The Passion of Patrick MacNeill (21 page)

The statistic staggered him. He could only imagine what the reality must be like. "What are you doing about it?"

She raised her eyebrows. "I'll spare you the medical details. The boy had third-degree burns over sixty-two percent of his body. Owen and I worked on him for five hours."

Patrick recognized the deliberate understatement and the dry tone. He ought to. He'd used the same defenses often enough. "I wasn't talking about his medical treatment."

"Oh." She rubbed two fingers between her brows, as if she could erase the lines of tension or smooth her tangled thoughts. "Well, the social worker took pictures, of course. The psych team is meeting tomorrow morning to discuss issues with the mother. With the stepfather arrested, the other children should be okay."

"That's good, but that's not what I meant either. What about you, Kate? How are you feeling?"

"I'm not feeling anything. I can't afford to feel anything."

She felt something, all right, Patrick thought grimly. It was tearing her apart. He didn't like it, didn't like not being able to fix things for her. He took her shoulders, but she was straight and stiff as a rifle under his hands. And as likely to go off, if she didn't find some safe release for the emotions churning inside her.

"Don't give me the medical line. You're off duty now. You don't have to play Super Doc."

She flashed. "Listen, flyboy, my Super Doc act kept that kid alive."

He preferred her anger to her distress. "Great. He's alive. Now cut yourself some slack. Cry, if you have to."

She jerked away from him. "I can't cry. I won't cry. Crying doesn't help."

He was used to being the strong one. Now he watched in equal parts irritation and sympathy as she paced her tiny living room.
And understanding.
God, how he understood.
Her words were a bitter echo of
his own
soul's cry after the accident.

"Not the kid, maybe.
It might help you."

She fetched up by the window, staring out as if her tidy living quarters were too small to contain her grief. "I can't afford to break my heart over every child who comes through the unit. How I feel isn't going to make anybody any better."

"So you don't let your feelings get in the way of what you have to do. But the feelings are there, Kate. You can't ignore them."

She whirled to face him. "You mean, like you do?"

It was a well-aimed shot, and it hit right on target. "We're not talking about me."

"No, we never do, do we?"

She was bitter, defensive.
Right.
And she still hadn't cried. Maybe talking wasn't such a good idea after all.

He crossed the room in two long strides, nearly stepping on the cat, and grabbed her. Her defiant face, her troubled eyes, tore at him.

"It didn't use to bother me," she snapped. "
Don't let it get to you
. I tell them all that, all the residents. You can't do your job if you let it get to you. Only I looked at this boy, this baby, and I saw Jack. I know what he's going to face. The process will be that much harder because he doesn't have a daddy like you to support him. His mother doesn't have it together, either. I'm in there trying to evaluate his wounds, and I came this close—" She held up her thumb and forefinger, half an inch apart, and shook them in his face. "—
This
close
—to losing it. I don't want to feel this way. I'm no damn good if I let myself feel this way."

Frustration drew a noose around his chest. No damn good? She was the best thing that had happened to
him
in a long, sorry while.

He tightened his hold on her. "That's a load of crap," he said brutally. "Your patients deserve a doctor who will treat them with her heart as well as her hands and her brain. It doesn't make you less effective if you see them as people and not just as meat on a table."

She stared at him, shock plain on her face. And then, quite suddenly, tears welled, blurring her burning anger and her fierce intelligence. She cried.

Patrick gathered her against his chest, trying to absorb both her tears and her grief. If he'd had any illusions left that he could enjoy a limited, physical relationship with this woman, her tears destroyed them. His hand, as he stroked her soft hair, trembled slightly.

"He's so little," she wept. "They're supposed to take care of him. How can any parent do that to a child who depends on them for love?"

He didn't have an answer for her. All he had was the strength of his arms and the comfort of his embrace. So he held her, just held her, while she sobbed noisily and without pretense against his heart. After a long while, she quieted. Her breath flattened the damp fabric of his shirt.

Deep inside, where Patrick had thought it safely smothered, an ember of guilt burned, sparked to life by the honesty of her emotion and fanned by her breath against his chest.
So little.
He closed his eyes in pain, remembering another small boy, another burn survivor.
So little, and so frighteningly dependent.

Kate shuddered, empty of tears.
A new, delicate peace expanded to fill the hollow space inside her. Her nose, buried against Patrick's chest, was stuffy, and her throat was raw. With her protective doctor's shell cracked around her, she felt wet and naked as a new chick. And yet, anchored in Patrick's arms, she also felt curiously
weightless,
and free for the first time that she could remember of the burdens of her profession and the weight of her own expectations.

"I love my son." The words grated out.

She tightened her arms around him, instinctively responding to the rough need in his voice. "Of course you do."

"But I wasn't there for him, either."

She shifted to look up into his face. "What?
When?"

"When he had his accident.
When Holly died.
I wasn't there."

Indignation swelled, disturbing her fragile sense of well-being. "That's not the same thing. You were on assignment, you told me.
With the reserves."

He shrugged, like a warrior resettling heavy armor. The gesture almost dislodged her hold on him.
"Yeah.
But the bottom line is
,
I wasn't there when he needed me."

All her protective instincts surged to deny it. She was fiercely angry he could think that way. "Don't you believe it," she said. "Jack lived. I remember. The nurses called him Iron Man, because he fought so hard to live."

Patrick's face had resumed its mask. She wasn't reaching him. Kate punched his upper arm in frustration. "Do you know how many patients we lose just when it looks like everything is going to be all right? Their immune system shuts down or their metabolic rate goes up or an infection starts in their wounds or in their lungs, and they just give up. Jack never gave up. You wouldn't let him give up. I saw you in his hospital room. I was just doing a visiting rotation, but I heard the stories. He held on to life, for you."

Patrick's eyes met hers, cautious with the need to believe. With fierce conviction, she said, "Don't you ever, ever tell me you weren't there when he needed
you.
"

His guard
raised
, revealing the wound that still oozed inside him. "I couldn't make the pain go away. I couldn't make him better. I still can't."

Her heart ached for him. But he didn't need her coddling. He needed to pull his head out of his hero hat and take a good hard look at reality.
"So what?
You do what you can," she argued. "You give him your love and support. Yes, Jack's scarred, but he's happy and secure, because of you."

"Dr. Kate." He touched her cheek, his touch a balm even as he refused her healing. His smile twisted.
"Trying to make everything all better."

She blew out a short, exasperated breath. "Patrick, you can't possibly compare your absence from an accident with the deliberate decision to do harm."

She could see by his face that he still didn't believe her. Driven by the need to make him whole again, by the need to make him see, she named the thing that made her love him, the precious thing he gave his son. The one thing she'd never had. "The point is, once the authorities contacted you, you were there for him in every way that counted.
You
didn't walk away from a child who needed you."

She'd revealed too much. She knew it the instant the words left her mouth. She saw her mistake in the comprehension that deepened his blue eyes, heard it in the compassion that softened his voice.

"So who walked away from you?" he asked.

She didn't want his pity. She didn't want to confess to him what a failure she was. "Let's not do this. Let's not play my-scar-is-bigger-than-your-scar. You win, anyway."

"Fair's fair. Talk. Tell me, Kate. Who walked away from you?" he persisted quietly.

"My father."
She blurted it out.

His strong fingers pressed comfortingly into the tight muscles of her shoulders. "How old were you?"

She pressed her lips together to control their trembling. She hated this, hated being reduced to a needy child again. It threatened the identity she'd created for herself as the all-knowing doctor, the almighty surgeon. "It doesn't matter."

He continued his slow massage.
"How old?
Do you remember?"

Too well.
Too clearly.
And saw again the shadowed interior of her father's car, the back of his head,
the
shape of his ears blurred by her tears. Had he looked back, just for an instant, when she blinked?
Daddy, I will be good
.
"Ten. I was ten."

Patrick's hands paused a second and then resumed their gentle stroking.
"His loss.
He was a fool to give you up."

Clearly, he didn't understand. She confessed the rest. "Wade, too.
My—my lover."

"And he was an idiot."

The conviction in his voice made her smile, in spite of the hurt at her heart. "So, according to you, the men in my life have all been brain damaged in some way, is that it?"

The corner of his mouth quirked up.
"Looks that way, doesn't it?"

There was a shaking, aching hollow right under her rib cage. She had to ask, had to know. "And you? Are you a fool, too?"

His level gaze met hers. "No.
No, a coward, maybe.
Maybe I haven't wanted to take the risk of letting anybody down again. But I've never been called a fool."

Hope unfolded painfully inside her. At least when the time came, Patrick wouldn't walk away without a backward glance. She meant something to him. For now, that belief was enough. It would have to be. And it was more than she'd ever expected.

Tentatively, she raised herself on tiptoe to touch her lips to his jaw. He'd shaved before coming. The scent of his after-shave, masculine and spicy, tingled through her.

His voice rumbled near her ear. "Of course, with two brothers, I've been called a jackass a time or two."

Amusement swelled inside her, shiny and ephemeral as a soap bubble. No one freed her laughter the way Patrick did.
For that alone, she would have loved him.

Loved him.

The realization burst the expanding giddiness in her chest and stole her breath. She couldn't love Patrick. She couldn't love anyone. Love led to disaster. Even if she discounted the lessons of her mother's example and her sister's misfortune, hadn't
Wade's
desertion taught her that?

Besides, Patrick didn't want her love. And yet, he held her so tenderly. He was so confident, so honorable and strong. He'd just shared the darkest corners of his heart with her, and there was nothing in him she could not admire. How could she not love him?

Kate rested her head on his broad chest, absorbing through their clothing the fit and feel of all those hard planes and angles against her softer curves. Not that she would ever tell him, of course. She would protect them both that much, at least. But what she could not tell him, she would show him.

She pressed her lips to the center of his chest, right over his heart, as her arms tightened around him.

"Kate?" His voice was rough.

She kissed his firm pectorals, which lifted with his breath. She nuzzled aside his shirt collar to kiss the ridge of his collarbone and the strong column of his throat.

He swallowed. "Kate, even a jackass could see where this is heading. Honey, are you sure?"

And this once, she was. For the first time, she allowed herself to feel the same ease and certainty in a man's arms that she experienced in the operating room.

"Sure." She nipped lightly at his earlobe.

He jumped. "Damn, Kate." It sounded like a prayer. Confidence flowed through her, as arousing as the scent of his skin, the hard planes of his body.

"Hold still," she said to him, as he had once ordered her, and they both smiled at the memory.

"I don't think I can," Patrick confessed.

His blood was hammering in his ears.
Pounding in his veins.
Pulsing low in his body.