and, taking a stool on rollers, made herself comfortable beside the gurney. “The meeting,” she added in case he’d lost the thread of the conversation.
Right now, her patient was eyeing the surgical tray like a person who would have preferred to have been miles away from where he was.
“To me.” He watched as she prepared to sew him up. From where he sat, the needle and suture was one and the same entity. He’d never been fond of needles. Jesse sat perfectly still as she numbed the area. “I was supposed to do a presentation. That was why I was cutting across the Diamond District,” he added. Then explained, “Because the traffic wasn’t moving and I needed to be there in a hurry.”
She nodded, her eyes on her work. “Lucky for that man that you did.” When he stopped talking, Tania momentarily raised her eyes to his face. Amusement curved her mouth. “I could write you a note, say you were saving a nice old man from a big bully,” she teased. “It’d be on the hospital letterhead if that helps.”
“No, I already called them to say I’d be late. They weren’t happy about it, but they understood.”
Her eyes were back on the gash just beneath his hairline. He had nice hair, Tania caught herself thinking. Something stirred within her and she banked it down. There’d be no more wild rides, she told herself sternly. They always led nowhere.
“Sound like nice bosses.”
“They are. For the most part,” he qualified in case she thought he had it too easy. Nothing could have been further from the truth. “What they are is fair.”
“So,” she said in a soothing voice, taking the first tiny stitch, “tell me exactly what you did to become a hero.”
Chapter 2
Tania heard the man on the gurney draw in his breath as she pierced the skin just above his temple. He sat as rigid as a soldier in formation.
Not bad, she thought. She’d had big, brawny patients who had passed out the very moment she’d brought needle to skin.
“It’s nothing, really,” Jesse said in response to her question as she slowly drew the needle through. He was aware of a vague pinching sensation and knew he was in for a much bigger headache later, when the topical anesthetic wore off.
Tania smiled to herself. Modesty was always a nice quality. It was also very rare in men who looked as good as Jesse Steele did. There was something about women throwing themselves at their feet that gave handsome men heads that barely fit through regulation-size doorways.
She kept her eyes on her work. “The man in trauma room three seems to think you’re the closest thing he’d seen to a guardian angel. And the man in trauma bay four thinks you’re the devil incarnate, so my guess is that you must have done something.”
He was probably going to have to give a statement and maybe show up in court, as well, if it came to that. No good deed went unpunished, Jesse thought.
Still, he did feel good about having saved the old man’s diamonds. “I tackled him.”
The doctor arched an eyebrow. He found it very sexy. “Excuse me?”
“The guy with the police escort,” he clarified. “I tackled him.”
“Why?” she asked.
His response had been immediate. There hadn’t been even a moment’s hesitation. “Because the old man yelled ‘stop thief,’” he told her and then, before she asked, he added, “and the guy in the suit was the only one running away from him.”
She could see why the old man had sounded so grateful. “That was pretty brave of you,” she acknowledged. “Most people would have looked the other way or pretended not to hear.”
He couldn’t do that, couldn’t look away or count the cracks in the sidewalk when someone needed help. He hadn’t been raised that way, wouldn’t have been able to live with himself if he’d just walked on. “I don’t like thieves.”
“Most of us don’t,” she agreed, humor curving her lips. And then she paused for a second to scrutinize him. There was more to this man than just looks, she decided. “Sounds like it’s personal.” Because her father had been and her new brother-in-law still was involved with the police force, she guessed, “Is someone in your family in law enforcement?”
He had meant to stop with just the first word, but somehow the rest just slipped out. She was extremely easy to talk to. “No. Someone in my family was robbed.”
Something about the way her patient said it made her look at him again, her needle poised for a third tiny stitch. “Who?”
“My parents.”
Tania felt her heart tighten in empathy. “What happened?”
Her patient blew out a breath and was quiet for so long, she thought he’d decided not to answer. Which was his right. She was prying.
But just as she completed the last stitch, he said, “My parents ran a small mom-and-pop-type grocery store in Brooklyn. We lived right above it. One night some thug came in and robbed them. When he tried to steal my mother’s wedding ring, my father pushed him away. The thug shot him point-blank and ran. My mother got to keep her wedding ring, the thug got seventy-three dollars in cash, and my father died.” His voice was stony. He could still remember hearing the shot and wondering what it was. He was home that night, struggling with his math homework and planning on asking his father for help. He never did do his math homework that night.
Tania cut the black thread and felt numb. When he mentioned his parents, she could envision her own, Magda and Josef, being in that situation. Granted, her father was a retired police detective, but, judging from the way Jesse’s jaw had tightened, the underlying emotional ties were the same.
She lightly placed her hand on his arm. “I’m very sorry.”
He nodded, trying to put distance between himself and the memory of that night. The memory of flying down the stairs and bursting into the store, only to see his father on the floor, not breathing, blood everywhere. His mother sobbing. Funny how it still cut so deep, even after all these years.
Jesse cleared his throat. He could feel the passage growing smaller, threatening to choke him. “Yeah, well, that happened a long time ago. I was thirteen at the time.”
Sympathy filled her. “Must have been rough, growing up without a father.”
She didn’t know what she would have done without hers. Especially after the incident. It was her father who’d broken through the stone wall she’d built up around herself rock by rock. Her father who’d held her hand throughout the ordeal and who’d given her the courage to stand up for herself. Without him gently, firmly urging her on, trying mightily to control his own anger, she didn’t know if she would have pressed charges, much less been willing to go to court to tell her story yet one more time. Each time she recited it, it got worse for her, not better.
But the latter never turned out to be necessary. She was spared the courtroom ordeal. Jeff Downey confessed at the last minute and the case was settled out of court with a plea bargain. He was sent upstate and got ten years. Less with good behavior. He was paroled six months ago. Which meant he was out there somewhere. She tried very hard not to think about that.
She’d always suspected that her father had had something to do with Jeff’s confession and his accepting the plea bargain, that somehow, Josef had managed to put pressure on the boy she’d once thought was the answer to her prayers instead of being the source of recurring nightmares. Her father had denied doing anything out of the ordinary when she asked.
But she knew her father, knew how he felt about all of them. How he felt about her being violated. There was nothing more important to Josef Pulaski than his wife and his daughters.
Although logically, she knew that not everyone had parents like hers, in her heart she always envisioned her parents whenever people mentioned their own. It was always sad to