Healing Dr. Alexander

Getting Jack back

This was not his professional plan. Dr. Jack Alexander—dedicated surgeon and humanitarian—never expected an accident would end his time in the O.R. Nor did he expect to have to abandon his aid work. Now, back in Atlanta, he’s faced with rebuilding his career…his life. And his hope for the future comes from the least likely source—the little family next door.

From the first moment he spots Sophie Connors having a water fight with her young sons, Jack is captivated. She defies all of his assumptions about family and relationships. Too bad she resists committing. Somehow he has to change her mind. Because together they may find that life doesn’t always turn out the way you planned…sometimes, it turns out even better.

Praise for Tracy Wolff!

“Wolff does an amazing job depicting Rhiannon’s fear and insecurity, as well as Shawn’s desire to help her get over both.”

—RT Book Reviews on Unguarded

“The Christmas Present is more traditional in its plot (lovers from the opposites sides of the track) but the characterization is...strong.”

—Dear Author on The Christmas Present

“Unguarded is a deeply compelling,

character driven novel.”

—Lynette’s Two Cents on Unguarded

“Wolff is an excellent writer.”

—IReadRomance.com on

The Christmas Wedding

Dear Reader,

I am so excited that Healing Dr. Alexander has finally made it to the shelves. This is my second book about doctors working to make the world a better place. Jack’s story has haunted me for years and I’m thrilled to have this chance to share it with the world.

I first got the idea for these books—and this story, in particular—when I was still in graduate school. Though I knew I wasn’t ready to write it then (too busy juggling school, teaching and a new baby) it was an idea I couldn’t let go of. So I filed it away, and when it came time to propose my latest ideas to Harlequin, I knew it was finally time for me to write this book.

Healing Dr. Alexander is a story of love and redemption, preconceived notions and second chances. My main characters, Jack and Sophie, have both had a really difficult time of it in recent years and I love the fact that, despite all their pain, mistrust and determination to go it alone, in the end they find their way to each other and their happily-ever-after. It isn’t an easy road—with their pasts and their baggage, trusting in something as nebulous as love is about as easy as going for a root canal without anesthetic. But somehow they manage it, and I’m so glad they do. Putting the end on this story and giving these two the future they both richly deserve was one of the most satisfying things I’ve done in a very long time. I hope, when you get to the end, you’ll agree.

Thanks so much for picking up Healing Dr. Alexander and giving Jack and Sophie a chance. I love hearing from my readers via email at [e-mail] or on my blog, www.tracywolff.blogspot.com.

Happy reading,

Tracy Wolff

Healing Dr. Alexander

Tracy Wolff

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tracy Wolff collects books, English degrees and lipsticks, and has been known to forget where—and sometimes who—she is when immersed in a great novel. At six, she wrote her first short story—something with a rainbow and a prince—and at seven, she ventured into the wonderful world of girls’ lit with her first Judy Blume novel. By ten, she’d read everything in the young-adult and classics sections of her local bookstore, so in desperation her mom started her on romance novels. And from the first page of the first book, Tracy knew she’d found her lifelong love. Tracy lives in Texas with her husband and three sons, where she pens romance novels and teaches writing at her local community college.

For my husband.

Love,

Tracy

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

PROLOGUE

“DR. ALEXANDER, now!”

The panic in the head nurse’s voice barely penetrated Jack Alexander’s concentration as he searched for the bleeder that, if not stopped, would claim his patient’s life. The top of the damn artery had started to roll back up the leg and he was having a difficult time finding it amidst all the blood.

“Dr. Alexander!” Becca’s shrill voice called his name a second time.

“Whatever it is, it’s going to have to wait!” he said, not taking his eyes from the teenage boy on the gurney in front of him. “I’ve only got a couple of minutes here or I’m going to lose him.”

The clinic didn’t have enough blood stored to make up for what was currently being pumped out of the poor kid. And while there was a line of people hundreds deep outside the clinic, most of the Somali patients were too close to starvation to afford the blood loss that came with donating. No, if this boy had any chance of survival at all, Jack had to find the top half of the shorn artery. Now.

“They want to talk to whoever’s in charge. I told them you were in surgery. They didn’t care.”

“Who?” he asked, distractedly. Then turning to Ruth, the nurse who was assisting him, he barked, “Stretch his leg out as far as you can. I’ve got to dig for it.” It was times like these that he missed his fully equipped operating room back in the States. Performing surgery in an ill-equipped tent in Somalia might have been his calling, but in moments like this it was also a horror.

“The Shahab,” Becca told him, her voice low and urgent and frightened. That got his attention.

“They’re here?” he demanded, even as he dug deeper into his patient’s leg. He was deadly aware of the moments that kept ticking by. In another ninety seconds this whole situation was going to be moot because the teenager on the table in front of him would be dead. Damn it. He glanced down at the kid’s face. He couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen. Far too young to die.

“They’re outside. They want supplies.”

“We just gave them stuff last week,” he said, following the path the artery had taken, his gloved fingers slipping. Thank God they’d had enough anesthesia to knock the kid out—this time. But if they gave the Somali warlords any more supplies, they wouldn’t have enough for the next emergency. The next shipment from For the Children wasn’t expected for at least three more weeks. “Tell them we don’t have anything left to share.”

“I did. They aren’t listening.”

The panic in her voice finally got through to him, but there was nothing he could do about it. Not then, as his fingers finally brushed against the ragged edge of the severed artery. “Stay here,” he told her as he twisted his arm and shoved his hand a little deeper. “I’ll take care of them when I’m done with this surgery.”

“I don’t think they’re going to wait.”

“They’re going to have to,” he snapped, “because I’m not letting this kid go.” He finally got hold of the artery and pinched it tightly between his thumb and forefinger. “Get the clamp ready, Ruth.”

She already had the surgical clamp in her hand, and extended toward him. He tugged on the artery, not bothering to be gentle. The boy was going to feel like hell when the anesthesia wore off, but at least now he actually had a chance of waking up. Here, now, that was all the hope Jack could offer him.

The knowledge grated his insides raw, but he couldn’t afford to dwell on it. Not right now.

He finally got the artery back down where he could see it, and within seconds had it clamped off, the steady pulsing of blood finally stopped. “Okay, I need the sutures,” he told Ruth. The kid was out of immediate danger, but now came the delicate process of mending the artery. “Fin Dr. Alexander?” he heard the gruff words behind him.

“Am shi!” he shouted at the rebels to get out. This might not be a sterile OR to start with, but that didn’t mean he wanted them tracking in God only knew what kind of germs while his patient’s leg was wide open.

Even as he yelled, he hadn’t turned around. There wasn’t time to be distracted. His nimble hands began weaving the ragged edges of the artery back together. “Get the last pint of O negative,” he told Ruth. “We’ve got to get it in him, quick.”

“Not so fast,” said Mussa, the leader of the rebels. “Nobody gets anything until we have what we came for.”

There was the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked, and Jack finally glanced up from what he was doing in time to see his nurse’s face, livid with fear. “Ruth,” he told her with firm authority, refusing to let her drown in her own panic. “Go get the blood.” If he could get her away from the rebels, it was one less person for them to hurt.

A gunshot rang out, slamming into the dirt floor near the foot of the hospital gurney even as he tensed for impact. “Damn it!” he shouted. “We’ve got oxygen going in here. You’re going to blow us all up if you’re not careful.”

A bunch of muttered words in Arabic followed his exclamation, and then one of the soldiers—who wasn’t any older than the boy he was currently working on—strode over to the table, shut off the gas that was flowing.

“What the hell are you doing?” Jack exploded, only half lunging over the table at him. The only thing that kept him from fully going after the guy was that he couldn’t afford to stop working. Not now. “Turn that back on!”

There was no response. Jack’s attention and his fingers flew over the torn artery, determined to finish as quickly as possible. His patient wouldn’t die without the oxygen, but it wasn’t optimum, either. Not like anything here was, but still… “Look, let me finish what I’m doing and then we can talk about this,” he said in the most conciliatory tone he could manage. Which wasn’t really, but it was better than swearing at them—or hitting them—both of which he wanted to do. Both of which might mean the difference between life and death for his patient.

The soldier pulled out a pistol, cocked it, and pointed it straight at Jack. “We want to talk now.”

“I’m almost finished, damn it. If I stop now, he’ll lose his leg.”

The man behind him—obviously the leader—laughed. “What does it matter to me if he loses his leg? I need supplies and don’t have time to waste.”

Jack swore again. “Fine, Ruth and Becca will take you back. You can—” He broke off as another shot rang out, this time mere inches from his feet.

“We want you.” He paused for emphasis before continuing. “Our general believes you were not as generous last time as you could have been.”

Anger ripped through Jack. He’d turned over half of his supplies to the bastards the last time they’d been here, so many that he’d all but crippled the clinic. It was a bitter pill to swallow at the best of times—and this was far from the best of times. Still, the alternative was having them ransack the place, destroying whatever they didn’t want. Or worse, having them make life so awful here that For the Children would have to pull out altogether. As it was, they were one of a very few relief clinics that had been allowed into the country to begin with.

While it was true the clinic could help more people if they got to keep all the supplies they received each month, at the same time, how many people would die if they weren’t here to help at all? It was a trade-off that hurt him deeply, but one he’d learned to live with through the years. In this, Somalia was no different from Eritrea or Chechnya or Haiti.

Tamping down on the resentment and fury that were ravaging him from the inside, he muttered, “Fine, whatever. I’m almost done.” He kept working even as he fumed. Another couple of minutes and it would be complete. The other doctor on staff could close the wound up.

“Now!” the leader said. And this time he was the one walking around the table, pointing a gun at Jack.

“Okay, okay.” He was almost finished, almost—

This time when the soldier fired three times, Jack didn’t even flinch, expecting the bullets to slam into the ground once again. His adrenaline was so high that it took him a full thirty seconds to comprehend that these shots hadn’t been fired at the dirt. Even then he didn’t understand, even then he didn’t feel anything until his patient’s artery began, once again, to spurt blood.

He went to stop it, tried to clamp the newly severed ends, but his fingers wouldn’t respond. They wouldn’t do what he needed them to do. And that’s when he finally understood. They hadn’t just shot his patient. They’d shot him, as well.

CHAPTER ONE

HE NEEDED TO get out of the car. Jack knew it, just as he knew his best and oldest friend, Dr. Amanda Jacobs, was waiting for him inside the run-down clinic. He’d been due to meet her here two hours ago, but somehow he’d found a million reasons to be late. Lingering over a lunch he didn’t want and couldn’t bring himself to eat, filling the rental car up with gas, exploring websites about sightseeing in Atlanta, though he had no desire to actually visit the place. Anything and everything to keep him from this parking lot, this moment, this decision he wasn’t ready to make.

Not that it was a done deal, he reassured himself as he finally reached for the door handle. He hadn’t agreed to anything. He was here to see his friend, to take a look around. Checking out the clinic didn’t mean he was promising anything. To Amanda or himself. It proved he was interested in what his friend had been getting up to.

Still, the walk to the front door of the clinic was a long one. And not just because of the bowling ball in his stomach. Both his leg and his hand ached from where he’d been shot two months before; Atlanta’s humidity exacerbating the still recovering tendons.

Which brought up the question he’d been asking himself ever since his plane had landed the night before. What was he doing here? His doctor was in Boston. His physical therapist was in Boston. His family was in Boston. And yet here he was, in Atlanta, checking out a clinic he had absolutely no interest in working in.

This whole trip was stupid. A joke. He didn’t belong here any more than he belonged in the fancy family practice his father had gotten him an interview at in Boston last week. He hadn’t been interested in that job, either, but his father had refused to take no for an answer. Dealing with sniffles and high blood pressure was a long way from being Chief of Thoracic Surgery at John Hopkins, but it was better than “scrabbling away in that pathetic little hovel in Africa,” as the elder Jack Alexander liked to say.

The casual cruelty, and inherent snobbery, of his father’s words was what made Jack dial up Amanda in the first place, then take her up on her frequently issued invitation to come see the newest project she was involved in.

Atlanta felt too foreign, too strange, and that was even before he took into account his ridiculous feelings for Amanda. Feelings that wouldn’t go away, no matter how hopeless they were.

And they were hopeless, he reminded himself viciously. They’d been friends for well over a decade—ever since they’d met as first years at Harvard Medical School—and though he’d been in love with her since they’d duked it out for the top spot in the program, she’d never seen him as anything more than a pal. And now she was married—married—to another of Jack’s closest buddies and any tiny hope he’d held on to that they might one day be together had been officially destroyed.

He closed his eyes, took a deep breath. Started to head to the car. No, he didn’t belong here. But that was the problem, wasn’t it? He didn’t belong anywhere. Not anymore. Not like he used to. These days he was a shell of his former self, one who could barely hold a stethoscope steady let alone a scalpel.

Jack cut off the familiar thought as he forced himself to turn back around and step into the clinic. He let the cracked glass door with its iron burglar bars swing shut behind him. The pity party was getting old. Especially since he was the only one at the table.Sick of himself, and the grinding pain he couldn’t escape no matter how many exercises he did, he tried to distract himself by looking around. Analyzing the surroundings.

There wasn’t much to analyze. The waiting room was large and spare, its walls painted with what he guessed had once been cream, but was now more of a dingy yellow splashed with stains. People sat on folding chairs, crammed into every available space, while a couple of forlorn plants—ones that had definitely seen better days—sat in the front corner of the room next to a high counter. Behind it, a large, African-American woman worked on a computer, several charts stacked in front of her. It all reminded him a lot more of his tent clinic in Somalia than the private practice his family was trying to force him to join.

To the woman’s left was a small sliding-glass window. There were about a dozen people lined up in front of it, all bedraggled and clearly feeling sick and miserable. Nothing compared to the patients he’d seen in Somalia, but still it was obvious these people needed help.

He felt that old familiar stirring inside of him, the one that demanded he roll up his sleeves and pitch in. This was what he did. What he was good at.

He beat the urge back down. This was what he had done. What he had been good at. These days, he could barely dress himself let alone practice medicine.

Despite the fact that the clinic was overcrowded, it was obviously efficiently run. Though the line of people was growing, they were being rapidly signed in and triaged. Behind the window, he could see a nurse taking temperatures even as she typed notes into a computer.

Not that he was surprised. Amanda could work anywhere, could practice medicine in the middle of war zones and natural disasters without blinking an eye. But she demanded efficiency of everyone around her—or at least she did when she wasn’t drowning in sorrow.

Seeing the way this clinic ran like clockwork, convinced him even more that he’d made the right decision all those months ago. Getting her out of Africa so she could deal with the loss of her child and regain her health, had been exactly the right thing to do. Even if, in doing so, he had lost her forever.

The loss was bittersweet, especially now that he could see that she really had found herself again here in this run-down, little clinic in Atlanta. He’d sent her out of Somalia a year ago, so burned out and run-down he was afraid she would work herself to death. He’d told her to take a vacation. Instead, she’d ended up here.

And now, somehow, so had he.

Not that he was planning on getting involved, he assured himself. He was just here to see an old friend, to see for himself that she really was okay and to assure her the same thing about him. He’d take her and Simon to dinner later that evening. Tell a few stories, crack a few jokes, and then catch the first flight back to Massachusetts in the morning. It would be easy, so easy that even he couldn’t screw it up.

Now that he had a plan, Jack straightened his shoulders.

Flexed his already cramping hand.

Made sure his I’m-in-control-and-master-of-my-own-destiny mask was firmly in place, then headed toward the front of the waiting room.

He figured his best bet was the woman behind the computer because, as he’d been standing here thinking, the line at the small window had only gotten longer. So he leaned on the high counter, hoping if he took some weight off his leg it would stop throbbing quite so badly. He smiled at the woman.

“I’m here to—”

“The line starts over there.” She pointed at the window without ever looking away from the computer.

“I can see that. However, I want to talk to—”

“Over. There.” The finger jabbed at the air for emphasis, but the woman still didn’t look at him.

“Again. I see the window. However, I’m a friend of—”

She did look at him then, her eyebrows pulled low over her eyes and her mouth curled downward. “I don’t actually care if you’re friends with the surgeon general, the president of the United States and Denzel Washington. The line starts over there.” Again she stabbed a finger in the direction of the window, than grunted as she reached for another file and began inputting its content into the computer.

Jack stared at her for a few moments, then turned to look at the line she was directing him to. It had grown exponentially in the past five minutes, efficient nurses or not. His leg throbbed, his hand ached and the last thing he wanted to do was to stand around for the next hour while he waited on a chance to see Amanda.

Maybe it wasn’t meant to be, he told himself as he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and flipped through his contacts until he found her cell number. He’d call Amanda and if she didn’t pick up—and she probably wouldn’t as she was more than likely with a patient—he’d call it a day. After all, he’d tried his best. He’d shown up, talked to the office manager, had tried to explain who he was. It wasn’t his fault that she wouldn’t listen.

Ignoring the voice in his head that told him he was being a coward and taking the easy way out, Jack listened to Amanda’s voice mail greeting and left a brief message letting her know that he was in the waiting room. Then he headed for the door, doing his best to justify the fact that he was—despite his good intentions—running away.

He assured himself that he wasn’t afraid of touring this little, low-income clinic. It was simply that he had better things to do. Like staring at the ceiling of his hotel room…

“Jack!” Amanda’s voice rang through the waiting room, foiling his escape. He froze, his hand on the door handle. “Where are you going?”

He turned to see her barreling through the door that separated the waiting room from the rest of the clinic. Then she was hurtling herself into his arms and his only choice was to brace himself with his good leg and catch her or let her take them both to the floor.

“Hey! Where’s the fire?” he asked, even as he wrapped his arms around her in a huge bear hug.

“I’m so glad you’re here!” she said, stretching up on tiptoes to kiss his cheek before pulling away. “I’ve missed you. And you have perfect timing. My shift just ended.”

He swallowed the sudden lump in his throat and smiled down at her. “I’ve missed you, too. Although Atlanta seems to be agreeing with you.”

“It really does,” she said, blushing a little.

“I can tell.” She barely looked like the same woman he’d banished from Africa all those months ago. The sparkle was back in her silver eyes, the shine back in her short, blonde hair. Her skin glowed and her smile was wide and unfettered. Her time here in Atlanta—and with Simon—had obviously been good for her.

He ignored the lingering pain that awareness caused, focusing instead on the sweet realization that Amanda really was okay. That was enough, more than enough, to make up for any hurt he might be feeling.

“I’m so glad you came,” she told him, giving him another quick hug. “I’ve been waiting for you to get here forever.”

“I’m sorry I’m late. I got…” His voice trailed off, his excuses drying up as surely as the deserts of North Africa. He never had been able to lie worth a damn, especially not to Amanda.

“No excuses,” she told him, reaching for his hand. “You’re here now. That’s what’s important.”