Wild Honey. Veronica Sattler

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СКАЧАТЬ engaged to marry David in the fall, and Dr. Martin was so certain of Jill’s recovery she’d delightedly consented to be a bridesmaid.

      But the doctor isn’t so certain of your recovery, is she? an inner voice taunted.

      Carol Martin was the psychiatric counselor they’d both seen following their stepfather’s death in a car crash. The car crash that had mercifully ended his months-long sexual abuse of Jill Terhune and prevented him from ever actually laying hands on Randi.

      Yet Randi had been the one with the nightmares after they’d gone to live with Aunt Tess. The nightmares that had awakened Jill, if not the kindly old woman who was their dead mother’s maiden aunt. And so Randi had finally been forced to tell Jill that she knew.

      The two of them had always been close, but that night, as they’d wept together, an even closer bond had been forged. A bond that gave them the courage to approach the guidance counselor at school. The woman had broken the news to their elderly guardian, and it was then they’d begun the sessions with Carol Martin.

      Sessions that had healed the actual victim of the abuse, but not her younger sister? In the silence of the darkened office now, Randi wanted to deny it, but how could she with the man whose sperm she’d stolen lying on a gurney a room away? Stolen, because she’d longed desperately for a child, but was terrified to conceive in the normal way.

      Still, old habits die hard, and so Randi did find herself denying it as she switched on the light and reached for a tissue from the box on her desk. Nonsense, she thought as she blotted her face and checked it in the small mirror from her purse. You aren’t afraid of men. You just aren’t one of those women who feels she needs a man to make her life complete.

      Feeling more resolute with this assessment, she switched’ off the light and, straightening her shoulders, headed back to the ER. She scrubbed her hands carefully and nodded to her assistant. Martha Pierson was still beside the gurney across the room, and Randi signaled she’d be right there. But as she approached the figure now sitting up on the gurney, her resolution took a nose dive.

      Matt will look like that in thirty years, she found herself thinking as she took in Travis McLean’s chiseled features. She’d already noticed several women in the room staring at him with unconcealed admiration, and she didn’t have to guess why. She’d looked at him the same way five years ago; he was too beautiful to believe.

      Pierson handed her a tray of sterilized instruments. Randi paused, feeling the inner tension mount as she stole glances at Travis McLean’s profile while Dr. Ames examined his shoulder. So much like Matt…

      Her own hair was a fine and silky honey blond. McLean’s was sun-streaked with flaxen. And coarser, thick and springy, with a lot more curl. Like Matt’s. The lean planes beneath the prominent cheekbones weren’t evident in her son’s young face yet, but she suspected they’d appear with time. Just as Matt’s perfect little nose would lengthen, grow into the narrow, straight proportions of his father’s. And Matt already had ample evidence of the square jaw she saw on McLean. She found herself wondering if it denoted the same stubbornness that—Don’t think about it! Don’t think about things you’ll never be able to compare because—

      The tray of instruments she was holding crashed to the floor.

      “Good grief, Terhune, what’s wrong with you? I’ve never seen you this way!” The resident’s uncharacteristic sharpness told her plenty about how distraught she must appear. She’d better get ahold of herself.

      “I…I’m sorry, Doctor. Just having a…a bad night, I guess.”

      Her face flaming, Randi bent to retrieve the instruments, even though it meant she’d have to scrub again. She needed to get away from those crystalline blue eyes that seemed to look right through her. What if he remembered her? What if…

      But, no, he had no way of knowing what she’d done. She’d destroyed all records of his donation after she’d inseminated herself. And she’d told no one but Jill and, reluctantly, Carol Martin. Jill and Carol, both sworn to keep her confidence.

      She’d been certain she’d never again lay eyes on the perfect specimen of American manhood she’d selected for his health, intelligence, family background and physical assets to be the father of her child. So certain…

      She straightened and handed the tray to an orderly. Taking great pains to avoid the sight of McLean’s tanned and muscled bare chest, she asked Pierson to cover for her again, murmured an excuse to Ames and went to scrub.

      Making her way across the busy room, she tried to regain a sense of normalcy by taking in the scene. It was chaotic, but familiar.

      On her far right a uniformed police officer waited, no expression on his face, to give her other assistant, Nurse Ryan, details about the young punk he’d just brought in; the teenager was comitose from a suspected drug overdose.

      Just to her left, an anxious young couple hovered, the woman clutching the man’s hand as they watched an intern stitch up a nasty cut on their little girl’s leg. The child was trying hard not to cry, but the words, “Mommy…Daddy,” kept erupting through her stilted sobs.

      Would she ever be able to watch so bravely if it were Matt lying there on the table? And no husband to share the agony, to support you, as this woman has? her inner voice taunted.

      Where on earth had that come from? She’d never questioned her single parenthood before. Besides, she wasn’t alone. She had Jill, didn’t she?

      Jill—who was getting married in a few months.

      Suddenly Randi began to feel as if she’d never again be certain of anything in her life.

       CHAPTER TWO

      TRAVIS MCLEAN hated hospitals. Emergency rooms in particular. That he sat in one at the moment was not improving his disposition one iota.

      Dammit, he’d told Cord he didn’t need this! A local ambulance, maybe the attentions of some small-town country doctor near the scene, and he’d have been fine. But would that SOB listen? Hell, no!

      But then, Jason Cord never listened much to anyone these days. Something was eating at that guy, and Travis suspected if Cord didn’t unload it mighty soon, there’d be hell to pay.

      As for Rafe O’Hara, his other so-called buddy of long standing, yeah, okay, maybe O’Hara had owed him one. And he doubted Rafe could have said anything that would have changed Cord’s mind, anyhow.

      But, Lord, did he hate hospitals!

      Scowling at the tired-looking overworked resident who probed the wound in his shoulder, Travis wanted to bolt and run. The shoulder hurt like a sonofabitch, but physical pain was not the reason. No, nothing that simple. Besides, he was more than acquainted with pain. Hell, any five-year CIA veteran was likely to be, and he’d had a four-year hitch in the navy before that. A hitch that had seen action. He’d been shot during that action, and compared to what he’d endured then, this was nothing. A run-of-the-mill flesh wound. He’d live.

      But what wasn’t so simple was another kind of pain the ER, for some reason, brought to mind The pain of remembering. And something that felt suspiciously like guilt….

      Travis, СКАЧАТЬ