will, he took a step closer, noting her head was precariously perched near the edge of the mattress. The reason for that made a certain part of his body react yet again.
He should wake her up, make sure she got home safely, but something stopped him from touching her. He was due at work in a half hour, but it wasn’t that.
He’d approached last night the same way as he did every year on this date, and yet something about this woman’s appearance in the bar had been different. The way she’d jerked the ring off her finger as if she couldn’t stand it being there one second longer. She’d looked lost, the sense of desperation in her eyes dragging up a sense of protectiveness he hadn’t felt in a long time. Hadn’t wanted to feel in a long time.
Rafe had thought for a moment she was running away from someone. He’d actually glanced behind her to make sure some abusive ex wasn’t following her. When he’d satisfied himself that she was alone, he decided to bide his time and leave her to someone else.
Except she’d sat down beside him, the clear blue of her eyes colliding with his glance and sending all rational thought running for the door. Maybe the alcohol had actually done the job he’d meant it to do and addled his thinking. The rest was history.
So what did he do now that he was no longer under the influence?
She was a big girl. Surely she could hail a cab and get home on her own?
The notepad on the end table caught his attention, along with a black elastic circle.
When she’d reached for the band to put her hair up before settling down to sleep last night, he’d stopped her, the thick mass of strands calling for him to sift through them one more time...to wrap them around himself and...
Hell, she’d driven him wild last night. He closed his eyes to banish the memory.
Time to go. Now. Before he woke her up and made himself later for work than he was already going to be.
Besides, goodbyes were one thing he’d never learned to do well.
Going to the table, he gripped the pen, his fingers accidentally brushing across the hair band in the process. Without thinking, he picked it up and pocketed it, picturing her leaving the hotel with her locks in sexy disarray from what they’d done in this room.
He would probably be damned to eternity for everything that had happened last night.
No. The damning had taken place many years ago, when shaking eighteen-year-old hands had placed his signature at the bottom of an irrevocable document.
He grabbed the hotel stationery. This time there would be no signature. The pen hovered over the pristine white paper for several seconds as he thought. Then he scrawled two words. No Goodbye. No Thanks for a fun evening. Just: Taxi fare. Then opening his wallet one last time, he drew out a crisp fifty-dollar bill. Because unless he wanted to go snooping through her purse or, worse, wake her up to ask if she had any money, it was the only thing he could think of to do.
Laying the bill under the note, he set a cheesy palm tree alarm clock on top of it.
Then he quietly exited the room. This was one event that would go down in annals of What Not to Do with a Beautiful Woman.
Because every moan and touch and thrust was permanently seared in his skull. A cautionary tale at best. So the only thing left to do was tiptoe back to his normal mundane life and never think of Bonnie—or whatever her name was—ever again.
One month later...
EVEN AS CASSIE wrapped the measuring tape around Renato Silva’s head, she knew. The newborn would fall below the circumference norms.
Microcephaly wasn’t something she encountered every day. Or even every year. And yet this child made three in the last eight weeks. A shiver went up her spine. With all of the reports coming out of Brazil and elsewhere, she worried that these cases could somehow be related.
Two centimeters below normal. Not terribly off, but still concerning.
One of the nurses glanced at her, brows up. Cassie knew what she was asking. She gave a subtle nod in response, her stomach churning inside her. And it was up to her to give the new mom the news. The obstetrician had already moved on to the next laboring patient.
She cradled the baby in her arms, and switched to Portuguese. “Você fala inglês?”
“Yes. Some. I am learning.” The young woman’s hungry eyes took in the swaddled infant. Her child. A tiny soul carrying a wealth of hopes and dreams.
Two centimeters surely wouldn’t destroy all of those dreams. She’d seen babies with terrible deficits go further than anyone had ever thought possible.
The baby gave a hoarse cry. It was a touch more strident than that of most newborns. Another worrying sign.
“Renato is breathing just fine and his color is good. We’ll want to run a few tests—”
“Something is wrong.” With those soft, knowing words, the whole atmosphere in the room changed.
Cassie couldn’t keep it from her, not and live with herself. “His head is a little bit smaller than we’d like to see, but we won’t know anything for sure until we check him out completely.”
Her patient fell back onto the pillows. “It was the sickness. I left...came here in December to get away from it. Ele me seguiu.”
It followed me.
The words sent a chill through her. “What sickness? You were sick while you were pregnant?”
“Yes. Just after I learned I carried him. I fear it was Zika.”
News and panic about the mosquito-borne virus had been a huge topic among doctors and journalists for the last year. Yes, she knew of it. This was the third incidence of microcephaly at the hospital. Like it or not, it was time to call the CDC again. She knew they were swamped—it was the excuse they’d given her three weeks ago when the second microcephaly case had appeared. They’d told her they’d get to her as soon as possible. But this time they had to listen to her. Her patients’ lives depended on it.
“You know for certain you had Zika?”
“I was sick. The mosquitoes, they were very bad.”
It was just turning summertime in the U.S. but since the seasons were the opposite on the southern side of the globe, December was the hottest part of the year in Brazil.
Her stomach took another turn, whether from the tragedy unfolding in front of her or from something else, she had no idea. She swallowed hard, trying to rid herself of the queasy feeling. It stayed with her no matter how much she tried to banish it.
“I’ll come back and talk to you as soon as we check Renato over.” She squeezed the woman’s shoulder. “I promise.”
Cassie nodded at the nurse to take the baby to the nursery, where they would carefully go over the newborn inch by inch.
But first...
She walked through the door and pulled her cell phone from the pocket of her lab coat. First, she was going to call the CDC in Washington one more time and give whoever answered a piece of her mind.
* * *
The canopy of the paraglider caught the wind and swept Rafael Valentino’s legs out from under him as it lifted him skyward. Still attached to the towline behind the boat, the wind whistled past his face, plastering his hair to his head. A familiar sense of weightlessness took over, allowing his problems to drop to the warm sands of the beach below, where they would stay until he touched down. A few more seconds, and he could relax into his harness. But not yet.
Rafe had flown more in the past month than he had in years. Not since those early terrible days after his father’s death, when the adrenaline