Protection Detail. Julie Miller

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       Chapter One

      September

      If anyone had to suffer a stroke after a traumatic brain injury like being shot in the head, Thomas hoped he or she possessed the same stubborn cussedness Seamus Watson did. There were bound to be a lot of arguments, setbacks and hurt feelings along the road to recovery, but apparently, it was the only way to survive.

      He just wished there weren’t so many casualties along the way.

      Thomas looked from his father’s red face to Millie’s pale, gaping expression to the retreating backside of the young speech-therapy intern who was running out the door of the Saint Luke’s Hospital rehab center in tears. Although the young woman barely looked old enough to have graduated from high school, much less college, her youthful enthusiasm, pretty face and obvious competence hadn’t spared her from Seamus’s wrathful outburst at the end of a long afternoon of medical evaluations.

      While he went down on his good knee to gather up the flash cards his father had knocked to the ground, Thomas spared a glance at the fourth person in the room, the private nurse he’d hired to aid in Seamus’s recovery, Jane Boyle. How was Battle-Ax Boyle, as his three sons had secretly nicknamed her, going to handle his father’s refusal to do the speech test since she was taking point on Seamus’s health and physical rehabilitation?

      Although her rigid professionalism and terse, almost-awkward personal skills had earned her the teasing, never-to-her-face nickname, Thomas had spent enough time with Jane over the past several months to have a slightly different take on the resident battle-ax. No one could question her devotion to her duty, a fact that all of them, as a three-generation family of cops, could understand and respect. As for the I’m-not-interested-in-making-friends vibe she put off? He wished he wasn’t so intrigued by a challenge like that.

      Thomas Watson solved mysteries. He’d done it so well for so long that he taught other cops how to solve them. And Jane Boyle was the biggest mystery to cross his path in a long while.

      The nurse’s honey-brown ponytail hung in a straight line down to the high collar of the pink mock turtleneck she wore. She stood with her arms crossed in front of her, her stance emphasizing feminine curves beneath the shapeless blue scrubs. About the only time she wasn’t wearing boxy scrubs and a jacket of one pastel hue or another was in the mornings when she went for a run before breakfast. Or late at night, when she roamed the upstairs hallway between the guest room and the shower in a sweetly sensible pair of pajamas that usually consisted of a T-shirt and cotton pants that never quite met at the waist, exposing a thin strip of bare skin that he’d glimpsed more than once as she hurried into one room or the other and closed the door.

      Really? He was a grown man, crawling on the floor of a major metropolitan hospital, cleaning up after his eighty-year-old father’s tantrum and picturing the woman who worked for him in her pj’s?

      Man, he needed to stop noticing details like that. It wasn’t like he could do anything about that little hum of awareness that seemed to excite his blood every time he cataloged another observation about Jane. After six months living under his roof, sharing meals and a few family evenings together, he couldn’t seem to help himself from noting the sleek arch of her hips, the flawless skin hugging the angles of her oval face, the soft pink mouth that rarely smiled. She worked for him. He needed her to focus on his father’s recovery. He needed to focus on his father’s recovery, too.

      He might have a few gray hairs at the temples of his dark brown hair, but he wasn’t dead. Yet he needed to act as if all the male parts of his body were too old to care about the pretty in a woman in order to maintain the professional relationship between them.

      Thomas set the cards on the table and pushed to his feet, ignoring the inevitable protest in his left leg. “Dad, you can’t talk to people that way. СКАЧАТЬ