Cage studied him a moment, then nodded. “You can have all the equipment you need. But I don’t let my team members go
Lone Ranger,
even on a quick island hop. You’re bringing a partner.”
Dale hid the wince, knowing Cage was bound by HFH policy. Nobody went into the field alone. Period. But he didn’t want anyone else at Boston General to know about his past. Not even his usual HFH partner, though he trusted her as much as he trusted anyone.
Unfortunately, Dr. Tansy Whitmore wasn’t an option. Not anymore. He scowled as the cheap beer soured in his stomach. That was the only reason he felt a twinge of pain that they’d gone from “let’s just be friends,” straight to “I hope you choke on your stethoscope and die, you miserable—”
“Slimy toad!”
Yeah, that was it. Dale looked up. The knot in his stomach grew tighter and he felt the familiar sizzle when he saw her striding through the disreputable bar without a sideways glance. Grown out from the short crop she’d given it during their last tropical assignment, her golden hair was caught mid-curl. It stuck out around her head like a nimbus of flame, matching the fire in her blue eyes. Her unpainted lips drew a tense line across her face, and energy crackled around her as she beat a path to Dale’s table.
As always, the sight of Tansy was like a punch to his chest. But now, that first thrust of sexual awareness was tangled with other things. Anger. Disappointment.
Regret, though she’d never know it.
“Oh, hell,” he muttered, rising to his feet more from self-preservation than manners.
Cage stood, as well. “Dr. Whitmore.”
Hospital hierarchy didn’t save Cage from Tansy’s anger. She snapped, “Don’t you ‘Dr. Whitmore’ me, Zachary Cage. You said you didn’t know where he was.” Without waiting for an answer, she turned on Dale and shook a piece of paper at him. “And
you!
What the hell is this?”
Her scent touched his nostrils, earthy and sensual like the woman herself. The dirty overhead light glinted off diamonds and gold at her wrist, neck and ears. Dale thought of the dull rock in his pocket, the only thing he’d kept from the island he’d once called home, and knew he’d been right to push her away before things got complicated between them. Like diamonds and ugly rocks, he and Tansy were too different to complement each other. Too different for a future, if he’d been looking for such a thing.
He glanced at the paper and forced detachment, though her anger raised an answering flare in his chest. She’d once called him cold, unemotional. Well, let her think that. Then maybe she’d go away and leave him to his beer. “It looks like my resignation,” he observed, lifting one eyebrow. “I thought I left it on my desk, not yours.”
“It’s bull, that’s what it is,” she fired back. “You’re the best outbreak specialist in HFH. How dare you quit?” The temper in her voice was familiar, but the glint of tears unsettled him. Voice lower, she continued, “If it’s because you don’t want to work with me anymore, I’ll ask to be reassigned.”
“Tansy—” he began, then stalled. He’d never known how to handle her emotions.
“Sit down, both of you,” Cage ordered, waving them both to their seats. “Nobody’s quitting or being reassigned. I’ve had enough of this.”
Dale sat cautiously. Damn. He’d been writing his resignation when the message from Mickey arrived. In the flurry of memory that had driven him to the bar, he’d forgotten to hide the draft. Now there was no reason for Cage to loan him equipment or an assistant. Double damn.
Tansy passed the letter to Cage. “He’s leaving. This was on his desk.”
And what the hell was Tansy doing in his office, anyway? Since their breakup, he’d barely seen her.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true. He’d watched her with her patients at Boston General, and he’d slipped into the back of her lectures and cursed himself for needing to see her. His only salvation was that she’d never noticed him.
Cage passed the paper to Dale and frowned. “Dr. Whitmore, I’m surprised at you. This is an invasion of Dr. Metcalf’s privacy.”
“I’m sorry,” she said without a hint of remorse,
“but I’m not going to sit by and let him do something as stupid as this. HFH needs him, and—”
“And it’s none of your business,” Dale growled. “You have no right to try to get inside my head anymore.”
She sucked in a breath. The quick hurt in her eyes made him feel like slime, though they’d had this conversation before. A hundred times, it seemed. Naturally open and giving, she’d wanted to know his every thought, his every feeling. But he had things he wanted to keep private. His emotions. His fears.
His past.
She rallied quickly. “We may not be in a relationship, but as far as HFH is concerned, we’re still partners. That gives me some say.”
“We’re not partners anymore. I quit.” Damn, he hadn’t wanted it to come to this. But he couldn’t keep Tansy in a relationship based on a lie, and he’d been surprised to discover that he didn’t want to stay at Boston General without her.
“No, you’re not quitting. I won’t have it.” She turned to Cage. “Reassign me to another HFH hospital and a different partner.” Her voice was steady, but Dale saw through to the hurt beneath, and his chest ached.
“Shut up, both of you,” Cage snapped, banging his half-empty bottle on the table. He waited until they subsided. “Okay. Here’s the deal. I’m not accepting Metcalf’s resignation or Tansy’s request. But I am
fed up
with two of my best people ghosting around Bos
ton General because they’re letting personal problems interfere with their work.” When they protested, he cut them off. “Just listen. Dale is leaving tomorrow to investigate a PSP outbreak off Maine. Tansy, you’re going with him. Take the small plane, you can leave in the morning.”
Tansy’s startled, “But—” was drowned out by Dale’s bellow of, “No way in hell!”
It was panic, pure and simple, that cranked his volume. He didn’t want her anywhere near Lobster Island. He didn’t want her to see where he’d come from. Who he was.
Diamonds and purple rocks didn’t mix.
“You’re going to the island together,” Cage said in a steely, unforgiving tone, “or I’ll fire both of you with prejudice.”
Tansy gasped at the threat and Dale scowled. He was resigned to leaving HFH, but he couldn’t get Tansy fired. The patients needed her. The group couldn’t lose her. Damn.
Cage’s expression softened. “Go to Lobster Island. Remember how to work together. You’re the best team I’ve got, and it’d be a shame to let that go to waste.”
“And if I still want to be reassigned after it’s over?” she asked quietly, not looking at Dale.
“Then I’ll reassign you.” Cage sighed and stood. “But I hope it won’t come to that. HFH needs you both. Together. Do we have a deal?”
His exit left a hollow gap in the conversation.
“Fine,” Tansy said after a moment. She stared at one of the empty strippers’ cages rather than at Dale. “E-mail me a list of equipment you want loaded on the plane. I’ll meet you at the hangar tomorrow afternoon.”
They’d had the same conversation a hundred times before, in a dozen different countries, but there was no sense of impending adventure now. There was only a sense of impending doom.
Tansy on Lobster Island. It was the last thing Dale wanted, but if he didn’t agree, she could lose her job. And really, what did it matter if she found out about his past?
She already hated him.
On that thought, he drained the last of his beer and felt none of the alcohol’s punch. “I don’t want you with me.”
She jerked her chin down. “Yeah, you’ve made that clear. Don’t worry, the feeling is mutual. Too bad we don’t get a vote.”
She slipped from the booth and marched out on Cage’s heels, leaving an aching hole in Dale’s gut. “Damn.” He pressed the empty beer bottle to the center of his forehead, wishing he’d chartered a plane and gone on his own. He hadn’t been back to the island in fifteen years, since his parents were lost at sea and he’d run away from his Uncle Trask’s brutal grief. He didn’t want to go back now. And he certainly didn’t want to bring Tansy with him.
Scowling, he reread Mickey’s message. Six peo
ple were sick. Three had already died from respiratory failure, though the disease shouldn’t be fatal. And although she was one of the best investigators in the business, Dale wished he could leave Tansy safe on the mainland.
Because people were dying on Lobster Island. Again.
HEADPHONES CLAMPED OVER her ears, Tansy slapped the throttle open and braced herself as the little prop plane surged down the runway, eager to be on its way. She’d gotten her pilot’s license when she first joined HFH, nearly three years earlier. God, she loved to fly.
But not today. Today, the man brooding in the copilot’s seat kept her from enjoying the sky. Arms folded across his broad chest, Dale made no move to touch the second set of controls. He merely sat there, sullen and angry.
Well, the hell with him. The breakup hadn’t been her idea. She’d wanted to work on their relationship. He’d bailed.
She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and tried to ignore the way the afternoon sunlight gilded his white-blond hair and accentuated his pale skin, which never tanned, even when they’d spent a month in the Serengeti. Long-legged and powerfully built, he had the hard body of a laborer and the graceful hands of a surgeon. His very presence filled the small cockpit, almost suffocating Tansy with the memories she’d tried so hard to avoid.
Both fair and blue-eyed, fit and wellborn, she and Dale resembled each other on the surface. But underneath, they were polar opposites, and those differences had been the problem. He wouldn’t let her into his guarded, private corners, and she hadn’t wanted to settle for less.
She glanced over again, and their eyes met. Heat flared in her midsection. After almost three months, she still woke up reaching for him, and despised herself for it. She was no better than her mother.
When they reached the shallow cruising altitude that would take them to a lobster-shaped speck off the Maine coast, she slid the headphones off one ear and broke the silence. “Want to tell me why we’re investigating a tiny outbreak of PSP?”
Paralytic shellfish poisoning was a serious, though rarely fatal, condition that was usually handled on the local level. From what little Cage had told her, there was no reason for HFH intervention. But she knew Dale well enough to realize he wasn’t going to volunteer any information. He was too committed to his bad mood.
After a long moment he sighed and uncrossed his arms. “It doesn’t look like typical shellfish poisoning. The reactions are too severe, and there hasn’t been a red tide in the area. Besides, the islanders fish for lobsters, not mollusks.”
“And lobsters, being scavengers, don’t usually absorb enough of the toxin to be a problem.” Tansy nodded, glad he had at least answered her. Though it hurt
to sit near him and know there was no hope for their relationship, she would be okay if she focused on the job. Always the job. Her work had gotten her through the last three months. It would get her through the next few days.
Besides, they usually got along fine when they were in the field. It was his behavior in Boston that had driven her crazy. When they were at home base, he withdrew, became unavailable. Toward the end, she’d wondered whether he had another woman in the city.
Know your man inside and out, and you’ll never be surprised, baby.
Her mother’s words came to her across the years, along with the memory of sitting in the car while Eva Whitmore cruised their ritzy neighborhood in search of her husband’s vehicle.
Feeling the familiar tightness in her stomach, Tansy clenched her teeth and concentrated on flying, as the sun sank towards twilight. She’d make it through this one last assignment with Dale, and then she’d leave. She couldn’t stand seeing him every day. Not like this. Though in the end she’d been the one to walk away from their relationship, he had pushed her there.
He simply hadn’t cared as much as she did.
“We’re almost there.” The voice was thick from the silence. The rough timbre heated the back of her neck with memory, and she stared harder out the cockpit window. The shadow of an island appeared, black against the gray sea. The granite claws arced around a central harbor at one end. The subtle curve
of tail at the other end completed the illusion and created a second harbor.
She craned her neck to follow the rocky contours as she flew past and came around to face the northernmost claw. “Damn. It
does
look like a lobster.”
“That’s why they call it Lobster Island,” Dale muttered as they began their descent.
Frustrated by his mood and his nearness, she snapped, “This trip wasn’t my idea, you know.”
“Wasn’t mine either,” he growled in return. “I tried to leave you home.”
Tansy compressed her lips and concentrated on flying. Maybe she should’ve refused the assignment and risked her job. But part of her had wanted this one last trip with Dale. Away from Boston General, she knew she would see the man beneath the brittle upper-crust charm. The man she’d fallen for. In the field, Dale Metcalf was a bit loud and a bit rough. Exciting. Almost uncivilized. More at home in the slums of the small, hot country of Tehru than the Theater District of Boston.
But the moment they returned to the city, that man disappeared and was replaced by someone else. She didn’t like the other Dale much, nor did she trust him. There was something…false about him in the city.
She darted a glance at the pale, perfect features of Boston General’s most eligible bachelor. His square jaw was tight with tension, the lines beside his mouth deeper than she remembered. Though they were
headed into the field, he had avoided his usual attire of bush pants and a cotton shirt. Instead, he wore a monogrammed shirt from England and lightweight wool trousers.
He was wearing his Boston clothes, Tansy realized. Not his field clothes. She felt a strange, unexpected stir of fear. Her mother had taught her that if she knew everything and understood everything, she’d never be out of control. That had made medicine a perfect career choice. Tansy understood illness, understood health. But as the little plane dropped through a scattering of clouds and shimmied in a slap of crosswind, she realized she didn’t know everything about this assignment.