In Good Hands (14 page)

R
OGER LISTENED,
his heart sinking as Amber started talking about her friend at Mandolin. It got so he hated the name Jack and worried about his ability to meet the man civilly in a few days.

It wasn't so much what she said as how she said it. She started simply, telling him that her old boss—“the bastard” was finally retiring. According to Jack, if she started reconnecting with her old colleagues, started playing those political cards right, she stood a really good shot at getting her job back.

Well, he wasn't surprised. A woman as focused and talented as she was should be getting job offers left and right. Good job offers. The larger mystery was why she was sitting in Cherry Hills nursing her neighbors. And that's when the discussion got really dicey because she started talking about Jack.

“We used to have these epic battles,” she said, her voice warming in memory. “Research, physics, the latest movie, it didn't matter because we always ended up in bed. It was turbulent, verging on violent, and yet—”

“You loved it,” Roger said. He couldn't quite bring himself to ask if she'd loved him.

“I don't know. It was all part and parcel of that life.
Everything was a constant struggle, constant battle.” She turned to face him more squarely. “You have to know that what I said about me and relationships is true. I've always been more focused on my career than on men. Jack and I were just…” She sighed. “We were buddies with benefits, and that ended a long, long time ago.”

He pushed up into a sitting position, leaning his back against the cold cinder block wall. She rested on his chest, coiling her legs around his. Normally he would have been hard within a minute, then on top of her within five. But not this time. Not when he was finally getting some answers to her past. And how it had all been wrapped up in some other guy.

“But there was passion there, wasn't there?”

She sighed. “Was it passion or adrenaline addiction? Was it desire or just a caffeine habit? I'm a doctor, Roger. That's what I do, even when what I'm doing is researching energy healing. Career first, guys a very distant second.”

“But you're going back there to find out, aren't you? That's why you set up the meeting with Jack, isn't it?”

She straightened. “I set up your meeting with Jack because I believe in your products and I thought RFE had something to bring to the table. And as for me and Jack, we had broken up long before I left Mandolin. I didn't even think about him when I made the decision to leave.”

He believed her. But the tension in her words told him something else. “And now? Now that you're going to see him again?”

She smiled and gestured to the bed. “After this, do you really think I'd be thinking about an old boyfriend?”

He shrugged, doing his best to cover the anxiety he felt in his gut. “Maybe. Are you?”

“God, no!” she laughed. At his relieved sigh, she reached up and kissed him. Gently, but thoroughly enough that he was
ready to push her back down on the futon. But she ended the kiss and pulled back. “However,” she said slowly, “the meeting between you and Jack does give me a way to test the waters back at Mandolin. I'd have a reason to be there, plus the credit for bringing in a great company—yours—for a joint venture or something, and—”

“A way to look at the land. See if you could rejoin a hospital again.” A hospital way out in freaking Arizona. He swallowed. “Does it have to be out there? I mean, aren't there hospitals here?”

“Yes, there are,” she said as she tucked close to him again. “But there's family history there, and you know that Mandolin is a leader. Change the way Mandolin operates, and other hospitals will follow. I could possibly affect the course of Western medicine. You don't know how tempting that is.”

“Of course I understand,” he said, though inside, his thoughts were screaming for him to stop her. But that was selfish of him. Her career was out there. He got that. So he forced himself to act the supportive boyfriend. “What I don't really get is why you haven't gone out there before now.”

“Because I like my life here. I'm doing good work.”

He arched his brows, not that she could see. “Really? Serving fruit smoothies to gambling addicts and single mothers. Doing yoga and meditation in the rare moments when they leave you alone. That's not work, Amber. That's a charity vacation.”

He felt her body still and knew that he had crossed a line. They'd never really talked about what she was doing in her energy “sessions,” even though she did them daily for hours. She sat at a table with a manual and a pad, then spent a lot of time staring into space. As far as he could tell, she was simply writing bizarre notations and meditating.

He knew she believed the shifts in his blood pressure were due to her energy work. But he thought it had more to do with
their great sex and the endless piles of salad. And now he was pushing her to see how ridiculous her new lifestyle was.

She straightened to look him in the eye. “You don't believe in anything I've been doing here,” she said softly. “You think that the traditional medical model is the best, even though it's done nothing to help you.”

He shifted, knowing he was treading on dangerous ground. “Hypertension is a complicated problem with multiple factors…”

She huffed. “And you don't think any of those factors could be energetic? That perhaps there's something that medicine isn't exploring because it's not linked to a drug?”

He leaned forward, trying to understand how this brilliant woman had gone from a promising medical career to spouting energetic hookum. “You put all those years into traditional medicine. Tell me you think it's all ridiculous. That a thousand years of science hasn't figured anything out.”

“Of course it has!” she said, throwing up her hands. “I just don't think it's found out
everything.
There are lots of people like you who don't respond to Western therapies. I think it's because medicine isn't looking in the right places.”

“But you are?”

She nodded, but the motion was less sure. “Yeah, I think I am. I think the direction I'm going in is very promising.”

He looked around her apartment pointedly. She lived in a converted warehouse in a neighborhood that cops never entered except in pairs. Her clothing was stacked in plastic crates and the sum total of her worldly possessions probably wouldn't add up to her paycheck in one month of working back at her old job.

She noticed his gaze, of course. He'd meant her to. And she gaped at him. “Why would you think that money and research go hand in hand?”

“What research, Amber? You sit in a corner and stare at the wall.”

“I have clients. I do work. Just because you can't see what I'm doing with your eyes doesn't mean it's not happening.” She stood up and grabbed a robe from a nail on the wall. “Why are you pushing this now? Is this part of your anger from before? Is this—”

“It's not part of my…” He didn't even have a word for what he'd experienced before. “My bizzaro mood. It's about you, Amber, about what you want in your life. Why did you run here? Why did you suddenly drop everything to live in a warehouse in Chicago?”

She winced and he knew he had the right of it. Something huge had happened and whatever it was, she was still running from it. He could see she was about to turn away, about to shut him out, but he couldn't let her do that. It was too important for her to face, so that she could get on with her life. So he went to her, gripping her arms to hold her still.

“Talk to me, Amber. I can listen without judgment.”

“It's not like I headed a criminal mafia or something.”

“Whatever it was, whatever you want to discuss, I want to listen.”

She glared at him, but he didn't waver. In the end, she gave in, though she twisted out of his arms as she did it. “I need chocolate first.”

He nodded. He understood comfort food. So he followed her into the kitchen where he watched her blend up avocado, dates, blue agave syrup and cocoa powder. She didn't speak as she worked, and he let her bang about her kitchen in silence. He knew she'd get to it eventually, and sure enough she did, but only after she'd spooned her concoction into a bowl and called it chocolate mousse.

“You're kidding, right?” he said, failing in his promise to
be nonjudgmental. He just hadn't expected her to serve him brown avocado and call it mousse.

“Just taste it. Or not,” she snapped. “More for me.” Then she took a spoon and dug in. It should have been erotic watching her lick chocolate stuff off with all appearance of enjoyment. It would have been if he hadn't known what had gone into that stuff.

But he'd made a promise and so he felt honor bound to stick to it, even if it was about weird food. So he took a small bite and raised his eyebrows in surprise. It tasted…good. Not exactly chocolate mousse like he was used to, but like the “living food lasagna,” he had to take it on its own terms. It was creamy, tasty and very chocolatey. Almost like mousse, except that it wasn't. Still, he took another bite because compared to salad, this was heaven. And as his reward, she finally began to talk.

“How long do you go down a path before you call it quits? Before you say it's wrong? Or it's not right enough for me?”

He frowned at her. “I don't do research, Amber. I'm the guy who tries to sell what the geeks produce.”

“But you started out in law, right? Doesn't your résumé say law school?”

He nodded. “But I didn't want to practice law, not even business law. I really wanted to understand the legal aspects of a business and how to make them work for me instead of against me. Sure, it took some time for me to figure that out, but once I understood what I wanted I never looked back.”

“But did you have some false starts? Did you look at criminal law or, I don't know—”

“Copyright law.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Really?”

He nodded. “It's still pretty useful for me. Patents, intellectual rights, even privacy laws, especially as it pertains to
the internet. They all relate to some small degree. I explored it, enjoyed it, even thought about having it be my career.”

“And?”

He shrugged. “It didn't fit. I liked what I was doing with Sam way more than any esoteric discussion with another lawyer. Yeah, there were real-world cases. More and more as it turned out, but I like being in a business, taking Sam's creations and seeing it all the way through to a profitable market.”

She pointed her spoon at him. “But what in particular made you shift away from copyright law?”

He shrugged. “Nothing in particular. It was just a series of little things that said this isn't nearly as much fun as that.”

She nodded. “That's kind of how it worked for me, except that I was going between this isn't working at all and this is only working a little. Take your blood pressure, for example. Best-case scenario, you take a pill every morning for the rest of your life that keeps your blood pressure down and
bam,
we call you healthy.”

He frowned. That would be healthy, in his opinion. He wouldn't have to quit his job, wouldn't have to worry about what he ate, wouldn't have to constantly wonder if the occasional throbbing in his temples was just Sam making him nuts or the precursor to a stroke.

“That's not healthy, Roger,” she said softly. “That's management. Your body shouldn't need a pill to regulate its blood pressure.”

“But it does.”

“But it shouldn't. So you're not really healthy until your body can regulate it without medication.”

He nodded. “So you're looking for a cure. Great. I'm all for it. Find out what the underlying causes for high blood pressure are and find a way to fix them. Except you can't fix DNA, you can't fight the mental factors and you can't heal everybody.”

“What if we could?”

“Heal everyone?”

She shrugged. “What if there's a whole new way to look at your physical body as vibrations and atoms and—”

“Physics and electricity?”

She nodded.

“Now you're sounding like Sam.”

She smiled. “I knew there was a reason I liked RFE.”

“But if that's the case, then you should be working in bioengineering, consulting with us, or I don't know—”

“Doing research in the direction that I think medicine should go?”

“Yes!”

She looked at him hard. “I already am.”

He sighed. “With your notebook and your paper and your navel gazing?”

She straightened up from the counter and started packing away the chocolate. She didn't speak until her back was to him. “Do you tell Sam what to do when he starts inventing something?”

Roger snorted. “All the time.”

“And does he listen?”

“Sometimes. Well, only a little of the time. Well, maybe never.”

She turned around to stare at him. “Then why do you think you know better than I do how to do my research?”

He winced. She had a point. “But come on, Amber. Meditation has its place. But it's not going to cure cancer.”

She arched her brow. “You know that for sure? What's the latest research on cancer patients who meditate?”

He didn't know. He hadn't a clue if that was even an area of study. “Fine,” he said. “I'm wrong about trying to direct your research. You're the MD. You know what you're doing way better than I do.”

“Thank you.”

“But you could have done that at Mandolin. You could have cut back your hours and stared at the wall there. You didn't have to give up everything and run here to nowheresville Chicago. So what happened, Amber? Why did you leave?”

She sighed and said the one thing he'd feared from the very beginning. “I killed a patient.”