Miracle For The Neurosurgeon. Lynne Marshall

your Master’s degree. Oh, and your hair was a lot longer than it is now.” Though he definitely liked this more cosmopolitan yet sexy look. He pulled down the weighted bar and did repetitions. Fifty pounds was nothing, but she’d find out soon enough.

      She watched his every move, ready to jump in and catch him if he lost his balance. Again, unnecessary, but he’d let her do it since it probably made her feel useful.

      “Well, I went on to get my PhD, then passed the boards and became a physical therapist.”

      “I get that part. I want the juicy bits. How many hearts did you break? Love affairs. The good stuff.”

      She gave a short laugh. “That’ll take all of two minutes.”

      He raised a brow in mid-pull, hands spaced wide on the bar working the neck, shoulder and trapezius muscles. As always, it felt great. But her personal assessment of what he thought was a damn important part of a person’s life—interactions with the opposite sex—felt all wrong. Two minutes? “I don’t believe that for a second.”

      “I was totally focused on my career and it was hard to meet nice guys.”

      “So tell me about the rotten ones, then. Come on, I’ve been living in a cave. There must have been someone.” He challenged her to dig deeper, just like she’d been doing to him. “I need some dirt.”

      She sighed, hands on her hips, her legs in a hip-wide stance. For a sex-starved man, even that looked sexy. He gripped the weight bar tighter.

      “I got engaged when I was twenty-nine. I think it was more out of panic for my upcoming birthday. The first big one after twenty-one, you know?”

      “Do women still let that bother them?”

      “You do live in a cave. Wes, some things never change. Like right now, I’m almost thirty-four and I’m re-evaluating my life. If I wait too long, it might be too late.”

      “You don’t look a day over thirty. In fact, I don’t see much change at all since my sister’s wedding and that’s, what, ten years ago now?” He stopped in mid-press. “And too late for what?”

      “My eggs are getting old.”

      “Eggs? Oh, for crying out loud, get a dog or a bird or something. You can have a pet in that traveling house, can’t you?”

      “I could, I’m just not sure it would be fair to a dog or cat.”

      “A bird would be in a cage, what difference would it make?”

      She shrugged, then stared off into the distance. That made him curious. “So why didn’t you marry the guy you were engaged to? You could’ve had a bunch of kids by now.”

      Her prior open expression closed down. She paused. “It was the other way around. He decided not to marry me.”

      “That’s harsh.” Who in their right mind wouldn’t want to marry Mary?

      A wistful breath laugh escaped her lips. “Let’s just say it took me by surprise.” She kept staring toward the ocean, and he wished he hadn’t picked at an old wound by being curious. “I guess he wasn’t the one.”

      Wes wanted to guffaw at such a silly notion, but he could see she was still hurting, so he trod lightly. “You honestly think that? The ‘one’ bit? Hell, I figured that out after my first engagement.”

      With all of her attention now turned back on him, she’d clearly moved on and it relieved him. “How many times have you been engaged? Sheesh, Alex obviously didn’t keep me in the loop.”

      Having successfully captured her interest, he sat straighter, ready to boast like the jaded man he’d become. “When I first graduated from medical school I thought I was in love. Didn’t work out, though, when I caught her in bed with my roommate. Then, after Alexandra got married, I guess I was feeling a little pressure. I proposed to my girlfriend of the time, a fellow doctor, and we set a date. With my neurosurgery fellowship and her pursuing thoracic surgery, sometimes the relationship felt more like a competition. Anyway, we were both extremely busy and we wound up not having enough time for each other, and whatever we’d had going on before kind of fizzled out.”

      “Why didn’t you bring her to Alexandra’s wedding?”

      Ah, so she hadn’t forgotten their time together. Their second world-class kiss and more? To be honest, he’d purposely opted not to bring Giselle that weekend. When he’d found out that Mary was the maid of honor, and he’d also be in the wedding party, he’d wanted to go solo. He’d been planning to ask Giselle to marry him, but had put on the brakes at that point, deciding to wait until after he’d seen Mary again. He wasn’t even sure why, but he knew for a fact that it was what he’d needed to do to be fair to Giselle.