CHAPTER ONE
“Haveyou had your bowels open today, Mr. Quinn?”
WTF!
Declan gave an audible groan and closed his eyes to accompany all the inner horror he felt as he acknowledged, and not for the first time, that getting shot in the back, twice, sucked.
Especially when it had resulted in him spending a week in a private hospital, three of those days in the Intensive Care Unit. The other four had been spent in this room, with its own adjoining bathroom. Both of which looked as if they belonged in a five-star hotel rather than a hospital. Even a private one.
And on every one of those days, Declan had been asked this same embarrassingly personal question. Because, as one of the nurses in ICU had explained, surgery could sometimes result in complications with the digestive system.
The last four days, that personal question had been asked by this same cheerily pert and beautiful young woman.
The always-smiling Nurse Fawn Meadows.
Was it normal for someone to smile this much?
Or was the smile just a façade, a cover to hide something she would rather other people didn’t know and she preferred they didn’t ask about? A bit like the way Declan’s own façade hid the demons that haunted him.
Damn it, Fawn Meadows didn’t look old enough to have that sort of painful history.
She looked to be aged in her early to midtwenties. At work, her straight blonde hair was always pulled back and secured in a ponytail on her crown. But Declan would guess it would reach down to the middle of her back once it was released from the hairband.
In contrast to her always cheerful disposition, Fawn’s amber eyes were often darker than her smile, as if they might contain secrets in those topaz depths.
Her hollowed cheeks were smooth and creamy.
Her lips were full and usually curved into a smile. They were also a tantalizing deep rose color.
Her pointed chin was invariably set at a challenging angle.
Like the constant smile, Declan had no explanation for those shadows in the depths of her eyes, but he had a feeling the two were somehow connected.
But maybe the habitual challenge in her demeanor was because she was such a tiny little thing—at least compared to him she was—and it was her way of projecting strength?
Declan guessed Fawn was at least a foot shorter than his own six feet and three inches in height. She was also at least a hundredpounds lighter than his two hundred and twenty pounds. He believed she was possibly almost twenty years younger than his own age of forty-three.
In experience as well as years.
She had also, during the past four days, become something of a torment to him.
And not just because she liked to ask him verbally awkward questions regarding his bodily functions!
No, for the first time in longer than Declan cared to think about, he’d had a strong and completely inappropriate physical reaction to a woman.
To Fawn Meadows, in fact.
The first time had been on the day Declan was transferred into this spacious private hospital suite.
It had happened when Fawn came to help him to the bathroom so that he could wash himself for the first time in days rather than suffer through another one of the bed-baths the nurses in ICU had insisted on giving him. He hadn’t had the same physical response to any of them.
An erection was a difficult thing to hide when you were only wearing loose sleep pants and nothing else, but Declan really hoped he had succeeded.
As was usual in a hospital, the ambient temperature was kept high. Consequently, it was more comfortable for Declan not to wear a T-shirt that would inevitably press against the two wounds healing on his back. The fact that it also revealed the matt of grizzled gray hair on his chest was just another reminderof the very obvious age difference between the grouchy Declan and the blonde and always happy Fawn Meadows.
Which was why it was doubly embarrassing that she always took such great delight in asking about Declan’s bowel movements every day!
How did he know she took delight in it?
