It was over, he thought numbly. The career he’d spent years building, all the hard work, the life he’d mapped out for himself as a leading surgeon…it was all over. Unless he could find a way to clear his name, the dreams that had gotten him through college and medical school were dead.
Disheartened, disillusioned, so frustrated he wanted to rage at the world, he could think of nothing to do but accept the inevitable. As long as he had a murder charge hanging over his head, he couldn’t work.
“I won’t quit,” he told his boss coldly. “I know there are some people in this hospital who would like to see the last of me, but I’m not quitting. I’ll take a leave of absence instead and return to work the day after I’m acquitted.”
If Michael thought there wasn’t a chance in hell of that happening, he wisely kept that to himself. Instead he nodded in agreement and rose to hold out his hand. “That’s fair enough. I wish you luck, Gavin.”
It went without saying that they both knew he was going to need it.
One
Two months later
T he Hip Hop Café was the place to be when gossip was running high, so Summer Kincaid wasn’t surprised to find the place packed to the rafters when she stopped in for lunch. Ever since Gavin Nighthawk’s arrest that was all anyone was talking about. The second Summer stepped inside, the gossip, rife with speculation, hit her right in the face.
“I always knew there was something not quite right about that boy. He always seemed so full of anger. It’s because he’s Indian, you know. He wants to be white. Everyone says so.”
“And he’s so big. I bet he killed that poor girl without even breaking a sweat.”
Across the diner, Judge Kate Randall Walker sniffed in irritation and said loudly, “That’s what’s wrong with this country. People rush to judgment without waiting to hear the facts of a case, and I think it stinks.”
Not surprisingly, that didn’t sit well with a majority of the diners, especially Lily Mae Wheeler, the queen of the town gossips and a general busybody who was, as usual, holding court from the first booth inside the door, which she considered “hers.” She’d been known to make up news on a slow day just to have something to talk about, but that wasn’t necessary today. There was nothing she enjoyed more than putting a negative spin on things and destroying someone’s reputation.
Arching a plucked brow at the judge, she narrowed beady little eyes at her. “Are you saying he’s not guilty?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Kate replied coolly. “That’s for a jury to decide. In the meantime, the man has a right to live in peace.”
Tossing her head to draw attention to her permed curls, which she’d died the outrageous color of cotton-candy pink to match what she claimed was her sweet personality, Lily Mae waved her hand and just that easily dismissed the old-fashioned notion that a man was actually innocent until proven guilty. “Well, of course you would think that. Everyone knows you’re a liberal. Personally, I don’t think Doctor Gavin Nighthawk should be allowed to walk around free, let alone with a scalpel in his hand. I certainly wouldn’t let him operate on me or someone I loved!”
Taking a seat at the counter, Summer could only privately shake her head at the asinine remark. Lily Mae had a well-known reputation for saying whatever came into her head. The more educated people in town didn’t take her seriously, but there were, unfortunately, others just like her who believed that Gavin was a dangerous man who needed to be locked away from decent society.
And that frustrated Summer no end. As a child of mixed heritage, she had, thanks to the insistence of her white aunts, spent her summers on the Laughing Horse Reservation getting to know the Native American side of her family, and there she’d had a chance to watch Gavin from afar. They’d never been close enough to even be called friends, but there’d always been something about the tall, gangly boy that she’d admired. He’d had a kindness to him that some of the other rougher boys hadn’t had, an inherent gentleness that came out whenever he came in contact with those who were weaker or slower or older and in need of help.
He had, however, never made any secret of the fact that he couldn’t wait to leave the reservation and its poverty behind. He’d had dreams, and he hadn’t let anyone or anything stand in his way. Through hard work and determination, he’d earned a full scholarship to college and left the day after he graduated from high school.
Summer had lost touch with him then and had no idea that he’d gone on to medical school, just as she had, until he’d returned to Whitehorn for his residency at the same hospital where she worked. Thrilled, she’d thought at first that fate had had a hand in bringing them back together, but it didn’t take her long to discover that there was little resemblance between the kind, gangly boy she had known on the Laughing Horse Reservation and the bitter, brooding man he had become. She didn’t know this new Gavin, and honesty forced her to admit that she wasn’t sure she wanted to. While she was comfortable with who she was and her Native American heritage, he had turned his back on his people to make a name for himself in the white man’s world, and that angered her. Still, she only had to remember the boy he had been to know that he would have never been able to take a life.
Anyone who doubted that only had to look at his work. If ever a man was born to be a surgeon, it was Gavin Nighthawk. As an immunology resident at Whitehorn Memorial Hospital, she’d observed him in the operating room numerous times and had nothing but admiration for his skill. Unlike other gifted doctors she knew, however, he wasn’t one of those arrogant, holier-than-thou surgeons who forgot about his patients once he worked his magic on them on the operating table. He truly cared about his patients and was a gifted healer.
No one seemed to remember that, however, when it came to Christina Montgomery’s murder. Before she’d died, everyone had known that she was sad and lonely and pregnant, in spite of her best efforts to hide her condition. The whole town had speculated on who the father of her baby was, but she’d taken that information with her to her grave. It wasn’t until months after her body was discovered in the woods that law enforcement officials discovered that the man who impregnated her was also the same one who’d delivered her baby and was the last one to see her alive—Gavin Nighthawk.
For months he’d kept his silence about the whereabouts of the baby and his own involvement, and that was enough to condemn him in most people’s eyes. The fact that everyone knew that he’d never cared about Christina but had turned to her on the rebound after his affair with Patricia Winthrop went sour had only made things worse.
“He’s going to prison, anyway. He might as well resign now.”
“Do you think the state will revoke his license? Do they let murderers practice medicine after they get out of jail?”
“Who said he’ll get out? He killed the mother of his baby. No jury in their right mind is going to let him off with anything less than life for that.”
All around her, people speculated on Gavin’s fate as if he was just some character on a soap opera and not a real man at all. And Summer hated it. She longed to stand up and shout at his detractors, to make them see him as he really was, but she was a quiet, unobtrusive woman, and that wasn’t her way. It wouldn’t do any good, anyway. She couldn’t control what people thought, couldn’t make them see him for the boy he had once been. To them, he was a hard, angry Indian with a chip on his shoulder who didn’t make friends easily, and they had little sympathy for his fate.
And that, more than anything, was what scared her. She’d done everything she could to help him by convincing her uncle Garrett to hire Elizabeth Gardener, one of the best lawyers in the state, to defend him, but now Summer wasn’t sure that even Elizabeth could save him. The tide of public opinion had definitely turned against him, and unless something drastic happened, he appeared to be a doomed man.
The bell on the door rang merrily then, signaling a new arrival, and everyone instinctively turned to check out the newcomer. When