Wild Honey. Veronica Sattler

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      “I beg your pardon?” Randi was doing her best to retain a professional demeanor, but it was getting harder by the minute.

      The grin was wider than ever. “It’s Travis, remember?”

      He had to know how his grin did devastating things to any woman foolish enough to be in the vicinity.

      A muffled sound had her glancing behind her. Martha Pierson was grinning, too. Foolishly, Randi thought. Solid no-monkey-business Pierson, who was happily married with five kids.

      Damn the man! The sooner she got out of the ER, the better.

      She faced him squarely, gave a curt nod. “Very well, Travis—”

      “Hey, Randi!” A small boy with a baseball cap worn backward waved at her from the doorway to the waiting room. The rest of his attire consisted of a pair of cotton pajamas decorated with Berenstain Bears and severely battered high-tops, unlaced and minus socks.

      “Robbie Spencer, what are you doing here in the middle of the night?” Robbie was the son of her next-door neighbor, and Matt’s best friend.

      Robbie’s smile split his freckled face. “Mom’s havin’ our new baby, an’ Daddy couldn’t get holda Grandma in a hurry, so I got to come!”

      Just then, a slender, pleasant-faced man put a hand on Robbie’s shoulder and bent to whisper something in his ear. Bob Spencer, Robbie’s father. After the brief exchange Bob glanced up. He saw Randi and waved.

      Randi gave him a thumbs-up. Then father and son withdrew and the door closed behind them.

      “Randi, huh?” Travis McLean’s drawl drew her attention back to him. He eyed her speculatively, but a teasing light still lingered in his eyes.

      “Now, I do know Demerol does frightenin’ things to a body’s wits,” he continued, “but I believe I’m still lucid enough to recall that ‘Randi’ begins with an R. ‘Course, the boy could be dealin’ with a minor speech defect, I suppose, meanin’ to say ‘Mandy,’ when he really—”

      “It’s Miranda! You lunkhead! Miranda, and Randi for short! Now are you satisfied?”

      The blue eyes remained speculative as the grin she was beginning to detest reappeared. “Satisfied? My, my, sugar, you do ask the most interestin’ questions.”

      Randi went beet red.

      The grin broadened, and she took a step backward as he slid off the gurney and towered over her.

      Lord, how tall was he? Six-four? Six-five? Too tall for her own comfort, she decided as he leaned over to whisper in her ear, “the thing is, darlin’, are you ready for the answers?”

      Randi felt perspiration dampen her uniform. He was toying with her, she was sure of it. Toying like a cat with a mouse. But why? Had he recognized her, after all? Was he using this ridiculous banter to draw her out in some way?

      Steady, she reminded herself as her knees again began to feel as if they wouldn’t support her. He doesn’t know anything, remember? Even if he does recognize you, he can’t suspect a thing beyond that.

      She stiffened her spine, pointed authoritatively at the wheelchair waiting beside the patient orderly. “In!” she commanded. “Now.”

      “Yes, ma’am.” Travis gave her a cocky salute and sauntered over to it. A stain of fresh blood had penetrated the gauze of his dressing; it would have to be removed and the sutures checked. Demerol or no, it had to be hurting him a great deal, yet he moved and acted as if he were socializing in somebody’s living room. She’d seen a lot of patients attempt to act unaffected by their pain, to appear brave in the face of it, but this was different. He’d put himself beyond it. Functioned as if it didn’t exist.

      What sort of a man was he to be able to ignore pain that way?

      The orderly began to wheel him away; when Travis turned and winked at her, Randi decided that maybe she didn’t want to know.

       CHAPTER THREE

      TRAVIS SAT in his hospital bed, grinding his teeth. He was ready to climb the walls. These jokers were set on keeping him here “at least till the end of the week,” he’d been told this morning. By Dr. Wallace Reston, the physician in charge, when he’d made his Monday-morning rounds.

      Reston knew his father. He’d gone to med school with the great Trent McLean and still played golf with him once a month. This had allowed him to invoke a familiarity with Travis he wasn’t entitled to, and ask too damned many personal questions.

      Not that Travis had answered them. The people he counted among those entitled to ask those questions, let alone receive answers, could be tallied on the fingers of one hand. The rest could go to hell.

      It had been a long time since he’d felt the need to justify his actions to anyone but himself. The chosen few who’d gotten any explanations at all had received them out of love. Not curiosity, not obligation and definitely not the misconstrued familiarity that came of playing golf with his estranged father!

      Oh, Reston had been discreetly courteous about it all. Very polite, as a matter of fact. Old school, Southern-style. Probably thought he was being smoothly oblique, too….

      “Heard they had to abandon another blast-off at the Kennedy Space Center yesterday,” the elderly doctor had mentioned all too casually. “Makes you wonder how all those scientists and technicians feel when that happens. You know, all that time and energy spent gettin’ ready. And then—nothin’. I wonder if it ever bothers them…” He’d looked pointedly at Travis when he said this. “‘Course, it isn’t as if they won’t have another go at it—not like it would’ve been for me, had I been talked into abandonin’ medicine after years of trainin’. Know what I mean, son?”

      Despite the old man’s prying, Travis remained courteous to him. Not that he hadn’t been mighty tempted to tell him he hadn’t the right to call him “son.” That no one had that right anymore. Mighty tempted not to counter with a query of his own: “Is that the lie the old bastard’s put out to all and sundry these days—that I was talked into it?”

      But he hadn’t of course. He was old school, too. The proper behavior of a Southern gentleman had been ingrained in him and his brother since the earliest days of their childhood. It was the foremost mark of the Tidewater gentry, their mother had always told them, and a true test of Southern manhood.

      And because Judith McLean had a way about her and they loved and respected her, her children had never questioned what she said. Southern gentility might be occasionally threatened and a little ragged around the edges since the Civil War, he and Troy used to joke, but it wasn’t dead yet.

      So Travis had smiled and gently changed the subject. Now he sat here, pampered like a pet poodle, because Wally Reston likely thought he was doing his old friend a service by mollycoddling the son Trent himself never spoke to. Never spoke to, never saw, never acknowledged as being alive.

      Dead, that was what he was to Trent Cunningham McLean III. Just as he was supposed to be dead to Judith СКАЧАТЬ