All she had was a cut on her hand. The hospital was only two blocks away.

Pulling her scattered thoughts together, Nina headed for the stairs.

Later, Nina couldn't remember much of the walk except the ache and the throbbing and the dizziness mixed in with how pretty Riverbend was in the twilight. If she had to bleed to death, at least it would be on a nice evening. But once she was at Riverbend General's ER, elbowing her way in the door, trying not to get blood on everything she touched, the calm evening turned into a madhouse filled with more people than she'd ever seen in her life, all talking at once. She found her way to the admitting desk and leaned against the counter, keeping her hand low and tight to her stomach so she didn't get blood on anything, hoping the pressure would ease the sharp ache that was turning into pain, a little overwhelmed and a lot woozy and very close to throwing up.

"I cut myself,'' she told the weedy little desk clerk when he asked what she needed. She meant to show him her hand, but she would have had to raise it above the counter to do that, and it seemed like a bad idea.

"Do you have insurance?" he asked.

Nina blinked. "I don't even have my purse." She bit her lip. "I know a doctor here. Alex Moore. He can vouch for me."

The desk clerk sniffed. "We'll see. Wait here. I'll get a nurse." He marched off, and a minute later a little dark nurse came down the hall and stopped to stare at Nina's stomach.

"What happened?" she asked, gently pulling Nina's throbbing hand away from her T-shirt.

"I cut my hand," Nina said.

"Not your stomach?" the nurse said, still supporting Nina's hand, and Nina looked down and saw that her T-shirt was soaked with blood.

"No," she said. "Just my hand."

"Don't move," the nurse said, and grabbed a wheelchair. "Sit."

"I can walk," Nina protested. "I just need a few stitches."

"Humor me," the nurse said, and Nina collapsed into the chair, suddenly grateful.

Her head was swimming a little, and her hand hurt, and when the nurse unwrapped the towel, it hurt more.

"It'll be okay," the nurse told her. "It's deep and it hurts, but you'll be fine."

"Oh, good," Nina said, and sat dazed while the nurse helped her put her bloody hand in a bowl of disinfectant and pulled out a tray with evil-looking things on it. Nina wanted to say, "Is this going to hurt more?" but she didn't have the energy and she didn't want to seem like a wimp. It was bad enough she'd cut herself in such a dumb way. Alex had told her over and over-Then she heard his voice in the hall. The desk clerk said, "Some woman was asking for you. Zandy has her in two," and Alex's lazy voice said, "All the women ask for me, Andrew. When will you learn?" He came through the door, somehow taller and broader in his doctor's greens, and said, "What have we got, Zan?" and then he saw her and stopped and said, "Nina!"

"I'm okay," she said, but he was beside her, his hand on her stomach, gently peeling up her T-shirt while she tried to tug it down. "It's not my stomach, it's my hand," she told him. "I just bled all over myself."

He stopped and swallowed and said, "Nice job, dummy," and the nurse looked at him oddly, which was the way she'd been looking at him ever since he'd said, "Nina!"

He turned to the nurse and said, "Let me see it, Zan," and she stepped back while Alex took Nina's hand from the disinfectant. He sighed and said, "Very nice job," and sat down, pulling the tray closer to him. "Flex your fingers for me," he told her, and she did, wincing. "I know, it hurts. Can you make a fist?" She did, and he put his hand against her fingers, and she was comforted by the warmth there. Then he told her to push against his hand, and it hurt again, but she did it anyway because this Alex, this new Alex, wasn't someone anyone would say no to.

"You're all right," he told her. "No nerve injury. We can put you back together here."

Nina nodded, tired from the pain. "Oh. Good."

Alex touched her cheek. "It's almost over. Hang in there." Then Zandy handed him a syringe full of something and Nina closed her eyes. "It's going to sting like hell, babe," she heard him say, and then her hand stung with the needle prick just the way he'd said, and a few moments later, the pain eased away.

She opened her eyes, and Alex said, "You don't want to watch this," so she closed them again, and tried to ignore the tugging sensation on her hand that she was pretty sure was thread being pulled through her skin. Instead, she concentrated on the pressure of Alex's fingers on her hand and the sound of his voice and the warmth of his body close to hers.

"How'd you do it?" he asked her while he tugged at her hand.

Nina winced, knowing she was going to hear "I told you so." Well, she deserved it. "The Crock-Pot fell on a glass I was holding."

Alex let his breath out. "That's my fault."

Nina's eyes flew open. "How is that your fault?"

He kept his eyes on her hand. "I knew that damn thing was going to fall, and I didn't move it."

Nina rolled her eyes, exasperated. "I could have moved it, too, you know."

"Yeah, but you're dumb," Alex said, and she leaned forward to glare at him and caught sight of what he was doing.

What he was doing was pulling the edges of the wound back together, quietly, efficiently, almost without paying attention, she thought, until she looked up at him and realized he was intent even while he teased her. He knew exactly what he was doing.

"You're good at this," she said, and the surprise was in her voice.

He put the last suture in and sat back. "Don't sound so amazed. I have a med-school diploma and everything."

"I'm sorry," Nina said hastily. "I didn't mean that the way it sounded."

He turned to her and looked down at her T-shirt and closed his eyes for a moment. "You look like you've been in a knife fight," he told her. "Get rid of that, will you? Zan will give you a scrub shirt."

"Sure," Zandy said, looking surprised again.

Alex stood up. "I can't stand looking at that. You scared the hell out of me, woman. Next time you show up here, break a leg or something. The sight of all that blood on you makes me want to throw up."

"I thought doctors weren't supposed to get sick at the sight of blood," Nina said.

"That depends on whose blood they're seeing," Alex said. He opened his mouth to say more, but then there was commotion in the hall, and he and Zandy went to look, and then he was gone.

"I'll be back," Zandy told her. "Don't move out of that chair. You could still be woozy from the blood loss."

"I'm fine," Nina said, but Zandy was already gone, so Nina stood up and moved to the doorway to see what was wrong.

The girl on the gurney that an orderly was shoving down the hall made Nina look like a piker in the spilt-blood department. She was sobbing, and there were people all around her, but all Nina could see was Alex, striding along beside her, giving orders that sounded like Greek in a voice that carried without shouting, calm, focused, completely in control while people scattered to do what he'd said. The whole time, he smiled down at the injured girl, interspersing comfort with command. "You're going to be all right," he told her as the gurney went past Nina's doorway. "We've got you now. I know you're scared, but you're going to be all right."

By the time the gurney was out of Nina's sight, the girl had stopped crying, and Nina felt like starting.

She went back and sat down, trying not to cry, close to it anyway because he'd been so wonderful, first to her and then to that girl, feeling stupid because all she'd ever seen him as was a good time and a body to fantasize about. She'd been as bad as Tricia. Norma was right; she'd been blind. She might be too old for Alex, but Alex was definitely not too young for her.

Zandy came back in a few minutes later.

"Is that girl going to be all right?" Nina asked her.

"Sure." Zandy picked up Nina's hand and began to swab the bloodstains off. "She's on her way to surgery now, and they'll put her back together."

Nina swallowed. "Alex is good, isn't he?"

Zandy stopped swabbing. "He's the best. Are you okay?"

Nina nodded. "I'm a little rocky. It's been a rough night."

"I brought you a shirt." Zandy handed her a green bundle. "Alex was right about that. You'll be back to normal as soon as that T-shirt is history."

Nina looked down at the gore that covered her shirt. "Right," she said, but she knew she'd never be back to normal again.

Norma would be so pleased.

Chapter 6

"I just want to take care of her for the rest of my life, and she won't even consider it," Alex told Max the next night as they sat in Alex's apartment after work. "I walked into that examining room and saw all that blood and almost lost my mind just because it was her, and that's when I knew it was all over."

He looked at Max, trying not to be pathetic. "This is it. This is the one. I'm crazy about her, but as far as she's concerned, I'm a kid." He took the beer Max handed him and collapsed back onto the couch, naked except for his shorts, trying to cool off from the heat of the July evening and the heat that just thinking about Nina generated in him. The second kind was the worst.

Max sat across from him, pulled another can from the six-pack he'd just dropped on the coffee table between them and popped it open. "As far as I'm concerned, you're a kid. Take those shorts, for instance."

Alex looked down at his Daffy Duck shorts. "There's nothing wrong with these shorts. As a matter of fact, your mother gave me these shorts."