Wynter was aware of a rush of butterflies in the pit of her stomach and her face flushing. Pearce's hands were not only strong, but gentle.

They stood so close that their thighs brushed.

"Feels okay," Wynter murmured as Pearce carefully circled the joints. Feels...wonderful.

Pearce slid her fingers along the border of Wynter's jaw and over her chin. "Sore?"

Wynter shook her head. She couldn't feel her chin. All she could feel was the heat of Pearce's skin. She was breathing fast. So was Pearce. Pearce's eyes had gotten impossibly dark, so dark that the pupils blended with the surrounding irises, creating midnight pools that Wynter was absoluty certain she could drown in.

"Pearce," Wynter whispered. Whatever was happening, she couldn't let it. But as she slipped further into Pearce's eyes, she couldn't recall why not. She forced herself to focus. "Don't."

"Hmm?" Pearce lowered her head, intent on capturing the hint of spice that was Wynter's scent. She slid her hand around the back of Wynter's neck as she very lightly kissed the tip of her chin where the bruise shadowed it. Her lips tingled and she tightened deep inside.

"Better?"

"Much," Wynter said teasingly, hoping to make light of the moment.

"It gets better," Pearce said, her lids half closed, her mouth closing in on Wynter's.

"I...Pearce...wait..." Wynter's cell phone rang, impossibly loud, and she jumped. She fumbled for it, unable to look away. Pearce's mouth was an inch from hers when she whispered, "Hello?" She listened, staring at the pounding carotid in Pearce's throat. "I thought you weren't coming. Okay. Fine. I'm in the bathroom. I'll be right out."

She closed the phone. Her voice was thick. "I have to go."

"Why?" Pearce kept her hand on the back of Wynter's neck and caressed her softly, tangling her fingers in Wynter's hair. She knew what she saw in Wynter's eyes. She'd seen it before, but it had never stirred her quite like this. "Got a date?"

"No," Wynter said as she gently backed away, escaping Pearce's grip, if not her spell. "It's my husband."

Standing absolutely still, Pearce said nothing as Wynter stepped around her and hurried out. When the door swung closed, leaving her alone, Pearce bent down and retrieved the forgotten white card. Wynter must have dropped it. She ran her thumb over the type, then slid the card into her breast pocket.

Goodbye, Wynter Kline.


CHAPTER TWO

Four Years Later Just as Pearce pulled her robin's-egg blue 1967 Thunderbird convertible into the parking garage on South Street next to the University Museum, her beeper went off.

"Shit," she muttered as she tilted the small plastic rectangle to check the readout. Five a.m. and the chaos was starting already. The number, however, wasn't one of the nurses' stations in the twelve-story Rhoads Pavilion, which housed most of the surgical patients. It was the chairman's office. And at that hour of the morning, it wasn't his secretary calling. It was him. "Fuck."

She pulled the classic car into the angled slot in the far corner of the first floor next to the security guard's tiny booth. It was a reserved space and one for which she paid premium rates, but she wasn't about to let some idiot dent the vehicle that she had spent countless hours restoring. She knew all the guards would keep an eye on it. She tipped them every month in thanks. "Hey, Charlie," she called as she climbed out.

"Good morning, Doctor," the pencil-thin retired cop said. He wore his security guard uniform with the same pride with which he had worn the Philadelphia Police blues for thirty years. "Might better have left the baby home today. The news is calling for rain later. Could be snow if it gets a little colder."

"I'll leave the car here until spring, then," Pearce yelled as she jogged toward the street. Her cell phone wouldn't work in the parking garage. And it wouldn't matter to her if it rained or snowed, because she was on call for the next twenty-four hours and would not be leaving the hospital for at least thirty. "You take good care of my girl, now."

Charlie laughed and sketched a salute as she disappeared up the ramp.

Once on the sidewalk, she thumbed the speed dial and punched in the number. When it was answered by the voice she anticipated, she said, "Rifkin."

"Would you stop by the office before rounds this morning?"

Although framed as a question, it wasn't a request.

"Yes sir. I'm just outside the hospital."

"Come up now, then."

Pearce didn't have time to reply before the call was cut off. Fuck.

She ran through the list of patients on the chairman's service, wondering if something had gone wrong that she didn't know about. The junior surgery resident who had been on call the night before knew that he was to advise her of any problem, no matter how small. But other than several routine questions about transfusions and antibiotic coverage, she hadn't gotten any calls of note. Despite the fact that her family home was only forty minutes away in Bryn Mawr and she could easily have had her own wing of the house and all the privacy she required, she lived in an apartment in West Philadelphia so that she could make it to the hospital in less than fifteen minutes. She did not like to be surprised by problems in the morning, and a call at this hour to the chairman's office could only be a problem. Fuck.

The elevator was empty when she got in. It stopped at the second floor to admit a bedraggled blond with dark circles under her eyes, a bloodstained Rorschach on the left thigh of her scrub pants, and a crumpled piece of paper in her right hand that she studied as if it were the Holy Grail. Pearce knew it was "the list"--an inventory of all the patients on the service to which the resident was assigned, with coded notations as to each patient's admission date, date of surgery, procedure performed, most recent lab tests, and outstanding test results. The work of the day--or night--centered around the list and, if an attending surgeon were to call for an update on one of their patients, everything the resident needed to know was on that single piece of paper. Even though every resident carried a PDA and there were computers at every nurses' station, the "list" still prevailed as the source of all vital info.

Without it, more than one resident had found himself giving incomplete or incorrect information, and in short order, had been looking for a new job. At least once a day, some frantic resident could be seen rushing through the halls asking all and sundry, "Have you seen my list? I lost my list. Has anyone seen my list?"

"Hey, Tam," Pearce said. "How you doing?"

Tammy Reynolds looked up from the page, blinking as if she had awakened from a dream. Then she smiled slowly, some of the fatigue leaving her eyes. "Hey you. I haven't seen you at O'Malley's recently.

Have you been hiding, or has someone been monopolizing all your time?"

"Neither. But I'm senior on the chief's service, and it's been busy."

"I know which service you're on." She moved a little closer in the elevator and put her hand on Pearce's waist. She circled her thumb on Pearce's pale green scrub shirt, massaging the muscles underneath. "I pay attention to where you are. And you're never too busy when you want something."

Pearce moved back out of touching range, aware that they were slowing for the fifth floor. She didn't want the doors to open and someone to see them. And she didn't want Tammy's attentions. At least, not right at the moment. "I gotta go. Take it easy, okay?"

"Call me. I'm on the onc service this month," Tammy called as Pearce stepped off the elevator. "I could use some of your medicine, baby."

Pearce lifted a hand in a parting wave, grateful that there was no one waiting in the hall who might've heard the comment. She didn't care what her fellow residents knew or thought of her, but she preferred that her private business not become the topic of conversation among the administration. Well, at least not by her own invitation.

She walked along the maroon-carpeted hallway toward the large corner office. The staff surgeons' offices were clustered in one corner of the fifth floor with the surgeons' lounge adjoining them and the operating suites taking up the rest of the floor on the opposite side of the building. This arrangement enabled the surgeons to wait in their offices, working, until their cases were ready to go. Since it was a matter of routine for cases to begin late, it prevented lost time, something that every surgeon loathed. The secretarial spaces, separated from the hallway by waist-high partitions, were all empty. The office doors were closed. The administrative work of the day would not begin until eight thirty, and by that time, most of the surgeons would already be in the OR. She enjoyed the quiet, empty warren, and likened the stillness to the calm before the storm. She glanced at the yellow face of her Luminox sports watch and grimaced. Five fifteen. If this took more than a few minutes, she would be late meeting the other residents, and that was a bad precedent to set. As the most senior resident on the service, she organized the daily work schedule, assigned the more junior residents to assist on cases, and oversaw the night call rotations. She was always on time, if not early, because her behavior set the tone for her service, and she expected everyone to be prompt. She expected a lot of things, and if she didn't get it, there was hell to pay.

She was the ultimate authority over all things resident-related on the chief's service, the busiest of the general surgery services. The only individual in the hospital with more power within the resident hierarchy was the chief surgical resident, and he was in charge of his own service and outpatient clinic--for all practical purposes functioning as a junior attending with only minimal supervision from the attending surgeons.