Born A Hero

Death was no stranger to those in the medical profession, especially surgeons and technicians involved in high risk cases. Over the years she’d grieved at every loss as though it were her own child, and as a matter of personal choice remained involved with helping parents come to grips with their own grief.

But never, in all the years since that bleak gray day in October, had she seen anyone suffer the way Elliot had. Her heart expanded and she nearly reached out to him before she remembered how easily he had shredded both her heart and her secret dreams.

“Katie, I’m truly sorry,” he said when she remained silent. “I shouldn’t have dumped my foul mood on you.”

“I agree completely, and your time is up.” She directed a pointed look at the large sinewy hand still holding her captive.

His brows lowered. “You’re still ticked off.”

“No, I’m in a hurry to get to the hospital, Doctor. I have patients to attend to!”

“Point taken.” Finally he let her go. The sensory imprint of those strong, callused fingers lingered, but she refused to indulge the need to rub away even that reminder of his touch. “I’m heading back myself. If you give me five minutes to throw on some clothes, I’ll go with you.”

Her self-possessed poise was beginning to fray. For the sake of her pride—and her peace of mind—she had to put some distance between the two of them.

“I don’t have five minutes, Doctor. And if I did, I wouldn’t waste them on you.”

Anger simmered for an instant in his eyes before fading. “Seems you’ve changed more than your looks, Kate,” he said quietly.

The whisper of hurt in his voice struck her as the worst kind of hypocrisy. He wasn’t the one who’d walked out of the pool house ten years ago, a pathetic basket case. Who hadn’t been able to get out of bed for a week. Who’d come close to hating herself for the humiliating spectacle she’d made of herself. Worst of all, who hadn’t been able to let a man touch her for years afterward.

“If you mean I’m no longer a…hmm, let me see if I can get this right. Oh yes, I remember now, ‘a stupidly naive little girl on some misguided mercy mission,’ you’re completely correct.”

He winced, then raked his free hand through his hair, leaving it tousled. Beneath the sun-bleached brows his eyes searched her face. “I hurt you more badly than you let on, didn’t I?”

“Yes, you hurt me, but I also realize I was as much to blame for what happened as you were. Let’s just leave it at that.”

He bowed his head, his free hand pinching the bridge of his nose. When he glanced up again, regret shimmered in his eyes like tears. “Katie, it’s not that I didn’t appreciate—”

“I’m not going to discuss the past with you, Elliot,” she interrupted, her voice bordering on shrill. She took a breath and tried to ignore the conflicting emotions in her chest. When she spoke again, she had her voice—and herself—under control again. “You and I are here to do a job, not walk down memory lane. I’m sure we can treat each other with appropriate courtesy on those few occasions when we’re forced to spend time in one another’s company.”

The disbelief in his eyes had her teeth grinding together. Clearly, Golden Boy wasn’t used to being rejected.

“Is that what you really want, Kate?”

“That’s what I want,” she said in her firmest tone. She felt a sharp stab of satisfaction. Less than admirable, perhaps, but completely human.

He hesitated, then sighed heavily, his big chest rising and falling mightily. Then, as she made herself hold her gaze steady on his, his jaw turned hard and ice formed in his eyes.

“In that case, Doctor, I won’t delay you a moment longer.” Without another word, he turned and stalked off with long, angry strides.

Alone in a bathroom the size of a regular hotel room, Elliot jerked the towel from his hips, wadded it into a ball and slammed it into the shower stall. As he stepped into clean briefs, he worked to level emotions that scared him.

“Way to go, Slick, you handled that real well,” he muttered as he dug into his shaving kit for his razor. As he slapped lather on his jaw, he forced his fractured thoughts into something resembling reason.

During the past ten years surly had been his mood of choice, followed by rude and uncommunicative. No matter where he was or who was around him, he’d been an equal opportunity…jerk. His jaw tightened as Kate’s outraged words rang in his ears again.

Self-involved? He tried to dispute that, but couldn’t. Not that it bothered him all that much. A man who’d had the best part of himself amputated tended to think about what was missing. In his case there wasn’t a prosthesis he could buy to replace his wife and baby girl.

All he wanted was to be left alone. Most people got the message quickly enough. Medics Without Limits colleagues who worked with him soon learned to leave him strictly alone between assignments. No one invited him to share a meal or a beer…or a bed.

Damn it, Kate Remson had been way out of line!

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d taken one look at a woman and wanted her beneath him naked. No, damn it, not just a woman. His sister’s best friend. The solemn little brown wren he’d come to love as much as he loved Sarah.

Little Katie Remson, who’d always seemed to have her nose stuck in a book, had become a knockout with enough sexual wattage to short-circuit common courtesy and scramble his senses.

No wonder he hadn’t recognized her, he consoled himself as he methodically scraped away a night’s growth of whiskers. The black-rimmed, soda-bottle glasses that had dominated her face were gone, no doubt replaced by contact lenses—or maybe she’d had one of the new surgeries designed to correct her kind of severe myopia. Whatever the reason, he had been mesmerized by those golden eyes with the curly lashes and expressive brows.

Instead of the scraped-back ponytail or that twisted-up bun thing, her hair was now cut into one of those fashionable styles he’d first seen in Paris a few months back—like she’d just gotten out of bed after a hot and heavy night of sex. While she’d been looking up at him as if he was some kind of peasant and she was the queen, his fingers had itched to touch the soft wisps at the nape of her neck.

But it had been her mouth that had had life returning to his groin. For about ten seconds, he’d been in real danger of embarrassing both of them, which was why he’d thrown attitude her way. And hadn’t she tossed it right back?

Damn straight she had. Worse, she’d gotten him as worked up as a horny sixteen-year-old. Hell, the woman could wake the dead, prancing around in that slinky purple skirt that barely covered her butt. Someone ought to remind her that she was a surgeon, not a Riviera bimbo trolling for a sugar daddy.

Damned if she didn’t have all the moves, too, he thought, scowling at the memory of that round little bottom swishing back and forth as she stalked off toward the elevators, her chin in the air and triumph glittering in her amber eyes like little gold stars.

Memory lane, hell. He didn’t want to remember that night in the pool house any more than she did, apparently. For ten years he hadn’t wanted to remember it. Sometimes he managed to forget for months at a time, but sooner or later he would hear a soft voice or see a flash of glossy auburn hair—and then it would all come crashing down on him.

I love you, Elliot. I’ve always loved you. Please let me give you another child. I know a baby can’t replace Lauren and I can’t replace Candy. I know you still love her, but I’ll wait, forever if I have to. Whatever you can give me now, even if it’s just physical love, is enough.

Sweet virginal Katydid, with her painfully innocent eyes and desperate eagerness to please. He’d loved her like a second sister for most of her life, and yet he’d used her.

The memory of the sex itself was blurred by the booze he’d drunk that night. The morning after, when he woke up in the pool house behind his parents’ home, cradled in her arms, the scent of sex mingling with the chlorine from the pool in the foggy air, he’d all but strangled on shame.

It was that shame that had made him cruel, compounding his sins. He’d lost count of the nights he’d drunk himself into oblivion after that. Dozens, hundreds, it hadn’t much mattered. Everywhere he’d looked, he’d run into a memory.

Finally he’d taken a leave of absence from medical school and hit the road, ending up in Alaska, where he’d worked on a shrimp boat to earn his keep. It had been brutally hard work, taxing his strength and straining his muscles. By the end of three months, he’d regained the weight he’d lost, most of it muscle layered over his chest and arms.

At the end of shrimping season, he’d gone back to medical school, because that’s what his wife would have wanted. He’d told himself he was healed, but he knew better. He was little more than a shell, with a hollow space where his heart was supposed to be.

Katie was right to want nothing to do with him now, he thought as he morosely wiped the last of the lather from his face. He would only hurt her again if he got the chance. He wouldn’t want to. He would try his damnedest not to, but sooner or later it would happen. Candy and Lauren had trusted him to keep them safe from hurt, and they’d died. Katie had trusted him with her heart, and he’d stripped her of her virginity and her pride.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out Elliot Hunter was poison to those he cared about—and he did care about Katie, as much as a man with most of his heart cut away could.

Whatever she wanted, that’s what he would give her. He owed her that, at least.

After stalking away from Elliot moments earlier, Katherine realized she was holding her breath, and let it out as she turned toward the elevator lobby. It was only when she was safely in the limousine that she allowed her shoulders to slump.

As the limo carried her through the narrow streets of Montebello, a sense of unreality came over her. She couldn’t believe the chain of events that had brought her and Elliot to this majestic island in the eastern Mediterranean. She had no idea what part of the world Elliot had been holed up in before he received the call from his father, but one week ago she’d been in dusty, hot Baja California, hyperventilating her way through a serious makeover she’d known without question would be a miserable failure. Her only worry then had been how fast her hair would grow back after Señor Jose Miguel had finished whacking off several inches….

Chapter 2

Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills, California;

two days earlier

The shiny gilt letters on the door spelled out the name of the boutique in the same ornate script gracing the bottle of the obscenely expensive perfume sold at the desk and wafting through the ventilation system. Salsa pulsed through the small, but opulent fitting room, as hot and steamy as its Latin origin.

Alone in the fitting room, Kate stared at her reflection in the mirror. The woman staring back at her was a perfect stranger.

A goddess.

A siren.

Or dare she even think it, a slinky, sleepy-eyed sex object?

She drew a shaky breath and wetted lips the color of ripe plums. Secrets shimmered like summer heat in wide-set eyes of dark clear amber. Beneath sweeping, honey-toned brows, feathery lashes of the same hue fluttered in a provocative invitation. Slender hips longed to sway beneath thin silk the color of fuchsia, while her blood heated and her skin glowed.

“Oh my,” she whispered in awe. This woman would never be invisible in a roomful of people. Her face was a perfect oval, her features delicate. Her unblemished skin had been sun-kissed to a golden hue, with a subtle hint of rose-petal pink brushed over exotic cheekbones.

Still reluctant to believe her own eyes, Kate lifted a tentative hand to the softly curling tips of her glossy auburn hair, now layered and blow-dried into a breezy, asymmetrical, shoulder-length shag that did terrific things for her cheekbones.

When she walked into the clinic on Monday morning her staff would stare. Her pint-size patients would giggle. When she joined her parents for their traditional Sunday brunch next week, both would express their disapproval with their customary multisyllabic eloquence. Father, in particular, would be outraged that she’d cut off her crowning glory. Hadn’t Mother worn her hair in the same sophisticated—and boring—French twist for the past thirty-odd years? The same French twist Kate had adopted as her own sometime around her fifteenth year.

It had been a brain warp or some kind of temporary insanity, of course, combined with the two margaritas she’d gulped down to give her the courage to bare her head to a stylist’s scissors.

Muy magnifico, Doctor Remson. Que linda!

Magnificent? Beautiful?

Her? The nerd who’d been two and then three years younger than everyone else in her class, even in medical school? The pathetic geek who’d had only one date in high school—and that arranged by the brother of her best friend, Sarah?

The same Sarah who had talked her into spending the last six days at El Puerto d’Oro, the outrageously expensive health and beauty spa located fifty miles south of San Diego on the Baja California peninsula.

“Give her the works,” Sarah had ordered. A major makeover.

If Sarah hadn’t been standing right there next to her, urging her on, Kate was pretty sure she would have leaped out of the fancy salon and run all the way back to the Bay Area.

So what if she wasn’t attractive to members of the opposite sex? She had a life, didn’t she? A boring one, sure, but it was richly rewarding, which was what she’d been raised to value above all things. Service to others had been a Remson tradition for generations. Teachers, doctors, scholars and philanthropists dotted her family tree. As her parents’ only child, she’d always known she had an obligation to carry on the tradition. Founding the Children’s Free Clinic in San Francisco’s Mission District three years ago had been both a joy and an obligation.

Unmarried, and rarely been kissed, she had a cozy, turn-of-the-century flat on Nob Hill, the same VW bug her father had driven as a graduate student at Stanford and a small, but beloved, group of women friends. Perhaps there were moments in the darkest hours of night when her heart wept for her lost dreams, but by the light of dawn she had banished her haunted memories to the back of her well-disciplined mind. Maybe she wasn’t always over-the-moon happy, but she was productive and valued.

“What’s taking you so long in there, Kates?”

Before she could answer, Sarah slipped through the yellow-and-white-striped curtain, her green eyes glittering with expectation. A brunette who was also highly intelligent and remarkably kind, Sarah had been Kate’s rock during the worst period of her life, and she loved the outrageously unpredictable woman like a sister.

“Wow!” Sarah murmured, her hand still clutching the curtain, her large, heavily fringed eyes going wide. “You look…dangerous.”

Kate snorted a self-conscious laugh. “It’s the dress, what there is of it.” Which was no more than a couple of yards of flowing silk, cut on the bias to fall from thin, rhinestone-covered straps. The bodice dipped into a V so deep it would be considered a misdemeanor in more conservative states. Below a slinky stretch of shimmering fuchsia, the ruffly hem hit her in midthigh, shorter even than her favorite man-tailored nightshirt.

Her father, the biblical scholar, and her mother, the primary-school principal, would be appalled to see their properly reared daughter parading around in a couple of flimsy scarves sewn together—and not much else.

“Um-hmm.” Pursing her lips, Sarah cocked her pretty head and studied Kate through those famous, sinfully thick Hunter eyelashes. “Give me a twirl, sweetie, so I can get the full effect.”

Kate reluctantly complied.

“Hmm, that sucker’s a definite keeper,” Sarah pronounced with a wickedly naughty grin Kate desperately wished she could replicate. But dull old Katherine had done only one naughty thing in her life—and she was still suffering the aftereffects.

“Oh, Sarah, I don’t know,” she wailed piteously. “I’ve already spent so much money on the spa and clothes and shoes I’ll never wear that the numbers are all but worn off my credit card.”

“So what? You’re a rich surgeon, aren’t you?” Eyes the color of sunshine on jade sparkled the way they always did when Sarah teased her childhood friend. Another pair of sun-dappled, jade-green eyes shimmered for an instant in Kate’s mind. Eyes that were haunted and bleak and…brutally angry. Years of practice helped her banish the image almost as quickly as it appeared.

“What I am is darn near broke after this past week,” she declared firmly. “I’ll be lucky to make the mortgage payment on my flat next month.”

Sarah dismissed that with typical Hunter imperturbability. Besides, she knew all about the trust fund from Kate’s maternal grandfather that had put her friend through medical school—with plenty left over. “Nonsense,” she declared airily. “Did you or did you not tell me only two weeks ago that you were…uh, let’s see, how did you put it exactly?” She lifted one winged brow. “Oh yeah, I remember, ‘fed up with looking in the mirror and seeing someone’s dried-up spinster aunt’?”

Kate felt her face warming. Her wine-soaked soliloquy on the night of her thirtieth birthday still had the power to make her wince. “Well, yes, I might have said something like that, but—”

“Did you or did you not tell me your sex life was a total dud?” The sudden glint in Sarah’s eyes dared her to disagree.

Damn her, Kate thought peevishly as she swallowed the skillfully worded denial already forming in her mind. “Yes, but I’d had a few glasses of champagne and—”

“Look at yourself, Katie!” Sarah demanded now. “A terrific, trendy hairdo instead of that awful retro-hippie look—”

“Thanks very much.”

“—and flattering makeup instead of that awful pink lip gloss.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Sarah, I spend most of my time behind a surgical mask. My patients don’t care whether or not I slather on mascara before I scrub.”

“But those studly residents prowling the halls do.”

“Attendings do not date residents,” Kate declared in her mother’s haughtiest tones.

Sarah, the rat, ignored her the way she always did. “Mark my words, sweetie, straight men all over the Bay Area will be falling prostrate at your feet, begging to be your devoted sex slave for life.”

Because Kate had a particularly vivid imagination, the image that arose featured hard muscles beneath bronzed skin, narrow hips and a particularly outstanding example of masculine anatomy. Her breathing sped up. But when her imagination directed her attention higher, to bold aggressive features and deep-set, haunted eyes, she deliberately wiped her mind clean.

“I don’t recall mentioning anything about sex slaves—”

“No, what you actually said was, and I quote, ‘Oh Sarah, just once in my life I’d like to feel wild and wicked and…utterly wanton instead of so damned proper and…matronly. Just once I’d like to have a man lick champagne from my navel and drive me into a frenzy with his mouth. Just once I’d like to—”

“Enough, please,” Katherine begged, her cheeks flaming. Narrowing her gaze, she glared at her friend with as much indignation as she could muster. “What did you do, bring a tape recorder along with that obscenely huge bottle of bubbly you forced down my throat?”

“No need,” Sarah replied breezily. “I have a photographic memory, remember? It’s genetic, like Mom’s dimples and Dad’s laugh.”

Kate arched a brow. “She who gloats brings serious karma down on her head,” she foretold in somber tones.

Sarah smiled smugly. “I’ll remind you of this conversation on your wedding day.”

Kate’s heart leaped—and yet again those haunted, sea-green eyes rose to taunt her. She had once loved Elliot Hunter with all of her heart and soul. She had given him her virginity with the sheer joy of being a part of him. Now she cringed inside every time she remembered the foolishly naive ninny she’d been at twenty.

“I don’t want to get married,” she said a little too shrilly—then forced herself to take a breath. “All I want is a little spice in the romance department before all my vital juices dry up.”

Sarah lifted her own perfectly shaped—and naturally golden—brows. “You want children, right?”

So desperately it was a soul-deep ache. “Yes, but—”

“And you’ve always said you believe in marriage before kids, right?”

“For me, yes, but—”

“So go for it, girl! Be proactive for a change. Be aggressive, be bold, be a little naughty.” Sarah clamped her hands on Kate’s bare shoulders and turned her toward the mirror again.

Biting her lip, Kate shifted her gaze to the skimpy cocktail dress, swaying just a little to make the hem tease her thighs—like the brush of a man’s mouth. Her breath caught, and she nibbled at the inside of her cheek.

Was it so wrong to want to feel feminine and desired and cherished just once in her life? Was it wrong to ache to hold a child to her breasts and feel an eager little mouth suckle? To have the child’s father curve strong arms around the two of them, love shining in his eyes?

“I’ll take it,” she said, making up her mind. As Sarah gave her a fierce hug, Kate had a feeling she’d just taken a giant step on the road toward some unknown destiny. She only hoped she wouldn’t live to regret it.

Somewhere on the road outside Puebla del Mar, southern Spain

“Bueno, mamacita, breathe through the contraction. You’re doing fine. Uh, fantastico, sí?”

Pausing while his fractured instructions were translated to the laboring mom, who looked more like a child herself, Elliot Hunter used his forearm to swipe away the sweat mixed with blood from the gash in his temple.

Though a surgeon by training and inclination, he’d done a rotation in obstetrics during his internship at Stanford Medical Center. All but a few of those births, however, had been normal deliveries in antiseptic conditions with the state-of-the-art equipment and superbly trained, highly skilled personnel of one of the best hospitals in the world backing him up.

In this case he had to make do with the few essentials in his medical bag—stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, an old-fashioned thermometer. Instead of scrubbing for the full five minutes, he’d drenched his hands in tequila from the bottle in his duffel, the only antiseptic he had. Instead of surgical scrubs he wore jeans, six-year-old boots and a Medics Without Limits T-shirt. An identical shirt, the last one he had that was clean, was folded nearby, ready to be used as a blanket for the newborn.

When the contraction finally eased, he settled back on his heels, resting his aching spine. The air was thick with heat and dust and the smell of sage. There wasn’t a hint of cloud cover, and the merciless midday sun beat down on the dusty road where, less than an hour earlier, the bus taking him to the seashore had blown a tire.

Before the driver could regain control, it had plowed into a rattletrap pickup truck driven by a frantic husband racing his pregnant wife to a woman’s clinic in Puebla.

When the tire had blown, Elliot had been jammed into the corner of the last seat in the bus’s rear, doing his best to block out the sights and sounds of happy, chattering families on holiday. The sickening screech of metal compressing metal had jolted him awake a split second before the heavy bus slid sideways into a deep drainage ditch beyond the rutted road’s dusty shoulder, where it had settled at a dangerous angle.

Terrified screams had rent the air as the passengers had been tossed around like corks in a savage sea. Elliot’s head had hit the window with a sickening thud, making his ears ring. The two chubby little girls from the seat across from his had tumbled against him, inflicting various blows from sharp little elbows and hard soled shoes as he cushioned them from serious injury.