“Doc it is, then,” Phoenix said with a smile she didn’t allow to reach her voice or her eyes. Outwardly calm, she felt jittery inside, as if she’d missed a stage mark during a performance, or come in on the wrong beat. Nothing she couldn’t cover, but it rattled her nonetheless. She straightened and moved unhurriedly around the desk, putting it and some distance between herself and the oh-so-arrogant Dr. Brown. Who the hell did he think he was? It astonished her to discover that she was disappointed. That she truly did want to know.
“So, Doctor…Patrick tells me you work at a free clinic down there in the…neighborhood.”
Yes, and when Patrick had told her that, she’d remembered why the doc had seemed so familiar to her, remembered that she’d seen him before, coming out of the clinic that day, the day she’d gone for her little walk down memory lane. She wouldn’t tell him that, though. He would wonder what the likes of Phoenix had been doing in that neighborhood. He would wonder why.
“That’s right,” he was saying, watching her with neither judgment nor speculation in his brown eyes. Just a curious intensity that she found unnerving.
She picked up the cheroot, stared at the still-smoldering tip and then, annoyed with herself, put it back down. How was it that she felt edgy and nervous as a teenager in the principal’s office, while he sat there looking, as Doveman would have said, like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth? Transferring her annoyance to him, she said sharply, “Tell me, how is it that you’re all the way over here with a group of concerned citizens during clinic hours, Doc?”
He shrugged, his eyes narrowing just slightly, as if from a sudden and brief flare of light. After a moment he said evenly, “I don’t know, civic duty?”
She gave a soft snort of laughter. “Right. So, who’s minding the store? Or do you just shut it down when you have…a civic duty to attend to?”
His gentle gaze made her feel vaguely ashamed. “I have another doctor covering for me.”
What was it with this guy? Phoenix wondered. Her head was full of a million questions she wanted to ask him, a million things she wanted to know about him. Since when did she give a rip?
And where did he get off, this kid—younger than she was, he had to be—sitting there looking at her with such assurance…like some sort of shaman, as if he knew all the answers to the riddles of the universe? Who the hell did he think he was? Didn’t he know who she was? She was Phoenix, for God’s sake!
“Come on, Doc. Civic duty?” She threw it at him like an accusation. “Patrick told me you were there the night that woman—”
“Louise Parker.”
“What?” He’d spoken so softly she’d barely heard him. Or perhaps didn’t want to hear.
“The woman who died. Her name was Louise Parker. Yeah, I was with her when she died. I couldn’t save her. I tried, but I…couldn’t.”
Well, she for sure didn’t want to hear that—the pain in his voice. Suddenly claustrophobic, she paced to the edge of the desk, stopped with a jerk and turned to face him. Took a deep breath. “Look, I’m truly sorry about what happened. I am. I had no idea I owned those buildings. To tell you the truth, I own a bunch of things I don’t know about. Look—handling my money is Patrick’s job, and I don’t get in his way. I trust his judgment. If he thinks it’s a good investment, he goes ahead with it. That’s the way we’ve always done things, that’s the way I want it. Of course—” she paused, wondering why she felt a need to say it “—when I found out about this I fired him.”
“Of course,” the doctor said dryly, “I can see that.”
“I’m always firing people,” she said, shifting her shoulders as if that could get her out from under the burden of guilt he was dumping on her. Damn him. This doctor was making her feel defensive. And she hadn’t done anything wrong to feel defensive about. She hadn’t. Not this time. What the hell right did he have to make her feel bad? “Ask anybody. Look, I can’t help it if nobody believes me.”
She was utterly mystified when he smiled. Really smiled. A smile of such warmth and blatant sex appeal it made her breath catch. My God, why hadn’t she noticed before how gorgeous this guy was? Good-looking, sure—that had been the whole point, hadn’t it?—but this…this was way beyond basic good looks. She found herself wondering what he’d look like without the beard, and whether he wore it to make himself look older, more doctorish. Lord, the man had the face of an angel—a completely masculine, incredibly sexy and extremely irritating angel. And, she suspected, underneath the casual slacks and short-sleeved shirt, the body of a Chippendale dancer….
Something—a noise, a slight movement—brought her back to her senses. Had he made that faint, embarrassed sound, or had she? How long had she been standing there staring at him? How long had she been smiling this goofy smile? She drew a shaken breath. The claustrophobia wrapped itself around her like a warm, wet blanket.
“Hey, Doc,” she said in the slightly thickened voice that in her case was most often the accompaniment of sexual foreplay or way too many Bloody Marys. “How about if we get out of here—go somewhere and grab some lunch?”
“Lunch?” Ethan repeated the word as if he’d never heard it before. The truth was, food was just about the farthest thing from his mind just then. He was feeling lightheaded and queasy, a little off-balance—symptoms that might be indicative of a fever, perhaps an infection of the inner ear. Except that Dr. Brown knew there was nothing whatsoever wrong with him, nothing physical, anyway. What was “wrong” with him, he suspected, was nothing more complicated than a case of acute sexual desire. Which was not a terribly difficult diagnosis, given that he was sitting a couple of arm’s lengths from one of the world’s most desirable women, and the woman was smiling at him like…as if she—oh, come on, Ethan, say it!—as if she was coming on to him.
Good Lord—seducing him. Which, he reminded himself, according to Father Frank had probably been her intention to begin with. And which, he dimly recalled, he’d expressed concern about his ability to withstand. With good reason, it now appeared.
It occurred to him that no matter how he felt about food at that moment, going out for lunch was probably the best idea he’d heard in a while.
“Fine,” he said, in a voice as viscous as hers. He had to remind himself to sit straight in his chair. He felt as though his body had begun leaning toward her of its own volition, as if she generated a magnetic field of some kind, something impossible to resist, like gravity.
It took a supreme effort of will to tear his eyes from her and focus them on his watch. Nearly one. He’d told the doctor standing in for him at the clinic that he’d be back at two. “I have an hour,” he said. And then, hearing the unaccustomed sharpness in his voice, gruffly added, “If there’s somewhere close by…”
“Perfect. Give me five minutes….” Already making for the door, she paused abruptly the way he’d seen her do so many times during performances, her body an incredible study in the dynamics of energy and motion, changing direction with the heart-stopping suddenness of birds in flight. “Just want to change into something…less comfortable.” And she smiled, lowering her lashes to sultry half-mast, her sexuality cranked up to full wattage, now. It was classic Phoenix—the Phoenix whose music videos had fueled countless millions of erotic fantasies.
Ethan wondered what she would say if he told her that for all her efforts, the heat she was generating in him now was barely a flicker compared to the conflagration he’d experienced a few minutes ago, when she’d allowed him one brief glimpse into what he felt certain was the heart of the real Phoenix.
True to her word, she was back in less than five minutes, although it was a moment before Ethan realized it. For an instant, just a heartbeat, he actually mistook her for Kaufman’s frosty secretary. Already half out of his chair when the double take kicked in, he smiled and self-consciously patted a nonexistant necktie. “Wow. I think