The Doctor's Undoing

His gaze lingered on her mouth. “I’ve been thinking a lot lately about your advice.”

“What advice?”

“You know what you always say about going after what you want? Like when a guy wants something very badly, but the risks are damned high?”

“I guess that would depend on how much you’re willing to lose,” she answered very softly.

He searched her face. And then he sighed lightly, dropped his hand and moved an inch backward. “Some things are just too valuable to gamble on.”

She reached out and caught his shirt. Giving a little tug, she brought him back to within touching proximity. “Some risks are worth taking.”

GINA WILKINS is a bestselling and award-winning author who has written more than seventy novels for Mills & boon. She credits her successful career in romance to her long, happy marriage and her three “extraordinary” children.

A lifelong resident of central Arkansas, Ms Wilkins sold her first book in 1987 and has been writing full-time since. She has appeared on the Waldenbooks, B. Dalton and USA TODAY bestseller lists. She is a three-time recipient of the Maggie Award for excellence, sponsored by Georgia romance Writers, and has won several awards from the reviewers of RT Book Reviews.

Gina Wilkins

For the Insomniac Divas, my light in the darkness.

And with thanks, as always, to Kerry for her invaluable assistance!

“Will you marry me?”

Haley Wright smiled fondly at the man who had just popped the question—for the third time that week. “It’s sweet of you to ask, but I’m afraid I can’t.”

He sighed heavily. “Already married, huh?”

He responded that same way every time she turned him down. “No, still single.” It was the same reply she always gave him. “Just too busy to get married right now.”

“I could make things easier for you,” he suggested hopefully. “I’m a great cook. I can even do the laundry.”

“As much as I appreciate the offer,” she said, making a note on the pad in her hand, “I still have to decline.”

Edgar Eddington, a sixty-two-year-old Caucasian male presenting with congestive heart failure and cirrhosis of the liver, nodded in resignation against the pillow of the hospital bed in which he lay. “Can’t blame a guy for asking a pretty young doctor.”

Smiling, Haley looked over her notes to make sure she had everything she needed when she presented her patient to the other students, the residents and the attending physician when they made rounds a short time later. Assuring herself that she had checked everything she was supposed to know about Mr. Eddington for that morning—she hoped—she held her notebook at her side and smiled at the patient. “I’ll see you in a little while, Mr. Eddington.”

He winked, a flirtatious smile lighting his illness-ravaged face. “I’ll look forward to it, doctor.”

She had told him several times that as a third-year medical student, she wasn’t yet entitled to be called doctor, but his answer to that was always, “Close enough.” Many patients on her internal medicine rotation tended to call anyone in a white coat “doctor,” making no distinction between the students’ shorter, hip-length white coats and the physicians’ longer coats, which fell almost to the knees. While she had been instructed to politely correct the misidentification, she was not expected to argue with the more stubborn patients.

Hurrying toward the students’ room in hopes of snagging a free computer on which to write her notes, she was still smiling a little in response to Mr. Eddington’s outrageous flirting. She never failed to be impressed by his bravely cheerful attitude even in the face of the pain he suffered in what both he and the medical staff realized was the final stage of his life. He had weeks to live, at the most, but during the days she had worked with him, she had never once heard him complain.

She was assigned to monitor three patients during the month she would spend on wards in the Veterans Administration hospital near her medical school campus. When one patient was discharged, she picked up another, so she always had three.

Every morning at six, she visited each patient to record any problems noted during the night, to make note of the vital signs that had been taken every two to four hours and to ask if they had any questions or concerns. She always did a physical exam—checking head, eyes, ears, nose, throat, heart, lungs, abdomen, blood flow, pulses in the hands and feet—writing down what she observed. Because she’d been doing those exams for only a week during this, her first rotation, she tried to look more confident than she actually felt.

After she had seen her assigned patients, she had to write notes on each before rounds started at 8:00 a.m. It wasn’t easy getting it all done in time, but she knew better than to be late or unprepared when her resident or attending physician asked her a question during rounds.

Aware of rapidly passing minutes, she rushed into the students’ room, hoping a computer there would be free. If not, she would have to find an available one somewhere on the floor, and she had very little time remaining before rounds. To her relief, only one of the two computers was being used. Sandy-haired Ron Gibson looked up from the keyboard with a grin when she stumbled into the room. “Running late again?”