www.millsandboon.co.uk

      To doctors and nurses and hospitals everywhere.

      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Chapter Eleven

      Chapter One

      He heard the whispered, amused comments as he walked down the hall toward the cardiac care unit of St. Mary’s Hospital, and it was hard work not to grin. He’d just been interviewed on local television that morning about his habits in the operating room. The interviewer had elicited the information that Dr. Ramon Cortero liked to listen to the rock group Desperado while he performed the open-heart surgery that he was world-famous for. The nurses and technicians in the cardiac ward where he worked had teased him about it affectionately all day. They were a team, he and these hardworking people, so he didn’t take offense at the teasing. In fact, some of them were fans of the Wyoming-based group Desperado, as well.

      His black eyes danced in a lean and darkly handsome face as he strode along in his surgical greens, scouting for the wife of a patient in whom he’d just replaced a malfunctioning heart valve.

      The woman wasn’t where she was supposed to be—in the surgical waiting room on the second floor. The CCU nurse had inadvertently sent her down to the main lobby waiting room, and when he’d phoned down there, she was missing. She was a middle-aged woman whose husband had survived against the odds, having been brought in with a leaky prosthetic valve complicated by pneumonia. It had taken all Ramon’s skill, and a few prayers, to bring the man through it. Now he had good news for this woman, if he could find her.

      The elevator doors opened nearby, and when he turned, there she was, surrounded by her teenage son, in a long black coat, several members of her husband’s family, and one of the female chaplains who’d rarely left her side since the ordeal began forty-eight hours earlier. She looked her age. Her eyes were red and puffy from much crying, and there was a desperate plea in them.

      Ramon smiled, answering the question she seemed afraid to ask. “He came through just fine,” he said without preamble. “He has a strong heart.”

      “Oh, thank God,” she whispered, and hugged her son. “Thank God! And thank you, Doctor.” She extended a hand and shook his hand.

      “De nada,” Ramon said with a gentle smile. “I’m glad we could help him.”

      The cardiologist, a debonair African-American, grinned from his stance near the heart surgeon. It was he who had met the woman and her son at the door as they arrived in the critical care unit and explained the heart catherization procedure as well as the valve replacement surgery to them. It was he who’d offered comfort and a glimmer of hope. The woman shook hands with him and smiled broadly, adding her thanks to him, as well.

      Dr. Ben Copeland only shrugged. “That’s what we’re here for,” he said, and smiled back. “Your husband is in the intensive care unit just down this hall. There’s a room next to it where you can wait until he’s hooked up to the monitors, and then you can see him.”

      There were more thanks, more tears. A nurse came along and was dispatched to show the relieved family where they could wait until they were allowed to see the patient.

      Ben joined Ramon. “Sometimes,” he said, “we have miracles. I wouldn’t have bet a cup of coffee on that man’s chances when he was brought in.”

      “Neither would I,” Ramon agreed grimly. “But sometimes we get very lucky indeed.” He sighed and stretched. “I could sleep for a week, but I’m still on call. I guess you get to go home.”

      Ben grinned.

      “Lucky devil.” He shook his head and left the other man with a wave of his hand as he went to check on the other two surgical patients he’d managed, with God’s help, to pull back from the abyss. There had been three emergency surgeries on this otherwise quiet Sunday when he was on call. He was stiff and sore and very tired. But it was a good sort of tired. He paused at a window to gaze with quiet satisfaction at the huge lighted cross on the main hospital wall. Prayers were often answered. His had been tonight.

      He checked his patients, wrote out the orders, dressed and went over to O’Keefe City Hospital across the street to visit three other new patients on whom he’d performed surgery. He also had to go to Emory University Hospital in Decatur on the way home to check a patient there who was ready to be dismissed. All his rounds made, he went home.

      Alone.

      His apartment was spacious, but not outwardly the home of a wealthy man. He preferred simplicity, a holdover from his childhood in Havana, in the barrio. He picked up a copy of Pio Baroja’s Cuentos and smiled sadly. There was an inscription just inside the cover that he knew by heart. “To Ramon from Isadora, with all my love.” His wife, who had died of pneumonia, of all things, only two years before. She had died while he was abroad performing complicated bypass surgery on a very important diplomat. She had died because of neglect, because her cousin had left her alone all night and the fluid in her lungs, combined with a desperately high fever, had killed her.

      It was ironic, he thought, that he hadn’t been home the one time he was truly needed. He’d left Isadora with her young cousin, Noreen, a registered nurse. He’d thought he could trust Noreen to take care of her. But she’d left Isadora, and when Ramon came home from overseas, it was to find her already