Doctor Seduction

Cross brought his hands down. “Want me to do it for you?”

She blinked at him. “How can you? You don’t even know why I want to see you.”

“Try this on for size. You’re having a hell of a time getting back to the woman you were before the rest of Hines’s hostages escaped through the vent in that storage room, before he returned in time to keep you and Sam Walters from doing the same thing.”

“I…yes.”

“Now, suddenly, you’ll be going about your business and—wham!—blazing fury seems to come at you from out of nowhere.”

Cait sat up straight. “You’re good.”

He grinned and she liked him better for it. “I memorize well and I read all the books.”

“What books?”

“On post-traumatic stress disorder.”

She sat up straighter. “I don’t have a disorder.”

“Tell me what’s been happening to you lately.”

With the simple question, she felt something begin to shake inside her. Cait sank back in her chair again. “It’s not just Hines. He was crazy, a horrible person, but he’s gone.”

Cross nodded. “He’s in jail. Which, theoretically, should make you feel safe again. But you don’t.”

Cait shuddered. “People like him don’t happen to people like me, at least not twice in the same lifetime. And he’s incarcerated.”

“He was supposed to have been incarcerated once before.”

It was true, Cait thought weakly. Hines had disrupted the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new maternity wing, then tried to kidnap the son of Crystal Bennett, the hospital fund-raiser. Already wanted for other crimes, he’d been remanded to the maximum-security prison in Lubbock. Somewhere between Mission Creek and Lubbock he’d escaped to follow the hatred in his heart right back to the hospital. He’d uprooted her life, not to mention those of several other people. But she and Sam had been the only ones held hostage in a room beneath his house. And then—

No, she couldn’t think of that again.

“Caitlyn?” Cross prodded.

She jumped. “I’m sorry. What?”

“You were saying?”

She felt herself flush. “I was about to say that I seem to be doing a lot of that lately—fading in and out. That’s what I meant. Hines is over, behind me. But I’m different.”

“Flashbacks?” he asked. “Do you experience flashbacks to your time in that underground room?”

She felt Sam’s hands on her breasts again. The heat that slid up over her skin, from her chest to her throat to her face, was excruciating. “Yes,” she said quietly.

Cross was watching her closely, but he said nothing.

“I think the worst part is that I’m…I’ve become paranoid,” she whispered, the final scalding admission. The word made her sound so…crazy.

“Checking your locks three, four, five times?”

“That’s it.” She swallowed dryly. “And I keep feeling like someone is…I don’t know. Watching me. Following me.”

Cross sat forward and put his elbows on his desk. “Describe your childhood to me in five easy sentences.”

Cait’s eyes went big. “What kind of a shrink are you? I thought that sort of thing was supposed to take weeks. ‘Tell me about your parents…. Did you wet the bed?”’

He laughed. “I’m a shrink who has a few more minutes with you today and who wants you to schedule another appointment. But in the meantime I’d like to point something out to you, and I might be able to do it if you answer my question in a nutshell.”

Cait took in air and shrugged. She felt fragile. “Okay. When I was two, my mother left me with her aunt so she could find a decent job in a larger city. She didn’t come back.”

“What about your father?”

Cait lifted one shoulder again carefully. “Who knows?”

“Where he was?”

“Who he was.”

“Ah. Okay, what happened then?”

“My great-aunt died when I was four and from then until I was eighteen I pretty much bounced from foster home to foster home.” She touched her hands to her cheeks. “I am so terribly embarrassed about the way I’ve been acting lately. Why does any of this matter?”

“I just wanted to nail down the fact that you had a shaky childhood.”

“But it didn’t affect me.”

“Sure it did. Your childhood is directly responsible for the type of adult you’ve become. For every action, there’s a reaction, and that goes for the human psyche, too. The reaction doesn’t necessarily have to be negative. Maybe you never had a problem with your past before—until Branson Hines grabbed you.”

Cait brought her chin up. “I put myself through college, then nursing school. I’m here. I did fine.”

He nodded.

“Those foster parents were kind enough. No one was ever cruel to me!” She shouted it and was instantly mortified. “Oh, heavens.”

“What?”

“That. That’s what I mean! I’m volatile. I’m…I’m out of control.”

Cross grinned. “I like that word. Control. Great nutshell word.”

“Why?” she pleaded.

“Because that was what you’ve had your whole life—or at least from the time you left that last foster home and went to college. And now—” he snapped his fingers “—it’s gone. Hines took from you something you’ve fought hard to never have to relinquish again.”

“Control,” Cait whispered.

Cross nodded. “Rumor has it that you run a pretty tight ship here at work. What about at home?”

She paid her rent months in advance just in case anything untoward should happen and she was suddenly unable to find the money. The apartment was hers, the first place she could really call home, and she would not lose it. “I…yes. I guess.”

“You had no control over things when Hines took you,” Cross went on. He laid his palms flat on the desk. “He proved that all your efforts in that area have been for naught. That could shake a person like you to the core. Anyway, here’s the deal. You did the right thing in coming back to work today. But I’d recommend that you confront the site of your trauma, too, and all the people associated with it.”

“The room where it started?” She didn’t want to go there.

“And Sam Walters. Though you work with him, so I imagine you’ve already dealt with him, right?”

Sam. Cait bit her lip.

“Was that a problem?” Cross asked. “Seeing him again?”

“Of course not. I’ll do whatever I have to do to get back to normal.”

“Good.” He watched her closely. “Caitlyn, is there something else you want to tell me about your abduction?”

She jolted. “Like what?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. You tell me. Something else that might have rocked your world during that time?”

She’d made love with Sam. “Absolutely not.”

“People react in some startling ways when they think their time is running out.”

“Not me.”

“They do uncharacteristic things.”

“I never got uncharacteristic until I got home again. That’s when all this started.”

Cross stood. “You’ll tell me sooner or later. I do want you to make another appointment. It would probably work best if you came in on your day off. We’ll have more time together that way.”

Cait pushed to her feet, as well. “Okay.” She was back to being polite and agreeable. For now, she thought a little wildly. Who knew how long it would last?

“I’m sorry this happened to you, to everyone Hines touched.”

Cait nodded. “Thank you. But he’s gone now.”

“With my help, you’ll get the old Caitlyn back. But I seriously doubt if she’ll ever be quite the same person she was before all this happened.”

Cait squeezed her eyes shut. She was so desperately afraid of that. “I’ve got to go.”

She fled Cross’s office without making a second appointment, but they both knew she would be back.

Hines can’t take me away from me! she wanted to holler. And as for Sam…well, just as he had said, it was a one-time thing. Time would pass and what they had shared would fade from her memory. And that was best. It was why she had prayed since they’d been released from that room, that he wouldn’t call her, wouldn’t try to get in touch with her. She’d seen woman after woman hang with bated breath on a man’s every whim and action and spoken word—every one of those things out of their control. She would not let that happen to her.

Cait turned into the nurses’ station again and came nose to nose with Sam’s angry face.

“Where the hell have you been?” he snarled.

Two

The world was clearly going to hell in a handbasket, Sam thought, watching Cait open and close her mouth in shock at his outburst.

One minute everything had been perfectly normal. He’d known himself inside and out. The world around him was just predictable enough to offer comfort without driving him crazy. Then Branson Hines had crashed into his life, showing him that he wasn’t so much the hero, after all. And now that they were free of the man, this woman seemed to stubbornly resist going back to the way she was supposed to be, the way she’d always been before.

“Excuse me,” she said, trying to step around the desk and pass him.

“The hell I will.” He blocked her way. “You owe me an explanation.”

“For what, pray tell?”

“Pray tell?” Suddenly Sam grinned. That was the Caitlyn Matthews he’d always known. Then again, the old Nurse Matthews had never argued with him or contradicted him. And now, unless he missed his guess, she was actually questioning him about his annoyance.

His blood pressure spiked again. “You walked out on me in the middle of rounds!”

“No, I did not.”

“You were there, then you just wandered off.”

“I attempted to tell you I was leaving. You wouldn’t acknowledge me.”

“Maybe you didn’t try hard enough!”

“Would you kindly stop shouting? You’re embarrassing me.”

“I ought to write you up for this! To hell with your pride.”

Then she shocked him. She placed both hands on his chest and shoved. “You’re in my way.”

“I’m—” He broke off, dumbfounded, his thoughts fragmenting. “You’re out of your mind!”

She swiveled on one hip to glance back at him. “Could be. If I were you, I’d watch my step. There could be an ax murderer lurking inside me. You wouldn’t want to tick her off.” Then she walked away.

“You know, after everything that happened to us last week, I don’t think that’s very funny,” he called after her.

Sam heard his own words and almost choked. He was the practical joker of the pediatrics floor, the one to whom not much was sacred, unless it affected a patient, the one who took a very sick boy speeding around federal land in a Maserati the day before surgery.

Caitlyn seemed to catch the incongruity of his statement, too. She stopped again. “I know what Hines took from me, Sam,” she said, looking back. “What did he take from you?”

He refused to be sidetracked. “A nurse, for starters. What if I had needed you ten minutes ago?”

“As you pointed out earlier, there are plenty of others on the floor who can do my job. I’m non-essential.”

“Damn it, I never said that.” He’d always had a good rapport with the nursing staff. After all, most of them were women.

“You implied it, then.”

“I was making the point that I had to come back to work. You didn’t!”

“You’re shouting again, Sam.”

He was going to choke her.

Then it hit him. She’d never once called him by his first name until the time he’d buried himself inside her in that room. Even when Hines had been shuffling them along at gunpoint, she’d called him Dr. Walters. Now she’d said Sam twice in the last minute.

Things were getting way out of hand.

“Go back to work,” he said shortly.

“I was trying to until you detained me.” She set off down the corridor again, her tight little hips twitching. Had they ever twitched before? He couldn’t be sure. He’d never quite gotten past her cool stuffiness until she’d whispered, “Show me how” in his ear.

So he had. He had shown her. And now he couldn’t get her out of his mind.

“Doctor?” One of the other nurses approached him, frowning. “Are you all right?”

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Stupid question, Sam thought. But Hines had derailed him a lot less than little Miss Fancy Hips, who’d just turned into a room down the corridor.

Sam brought his focus back to the nurse before him. Her name was Angelina Moffit. She was a brunette of staggeringly appealing proportions—the type he usually went for. He opened his mouth to tease her, then just waved a hand in abject disgust with himself. For the first time in his memory, words failed him. “Oh, to hell with it.”

He left her and started down the hall. This, he thought, was going to end right here and now. He caught up with Jared Cross just as the psychiatrist was ushering a woman and her daughter into his office. “I need a minute with you,” he said peremptorily.

Cross lofted a brow. “Most people make an appointment.”

“I don’t have time for that. This can’t wait. It’s important.”

The psychiatrist watched him for a beat, then nodded. He stuck his head in his office and said a word to the woman, then he returned. “Five minutes.”

“Fine.” Sam turned to a door across the hall and threw it open. He stepped into his office after Cross and closed the door, being careful to turn the lock. “Have a seat.” He said it like an order.

“That’s usually my line.” But Cross sat. “What’s going on?”

Sam went behind his desk and sat, as well. There was no way to handle this, he thought, other than to dive right in. “I’m losing my mind.”

Jared Cross laughed. “My practice is thriving. I ought to start charging more.”

Sam scowled at him, not understanding. He raked his fingers through his hair, agitated.

Cross relaxed, leaning back to rest one ankle on his knee. “Okay. Tell me about your childhood.”

Sam felt his eyes go to slits. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No, not entirely. Cooperate with me.”

“Well, I didn’t wet the bed, that’s for sure.”

“You?” Cross shook his head. “No, I can’t imagine that you did.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You’ve led a gilded life.”

Sam thought about it and eased back in his own chair. “Yeah, right.” He shrugged. “What’s to tell? My parents have been married for almost forty-five years. I had dinner there last Sunday. The only thing they said to each other was ‘Pass the salt,’ in the exact same tones they used when I was six.”

“Ah.” Cross steepled his fingers under his chin. “School?”

“Straight A’s, for the most part.”

Cross grinned. “I’ve been your colleague for some time now and I know you’re not that smart.”

Sam relaxed enough to laugh a little. “I did a hell of a lot better with the female teachers, I can tell you that. Is this supposed to give me some insight as to what’s wrong with me?”

“Yes. Because I’m smarter.”

Sam laughed outright. Then Jared got serious.

“Try this on for size. My guess—knowing you as long as I have—is that you learned early on that what you failed to accomplish with your brain, you could always wing on your charm.”

Sam didn’t like the sound of that, but he nodded cautiously. “That’s me. Charming.”

“Personally, I think you rely too much on the knowledge that your looks and your talents of persuasion can get you out of pretty much any sticky situation.”

“People pay you for this?”

“You’ll have my bill in the morning. In the meantime, let’s get back to what I was saying. When you were abducted last week, you ran headfirst into a brick wall. For the first time in your life, you hit up against something you couldn’t finesse your way out of.”

“Correction. I did get us out of it.”

Cross waited.

“Okay, with some help.” And, Sam thought, things had been looking pretty dismal until Tabitha Monroe and Jake White had arrived. Yeah, that bothered him.

“Now you find yourself doubting your every move in areas that had always been your strong suits,” Cross continued.

“Not every move.” Though he’d had a horrible moment in surgery yesterday, Sam thought. What was the sense in denying it? He had asked this guy for help. “Just most of them.”

“It’s called post-traumatic stress disorder,” Cross said.

Sam stiffened. “I don’t do stress and I don’t do disorders.”

“You do now.”

“That’s bull—”

Cross held up a hand to cut him off. “It basically happens when the predictable order of one’s life is suddenly derailed by any sort of catastrophic event. Things you once put trust in are no longer viable. You find yourself reacting differently, in ways you never considered before.”

Sam breathed again. There it was. The answer. That was why he couldn’t get little Nurse Sweetness off his mind. “So give me something for it.”

Cross shook his head. “No can do.”

“Come on, there’s a drug for everything these days. Turn me into me again.”

“You’re a doctor, a surgeon. Kids’ lives depend on you. I’m not prescribing you so much as an aspirin. Besides, it wouldn’t work, anyway.”

There was that, Sam thought, feeling chastened. But he was desperate. “What, then?”

“I want to see you again. Make an appointment this time. We’ll talk our way through it.”

“I’m not going to start seeing a shrink over this.”

“You already have.”

Sam rubbed his jaw. “I’ll think about it.”

Cross stood. “In the meantime, you might want to think about confronting the source of your trauma.”

“Come on, Jared, ‘trauma’ is a little harsh.”

“The scene of the crime, then.”

Sam’s mind flashed immediately to Caitlyn—and what they had done in that basement room. “You can’t be serious.”

Cross gave him an odd look and nodded. “Try visiting the place where it began, where you started realizing you were a day late and a dollar short on saving yourself and Nurse Matthews.”

“The storage room.” Sam breathed again. That he could do. “Why not? It beats the hell out of tangling with little Nurse Prim-and-proper.”

“You seem more focused on your hostage situation than on the actual abduction,” Cross observed. “What exactly happened to the two of you in that underground room, anyway?”

I lost my mind for a woman I never thought I liked, Sam thought, and now she’s metamorphosed on me. “Nothing.”

Cross shrugged. “You’ll tell me. Sooner or later.”

Sam had a staggering thought. “This post-traumatic stress disorder could have happened to Cait, too, right?”

“Cait?”

“Caitlyn. Nurse Matthews.”

Cross fought a grin. “Presumably. If the normal order of her world was rocked.”

“This sort of thing could really change people,” Sam mused.

“It changed you.”

“It’s tripped me up a little, that’s all.”

“You know, after we’re finished with the stress disorder, we can work on your ego problem if you like.”

Sam made a gesture in Cross’s direction to tell him what he thought of that. Then he got to his feet, too. “You’ve already fixed me. Thanks for taking the time.”

“Make an appointment, anyway.”

Sam watched Cross leave the office and he took a deep, steadying breath. It wasn’t him. Well, not entirely. It was Caitlyn, too. She’d gone wacky on him. He was essentially fine.

He had pre-op routines to do on Gilbert. Sam headed for the door. He stepped into the corridor almost squarely into Dr. Kimberlie Leon’s impressive chest.

“Hey there,” he said, grinning. “Looking for someone?”

“As a matter of fact, I am. You.” She tossed back her mane of long, dark-blond hair. She was the newest addition to Mission Creek Memorial’s staff—an oncology physician.

“My lucky day.” He leaned a shoulder against his door. “What can I do for you?” He was back, Sam thought. Oh, yeah, he was definitely back on his stride.

Then he looked over the doctor’s shoulder. He saw Cait Matthews coming toward them down the corridor, shoulder to shoulder with one of the interns, a dark-eyed Lothario from somewhere out West. California, Sam thought it was. As he watched, she tucked that tidy, short blond hair behind one of her ears and glanced up at the guy out of the corner of her eye. Then she laughed.

She’d been a virgin until a few days ago! Was she trying to turn that one inaugural event into a whole four-year term or something?

“Got to go,” he said suddenly to Kimberlie.

“But—”

“Catch up with me later.”

He left the doctor gaping after him and stepped back into his office. He slammed the door hard.

It was well after four before Cait returned to the maternity wing. She was so tired her legs felt weak.

She had managed to keep her contact with Sam to a minimum through the rest of the day, but each isolated encounter with him had drained more out of her. Emotions had been ricocheting through her for the past eight hours—ups, downs, highs, lows and everything in between. She’d found herself sneaking peeks at him, remembering. Again. Then she’d found herself hating him for his newfound brusqueness, though she’d noticed that he was foul with everyone, not just with her.

Maybe he, too, was having trouble regaining his equilibrium after what had happened to them, she thought as she made her way down the flamboyant corridor. The absurdity of such an idea would have made her laugh if she’d had the energy. The unflappable, outrageous Sam Walters? Hardly.

Cait’s feet stalled as she reached the storage room across from the nursery. She touched the doorknob tentatively, praying it would be locked and she could just turn away from here and go home. Why did Jared Cross want her to do this, anyway? Her every inclination was to turn her back on what had happened, to walk away from it, close it out, forget it. Then again, if she’d been able to do that, she wouldn’t have gone to see him in the first place.

The door wasn’t locked. Cait leaned into it and it opened. She stepped over the threshold and let the door swish shut behind her.

She took a few militant steps into the room, then stood in the center of it with her arms crossed over her breasts. Her heart started beating a little too quickly. She unfolded her arms to press the heel of her right hand to her chest. “This is ridiculous.”

Her gaze slid over the shelves stacked with cardboard boxes. Someone had picked them up, she thought, because they’d gone flying when Sam had briefly struggled with Hines the day the man had taken them. Hines had come back into the room to find the others escaping through the vent, and Sam had held him back long enough to keep him from grabbing the last woman in the duct. By then, of course, it had been too late for Sam and her.

Cait shivered and glanced at the hard plastic-and-metal chairs tangled together like some kind of absurd jungle gym in one corner. Then her eyes were drawn to the door, and the memories came rushing back….

“Let’s go, let’s go!” Hines shouted, waving his gun.

Cait took a step that way, then balked. The thought of leaving the room with him had cold sweat beading along her spine, between her breasts, under her arms. Then Dr. Walters was behind her and she couldn’t back up anymore, couldn’t get away.

“Do it. Just go ahead,” he whispered. “I’m right behind you. We need to placate him until I have time to think our way out of this. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

She’d believed him, Cait realized, had trusted him blindly. Probably because, for the first time in her life, she hadn’t been able to think her own way out of what was happening to her. Hines had forced them down the hall to a maintenance room and into a laundry chute there.

Now she went to the vent and placed her palm against the cool metal. Then she eased down to sit on the floor, pulling her knees up to her chest. She wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen here. Was she supposed to feel miraculously better for confronting this place? Well, she didn’t. She covered her face with her hands and closed her eyes.

Then she heard the door open.

For a single moment her heart seized. She was afraid to look to see who it was. She was suddenly, insanely sure that Hines was back to try again. He’d escaped. It was going to start all over again—except this time she was alone.