Wedding Date With The Army Doc. Lynne Marshall

to get better between them. He’d stayed on in the army reserves doing his one weekend a month, catching hell from Evaline if it fell on either of his sons’ sports team events, but he hadn’t been able to pick and choose his times of service. They’d limped on, keeping a united front for their boys and their families, while the fabric of their love had worn thinner and thinner.

      Then, after a brutal series of attacks on US military personnel, they’d needed army reserve doctors and he’d volunteered to be deployed to Afghanistan. He had been one week short of going home when the IED had changed everything.

      His fault?

      He’d come home, had hit rock bottom after that, then eventually had got help from the veterans hospital, and had spent the next year accepting he’d never be the man he’d once been and cleaning up his act. He’d been honorably discharged from the army, too. But the damage to Evaline and his sons and his reputation as a surgeon had already been done. She’d filed for divorce.

      As time had passed his PTSD had settled down and he’d felt confident enough to go back to work. That was when he’d figured there wasn’t anything for him back home in Georgia anymore. His wife had divorced him. His oldest son had wanted nothing to do with him. So since his youngest son would be attending Pepperdine University in Malibu, California, he’d sought employment in the area, hoping to at least mend that relationship. St. Francis of the Valley Hospital had been willing to give him a chance as a staff surgeon. With less responsibility, not being the head of a department but just a staff guy for a change, not having to deal with his ex-wife and her ongoing complaints anymore and enjoying the eternal spring weather of Southern California, his stress level had reached a new low.

      Until today, when he’d had to tell his friend Jim Gordon some pretty rotten news—that he had metastatic cancer—and they both knew there’d be one hell of a battle ahead. Then, in a moment of weakness, seeing the distress Charlotte Johnson had been in, he’d let his gut take over and he’d moved in to comfort her. But it hadn’t worked out that way, because he’d played with fire. He knew he’d thought about her far, far differently than any other colleague. That he’d been drawn into her dark and alluring beauty while sitting across from her, looking at patient slides, for the last year. Come to think of it, could he have been any slower? How long had he had a thing for her anyway? At least three-quarters of the last year, that was how long.

      Could he blame himself for kissing her when she’d fit into his arms so perfectly, and she’d shown no signs of resisting him? Still, it had been completely improper and couldn’t happen again because he wasn’t ready to have one more woman reject him because his lower leg had been replaced with a high-tech prosthetic. Maybe it wasn’t sexy, but it sure worked great, and he’d been running five miles a day to prove it for the last two years. In fact, he’d never been in better condition.

      Ah, but Charlotte, she stirred forgotten feelings, that special lure of a woman that made him want to feel alive again. Something about her mix of confidence on the job and total insecurity in a social setting made him hope what they had in common might be enough to base a new relationship on. When he’d kissed her, because of her response, he’d got his hopes up that maybe she felt the same way. But she’d stopped the kiss and an invisible barrier had seemed to surround her after that. He’d pretended everything had been fine when he’d walked her to her car—he hadn’t noticed her need to be left alone—but the message had got through to him. Loud and clear.

      He wandered into his galley kitchen and searched the refrigerator, hoping there might be something halfway interesting in the way of leftovers. He grabbed a bottle of sparkling water and guzzled some of it, enjoying the fizzy burn in his throat. Today he’d kissed the woman who held his interest more than any other since his high-school sweetheart. That was the good news. The bad news was he knew he couldn’t do anything further about it. Her invisible force field wouldn’t let him through, and if that wasn’t enough, his boatload of baggage held him back.

      Out of curiosity, though, he did have one little—okay, monumental—test for Charlotte, one that would really determine her mettle before he totally gave up.

      * * *

      Saturday was the annual charity fund-raiser five-and ten-kilometer run for St. Francis of the Valley trauma unit. Charlotte had signed up a while back and had forgotten to train for it, but she showed up anyway in support of the event. What they’d neglected to tell her was that this year they’d added zombies. Someone had got the bright idea to raise more money by getting employees to pay professional makeup artists, who’d donated their time for the event, to be made up as the undead. The sole purpose, besides getting their pictures taken, was to chase down the runners and tag them with washable paint, and hopefully improve some personal best times for some participants in the process.