She preferred jotting things down, it seemed more personal.
But she couldn’t ask Avery to do that when things in the US were all done via computer. The young woman had been with Mila from the very beginning, when she’d rushed into Bright Hope as the frantic single mom of a very ill three-year-old girl. It had turned out Sarah had type one diabetes. Once they’d gotten her blood-sugar level under control, Avery had wanted to give something back and had insisted on donating several hours a week to the clinic—after working her own full-time job. She’d been at Bright Hope ever since, eventually becoming an employee rather than just a volunteer, and Mila had no idea what she’d do without the woman.
“Do you want me to take a look at it?” James’s voice rumbled over their heads.
Yeah, it would have been pretty tempting to ask him to crawl around underneath that desk, but she was afraid her body would go haywire and send out pheromonal signals that could be detected for miles. “It’s just a loose power cord but every time the desk jiggles, the power blinks in and out, and Avery loses data.”
He gave the old machine a dubious look. “Not good for your system. Do you have any tape?”
“Tried that a couple of times.” She was proud of herself for being one step ahead of him. Although it was really Avery who had thought of that. And how embarrassing was it to have this exchange in front of a camera?
“How about surgical tape? Or even phlebotomy tubing?”
How was that supposed to work any better than what they’d already tried?
Before she could ask, Avery said, “I’ll get you some. Anything to keep the darned thing going.”
Mila made a mental note to get someone techy out to look at the machine. The last thing she wanted was for James to have to come out to fix things.
Like her practice itself? If Freya hadn’t gotten him to agree to pump some funds into Bright Hope and allow her to open a branch inside The Hollywood Hills Clinic, people like Avery would have very few options. Mila had gone through most of her inheritance in the years since her aunt had passed away. Not that she missed the money. She didn’t. But she missed what it could do.
Within a minute her assistant had come back with a roll of latex tube tourniquet and wide surgical tape. “Pick your poison.” Avery said it with a smile, but a shiver went over Mila. Maybe because her poison had been James once upon a time. And like a slow-acting toxin, he’d killed the part of her heart that she’d handed over to his care.
“Let’s try the tubing first.”
Freya, who’d been silently watching the exchange, smiled. “My brother the handyman. Always trying to fix what’s broken.”
Was her friend talking about the eating disorder she’d overcome years ago? Mila remembered James’s sometimes heavy-handed tactics when it came to his sister, but Freya said that things had mellowed between them over the last year or so. Especially now that she and Zack had fallen in love and gotten married. Their twins were weeks away from being born, and the pair was ecstatic. Mila had done her best to be happy for her friend, but it struck too close to home. That could have been her and James had he not decided that a wife whose passion was working with various relief organizations would cramp his Hollywood style.
That might not be exactly true, but something had given him cold feet. He knew she wasn’t interested in being a big earner, so she’d always assumed that had had something to do with it. Only James had never seen fit to tell her why he hadn’t wanted to marry her. Just that she was better off without him.
And she was.
Definitely.
And he could keep his reasons for breaking their engagement to himself. After all, she was used to being kept in the dark. Her aunt had loved her, but in trying to protect her she’d left Mila unprepared for the shocking reality of her parents’ deaths. They hadn’t died in a car accident, like her aunt had told her. In fact, her mother had lingered for days in a hospital after being shot. Ten-year-old Mila had never even had the chance say goodbye. It had taken her a long time to forgive her aunt for that once she’d discovered the truth.
The Mila of today did not believe in holding back information no matter how unpalatable or difficult it might be. To do so was to destroy her trust. So James’s refusal to level with her had made it easy for her to walk away and never look back.
His voice came from nowhere, jerking her back to the present.
“I’ll need some scissors.” He tested the flexibility of the tubing he’d been handed.
What was he going to do with it?
Avery grabbed a pair of sharp scissors from the desk and handed them over.
Somehow wedging his large body between the leg of the desk and the wall, he grunted a quick oath at something and then remained silent for several minutes.
And the view from where she was standing was exquisite.
A length of tubing appeared on one side of the computer. “Can you grab that, Mila?”
Conscious of the pencil skirt she’d donned for the photo shoot, and praying the photographer didn’t catch a wardrobe malfunction, she knelt down and took hold of the tubing that he’d pushed beside the computer. Only it now had a dark stain on it. Red. Wet.
“Are you bleeding?”
She glanced up at Avery, who read her wordless request. Within a second or two she handed Mila a bottle of hand sanitizer and some gauze. She quickly wiped down the tubing and lobbed another question toward James. “What’s going on back there?”
“Tie it at the front of the computer.”
She frowned. How was this supposed to fix anything? “How tight do you want it?”
“Pull it taut and then start the computer up.”
Mila tied the two ends together and made a quick knot in the rubber. “Okay, let’s see if that did it.”
Pushing the start button, the screen leapt to life, along with a warning that the computer hadn’t shut down correctly.
“No kidding,” her assistant muttered, staring at the monitor.
“It’s going, James. Thank you.”
A few seconds later the man edged backward and climbed to his feet. The fingers of his right hand were pressed tightly against the sleeve of his dress shirt, where another stain had formed. “Oh, my God, what did you do?”
A series of clicks went off behind them. Mila ignored the sound.
“It’s nothing. Just found some old tack strip along the wall.”
Oh, no. The building had been carpeted when they’d first moved in. Mila had immediately gone to work removing it and then prying up the tack strip. By the end of the process she’d been dog tired, and since the office desk had always been there, she’d left the lone strip where it was. She’d forgotten all about it until now. It was a wonder Avery hadn’t cut herself on it. She threw the woman a look. “I’m sorry, I totally forgot about it.”
Her assistant gave her arm a gentle squeeze. “It’s fine. I’ve never had any problems avoiding it.”
Avery was a lot smaller than James, so that was probably true. Still, it didn’t make her feel any better.
“Let me see.” She held her hand toward him. He eyed her for a second and then shook his head.
“It’s nothing. Just a scratch.”
“Then you won’t mind if I look at it.”
His jaw tightened, but he didn’t argue with her again. He let her take his hand. The second his skin touched hers, a frisson of awareness trickled up her arm and circled her chest. She did her best to beat it back, turning his hand over to get a better look at it.
The flash of a