was making that odd sound from inside the house. It wasn’t as if she lived in a mighty mansion that would take hours to check out. Her ranch-style house was downright miniscule-but it was hers. Hers and the bank’s, anyway.

  She’d put a chunky down payment on it last year. She was twenty-eight, time to stop renting. Time to start making sure she had a place and security and in a neighborhood with a lot of kids and a good school system. Her bedroom was cobalt-blue and white, and, since decorating choices scared her, she’d just used the same colors in the bathroom. A second bedroom she used as a den, where she stashed her TV and computer-and anything she didn’t have time to put away. The third bedroom was the biggest, and stood starkly empty-Winona wasn’t admitting the room was intended for a baby, not to anyone, at least not yet. But it was.

  The kitchen was a non-cook’s dream, practical, with lots of make-easy machines and tools, the counters and walls covered with warm peach tiles that led down into the living room. A cocoa couch viewed the backyard, bird feeders all over the place, lots of windows…damn. There, she heard the sound again. The mewling cry.

  Either that or she was going out of her mind, which, of course, was always a possibility. But she unlatched the front door and yanked it open.

  Her jaw surely dropped ten feet. Her ranch house was white adobe, with redbrick arches in the doorways. And there, in the doorway shadow, was a wicker laundry basket. The basket appeared to be stuffed with someone’s old, clean laundry, rags and sheets…but damned if that wasn’t where the crying sound emanated from.

  The car keys slipped from her fingers and clattered to the cold steps. The apple slipped from her other hand and rolled down the drive, forgotten. She hunched down, quickly parting the folds and creases of fabric.

  When she saw the baby, her heart stopped.

  Abandoned. The baby had actually been abandoned.

  “Ssh, ssh, it’s all right, don’t cry…” So carefully, so gingerly, she lifted out the little one. The morning was icy at the edges, the light still a predawn-gray. The baby was too swathed in torn-up blankets and rags to clearly make out its features or anything else.

  “Ssh, ssh,” Winona kept crooning, but her heart was slamming, slamming. Feelings seeped through her nerves, through her heart from a thousand long-locked doors, bubbled up to the pain of naked air. She’d been abandoned as a child. She knew what an abandoned child felt like…and would feel like, her whole life.

  A crinkle of paper slipped out of the basket. It only took Winona a few seconds to read the printed message.

  Dear Winona Raye,

  I have no way to take care of my Angel. You are the only one I could ask. Please love her.

  Winona’s cop experience immediately registered several things-that there’d be no way to track the generic paper and ordinary print, that the wri
ting was simple but not uneducated, and that somehow the mother of the baby knew her specifically-well enough to identify her name, and well enough to believe she was someone who would care for a baby.

  Which, God knows, she would.

  As swiftly as Winona read the note, she put it aside. There was no time for that now. The baby was wet beneath the blankets, the morning biting at the January-freezing temperatures. She scooped up the little one and hustled inside the warm house, rocking, crooning, whispering reassurances…all past the gulp in her throat that had to be bigger than the state of Texas.

  God knew what she was going to do. But right now nothing mattered but the obvious. Taking care of the child. Making sure the little one was warm, dry, fed, healthy. Then Winona would try to figure out why anyone would have left the baby on her doorstep specifically…and all the other issues about what the child’s circumstances might be.

  That fast, that instantaneously, Win felt a bond with the baby that wrapped around her heart tighter than a vise. The thing was, as little as she knew-she already knew too much.

  She was already positive that the child was going to get thrown in the foster-care system, because that’s what happened when a child was deserted. Even if a parent immediately showed up, the court would still place the child in the care of Social Services-at least temporarily-because whatever motivated the parent to abandon the child could mean it wasn’t safe in their care. A change of heart wasn’t enough. An investigation needed to be conducted to establish what the child’s circumstances were.

  Winona knew all those legal procedures-both from her job and from her life. And although she knew her feelings were irrational-and annoyingly emotional-it didn’t stop the instinct of bonding. The fierceness of caring. The instantaneous heart surge-even panic-to protect this baby better than she’d been protected. To save this baby the way she almost hadn’t been saved. To love this baby the way-to be honest-Winona never had been and never expected to be loved.

  There were several coffee machines spread through Royal Memorial Hospital, but only one that counted. After he’d switched from trauma medicine to plastic surgery, Justin had generally tried to avoid the Emergency Room, but by ten that morning, he was desperate. Groggy-eyed, he pushed the coins into the machine, punched his choice of Straight Black, kicked the base-he knew this coffee machine intimately-and then waited.

  He wasn’t standing there three minutes before he got a series of claps and thumps on his back. It was, “Hey, Dr. Webb, slumming down here?” and “Hi, Doc, we sure miss you” and “Dr. Webb, it’s nice to see you with us again.”

  As soon as he could yank the steaming cup out of the machine, he gulped a sip. Burned all the way down. The taste was more familiar than his own heartbeat. Battery acid, more bitter than sludge, and liberally laced with caffeine.

  Fantastic.

  He inhaled another gulp, and then aimed straight ahead. Down the hall, through the double glass doors, was his Plastic Surgery/Burn Unit. The community believed that the wing had been anonymously donated, which was fine with Justin. What mattered to him was that in two short years, the unit had already developed the reputation for being the best in the state. He couldn’t ask for more. The equipment was the best and the technology the newest. The walls were ice-blue, the atmosphere sterile, serene, quiet. Perfect.

  Nothing like the chaotic loony bin in the ER. Royal Memorial was a well-run small hospital, but a crisis stretched the capacity of its trauma unit-and the crash landing of the Asterland jet earlier that morning was still stressing the trauma team. Nobody’d had time to pick up towels and drapes. Staff jogged past in blood-and debris-stained coats. A kid squealed past him. A shrieking mom was trying to chase the kid. A nurse trailed both of them, looking harassed and taking mother-may-I giant steps. He heard babies’ cries, codes on the loudspeaker. Lights flashed; phones rang; carts wheeled and wheedled past. Somebody’d spilled a coffee; someone else had thrown up, so those stinks added to all the other messes and noises. Just being around it all made something clutch in his chest. Something cruel and sharp.

  Justin loved his Plastic Surgery/Burn Unit. He made a difference in his Burn Unit, for God’s sake. He wanted nothing to do with trauma medicine anymore. Nothing.

  He sucked down another gulp of sludge, and this time aimed down the hall and refused to look back…but he suddenly caught sight of the top of a curly-haired head coming out of a side room.

  “Winona?” He wanted to shake himself. One look at her-that’s all it took-and his hormones line-danced the length of his nerves and sashayed back again. At least he promptly forgot his old hunger for the ER. “Win?”

  Her head jerked up when she heard his voice. That was the first he noticed that she was carrying a baby-not that there was anything all that unusual about Winona being stuck with a kid in the Emergency Room. Her job often put her in the middle between a child and school or parents. But something about her expression alerted Justin that this was nothing like an average day for Win.

  Her smile for him, though, was as natural and familiar as sunshine. “I figured you’d be in the thick of this,” she said wryly. “What a morning, huh? Were you out at the site of the crash landing?”

  “Yeah, first thing. I’m not one of the doctors on call for something like that, but you know how fast news travels in Royal. I got a call, someone who’d heard there was a fire associated with the crash-so I hightailed it out there, too. I’ll tell you, it was a real chaotic scene. But any outsider was just in the way, so all I did was the obvious, help the trauma team get patients routed back here. Particularly those going into my Burn Unit.”

  Her eyes promptly sobered. “I haven’t heard anything about how many serious injuries there were yet. Was it bad?”

  Something had happened to her. Justin had no more time for idle chitchat than he suspected she did, but he kept talking, because it gave him a chance to look her over. His gaze roved from the crown of her head to her toes-the way the jeans cupped her fanny, the boots, her wildly tousled hair, the way her cheeks had pinked from the slap of a cold morning wind-none of that was unusual. But there was something different in her eyes. A fever-brightness. She stood there, rocking, rocking the bundle in her arms-the baby made no sound at all-but that liquid softness in Win’s eyes was rare. Vulnerable. And Winona just never looked vulnerable if she could help it.

  A blood cart pushed between them, but he wasn’t about to stop their conversation just because all hell was still breaking loose. “Things could have been a lot worse. At least no one died. In a crash landing, that’s pretty much a miracle in itself. Robert Klimt-one of the minor cabinet members from Asterland? He was knocked unconscious, head injury-I don’t know how he is right now, I took care of some minor burns and left him to the neurologist. Pamela Miles was also on that flight-”

  “I know, I know! She was headed overseas to be an exchange teacher in Asterland-did you see her, Justin? Do you know if she’s okay?”

  “I didn’t take care of her myself, but I heard she was basically fine. Lady Helena, though-”

  “Serious injuries?”

  “Well, not life-threatening. Complicated break in her ankle. And once she’s done with the bone man, for sure she’s going to be mine. She did get some burns-”

  “Oh, God. She’s such a beautiful woman.”

  Justin couldn’t say more on Helena. For him to discuss a patient, any patient-he just never did. Not with anyone, even Winona. But he still hadn’t taken his eyes off her and didn’t want to give her the excuse to shoot past him. “Well, at this point, I think everyone on the flight’s been through here, checked out, even if they seemed to be fine. And the whole town was as shook up as the passengers on that flight, it seems like, because people were flooding in right and left.”

  “You didn’t hear what caused the emergency landing, did you?”

  On that he had to lift his eyebrows. “I was just going to ask you that, Ms. Police Officer. If anyone had answers, I figure it would be the cops first.�
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  “Well, normally I’d be elbowing my way to the middle of the mess from the start,” she admitted wryly, “but I got sidetracked.”

  When she lifted the corner of the pale pink flannel blanket for him to get a peek, Justin finally figured out what the emotion was in her eyes. Fierceness. The fierce protectiveness of a mama lion for her cub, or a mama eagle for her eaglet. There was nothing strange about thinking of Win and motherhood, or of her wanting to be a mom, but it just hadn’t crossed his mind before what a major thing it might be for her. His knuckles-almost accidentally-brushed her hand when he touched the baby’s cheek.

  “Don’t tell me anyone hurt this darling, or I’ll have to go out and kill someone,” he said gently.

  Her voice melted. “Oh, God. Justin. That’s exactly how I felt. Isn’t she beautiful?”

  Considering she was swaddled up with nothing showing but about two inches of face and some blond spriggy hairs, Justin was hard-pressed to use the word beautiful. On the baby. “What’s the story?”

  “Her name’s Angel. I ran out my front door this morning, headed for the crash site-Wayne called me around seven in the morning-and there she was. In a basket on the doorstep. With a note saying her name was Angel and asking me, specifically, to take care of her.”

  Justin felt his pulse still. “This isn’t the first time you’ve had to handle an abandoned kid,” he said carefully.

  “No, of course not. But this baby’s so young that obviously I had to bring her here first. I’m sure you know the beat. This day and age, a deserted baby could mean drugs or AIDS or all kinds of things in the child’s background-so before we can do anything else, we have to know the state of the child’s health for sure.”

  “And…?”

  “And Dr. Julian gave her a terrific bill of health. Just under three months old, he thought.”

  “So, the next step is…?” He was watching her face, not the baby’s.

  “Finding the mother, of course. It’s not like Royal is that huge. And if anyone has a bird’s-eye view to kids in trouble, it’s got to be me in my job. So if anyone can track down the parents, I’ve got the best shot.”