The Doctor's Guardian. Marie Ferrarella

coat that she’d tied around her waist earlier, hoping she looked presentable. “No, I’m fine,” she assured him. “As long as your grandmother doesn’t scare easily.”

      To his recollection, he’d never even seen his grandmother worried, much less scared. “She has nerves of steel.”

      Nika laughed shortly. He found the sound had a nice, soothing ring to it.

      “That puts your grandmother one up on me,” Nika told him. She glanced down at her hands. There were streaks across the top of each of them. “I just need to wash my hands and I’ll be ready to go.” The orderly retreated back to what he was doing when he’d stopped to help, and Nika paused for a moment as she got a good look at her rescuer’s slacks. She felt instantly guilty. “Oh, your pants.”

      Cole looked down at them himself, checking to see if they had somehow gotten worse in the last minute. Sadly, the grease stains on each leg were just as vivid.

      “Guess the crease isn’t as sharp as it could be,” he cracked.

      “I was looking at the grease,” Nika said before she realized he was being sarcastic. Getting them cleaned was her responsibility, she thought. “Give them to me.”

      “My pants?” he questioned, looking at her in surprise. Just what kind of a doctor was going to be treating his grandmother?

      “Oh, I don’t mean now,” she explained quickly. Not quickly enough, she gathered, judging by his expression. “I mean, the next time you come back here to see your grandmother. I’ll send them to the cleaners—or you can send them to the cleaners and just give me the bill.”

      He waved away her words. He could pay for his own dry cleaning. Or just toss the slacks away if it came down to that. The only thing this woman owed him was taking care of his grandmother.

      “That’s all right.”

      “No, it’s not,” she insisted firmly. He stopped walking for a moment and looked at her. She couldn’t tell if he was impressed or annoyed. Either way, she pressed on. “You wouldn’t have gotten that way if you hadn’t come to my rescue. I believe in paying my debts, Mr. Baker.”

      “That’s detective,” he corrected her.

      She’s resumed walking and now it was her turn to stop first. “Mr. Detective?” she questioned, her brow furrowing.

      “Detective Baker.” Who the hell called anyone “Mr.” Detective? He scrutinized her closely. Had she hit her head when the elevator had initially come to a stop? “You sure you’re all right?”

      “Yes, I’m sure.” She was slightly embarrassed. “I’m just a little out of sync, that’s all. It’s not every day I get to climb up a man’s torso to get out of an elevator car and into an elevator shaft,” she told him in her own defense. “I’ll be at the top of my game in a couple of minutes,” she promised.

      His eyes narrowed as he focused on her. “And just exactly what does this ‘game’ involve?” Cole asked.

      She really was having trouble putting her thoughts into words this morning. Getting trapped in the elevator didn’t have anything to do with it. Pulling double shifts, however, did. Someday, she would catch up on her rest and sleep for a week.

      “Poor choice of words,” she acknowledged. “The only ‘game’ in town, as far as I’m concerned, is making sure that your grandmother leaves the hospital healthier than when she came in.” I might as well make use of this man being here, Nika thought as they turned a corner down the corridor. “Can you tell me briefly what her complaints are?”

      She peered at his face as she asked the question and was rewarded to see the corners of his mouth curve ever so slightly.

      The word “complaint” triggered memories of the last conversation he’d had with his grandmother before he discovered her neglected medication. “You mean other than the fact that they brought Becky Warren back from the dead?”

      Nika stopped abruptly just shy of Ericka Baker’s single care unit and stared at him. “Excuse me?”

      “Becky Warren,” he repeated. “The town ‘harlot,’ to quote my grandmother.” And then he filled her in on the joke. “My grandmother watches Living the Good Life faithfully,” he said, naming his grandmother’s favorite soap opera. “Has for the last fifteen years. It’s her only weakness—or vice. That and dark chocolate with coconut,” he added. “Otherwise, she’s a trouper who doesn’t complain. I wouldn’t have known about her heart condition if I hadn’t been there for one of her ‘episodes.’” He vividly remembered fearing the worst as he saw his grandmother clutch her chest, the side of her neck throbbing wildly. “Scared the hell out of me,” he said as he pushed open the door to his grandmother’s room. “I got her to go see Dr. Goodfellow.”

      Nika nodded as she walked into Ericka’s room. “Good choice. He’s one of the top cardiologists in the state,” she informed him.

      At the sound of their voices, the woman in the hospital bed turned her head toward them. The look on her finely lined face was affectionate disapproval as sharp, sapphire-blue eyes swept over the dirt and grease on Cole’s clothes.

      She shook her head. “Have you been making mud pies again, Coleman?” she asked.

      Chapter 3

      The question his grandmother asked hung in the air, unanswered.

      It scraped against Cole’s heart.

      G wasn’t teasing him the way she occasionally did, and she wasn’t being witty. She was serious. He’d seen that look enter her eyes several times before. The look that silently announced that she had temporarily slipped away from him and was now off into the past. A past when she had been all things to him, including both mother and father.

      Cole slanted a glance at the physician at his side, wondering if anything in his grandmother’s behavior had tipped her off that the woman wasn’t quite lucid.

      But since this doctor he’d brought to his grandmother’s bedside didn’t know G, from all appearances, she seemed to be taking the remark at face value as a sign of affection between his grandmother and him.

      Good.

      Walking over to the older woman’s bedside, Cole leaned over and kissed the weathered yet incredibly soft cheek.

      “Not this time, G,” he said quietly in response to her question. When he took a step back, he saw that she’d returned to her old self and he breathed a silent sigh of relief.

      “Coleman, how did you manage to get so dirty?” Ericka wanted to know, clearly surprised by his less than neat appearance.

      “Rescuing me,” Nika told her, stepping forward.

      Instead of picking up the elderly woman’s chart, or accessing Ericka Baker’s records on the portable computer just outside the woman’s room, Nika preferred to go straight to the source and meet her patients first, then look at their records. It helped her form a relationship with the patient, however briefly it might last, and that, she’d always felt, held her in good stead. It also made the patients feel that she viewed them as people first and patients second.

      But before Nika could introduce herself, the woman in the bed gave her a quick, albeit penetrating, once-over, Ericka’s very blue eyes sweeping over her.

      “And you are?” Ericka asked.

      “Dr. Veronika Pulaski,” Nika told her, putting her hand out to the woman.

      She found herself on the receiving end of a handshake that was both firm and confident. No matter what the notes on the chart claimed, this was no “little old lady.” This was a force to be reckoned with, Nika thought with a warm smile.

      “Dr. Goodfellow asked me to run some tests on you to make sure that the procedure he intends to perform to get your atrial fibrillation under control won’t do