it came to his work, Emmitt had implemented his own strict code of ethics—and had never wavered. Didn’t mean he was above misleading or manipulating a situation if it kept him from the truth. Unfortunately, the good doctor had but one kryptonite—and she was off limits.
Emmitt would bathe in BBQ chip dust and play punch-tag with a rabid grizzly before ever bringing Paisley into this. Which left him with just one option. He wasn’t particularly proud of his game plan, but he was desperate. And desperate men did desperate things. Like lie to a man who could remove Emmitt’s kidney while he slept.
Dragging in a few deep breaths, Emmitt wiped his brow and entered the waiting room of the clinic. The place was hopping with patients, ringing phones, and intercom pages. Behind the table sat Rosalie, who ran the front office with the efficiency of an air traffic controller.
Emmitt didn’t know which was older, the town of Rome or Rosalie Kowalski. As far as he knew, she had been the office manager since before Dr. Tanner Senior hung out his shield sometime in the sixties.
Most people had assumed that when Gray graduated from med school he would come back to Rome and join the family practice. Anyone who knew Gray, like really knew him, would explain he was the kind of guy who liked to earn his accolades. Who always took the right path, even when it was the hardest.
Emmitt respected that. Respected him even more when, after his grandfather had a stroke, Gray gave up a lofty position in Boston to help his father with the practice until he could find another partner.
Then he’d met Michelle and decided Rome was where he wanted to be after all. Love was funny that way.
“Well, look who’s here,” Rosalie said, managing two phones at once. At first glance, the silver bun and perpetually nose-perched glasses brought to mind a plumper Professor McGonagall from Hogwarts. But while Rosalie had played Mrs. Claus in every Rome Christmas parade since the beginning of time, she was also the leader of Grannie Pack, a motorcycle club for people fifty-five and older. “Our own hometown hero.”
“I don’t know about that.”
“I bet those women you pulled from the fire would disagree.” Rosalie placed a pudgy hand to her chest. “Putting their lives before your own. We couldn’t be prouder.”
Emmitt itched the back of his neck. “The women?”
“Yes, the group of Future Female Engineers of the World who were visiting the plant the day of the explosion. I heard you saved them all in one fell swoop.”
Emmitt cringed. The only way to keep his condition quiet was to say as little as possible. But instead of slowing the gossip, people took his silence as permission to fill in whatever holes were missing from his story.
In small town speak, people were flat-out lying.
“The lengths I’ll go through to get a pretty lady’s number.” The only numbers he’d received were from his doctor. The number of ribs fractured. Number of shrapnel pieces extracted. The number of days he’d been unresponsive. The number of months it would take to recover.
And the number of ways he was damned lucky to still be alive. Twenty-two women, eleven men, and nine children couldn’t say the same.
Emmitt had reported on a lot of disasters over his career. One of the worst was a story he’d covered in Iraq when a truck bomb detonated three feet from the walls of a Marine base. It took seventy-three soldiers two weeks to locate all the genetic material belonging to the fourteen downed Marines, twenty-one civilian contractors, nine local workers, and six naval hospital corpsmen caught in the blast.
Soldiers go into a war zone trained to keep atrocities from happening, but equally trained in case the worst happens. In China, these were day laborers in a concrete plant. Moms and dads who felt safe enough that many of them brought their young children to the day care located just outside the factory.
The knot in his stomach tightened and squeezed, which made his eyes burn with grit and his head pound double time.
Rosalie watched him with growing concern.
He was tempted to tell her it wasn’t necessary. He was concerned enough for the two of them. And, before she got it in her head that he needed feeling sorry for, he flashed her enough pearly whites to thoroughly rattle her. It was one of those half-smile, half-grin deals that released a set of double-barreled dimples he’d hated as a kid but came