Guilty Secrets

“We don’t keep any methadone in stock.” It was a relief to be able to offer some good news. She hadn’t done anything wrong, Nell reminded herself. “And we keep such small quantities of Oxycodone that any theft would have been noticed immediately.”

Tom wrote that down. “When did you notice the other stuff was missing?”

“Ed Johnson—our pharmacist—suspected a discrepancy in the inventory last night. I checked the supply records and called you this morning.”

“Okay. We’ll need to talk to him. Who else has access to the pharmacy?”

Nell wiped her hands surreptitiously on her lab coat. This was where things got sticky. “Ed and I are the only ones with keys. Sometimes, when Ed is gone and I’m tied up with a procedure, one of the nurses will come in to get medication for a patient.”

“You loan them your keys,” Mike Reilly clarified, his voice expressionless. He sounded like his brother.

Nell winced. It was hard to explain how habit and convenience created trust among members of a medical team. Harder to admit, even to herself, that such trust could have been betrayed. “Yes. But they don’t have access to the narcotics cabinet.”

Tom rubbed his forehead. “They’ve got the keys.”

“The cabinet has a punch lock,” Nell explained. “It can only be opened with a three-digit code.”

“And who knows the code?” Tom asked.

Fear, bitter as bile, rose in Nell’s throat. She swallowed hard.

“Ed,” she said steadily. “And me.”

Mike Reilly shifted his seat on the edge of her desk. “Could be a tailgater,” he said to Tom.

Nell looked at them hopefully. “What’s that?”

“Somebody walks by, looks over your shoulder while you’re punching in the code,” Mike explained. “It’s easy enough to pick up.”

“You got a security camera on the inside?” Tom asked.

“No,” Nell admitted. In the acute-care room, an older woman was moaning, disoriented and in pain. Nell heard Billie’s attempts to comfort her, to make her lie still for an exam.

“A larger pharmacy with a walk-in narcotics vault would have a camera monitoring the inside. But we just have the cabinet. And the camera is positioned to record people approaching the pharmacy window from the outside.”

“Okay.” Tom closed his notebook. “We’ll take a look. In the meantime, you might want to change the code sequence on that punch lock.”

A crash sounded from across the hall. Billie yelled for help with the restraints. Mike Reilly looked uncomfortable.

“We don’t want to keep you,” Tom said. “I’ll give you a call in a couple of days, do a follow-up.”

Nell blinked at him. Surprised. Deflated. “That’s it?”

“We’ll file a report,” Tom assured her. “Let the assignment sergeant know in case your theft fits a pattern in the area. He might send out a detective. But the amounts you’re missing… We’ll check, but it’s not an index crime. Looks to me like you’ve got a problem with personal use.”

Nell went cold.

“Not you, personally,” Mike Reilly said. “Just, you know, somebody with access. You didn’t notice if the doors or locks were tampered with?”

“No,” Nell said faintly. Her heart pounded. Her mind raced. Somebody with access. Ed, whom she’d promised a job? Melody, whom she’d promised a second chance? A volunteer doctor? A nurse? “Nothing like that.”

“Well, we’ll look into it,” Tom said. “Want to show me that security camera? Even with the bad angle, you might have something on tape.”

He sounded doubtful but kind, like a surgeon explaining a patient’s chances of surviving a risky operation.

Nell led the way toward the pharmacy feeling numb. Someone she worked with, someone she trusted, someone she’d helped was stealing drugs from the clinic pharmacy. For personal use, Tom had said.

She turned the corner. Joe Reilly stood in the work aisle, leaning over the counter to talk to Melody King.

And things teetered from bad and slid to worse.

“Joe?” Mike Reilly sounded pleased, but puzzled. “What are you doing here?”

Joe pivoted stiffly on one leg.

Nell took a deep breath. She was not going to panic. Yet.

She forced herself to compare the two men, as if she could assess the threat to her clinic on the basis of their family resemblance. They didn’t look alike. Mike Reilly was bigger, blonder, broader than his brother. Beside him, Joe looked lean and tough and scruffier than ever. But something—the shape of their heads, the angle of their jaws, the set of their shoulders—marked them as brothers. And something else, a weariness, a watchfulness, marked Joe as the older one.

“Hello, Mike,” he said quietly.

“He said he had an appointment,” Melody piped up.

Both men ignored her.

“You listening for my car number on your police scanner again?” the cop asked.

If it was a joke it fell flat.

Joe shook his head. “I didn’t know you were here. What’s going on?”

Tom Dietz pushed up his hat brim with his thumb. “Nothing you need to worry about. Police blotter stuff.”

“Yeah, you stick to the big stories,” Mike said. “Are you here to see Nell?”

Nell started. She’d told Mike Reilly she knew his brother. But that was all. Had the young officer somehow picked up on the tension between them? Or was he just used to his big brother hitting on every woman that breathed?

I thought the purpose of this dinner was to get to know one another better.

If that’s what it takes.

Joe’s face was impassive. “I’m here on a story.”

Tom looked from Joe to Nell. “What kind of story?”

Nell stepped forward. The less the two Reilly brothers compared notes, the better. And yet something about Joe’s careful lack of expression tugged at her heart. “I contacted the Examiner to ask if they would send a reporter to profile the clinic. With all the recent budget cuts, we could use the publicity.”

Mike’s eyes widened. “You’re doing a—”

“Feature piece,” Joe supplied grimly. “For the Life section. Yeah.”

“Oh.” Mike shifted his weight, clearly uncomfortable.

Because he’d assumed Joe was having a personal relationship with his subject? Nell wondered. Or for some other reason?

“Well, that’s great,” Mike said finally, heartily. “You’re lucky,” he told Nell. “Joe’s a great writer. He won an AP award for his series on the looting of Baghdad, you know.”

She hadn’t known.

“Nell isn’t interested in my résumé,” Joe said.

But Mike continued as if his brother hadn’t spoken. “After he got hurt, he laced up his boot and kept right on reporting.”

Nell felt a flutter of concern. “You were injured?”

“It wasn’t a war wound,” Joe said. “I fell.”

“Some looters pushed him down a hospital stairwell,” Mike explained. Nell sucked in a distressed breath. “That didn’t stop Joe, though.”

Joe thrust his hands into his pockets. “Yes, it did. It just took me a while to wise up to it.”

“He was in the hospital for a couple of weeks when he got back,” Mike confided. “Getting his ankle patched up.”

A couple of weeks? For a broken ankle?

Nell glanced at Joe. He was clearly not enjoying this turn of the conversation.

“Sounds serious,” she said.

“Tedious,” Joe corrected. “I’m fine now.”

“You will be when you get that other surgery,” his brother said.

“I’m fine,” Joe said again, flatly.

A long, loaded look passed between the two men.

Mike snorted. “Yeah. Fine. That’s why you’re in Chicago writing PR copy for a cut-rate health clinic instead of overseas covering the action.”

Nell stiffened at the good-natured insult.

Joe’s face didn’t reveal any reaction at all.

“O-kay,” Tom said. “We’re about done here. I’ll just have a few words with Ed in the pharmacy and let you folks get back to—”

Writing PR copy for a cut-rate health clinic.

“—your business,” Tom finished. “Mike?”

“Gotcha.” He said goodbye to his brother, winked at Nell and sauntered after his partner.

“Are you all right?” Nell asked.

Joe’s mouth twisted. “Weren’t you listening? I’m fine.”

That wasn’t what his brother had implied, but Nell figured this was a poor time to point that out.

“What happened?” she asked.

“My baby brother just shot his mouth off.”

“I didn’t mean here. I meant over there.”

Joe rocked back and stared down his nose at her. “I thought I was here so you could give me a story.”

Nell’s heart beat faster. “I will. You go first.”

“Everything I have to say I wrote for the paper.”

She put her hands on her hips. “Are you really going to make me dig up back issues from a year ago?”

But instead of grinning, Joe shook his head. “Why should you care?”

She was surprised enough to tell the truth. “Because you were hurt, I guess. Because it’s my job to observe and to care, and I didn’t even notice.”

He smiled then, and the sight of all those even, white teeth against his movie-star stubble weakened her knees. “I knew there was a reason I liked you.”

She blinked. “What?”

“I get tired of being treated like the walking wounded all the time.” He looked directly into her eyes. “I don’t want you to see me as one of your patients, Nell.”

Her breath clogged. The moment stretched between them, fine and strong as suturing thread.

Until he snapped it by saying, “Unless you’d have sex with me out of pity. I’m okay with that.”

Disappointment made her cross. “Are there any circumstances in which you are not okay with sex?”

He considered, then shrugged. “Nope. Can’t think of any.”

Nell drew herself up. His crudeness could be a deliberate attempt to set some distance between them.

Or he could be a jerk. And she was an idiot for imagining that he was something else, that he felt any corresponding connection with her.

“I’ll give you that clinic tour now,” she said.

That was a close call, Joe thought as he tagged behind Nell to the acute-care room. Her shapeless white lab coat swayed with her walk.

Sex was one thing. Sex was good. Sex dulled the pain for a while.

But the exchange in the hall had forced him to face that Nell Dolan was not a woman he could simply have sex with. She was perceptive and funny and caring as hell.

She wouldn’t accept a relationship that was all about sex. She wouldn’t let a relationship be all about her. She would want—God help them both—to know about him. And eventually, all the get-to-know-you stuff that usually kicked off a relationship would lead her to figure out that he was hanging on to a job he hated by the edge of his fingernails. And she would demand to know why.

The thought made him shudder.

Better for them both, safer for them both, if he churned out his story and dragged his sorry ass out of here.

“Why do you need all this equipment?” he asked, interrupting her. “Wouldn’t your patients who need these kinds of tests be better off going to the hospital in the first place?”

Instead of taking offense, Nell considered his question seriously. “Some of them. But our goal is to identify and treat illnesses before a patient requires a trip to the emergency room. Many of them are afraid to go to the hospital. And most of them can’t afford it. Our clinic is actually cost-effective for the community. For every dollar in donations, we can return seven dollars in health care. I have statistics showing…”

Her face was animated. Her eyes were bright with conviction. And every word wiped out his hopes of taking her to bed.

Nell was a do-gooder, a fearless meddler, a tireless fixer-upper. What had she said? It’s my job to observe and to care. If they got involved, she would want to help him. She would demand to know why he wouldn’t help himself.

And he wasn’t going there. Not with his doctors. Not with his family. And not with a woman he wanted to take to bed.

Are there any circumstances in which you are not okay with sex?

Yes. When it threatened to become more than sex and jeopardized the barriers he’d set around his soul to survive.

Nell was still talking about clinic costs with the endearing earnestness of Mother Teresa and the convincing delivery of a used-car salesman. “It’s all about preventive care. A routine patient visit can cost a hundred and fifty dollars at a private doctor’s office. Using volunteer doctors, we can provide the same services for one-fifth the cost. And that includes a lab test,” she added triumphantly. “If you extrapolate—”

“Hey, Nell.” The big black nurse stuck her head in the door. Her hair, shaved short and dyed red, glowed like the fuzz on a tennis ball. “Let me have your keys a second.”

Nell’s hand moved easily to her pocket. And then she stopped. “Where’s Ed?”

“At lunch. You’ve been so busy you lost track of time.” The nurse flicked a glance in Joe’s direction. “Billie Parker,” she introduced herself.

Joe was skeptical. Did she really need keys? Or was she angling for a mention in the paper? “Joe Reilly,” he offered blandly.

She looked him over. “Yeah, I know.” She turned back to Nell. “Anyway, I need some cortisone samples for the kid in Exam Six. He has a rash in places you don’t want to think about.”

Nell moved toward the door. “I’ll get them for you.”

“That’s okay. I’ll just—”

“I really should get them myself,” Nell said.

In the field, Joe had developed an ear for a story and an instinct for survival. And something in her tone caught his attention as surely as the sound of a pistol being cocked.

Billie Parker shrugged. “Whatever. When you find the time. Exam Six.” She started to walk out.

“I’ll come with you,” Nell said. She turned to Joe, her clear blue eyes questioning. A conscientious frown pleated her forehead. He had to stop himself from smoothing it with his thumb. “I have to get back to my patients. Did I give you what you need?”

Not by a long shot, sweetheart, he thought.

But he couldn’t ask for what he needed. Not from anyone, and not from her.

He forced a grin. “Are you offering to play doctor, Dolan?”

Her head snapped back as if he’d slapped her. “Not unless you’re volunteering to turn your head and cough,” she said icily and stalked out.

Chapter 4

It was amazing what kind of crap a writer could produce when he was up against a deadline and had absolutely no feeling for his subject.

Joe scowled at the half page of text displayed on his computer screen. The cursor blinked impatiently at the bottom. Write. Now. Right now. Write.

He swore and reached for a cigarette. Every morning he counted them out, three cigarettes, his day’s allowance, and placed them carefully in a box in his breast pocket.

The box was empty. The cigarettes were gone.

Joe checked the ashtray on his desk to make sure. Yep, sometime between typing his byline and that last, remarkably bad paragraph citing statistics on America’s uninsured, he’d smoked his last cigarette. Exhausted his supply. Reached the end of his resources and his rope.

Maybe he should give up and turn in the piece his editor expected. Some slop with Nell Dolan as an angel of mercy dispensing hope and drugs to the city’s grateful poor. Nurse Practitioner Barbie, with long blond hair and a removable white lab coat.

She would hate that. Joe almost smiled.

But thinking about Nell, undressing Nell, only made him more frustrated in a different way. Physically frustrated. Sexually frustrated.

He reached again for his cigarettes. Hell. Crushing the empty box in his hand, he lofted it across the living room toward the wastebasket.

He missed. Loser.

In his front hall, the doorbell rasped like the final buzzer at a Bulls’ game.

Joe hobbled across the bare hardwood floor to the door and peered through the security glass at the side. Two men, one in uniform, occupied his front stoop.

Joe yanked open the door. “What the hell are you doing here?”

His middle brother Will walked in without asking. “Ma was worried when you bailed on dinner.”

Mike followed, thrusting a round Tupperware container into Joe’s hands. “She sent us with leftovers. Got any beer?”

His family. He loved them, admired them, let them down… And right now, he wanted them to go away.

“No.”

No alcohol. It was something else he was learning to deny himself.

Mike snorted. “God, now I’m worried about you, too. What about coffee?”

“Instant. And you’ll have to make it yourself.”

“Okay. In the pantry, right?” Without waiting for an answer, Mike snatched back the covered dish and carried it through to the kitchen. A cupboard door banged. A drawer slammed.

With a curse, Joe limped after him.

“You’re not walking too good,” Will observed behind him. “You hurt your ankle again?”

Joe gritted his teeth. He supposed it was too much to hope Will wouldn’t notice. “Nope. Just overdid it the past couple days.”

“Is that why you blew off dinner?”

“No. I told Ma. I have a deadline.”

“You still have to eat,” Will said.

Joe regarded his brother with loathing. “You sound exactly like Ma, you know that?”

Will grinned at him, five feet ten inches of compact, confident Chicago firefighter. “Say that when you’re on both feet, paperboy, and I’ll take you down.”

It was the kind of threat he used to make before the accident. Even with his brother’s qualifier—when you’re on both feet—the taunt improved Joe’s mood.

The microwave pinged from the kitchen.

“Dinner’s ready,” Mike called.

The scent of Mary Reilly’s lamb and onions permeated the hall. The house was small, with one bedroom on the ground floor and a couple of others upstairs that Joe had barely seen. Eight months ago, when he bought the place, the layout had been the house’s key selling point. He still couldn’t negotiate the stairs easily.

Stumping into the kitchen, Joe dug a spoon from the drawer. Will filled a kettle with water. Mike rescued the plastic container of stew from the microwave and slid it across the table.

Joe lowered himself cautiously onto a chair, cupping the Tupperware in one hand. The smell reminded him of decades of Sunday dinners eaten off his mother’s lace tablecloth in his parents’ dining room. The solid weight of the container in his hand was warm and comforting.

“Thanks,” he said gruffly.

Will lifted one shoulder in a shrug. No big deal.

“Mom made us come,” said Mike. “She and Pop are worried you’re not getting out enough.”

“Oh, like you do,” Joe retorted. “You still live in their basement.”

“I like saving money.”

“You like Ma doing your laundry,” Joe said.

“Yeah, well, a year ago she was emptying your bedpan and bringing your meals on a tray,” Mike said. “So I don’t want to hear it.”

An awkward silence fell.

Mike meant well, Joe reminded himself desperately. He always meant well.

But neither of his brothers understood how Joe’s crash-and-burn return from Iraq had crippled him. He prayed they never did. To lie at the mercy of his doctors, to wake crying in pain, to rely on pills to function and his family for the most basic human needs had been a devastating comedown.

He was the oldest, the leader, the one who did well in school. The foreign correspondent, the world adventurer.

Now he was back to eating his mother’s leftovers and fretting over writing a feature on a hole-in-the-wall clinic.

Will’s chair scraped back. He grabbed the whistling kettle and poured boiling water into two mugs.

“Want some?” he asked Joe, lifting the kettle.

He wanted a drink. He wanted his life back.

He cleared his throat. “Sure. Thanks.”

Will snagged another mug from the cupboard and added instant crystals.

“Don’t worry about Mom,” he said, stirring the coffee. “I told her you weren’t getting out because you were finally settling down.”

Joe pushed his half-eaten stew away. “And she believed that?”

“She didn’t,” Mike said, helping himself to one of the mugs and bringing another over to Joe. “But then I told her you were seeing somebody.”

Joe didn’t “see” women. He had sex with them, to fill the time and dull the pain.

“Yeah?” he asked, almost amused. “Who did you tell her I was—”

Oh, no.

Mike wouldn’t. He couldn’t.

He had. He was trying not to wriggle like a puppy who’d missed the paper, but it was clear he knew he’d made a mess.

“Nell Dolan,” Joe said flatly, answering his own question.

“She was the only one I could think of,” Mike said.

“A blond nurse with an Irish surname,” Will put in, a gleam in his eyes. “She’s perfect. Mom was thrilled.”

Nell was perfect, Joe acknowledged. That was her problem. Or rather, it was his.

She would fit too well into his family and into his parents’ expectations for their disabled son. She had the idealism and commitment they admired and he had lost. On top of that, she was Irish. Catholic. A caretaker.

She could take care of him.

The thought was as bitter as his brother’s coffee and much harder to swallow.

Joe forced himself to take a sip and turned the conversation. “What were you doing there today, anyway? At the clinic.”

“Your girlfriend called us in,” Mike said. “Somebody’s lifting narcotics from the clinic pharmacy.”

Joe felt the tickle of interest like a spider on the back of his neck. “Is it serious?”

“Not yet.” Mike waggled his eyebrows. “It wouldn’t hurt you to keep an eye on things, though.”

It could, Joe thought. He didn’t want to get involved with Nell or with her clinic. He was going to turn in his fifteen-hundred words and be done with them both.

But as he sat waiting for his brothers to finish their coffee and leave, he couldn’t stop thinking this could be the hook, the angle his story needed.

The hell with it.

Frustration bubbled and seethed inside him. Despite the time he’d lost with his brothers’ visit, despite his aching ankle and looming deadline, he needed to get out of the house tonight.

He needed a meeting.

The banging woke her.

Nell’s head jerked up. She blinked, disoriented, at the scattered pages of the grant proposal spotlit by her desk lamp. She had to finish it tonight. She had to—

Bang. Bang. Bang. Like a garbage can bouncing down a fire escape.

—open the door.

Nell hauled herself to her feet. Her eyes were gritty. Her mouth was fuzzy. Her brain wasn’t working at all. If she had any kind of sense, she’d be home at this time of night. If she had any kind of life…

Someone was at the clinic door, pounding hard enough to threaten the glass. Her heart tripped. Trying to get her attention? Or trying to get in?

The panic button was up front, under the registration desk. It hadn’t been used in… Nell couldn’t remember the last time it had been used.

She hurried down the hall, switching on lights along the way. The Ark Street Free Clinic wasn’t the county E.R. Her practice specialized in preventive medicine and family care. Not belligerent drunks or whacked-out junkies or gangbangers who had to be strapped to their gurneys to stop them from finishing in the hospital what they’d started on the streets.

Bang. Bang.

Pulse racing, Nell flipped the entrance lights. A pale face leaped at her from the darkness beyond the glass. Her heart rocketed to her throat.

Joe Reilly?

Dazed, Nell stood with her hand still on the switch plate and her feet rooted to the linoleum. What was he doing here?

He rattled the door in its frame.

Shaken from her surprise, Nell jumped forward to slide back the bolts.

“What is it?” she asked. “What do you want?”

And it better be good, her tone announced. She was tired. And she still hadn’t forgiven him for his “play doctor” crack.