The Awakening Of Dr. Brown

Ethan did have a clue, actually, but it embarrassed him to say it. He waited, scowling, for his former college roommate to do so instead.

The priest obliged with a sigh. “You’re a guy. As in, young, impressionable, and above all, the opposite gender.”

Ethan snorted in a wholly ineffective attempt to disguise his discomfort. “You’re a guy, Kenny’s a guy, half the tenants are guys.”

“I’m a priest, in case you’ve forgotten. And it’s pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain that Kenny’s only got eyes for Ruthie. The tenants are after her blood, so that leaves you. Besides, as I said, you’re young, good-looking—”

“Impressionable. You said impressionable.”

“Yeah, I did.” Father Frank was silent for a moment. “I think it’s pretty safe to say Phoenix is someone who’s accustomed to having her way. She’s used to being the one in control. That’s why she walked out just now. Things had gotten out of hand—she wasn’t in control. She thinks—”

“She thinks that with me, she will be.” Ethan pulled out the chair next to the priest’s and sank into it. After a moment he said in a soft, chagrined growl, half to himself, “I’m not sure she isn’t right. She’s Phoenix, for God’s sake.” He leaned forward earnestly; he and Frank Mendoza went back a long way, and he’d long since gotten over the impulse to apologize for his language lapses. “You think you’re the only one who had a crush on her all through high school? She was…” He lifted his hand and waved it helplessly, unable to find the words.

“She was the classic rebel, the Bad Girl,” Father Frank said, in the gentle tone of reminiscence. “But there was something untouched—and untouchable—about her, too. Every girl wanted to be her, every guy wanted to have her, but nobody ever could. A potent recipe for an icon.”

Ethan nodded. But he didn’t feel comfortable explaining, even to his closest friend, that with him, where Phoenix was concerned it hadn’t ever just been about sex appeal. That had been part of it, of course; he’d been a normal adolescent male. But raging hormones couldn’t have accounted for the way he felt when he listened to her music. The stirrings in his soul that even now he couldn’t give a name to. The hours he’d spent with his guitar and a Walkman portable stereo, softly playing and singing along.

“I gotta tell you,” he said ruefully, leaning toward his friend, the priest, in the classic manner of a confessing sinner, forearms on his knees, hands clasped together between them, “she still has it. You know? When she walked in, I have to tell you, my pulse rate shot up.”

Father Frank laughed and clapped him on the shoulder, more like college roommate than priest to sinner. “Just means you’re alive, my friend. And about the rest—” He broke off momentarily as the conference room door opened to frame the secretary’s patrician form, then continued in a hurried aside as they both rose to follow her. “Don’t underestimate yourself. That woman may not know it yet, but I think this time Phoenix may have bitten off more than she bargained for.”

“Are you sure you want to do that?” Patrick Kaufman asked in a neutral tone.

Phoenix ignored him while she carefully selected a cheroot from the rosewood humidor on the bookcase shelf behind his desk and lit it with the matching rosewood-and-silver desk lighter that sat beside it. She puffed out a cloud of fragrant smoke before she said with an audible hiss, “Yess.”

Patrick shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He glanced at his watch and murmured, without even a hint of sarcasm, “I suppose you’d like me to leave you two alone?”

That was the great thing about Patrick, Phoenix thought. She could browbeat him all she wanted, even usurp his private office in the middle of a working day, and it never had the slightest effect. She wondered sometimes what went on behind those pale, rabbity eyes, whether a real heart pumped inside that narrow chest.

“Yes, thank you, Patrick,” she said with exaggerated sweetness. “And while you’re at it, tell Miss Freeze to turn on the voice mail machine and get lost, too, would you please?” She let her voice drop an octave to its customary purr. “In situations such as this I find it’s best to work in…privacy.” Around the cigar her lips formed a seductive smile.

Which, naturally, had no effect whatsoever on Patrick. “I’ll suggest to Mrs. Fitzhugh that she take an extended lunch,” he said dryly, punctuating that with the snap of his briefcase lock.

Alone in the lushness of burgundy, brass and mahogany, Phoenix took the cheroot from her lips and gazed at it with satisfaction. She didn’t smoke—had given it up years ago, in fact, with reasonable ease, never having been all that serious about it to begin with. But, she thought, it was amazing what a prop like that did for her self-confidence. Almost like having a microphone in her hands.

Well, hell yes—it is. It’s the same. Just the same… She closed her eyes and concentrated on slowing her breathing. She inhaled the sweet, heavy perfume of cigar smoke…psyching herself…calming herself…preparing. Because it was the same, this moment, waiting here in the plush privacy of Kaufman’s office for that young, gentle-looking doctor to join her. No different from all the moments before, so many of them, waiting in the wings for that moment when she would erupt onto a stage before a stadium filled with thousands of screaming fans. Same butterflies, same pounding heart, same adrenaline rush. Somehow, that made it easier—a familiar and therefore much more manageable fear. Whether of one or fifty thousand, an audience was an audience.

Ethan’s first thought when he smelled cigar smoke was that Patrick Kaufman’s meek and mild exterior hid some unexpected depths. Phoenix appeared to him only as a silhouette, standing behind Kaufman’s big mahogany desk with her back to a bank of windows framing a pale noonday sky, so he didn’t see, at first, that it was she who was responsible for the cigar smoke. Until she stepped forward, gesturing with what appeared to be a twig held between her thumb and forefinger, then lifted it and put it between her lips.

“Hey, Doc.” Her rusty voice was muffled only slightly by the cigar. “Glad you decided to take me up on my offer. Have a seat.”

Ethan nodded by way of a greeting, feeling about as uncomfortable as he’d ever been in his life. After a moment’s hesitation he took the burgundy leather chair she’d indicated and settled himself into it, striving to appear relaxed and knowing he was fooling absolutely no one.

He waited for Phoenix to seat herself, either in the mate to his chair or the big one behind the desk. When she did neither but remained standing with her backside propped casually against the desk behind her, he remembered suddenly what Father Frank had said to him in the conference room. She has to be the one in control. By seating him and standing herself, he realized, she’d put herself in the familiar—and comfortable—position of performer, with him as her audience.

Oddly, he felt himself warming toward her then, actually admiring her cleverness. He almost smiled—before he remembered what her reaction had been the last time he’d done that. So he kept the smile inside and concentrated on keeping his outward demeanor somber.

She made a breathy sound—soft, ironic laughter—and blew smoke toward the ceiling. “Come on, Doc, don’t look so disapproving.”

“Not disapproving,” said Ethan. “Surprised, maybe.”

“Surprised? Why?” Her lips curved, forming a smile around the slender shaft of the cigar. Ethan’s stomach lurched oddly, as if the chair had just dropped out from under him.

He shrugged and leaned forward, elbows on the chair arms, hands clasped across the empty space in front of him. Trying to look—and think—more like a physician and less like a starstruck boy. “Oh, I don’t know—I guess I thought you’d have a little more concern for your health—and your voice.”

She took the cigar from her mouth, frowning critically at the glowing end. “I don’t smoke, actually. Just wanted something to play with.” She slid a sideways glance at him from under her lashes. “Looks kind of neat, though, doesn’t it?”

“I think I saw one in a Clint Eastwood movie.”

“Yeah,” said Phoenix with a hint of a smile, “me too.” She whistled a bar or two of haunting melody. When he recognized it as the theme from a famous spaghetti western, Ethan felt it was safe to return the smile. When he did, the whistling broke up into a husky chortle, the kind that provokes a similar one deep in the listener’s own chest.

“There, you see? Not a bad little icebreaker.” She looked around for an ashtray and seeing none, laid the cigar carefully on the glass desktop. “And now that we have—broken the ice, that is…” her eyes zeroed in on him with a directness that was, in an odd way, more seductive than flirting “…Dr. Brown seems kind of formal, doesn’t it? Don’t you have a first name?”

Ethan hesitated, wishing, not for the first time, that his parents had had the foresight to name him something like…Bobby, or James. As exhilarating as the idea was of being on a first-name basis with Phoenix, the combining of Ethan and Brown was just unusual enough to be recognizable. She hadn’t recognized him yet, and for reasons he couldn’t explain, even to himself, he wanted her to know him just as plain Dr. Brown for a little while longer. As long as possible, anyway. She’d have to know eventually, he supposed, but…not yet.

He cleared his throat and said quietly, “Under the circumstances, I think Dr. Brown is probably more appropriate.” And watched her eyes flare with the same indefinable emotion he’d seen in the conference room, when she’d caught him smiling at her. The one he still wasn’t sure was anger.

“Doc it is, then,” Phoenix said with a smile she didn’t allow to reach her voice or her eyes. Outwardly calm, she felt jittery inside, as if she’d missed a stage mark during a performance, or come in on the wrong beat. Nothing she couldn’t cover, but it rattled her nonetheless. She straightened and moved unhurriedly around the desk, putting it and some distance between herself and the oh-so-arrogant Dr. Brown. Who the hell did he think he was? It astonished her to discover that she was disappointed. That she truly did want to know.

“So, Doctor…Patrick tells me you work at a free clinic down there in the…neighborhood.”

Yes, and when Patrick had told her that, she’d remembered why the doc had seemed so familiar to her, remembered that she’d seen him before, coming out of the clinic that day, the day she’d gone for her little walk down memory lane. She wouldn’t tell him that, though. He would wonder what the likes of Phoenix had been doing in that neighborhood. He would wonder why.

“That’s right,” he was saying, watching her with neither judgment nor speculation in his brown eyes. Just a curious intensity that she found unnerving.

She picked up the cheroot, stared at the still-smoldering tip and then, annoyed with herself, put it back down. How was it that she felt edgy and nervous as a teenager in the principal’s office, while he sat there looking, as Doveman would have said, like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth? Transferring her annoyance to him, she said sharply, “Tell me, how is it that you’re all the way over here with a group of concerned citizens during clinic hours, Doc?”

He shrugged, his eyes narrowing just slightly, as if from a sudden and brief flare of light. After a moment he said evenly, “I don’t know, civic duty?”

She gave a soft snort of laughter. “Right. So, who’s minding the store? Or do you just shut it down when you have…a civic duty to attend to?”

His gentle gaze made her feel vaguely ashamed. “I have another doctor covering for me.”

What was it with this guy? Phoenix wondered. Her head was full of a million questions she wanted to ask him, a million things she wanted to know about him. Since when did she give a rip?

And where did he get off, this kid—younger than she was, he had to be—sitting there looking at her with such assurance…like some sort of shaman, as if he knew all the answers to the riddles of the universe? Who the hell did he think he was? Didn’t he know who she was? She was Phoenix, for God’s sake!

“Come on, Doc. Civic duty?” She threw it at him like an accusation. “Patrick told me you were there the night that woman—”

“Louise Parker.”

“What?” He’d spoken so softly she’d barely heard him. Or perhaps didn’t want to hear.

“The woman who died. Her name was Louise Parker. Yeah, I was with her when she died. I couldn’t save her. I tried, but I…couldn’t.”

Well, she for sure didn’t want to hear that—the pain in his voice. Suddenly claustrophobic, she paced to the edge of the desk, stopped with a jerk and turned to face him. Took a deep breath. “Look, I’m truly sorry about what happened. I am. I had no idea I owned those buildings. To tell you the truth, I own a bunch of things I don’t know about. Look—handling my money is Patrick’s job, and I don’t get in his way. I trust his judgment. If he thinks it’s a good investment, he goes ahead with it. That’s the way we’ve always done things, that’s the way I want it. Of course—” she paused, wondering why she felt a need to say it “—when I found out about this I fired him.”

“Of course,” the doctor said dryly, “I can see that.”

“I’m always firing people,” she said, shifting her shoulders as if that could get her out from under the burden of guilt he was dumping on her. Damn him. This doctor was making her feel defensive. And she hadn’t done anything wrong to feel defensive about. She hadn’t. Not this time. What the hell right did he have to make her feel bad? “Ask anybody. Look, I can’t help it if nobody believes me.”

She was utterly mystified when he smiled. Really smiled. A smile of such warmth and blatant sex appeal it made her breath catch. My God, why hadn’t she noticed before how gorgeous this guy was? Good-looking, sure—that had been the whole point, hadn’t it?—but this…this was way beyond basic good looks. She found herself wondering what he’d look like without the beard, and whether he wore it to make himself look older, more doctorish. Lord, the man had the face of an angel—a completely masculine, incredibly sexy and extremely irritating angel. And, she suspected, underneath the casual slacks and short-sleeved shirt, the body of a Chippendale dancer….

Something—a noise, a slight movement—brought her back to her senses. Had he made that faint, embarrassed sound, or had she? How long had she been standing there staring at him? How long had she been smiling this goofy smile? She drew a shaken breath. The claustrophobia wrapped itself around her like a warm, wet blanket.

“Hey, Doc,” she said in the slightly thickened voice that in her case was most often the accompaniment of sexual foreplay or way too many Bloody Marys. “How about if we get out of here—go somewhere and grab some lunch?”

“Lunch?” Ethan repeated the word as if he’d never heard it before. The truth was, food was just about the farthest thing from his mind just then. He was feeling lightheaded and queasy, a little off-balance—symptoms that might be indicative of a fever, perhaps an infection of the inner ear. Except that Dr. Brown knew there was nothing whatsoever wrong with him, nothing physical, anyway. What was “wrong” with him, he suspected, was nothing more complicated than a case of acute sexual desire. Which was not a terribly difficult diagnosis, given that he was sitting a couple of arm’s lengths from one of the world’s most desirable women, and the woman was smiling at him like…as if she—oh, come on, Ethan, say it!—as if she was coming on to him.

Good Lord—seducing him. Which, he reminded himself, according to Father Frank had probably been her intention to begin with. And which, he dimly recalled, he’d expressed concern about his ability to withstand. With good reason, it now appeared.

It occurred to him that no matter how he felt about food at that moment, going out for lunch was probably the best idea he’d heard in a while.

“Fine,” he said, in a voice as viscous as hers. He had to remind himself to sit straight in his chair. He felt as though his body had begun leaning toward her of its own volition, as if she generated a magnetic field of some kind, something impossible to resist, like gravity.

It took a supreme effort of will to tear his eyes from her and focus them on his watch. Nearly one. He’d told the doctor standing in for him at the clinic that he’d be back at two. “I have an hour,” he said. And then, hearing the unaccustomed sharpness in his voice, gruffly added, “If there’s somewhere close by…”

“Perfect. Give me five minutes….” Already making for the door, she paused abruptly the way he’d seen her do so many times during performances, her body an incredible study in the dynamics of energy and motion, changing direction with the heart-stopping suddenness of birds in flight. “Just want to change into something…less comfortable.” And she smiled, lowering her lashes to sultry half-mast, her sexuality cranked up to full wattage, now. It was classic Phoenix—the Phoenix whose music videos had fueled countless millions of erotic fantasies.

Ethan wondered what she would say if he told her that for all her efforts, the heat she was generating in him now was barely a flicker compared to the conflagration he’d experienced a few minutes ago, when she’d allowed him one brief glimpse into what he felt certain was the heart of the real Phoenix.

True to her word, she was back in less than five minutes, although it was a moment before Ethan realized it. For an instant, just a heartbeat, he actually mistook her for Kaufman’s frosty secretary. Already half out of his chair when the double take kicked in, he smiled and self-consciously patted a nonexistant necktie. “Wow. I think I’m under-dressed.”

The “less comfortable” outfit she’d changed into was a formfitting dove-gray business suit, with a skirt that ended a good eight inches above her knees. Serviceable black high heels put her somewhere near Ethan’s own six feet in height, and her glorious long black hair had all but disappeared into a sleek and tidy bun. A pair of tortoiseshell glasses and a black briefcase completed the ensemble.

At the look on his face, Phoenix laughed, a child’s delighted chortle. “Protective coloring,” she said, and pirouetted, showing off her costume as unselfconsciously as a child might. “I can lose myself in any crowd. It’s so easy—you just have to dress like everybody else, walk like everybody else. Nobody looks at faces, don’t you know that? People see what they expect to see. It’s lunch hour in a downtown business district. Trust me—nobody’ll look twice at one more gray flannel suit.” She paused to squint critically at him, one long glance down…then up. “Too bad I don’t have an extra one for you.” But the way she said it, with a little half smile and a certain shimmer in her eyes, took most of the criticism out of it.

“Oh, well—” she shrugged as she turned, for some reason breathless “—just try and keep a low profile, okay?”

Weren’t those almost exactly the same words Father Frank had said to him on the way in? Ethan was silently laughing as he followed Phoenix out of Kaufman’s office.

And for the second time she happened to glance at him just in time to catch him in the act. “What?” she demanded, coming to a dead halt. “What is it with you, anyway? Or maybe I should say, what is it with me that you think is so damn funny?”

“Trust me,” said Ethan quietly, “there’s nothing about you I find even remotely funny.” But all at once he was looking at her—really looking, and seeing not Phoenix the icon, but the woman behind the image. With eyes half-closed, as if through a filter he saw once again the woman—perhaps even the girl—he’d first caught a glimpse of when she’d told him about firing her business manager. Vulnerable and uncertain. “I was laughing at myself, actually. Don’t you ever do that—laugh at yourself?” He reached around her to open the door she seemed to have forgotten.

She threw him a quick, startled look, and except for a breathy sound too subtle to ever be called a snort, didn’t reply.

In the corridor, they almost collided. Ethan had made the turn he thought must take them to the elevators, but Phoenix, unexpectedly, had started in the opposite direction. For one dizzying moment he felt the brush of her body against his arm, an engulfing fireball of heat. Smelled her scent—unique, indescribable, but once encountered never to be forgotten—simply Phoenix.

“Uh-uh—this way,” he heard her say through the ringing in his ears. “I have a secret exit. It’s a service elevator, or something—goes straight down to a loading dock in the parking garage. Patrick got me a key. It’s not fancy, but it saves hassles—you know.”

Ethan did know—very well. What he didn’t know was how he was going to get word to the Secret Service agent stationed in the lobby downstairs, patiently waiting for him to step off one of the building’s three polished brass elevators. He did try to avoid putting his protectors’ jobs and his own safety at risk unnecessarily. As he lengthened his stride to keep up with Phoenix’s brisk pace, he wondered whether there might be a cell phone in that briefcase she was carrying, and what she’d think if he asked to use it. He reminded himself that he was a doctor, after all.

The freight elevator was large, utilitarian and slow, and smelled faintly of chemicals. As the doors rumbled shut behind her, Phoenix punched the button for the lowest parking level, then settled herself against a side wall a polite distance from Ethan, who was already stationed against the back. He angled a long look at her briefcase and thought again about asking for a cell phone. Instead it was she who broke the awkward elevator silence.

“You tell me, Doc—” and her voice seemed loud in that enclosed space “—what do these people want from me?”

The question caught Ethan off-guard. Playing for time, he cleared his throat then shrugged. “I don’t think I should speak for them.”

She laughed, a sharp, rude bark. “You’re their spokesman. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

Ethan shook his head. “Spokesman? That was your idea, not mine.” He studied her, wondering about the faint pink flush that had crept into her cheeks, just below the rims of the tortoiseshell glasses. “I was just here as an interested observer. I don’t consider myself qualified to speak for anyone, much less the people who live in those buildings. I don’t have any idea what their lives are like. I don’t think anyone does.”

“Yeah, well, I guess you’ll have to find out, won’t you,” Phoenix snapped as the elevator bumped to a stop. She pushed through the gap in the opening doors, then halted, one hand on her hip, to look back. The doc was sure taking his sweet time, standing there looking around him with that funny little frown on his face. “I thought you said you were in a hurry.” What was he waiting for, a bus?

“Sorry,” he said as he joined her, looking guilty as sin, “but I really need to make a call. You don’t happen to have a cell phone, do you?”

“What, in here?” Following the direction of his eyes, she glanced down at the briefcase in her hand and was half-surprised to see it there. “God, no—this is just for show.”

Then it occurred to her—she’d all but forgotten he was a doctor, easy to do when he looked so little like one. It was hard to think of him that way even now, hard to imagine him actually saving people’s lives… “I thought all you doctors had your own phones,” she said, but in a friendly tone to show him she’d forgiven him. “Beepers and all that.”

He pulled a hand from his pocket and showed her a small black object. “Just a beeper. No phone.” He smiled wryly. “Maybe when I actually have a salary.”

“Ah.” She shrugged; financial concerns made her uncomfortable, which was why she employed Patrick. “Well, I think there might be one on the next level, next to the pay booth.”

There was. Unaccustomed to waiting for anyone, Phoenix paced and fidgeted while he made his call. It wasn’t that she minded waiting so much—although admittedly it was a whole new experience for her to have to adjust to someone else’s schedule—but much of the success of her protective coloring depended on staying in motion, not giving anyone a chance to look too long or too hard. Standing still made her nervous—another of Doveman’s sayings—as a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.