Waiting... On You (Force Recon Marines) (4 page)

In the twenty years that followed,
they had continued to write to one another regularly. They also saw each other
whenever he came home. Except for a brief interlude three years ago, there had
never been enough time together, though. Much to Hanna’s regret, they remained
best friends, but nothing more. Not that she wanted to lose his friendship, but
she had always hoped that one day he would see her as more than a lifelong
friend.

Sometimes Hanna wondered if she’d
still be waiting for Nick Kelly when she was old and gray. No one had ever come
close to replacing him in her heart. She had always been helplessly and
hopelessly in love with him, and she probably would be until the day she died.

Now, he was coming home again, after
being gone three long years. Colleen had told her that his commander had given
him all the leave he needed to assist his family in finding his brother. Hanna
was elated and yet scared to death. No doubt, they’d be seeing a lot of each
other as they worked to discover what had happened to Dylan and Lance. Her life
was in an upheaval as it was, and Nick Kelly’s extended visit was undoubtedly
going to bring even more chaos.

CHAPTER 3

“THAT WAS A NICE PIECE OF EMERGENCY
SURGERY, DR. WALLACE.”

Rick Penman was a resident physician
who frequently assisted Hanna in surgery. As they stood side by side at the
sink, removing their surgical gloves, then washing their hands, his compliment
made her smile self-consciously. A blush heated her face. Compliments always
made her feel awkward, but one of her teachers at medical school, a favorite,
had told her once just to be gracious and say thank you, so she did.

“I was afraid he’d lost too much blood
from that leg laceration. That was a bad car accident out on Highway 20. The
cops were saying the guy who caused it was high on something,” Dr. Penman told
her.

Hanna shook her head as she left the
operating room with the young doctor. “I heard he was hardly injured.”

“Just a few scratches. The triage
nurse patched him up before the arresting officer took him over to the police
station for booking.”

“The young man we operated on was
lucky. If he’d been older all that blood loss probably would have killed him.
He should be fine, eventually.”

She’d had to stop the rapid and heavy
blood loss from a deep wound to the man’s right leg. In addition, he’d suffered
broken bones in the both legs when he’d gotten trapped in his demolished car.
The firemen at the scene had used the Jaws of Life to extricate him from his
totaled vehicle.

One thing she saw a lot of in the
emergency room at George Vancouver County General Hospital was car accident
victims, especially during tourist season. Too many were caused by intoxicated
drivers, drunk, or lately, high on drugs. Port George was a community of around
9,000, so they hadn’t had much of a drug problem, until recently. And it wasn’t
just pot or amphetamines or barbiturates. They were seeing more and more cases
of cocaine overdoses in ER, even heroin occasionally.

“Are you done for the day?”

Hanna glanced at her watch. “Yes,
barring any more accident victims coming through those doors before I get out
of here.”

It was Friday night, and she was
anxious to get home; to take a long hot bath and curl up with a good book.
She’d worked twelve-hour days all week. But she had the weekend off. Then she
had only one more week until her two week vacation. Besides being the chief
trauma surgeon at the hospital, she was head of ER, though you’d never know it
by her arduous work routine. No perks for her.

But she loved her job, and she loved
the emergency room. People needed a good doctor when they came into the ER. She
felt like she was doing something important, not just making money. She hadn’t
gone into medicine to make money. She’d wanted to make a real difference; to
help people. And she loved the nonstop energy of the emergency room. It kept her
sharp and on her toes. You had to assess quickly and correctly in emergency
situations. George Vancouver County General wasn’t as fast paced or as
challenging as Harbor View Medical Center in Seattle had been, but she had more
responsibility as head of ER, so it made up for the slower pace.

Though she certainly needed the rest,
her vacation was going to be a working one. She was going to spend her two
weeks looking for Lance and trying to solve the mystery of her brother’s death,
with or without Nick Kelly’s help and in spite of the fact that he had told his
mother to tell her to leave it alone until he got home.

Well, he hadn’t come home yet, and she
wasn’t going to sit around waiting for him. She planned on interviewing the
folks who lived around Nat Simm’s place, and she was going to make a more
thorough exploration of Discovery Bay. She’d dive the entire bay, if she had to.
And while she was at it, she just might try to find Lance’s worthless ex-wife,
not that she thought it would do much good, but at this point, anything was
worth a try.

Hanna was just about to go into the
doctor’s lounge where her locker was located, when Rick Penman caught her arm
and stopped her. “Want to go have a drink or a cup of coffee?”

The man beside her was only two years younger
than Hanna, but she felt much older than him. She’d done her residency ten
years ago. She had a lot more experience than he did. Not only was she head of
ER, but she taught medical classes at the University of Washington during the
regular school year and lectured frequently at other medical facilities in the
Puget Sound. He was a very nice man. He was even moderately attractive, and he
was an excellent physician with a promising future. But she just wasn’t
attracted to him.

“Sorry, Rick, but I’m so tired
tonight, I just want to go home and soak in a tub of hot water. It’s been a
long week.” She hated disappointing him, so she smiled and left him a little
hope. “Maybe next week after one of our shifts together.”

Rick definitely didn’t look too happy.
“I’m not sure we have any shifts together next week, but I’ll hold you to some
future date.”

Hanna smiled again and nodded, wondering
if she had given him the wrong impression about an actual date. Well, as
always, the social graces were not her forte.

At the back of the lounge, she opened
her locker and pulled out the clothes she’d been wearing before surgery, then
headed toward the women’s dressing room.

After a quick shower, Hanna dumped her
scrubs in the laundry bin and slipped into her red linen dress. With a
button-up front, it had a shirt-style collar and a deep neckline, cap sleeves
and twin pockets over her breasts. The tailored darts in the front and back
created a form-fitting effect that flattered her tall, willowy figure. Her red
high-heeled sandals matched the dress. It was one of her favorite outfits,
feminine, but professional.

Unfortunately, her hair was not nearly
as neat and stylish. Once again, it was in a short French braid. Loose wisps of
honey blonde hair had escaped to curl around her face and neck, proof that it
had been another long hard day. She repaired it as best she could, then headed
back to her locker where she reached into the pocket of her white hospital
jacket and dug out her eye glasses. Because she was always misplacing them, she
kept extra pairs everywhere, in her coat pocket, her purse, the operating room,
at home, in her car. It was ridiculous. She ought to just get laser surgery.
She had contacts, but they were troublesome for her, so she didn’t wear them
often.

After grabbing her shoulder purse, she
headed for the exit. At the double doors that separated the emergency care
rooms from the waiting area, she came to a dead halt. Through one of the small
windows in the door, she saw Nick Kelly on the other side, talking to some of
the staff.

Her heart skipped several beats and a
wave of lightheadedness swept over her. She stepped back, away from the doors,
and grasped the corner of the wall, taking several long deep breaths.

Every time she saw Nick Kelly, it was
like this; her heartbeat quickened, her knees weakened, and her stomach
summersaulted. Her entire body stirred with sweet excitement. She’d seen so
little of him over the past twenty years, she was always overwhelmed by his
reappearance. Managing the excitement racing through her, she returned to the
doors and stared through the window at him, soaking up every single detail of
him covertly.

Six feet four inches and somewhere
around two hundred and forty pounds of superb physical fitness were all
packaged into the most handsome man she’d ever set eyes on. He was a big man,
and he carried all that height and muscle on a frame that had been trained to
be in the best shape a man could be in. He wasn’t ramrod postured, but he had
the bearing of a military man, of a Marine, so straight and tall, so forceful.

He was conversing with a few of the ER
staff he’d gone to high school with. A petite, dark-haired, operating nurse, by
the name of Ashley Davis, stood close to his side. She was an old flame of
Nick’s from high school. Twenty years ago, Ashley had been head cheerleader and
homecoming queen. Since then, she’d been married and divorced twice. At the
moment, she was single and still very pretty, even at thirty-eight. She
attracted men like a magnet.

Hanna noted how blatantly she was
flirting with Nick. She kept touching him as she talked to him, using the same
routine on him she used on all the good-looking doctors in the hospital.

Hanna wondered how some women did all
that so easily. Were they born flirts? Or did they learn it? If they learned
it, they must spend hours in front of a mirror perfecting those pouty,
come-hither looks. Invariably, those women also knew how to walk. Hanna had
always wondered how you got your hips to sway with the rhythm of your walk. How
come she’d never been able to do that?

When she reflected further on it, she
figured she’d probably just look so stupid, she’d make herself and anyone
looking at her laugh. She watched Ashley give Nick a long inviting look, then
laugh at something he said like it was brilliantly funny. Maybe she should try
a few of those provocative moves, especially if they would catch the interest
of Nick Kelly.

On impulse, Hanna went in search of
the nearest mirror. She looked at herself critically and grimaced. After being
on duty twelve hours, the makeup that she’d applied this morning was now long
gone. She looked tired, and as usual, her braid was unraveling. She worked out
on her days off, so she still had a slim figure, and her red dress outlined
that nicely, but it was not voluptuous and sexy, like Ashley Davis’.

Why had Nick shown up here, at the
hospital, so late in the day anyway? This wasn’t how she had envisioned looking
for him after three years. Well, damn! She was never going to be a femme
fatale. Women like that didn’t wear thick-rimmed glasses or their hair in a
braid at thirty-four because it was convenient. They weren’t socially inept or
shy and ordinary, either. And if they had been as hopelessly attracted to a man
as Hanna was to Nick Kelly, they would have known what to do about it.

Sighing in resignation, Hanna put her
glasses back on, squared her shoulders, and walked out to greet Nick. He was
her friend, after all, and she knew he’d come here to see her. She wasn’t going
to hide from him just because she didn’t look the way she wanted to for him.

To her immense relief, he flashed her
a smile the moment he saw her. It eased her anxiety and made her heart melt. The
moment she walked up to him, he reached for her and seized her in a bone-crushing
hug that completely enveloped her and thoroughly surprised her.

It wasn’t the light friendly hug she
had anticipated. It was an unexpected, precious moment stopped in time. She
lingered in his powerful arms, and to her great joy, he held her there, against
his big frame, for several long wonderful moments.

When he finally put a little space
between them, his smile was broad, displaying straight white teeth framed by a
wide sensuous mouth that was endearingly tilted at one corner. Three years had
put a few more wrinkles around his eyes. A few also bracketed the corners of
his mouth.

His jaw was square, and shadowed with
a day’s growth of beard that darkened his cheeks. His chiseled facial features
were just as striking as ever, but he looked a little older and a little more
world-weary than Hanna remembered. He lived a hard life, most of it spent in
harsh, austere, outdoor conditions, and it showed.

His dark brownish-black hair was
clipped to an inch in length on the sides and up the back. The line around his
ears and neck was a bit ragged, as if it hadn’t been cut in a while. On top, it
had been left longer, maybe a couple of inches, long enough to be tousled and
wind-blown, so that a few spiky tendrils just barely fell onto his forehead.
Hanna wanted to sweep her fingers through his dark hair and comb it back into
place.

Realizing she hadn’t said a word to
him yet, that she was simply staring at him like an idiot, she settled for a
smile that told him how much she had missed him. “It’s good to see you again,
Nick. How was Afghanistan?”

“Cold and miserable,” he laughed. “And
damn, it’s so good to see you again, too, Hanna!”

Now that his smile had faded to an
impossibly sexy lopsided grin, she could see his beautiful, long-lashed, pale
gray eyes better. She loved their color. Depending on his mood, they could be
dark and smoky or pale and silver. They also tended to pick up bits of color
from the shirts he wore, she had noticed long ago.

As her eyes slid over every detail of
his face, she noticed he had a scar through his left eyebrow. It interrupted
the straight heavy slashes of his brows, giving him a rakish look. Hanna didn’t
remember seeing it there the last time he’d been home. She couldn’t stop
herself from tracing its length with the tip of her finger.

“Were you injured?”

The look he gave her made her breath
catch. “Just a nick. Nothing really.”

She doubted that. It looked like a
knife wound, or maybe a close call with a bullet, but she didn’t pursue it. She
suddenly realized that there were still other people around them, including
Ashley Davis. In her preoccupation with Nick, she had completely forgotten
about them. When she glanced over at Ashley, she noted how the nurse was
watching both of them with a decidedly petulant expression. To Hanna’s stunned
surprise, she realized that the woman was jealous. It was a revelation that
delighted her. Moments ago, she never would have thought that she could make
someone like Ashley jealous.