Okay. Just stop!I pressed my hand to my head and closed my eyes.Bloody hell. Just stop thinking about it. Or him. It. Argh…
Throughout the rest of the day, like all the other days since he’d come and gone from my orderly life here, he was in mythoughts. And it seemed that everyone wanted to ask me what I thought of the older Mafia man, the sexy boss of the dangerous organization.
I didn’t have anything to tell them. Gossiping wasn’t something I cared to participate in anyway, but where Mikhail mattered, I wanted to, well, keep the mystery to myself.
“How come Jack’s not in?” I asked later in the shift when one of his patients coded and passed away. It wasn’t his fault, but it was impossible not to consider the other doctor when it happened.
Fatima shrugged. “I think he took a few days off.” She grinned. “Why? You getting tired of thinking about your hot Mafia man and need to include some fantasies about your sexy doctor?”
“Oh, please.” I rolled my eyes. “Mysexy doctor? Nothing’s happening between me and Jack no matter how flirty he wants to try to be.” I would never fall prey to the constant drama and sleeping-around in this workplace.
She set the tip of her pen on her lip and chewed it slightly, smiling slyly. “Uh-huh.”
I shook my head, peeved but not put off by her teasing. “But Iwaswondering about Jack.” After looking around to make sure no one was listening in, I confided in her about how Jack reacted when he saw that Mikhail was in the room. How he’d wanted to call the cops and have him arrested even though he hadn’t woken up yet.
“It seemed so odd,” I said in conclusion, hating thatIwas gossiping now.
“Maybe he was just being overprotective of you,” Fatima suggested with a shrug. “He’s made it clear that he’s got his eyeson you, and he didn’t want to worry about your being in a room with a dangerous man.”
For God’s sake. Mikhail was unconscious. He wasn’t a danger to me.Yet, when he woke up, he sure made an impression on me.
“What’s on your mind?” she asked as we walked from the station together.
“Umm…” I shook my head. “I was thinking that he seemed so against Mr. Orlov being a patient of mine, or at this hospital at all.”If that was even his real name since it came up to match a dead person’s.“Yet he was fine with those Italian street thugs being here. He seemed so nice and casual with them, so friendly.”
But not with Mikhail.
All of them were likely living lives no one else could fathom. I certainly couldn’t as the daughter of a judge. I couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like to exist with such lawlessness, thinking I was above the law and untouchable with the laws and rules that were set in society.
“Maybe Jack prefers those Italians because they make hefty donations to this place as well.” Fatima shrugged, dismissing it all.
I couldn’t, though. For the rest of my shift and into the next one, I couldn’t shake off this hunch that Jack had been overly protective about my being near Mikahil. As ifhe, not all the other mobsters, was somehow worse.
By the time my day off came, I couldn’t stand the suspense and questions. All week, I’d fussed and fretted about how Mikhail was faring. If his wounds were infected. If he’d sought a privatenurse. If he was healing and not worsening or tearing his injuries.
I shouldn’t have cared. He walked out on me. Deliberately and cockily, he’d left against my medical advice, like he couldn’t ever bear to let someone else tell him what to do.
Such arrogance.
So much stubborn hostility.
Although those first impressions lingered, I couldn’t lie to myself and forget how he’d gazed at me with such interest, too.
“Oh…” I growled, snatching my phone off my coffee table in the apartment that I wouldn’t even be living in for long. As soon as the details were figured out for my mission, I’d be out of here, nomadic and not setting down roots as I tried to find myself after the loss of my family back home.
“That’s all the more reason to check on him.” I shook my head as I doubted my sanity. Yanking that note out of my purse, I tapped in his number. “All the more reason to just do the right thing,” I told myself. “To check on him, a follow-up that I would want to do for any other patient.”
The phone rang. I closed my eyes as I second guessed myself.
He wasn’t a good guy. He couldn’t be. But I was helplessly drawn by this curiosity and concern for him.
“If I wait too long, I’ll be gone and I’ll forever wonder if he is okay,” I coached myself, desperate for an excuse.
“This is purely business,” I reasoned as I waited for the call to be picked up.
“Not because I can’t stop thinking about him.”
“Not because he is stuck in my mind and making me so…”
