Dante's Shock Proposal. Amalie Berlin

could she offer after all these years?

      He hadn’t told her because he wanted comfort. Of course it still hurt—she could summon the shock and anguish of losing her father in an instant, but that was different. His had been a double-whammy violence perpetrated by others, not them simply deciding to die.

      There was something else he’d meant. Her plan. “You think I’m making a mistake going forward with my pregnancy plan because I have no family.”

      That surprised him. That expression she could identify. He really didn’t know anything about her, so why it surprised him, she couldn’t guess.

      “You have no family?” Alarm. Identified. “No one at all?”

      Great.

      Lise sighed. This had gotten too far off track, and she didn’t know how to get it back on track. Not with her contradictory reaction to wanting him, and his single-minded focus on tempting her—either physically or emotionally.

      They barely knew one another, even if she knew one really terrible thing from his past. “It doesn’t matter. I’m not going to let the fact that I don’t have a family keep me from having a family. Don’t go down that road.”

      A knock at the door cut off whatever he’d been about to say. Dante stood up, one of his knees between hers, his body so fleetingly close it dominated her personal space and pulled at her like gravity—so like that moment after the kiss to end all kisses, when he’d stood over her, hand fisted in her hair, and the pull between them so strong other people in the club had felt it.

      Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and she felt herself craning forward to look up at him, but a shot of pain radiated down her right arm. She lowered her chin again and he stepped around to head for the door.

      “Hello, Dr. Valentino. I wanted to check in and see if you’d heard from Lise Bradshaw? Do you want to file disciplinary action against her?” a woman’s voice asked from the other side of the door, sounding entirely too cheerful considering the words she’d chosen.

      Disciplinary action?

      Who was that? Human Resources?

      She tilted her head to try and see past him, but Dante’s body blocked the small opening in the door.

      “She arrived just after we hung up with you earlier. No need for disciplinary action. This was her first tardiness, and she had a very good excuse.”

      They hadn’t even talked about why she’d been late. Was the man allergic to the truth?

      He spoke with her a moment longer, then added a doozy. “But it’s good you stopped by. I want to start paperwork to have Nurse Bradshaw transferred to my team full time.”

      He gave reasons—not all entirely true, but mostly. They came to some kind of agreement, and Dante closed the door and returned to sit with her.

      “How do you know I had a good excuse? I haven’t told you anything about why I was late.”

      “You’re not the tardy sort.” His phone rang and he held up one finger, checked the screen, and said, “It’s Recovery. I’ve got them giving me updates every twenty minutes.”

      So he’d assumed, which was different from lying how? Not at all. She could have a terrible excuse for all he knew.

      For the most part Lise was confident in her personal life. She might not have been had she known her fellow nurses were judging her for the size of her scrub tops, but generally she felt confident in her abilities, her job, her life plans, her moral compass...

      But she wasn’t so confident as to assume she knew everything. Did unreasonable confidence make something not a lie?

      Another reason she should run the other direction. Dante hadn’t even asked if she wanted a full transfer to his team, he’d just started the ball rolling.

      Dante rang off and dropped the phone back into his chest pocket. “So, you were saying?’

      “I was asking why you just lied, because you never asked why I was late.”

      “No one will question it. Our secret, then? I was simply giving you the benefit of the doubt.”

      “I don’t like secrets. And you admit you had doubts.” Lecturing a grown man about honesty wasn’t a smart use of her time, and yet...prior to this morning Lise would’ve never thought she could enjoy arguing with anyone, and she really didn’t want to examine why she liked arguing with him.

      “You’re right. Tell me why you were tardy.”

      “Because I was rear-ended this morning on the way to work,” she said. “Which, granted, is a good excuse. But the point is—”

      “You had a car accident on the way to work?” He cut her off—much as the driver ahead of her had done, which had ended in her being rear-ended. “You had an accident and you were only about fifteen minutes later than usual? Did you have yourself checked out? That’s why you were dropping instruments and why you keep rubbing your shoulder?”

      Muttering an expletive, he didn’t wait for her to answer the questions at all, just stood, rounded her chair, and ran his fingers along her vertebrae. Thumb. It was the pad of his thumb—she could even feel the texture of his skin, the ripple of every ridge of his thumbprint seemed to stand out to her.

      The man went from smirking and self-assured to angry doctor mode in an instant. She couldn’t keep up, and moments before smirking and self-assured, he’d been all sexy.

      “I’m a little sore. It didn’t destroy my car. They didn’t have to cut me out with the Jaws of Life. My back bumper fell off. I got a jar forward but I’m okay. I’m just a little sore.”

      “A little sore deserves to be checked out.” He swore again and once again one hand slipped around the front of her neck, long index finger and thumb cradling the underside of her mandible while his palm and fingers cupped her throat.