Chapter One

      Dr. Alexandra Larson had a fantasy. It was decidedly tame, as fantasies went, but she’d never regarded herself as terribly creative or adventurous. She didn’t even have what she considered any real sense of style. She just played it safe. She wore her dark hair short, her make-up soft and her clothes either simply tailored or loose, depending on her mood or what was handy. And she always shied away from the extravagant, the outrageous or the truly indulgent.

      She considered her little daydream the ultimate indulgence.

      In it, she was alone. In a hot bath. The kind of bath a woman had to carefully ease into while aromatic steam fogged the room, beaded on her chest and filled her lungs. The kind where skin pinked and knotted muscles relaxed in the liquid heat, and the mind emptied of everything but the knowledge that all she had to do was…soak.

      She savored that image, lingered over the details, letting her mind drift to it as she ran between surgery, hospital rounds, clinic appointments, day care and, occasionally, the vet.

      She’d been caught indulging in it when her pager had gone off as she’d pulled into her driveway forty minutes ago. It was her thirty-second birthday. She should have been able to toy with the thoughts a little longer. Instead, she was scrubbing in for surgery with barrel-chested Ian Whitfield, one of the trauma doctors from emergency, and the fantasy of aromatic steam had given way to the reality of antibacterial scrub.

      “What can you tell me?” she asked, working lather from her fingertips to beyond her elbows. “I was only told that we have a thirty-four-year-old male with a compound femur. Are we dealing with anything else?”

      “CT shows no concussion or other internal injuries. The compound break in the left leg is the worst of it. That’s why I asked for the orthopedic surgeon on call.”

      Between the green cap covering the man’s receding hair-line and the band of white mask obliterating the bottom half of his ruddy face, only his bespectacled eyes were visible. They narrowed, light bouncing off his lenses, as he shook his head. “That’s one lucky man in there. According to the paramedics, a truck blew a light and nailed him full on the driver’s door.”

      “He was driving?”

      “Apparently.”

      That meant the victim had borne the brunt of the impact. Alex stored that detail as she reached for a brush to work under her short, unpolished nails. The force of that impact also explained how such a strong bone had penetrated the lower thigh.

      She’d already seen her patient’s X-rays. The femur, the long bone of his upper leg, had fractured in two places. The distal break, the one closest to the knee, had also splintered into a jagged spike.

      The good news was that she’d seen far worse. The bad news was that this sort of break often led to nasty complications.

      “Was anyone able to get a medical history from him?” she asked.

      “They had him full of morphine when they brought him in, but we got enough to determine that he’s never had any medical problems. Except for his injuries, he appears to be in excellent shape.”

      “Excellent is an understatement.” A gowned and masked surgical nurse with an awestruck look in her heavily made-up eyes rustled through the bright, white-tiled room in her paper booties. “That has to be the most gorgeous hunk of muscle and testosterone to ever grace an operating table. No man that rich should look that good.”

      Alex glanced up. As a surgeon, the emergency patient’s identity made no difference to her. She helped where she could, in and out of the operating room, and this man definitely needed her assistance. But the female part of her—the part she tended to neglect the most—was suddenly curious to know who she was about to put back together.

      The X-rays had been labeled C. Harrington. Beyond that, all that had registered was the damage done to an otherwise impressively healthy bone.

      Rita Sanchez, one of Alex’s favorite scrub nurses, approached the door of the surgical suite. “He may be gorgeous, Michelle,” she conceded, her tone disapproving, “but he’ll walk over anyone to get what he wants. That’s what I read in the papers, anyway.” Her back to the door to push it open, her hands in the air to keep them sterile, she paused. “I wonder what he’s doing in Honeygrove.”

      “There can only be one reason Chase Harrington would be here.” Pushing forward on the horseshoe-shaped knee handle to turn off the water, Whitfield snagged a sterile towel. “The man lives, eats and breathes mergers and takeovers. We’ve had a couple of manufacturing facilities take off here in the last couple of years. I’ll bet my golf clubs he’s after one of them. I just wish I knew which one it was,” he muttered. “The stock is bound to go up.”

      “What about you, Doctor?” the matronly nurse asked Alex. “Why do you think he’s here?”

      “I haven’t a clue.” Alex flashed her a smile, taking a towel herself. “I really don’t know that much about him.”

      All she did know was that Chase Harrington was one of those people whose name popped up on newscasts and in print because what he did and what he owned set him apart from the masses. As she understood it, the man’s lust for multi-million-dollar mergers and trades was as legendary as his drive, his ambition and his tendency to run over anyone who stood in his way. Since his image routinely graced the covers of Time and Newsweek in waiting and exam rooms, she even knew what he looked like. She wouldn’t go quite as far as the early-twenty-something Michelle had in her sighing description of the man, but he was rather attractive—if one was drawn to the lean, chiseled type.

      As for the body the impressionable nurse had described, when Alex, gowned and gloved, backed through the door of the surgical suite, all she could tell was that it was…long.

      The familiar beep of the heart monitor underscored the quiet murmur of conversation as she approached the blue-draped form on the operating table. The trauma doctor and the anesthesiologist hovered at the head. At the other end, the surgical nurses and another assistant were setting up stainless-steel trays of barbaric-looking instruments that appeared more suitable for torture than healing.

      The only exposed parts of the patient were the facial laceration Whitfield had already starting suturing and the thigh she would repair.

      The thigh was what had her attention.

      It was a mess.

      “Ouch,” she whispered, and reached for the large plastic bottle of clear antibiotic wash Rita had anticipated she would want.

      “Was he alone?” she heard Michelle ask.

      Rita clamped a gauze pad with a hemostat, holding it ready. “You mean, was there a woman with him?”

      “This suture’s too big.” Metal ticked softly against metal when the curved needle Whitfield tossed landed on a tray. “I need a one-point-three.”

      Michelle was the float nurse, the one who moved about the room taking supplies and materials to and from the team members at the table. “I’m just curious,” she defended on her way to the supply cabinet a few paces away. “If he’s alone,