Daddy By Choice. Paula Detmer Riggs

loves you, he’ll be back, her pastor had told her over and over. But he hadn’t come back, and her life had gone on. Obviously his had, too. Very nicely, it seemed, she decided, glancing around for the umpteenth time.

      Though the examination room was small, the signed lithograph of a lone rider silhouetted against a dying sun was by a famous Southwestern artist. The diplomas and certificates that marched next to the print were even more impressive. A bachelor’s in biology from Arizona State, a medical degree from Stanford. A chief residency at Portland General. A clutch of fellowships and honors. Not bad for a high-school dropout with lousy grammar who’d sworn up one side and down the other he’d never set foot in a classroom again.

      A knock on the door had her pulse skittering. But it was Esther, the rotund nurse with smiling eyes, who entered. “Doctor just phoned from the hospital and he’s on his way,” she offered as she wrapped the familiar black blood pressure cuff around Madelyn’s arm. “Shouldn’t be long now.”

      The sky was a solid gunmetal gray and the air smelled like rain as Luke limped across the grassy median separating Port Gen from the medical building.

      In spite of the three cups of coffee he’d gulped down with the breakfast he’d grabbed in the cafeteria, he was still a little queasy from the meds he’d reluctantly taken to soothe the inflamed tissues in his spine. Though he’d showered and shaved, he still felt grimy and battered, pretty much how he’d felt after a day on the rodeo circuit.

      Dorie Presley, his iconoclastic frizzy-haired receptionist, looked up as he slipped through the back door to his ground-floor office suite, her Celtic blue eyes sharply assessing. A transplanted Californian who had grown up in a San Francisco mansion, she was married to a surgical resident who adored her enough to overlook her haphazard housekeeping and lousy cooking.

      Luke couldn’t care less about her lack of domestic skills. All that mattered was her ability to keep him organized and halfway on schedule, a skill he’d never mastered. She also made the best coffee he’d ever tasted, which meant a lot to a man who lived on caffeine.

      “You look terrible, L.J.”

      “Thanks, I needed that,” he muttered as he shrugged into the starched white coat he’d learned to wear because some patients had trouble trusting a doc who wore frayed jeans, scuffed cowboy boots and plain old cotton work shirts.

      “This should help,” she said, handing a mug of the extra-strong boiling-hot French roast she’d started brewing the instant he’d called to say he was on his way.

      “Darlin,’ you’re a pearl beyond price.”

      He took a greedy sip, far too aware that he really should cut back. The chronic burning in his gut wasn’t exactly an ulcer, but it had the potential.

      “How’s Mrs. Greaves?” Dorie asked, looping his stethoscope around his neck.

      “Awake and thrilled with her twin daughters.”

      “Congratulations, boss!” she said, grinning. “You beat the odds again.”

      Luke allowed himself a private moment of deep satisfaction. Phyllis Greaves had lost four babies before coming to him. The Greaveses were nice people who would make wonderful parents. “Thanks, but most of the credit goes to Phyllis.” The determined lady had spent the last two months of her pregnancy in bed and never once complained. He admired her grit.

      “Your messages are on your desk in order of priority. Nothing urgent, but Dr. Horvath at Rogue River definitely needs a return call before five.”

      “Remind me, okay?”

      Dorie’s grin flashed. “I live to serve, oh exalted healer.”

      Luke snorted. “Do we have a full house or did some of my ladies get tired of waiting?” he asked over the muted ringing of the phone.

      “Definitely stacked full, so don’t dawdle,” she said before snagging the phone.

      While she dealt with the call, he slugged down the rest of his coffee, then patted his pockets, looking for his reading glasses before he remembered he’d left them in his locker at the hospital.

      While dealing with a question for the patient on the other end, Dorie fished his spare pair from her bottom drawer and handed them over. He grunted his thanks before tucking them safely into his breast pocket, along with a pen he filched from the jar on her desk, and heading down the hall toward the examining rooms.

      All four doors were closed, with patient charts lined up neatly in the Plexiglas slots on the wall. He stopped at number one. The folder was yellow and tagged in blue and red. A new patient, high risk, the only kind he had time to treat these days.

      Moving his shoulders to relieve the tension that had started the instant he’d walked through the back door, he plucked the chart from its plastic slot and flipped it open.

      The name was printed on the tab in Dorie’s neat boarding-school script. Madelyn Smith Foster.

      His breath dammed up in his throat. My God, Maddy? Here? The last time he’d seen her he’d been standing on her porch with his hat in his hand, begging her to forgive him.

      While he’d been having a high old time in Canada, flirting with more pretty girls than there were fleas on a dog, she’d been twisting and turning through two days of torturous labor, only to hemorrhage and nearly die before the frantic GP had taken the baby by cesarean. Her parents had waited less than twenty-four hours before offering her an ultimatum—give the tiny but perfectly formed baby girl up for adoption or take the kid and leave.

      It hadn’t been much of a choice for a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl with no job skills and no money, so she’d signed the papers that had taken her baby away forever. It hadn’t been easy for her, however. Anything but. Her eyes had still been puffy and glazed with grief two weeks later when she’d opened the screen door to his nervous knock.

      Forcing himself to breathe again, he scanned the patient-info sheet. Thirty-nine years old. Employed as a guidance counselor at Whiskey Bend High School. Divorced. His mind stuttered over that fact before moving on to the medical history—the usual childhood illnesses, an appendectomy at the age of seven. On the night they’d made love she’d been embarrassed to let him see the scar—

      “Luke, are you all right?”

      His head shot up and for an instant he felt disoriented. “What?”

      “Don’t take this wrong,” Dorie murmured, looking both concerned and amused. “But you look exactly like a man who’s taken one where it hurts the most.”

      He managed an off hand grin. “It’s my office. I can look anyway I want, sugar.”

      Unimpressed gray eyes, sharp as lasers, zoomed in on his face. Heat crept up his neck as he dropped his gaze to the chart. “This…this patient, what do you know about her?” he asked, careful to keep his voice low.

      “Just that she’s a referral from a GP I never heard of, has excellent insurance through a group policy for Texas-state employees, arrived early for her appointment, seems a bit aloof, but pleasant—and definitely anxious, though she hides it well. On a scale of one to ten, style-wise, I give her a twelve.”

      “What the hell is ‘style-wise’?” Luke muttered. He was always edgy when he was caught off-guard.

      “You know. Style. Presence.” She lifted an eyebrow and he frowned. “The way a woman dresses and wears her hair and carries herself.”

      “Mrs. Foster is a twelve?”

      “Absolutely.” Dorie grinned, clearing enjoying herself. “If I had to guess, I’d say she bought the suit she’s wearing from Neiman Marcus, probably not on sale. Same with her shoes. Lizard pumps, probably Italian. And hair to die for. Thick, sun-streaked and blond, which has to be natural or the best dye job I’ve ever seen.”

      Luke felt a little dizzy. The Maddy he’d known had worn jeans or short cotton skirts and flirty shirts that showed