THE LAST TEMPTATION OF DR. DALTON (4 page)

Her heart did a little dance as his warm breath touched her face. Blue eyes darker now, his head dipped closer still until his lips slipped across hers, whisper-soft, clinging for a moment. “Yeah. Like sugar and honey.”

His lids lowered in a slow blink before he straightened, turning to open Anna’s door.

The child led the way as they trudged up to a group of metal shacks, giving Charlie’s heart rate a chance to slow. Why had he kissed her when they’d agreed not to go there? Probably for the same reason she’d wanted him to—that overwhelming chemistry between them that had caught fire the first day they’d met.

They approached a shack that looked as though it must be Anna’s home. A cooking pot sat over a coal fire with what smelled like cassava simmering inside. The shack’s crooked door was partially open, and Anna shoved it hard, scraping it along the muddy ground until they could step inside the dark interior.

A young child lay sleeping on a mat on the dirt floor and another was covered with a blanket, exposing only his or her outline. An older woman with a brightly patterned scarf on her head sat on a plastic chair, stitching some fabric.

“Mama Grand, I bring a doctor to see Prince.”

The woman looked at them suspiciously. “No need, Anna. I use more healing herbs today and Prince will be fine soon.”

Anna twisted her fingers and looked imploringly at her. “Please. The doctor is here, so let him see if Prince is getting better.”

Trent stepped forward and gave one of his irresistibly charming smiles to the woman. “I’m sure you’re doing a fine job taking care of Prince. But the boss lady, Miss Edwards here, will be mad at me if I don’t have work to do today. She might not even pay me. Can I please just take a look at your fine little one while I’m here?”

The woman’s stern expression softened slightly, and after a moment she inclined her head. Charlie had a hard time suppressing a smile. Trust Trent to turn it around to make Charlie look like the bad guy, and to know exactly how to twist it so his being there was no reflection on the older woman’s treatments.

Trent crouched down and looked back at the woman. “Is this Prince hiding under the blanket? May I look at him?”

She nodded again, and Trent reached to pull the blanket from the small, huddled shape. He quickly jerked back when he saw the exposed child.

“What the...?” Trent’s face swung towards Charlie, his eyebrows practically reaching his hair.

CHAPTER FIVE

T
HE
LITTLE
BOY
looked like a ghost. Literally. He’d been covered head to toe in white paint. In all Trent’s years of seeing crazy and unusual things around the world, he’d never seen this.

Charlotte covered a small smile with her fingertips, and he could tell she wanted to laugh at whatever the hell his expression was. Could he help it if it startled him to see the little guy looking like that?

“It’s a common home remedy here for malaria. The sick person is painted white as part of the cure.”

“Ah.” Trent schooled his features into normal professionalism and turned back to the boy. He touched his knuckles to the sleeping child’s cheeks, then pressed the child’s throat, both of which were hot and sweaty. The boy barely opened his eyes to stare at him before becoming wracked by a prolonged, dry cough. When the cough finally died down, Trent leaned close to him with a smile he hoped would reassure him. “Hi, Prince. I’m Dr Dalton. How do you feel? Anything hurting?”

Prince didn’t answer, just slid his gaze towards his sister. She knelt down next to him and touched her hand to the boy’s thin shoulder. “It’s okay, Prince. Dr Dalton is here to help you get better.”

“Have you had belly pain or diarrhea?” The boy still just stared at him, looking scared, as though Trent was the one who looked like a ghost. Maybe the child was delirious. “Anna, do you know about any belly pain? Has he been confused or acting strange?”

She nodded. “He did complain about his tummy hurting. And he has been saying silly things. I think he seems the same as when I had the malaria—shaking and feeling very hot and cold.”

“Trent, how about I drive back to the compound and get the malaria medicine?” Even through the low light, he could see the green of Charlotte’s eyes focused intently on his. “I’ll bring it back here; maybe we won’t have to scare him by taking him to the hospital.”

He shook his head, not at all sure this was malaria. “If he has belly pain, it might be typhoid, which requires a different kind of antibiotic. Hard to tell with a child who’s sick and obtunded like he is. The only way to know for sure is if we take him back to the hospital and get a blood test—see if it shows the parasites or not.”

“No hospital.” The older woman’s lips thinned. “If de boy go, he will never come back.”

Obviously, the poor woman had lost someone she loved. “I’ll watch over him myself,” Trent said. “I promise to keep him safe.”

“Mama Grand, no boys are kidnapped any more. For true. The war is over a long time now.”

Damn, so that was what she was worried about. He could barely fathom that boys this young had been kidnapped to be soldiers, but knew it had happened so often that some parents sent their children out of the country to be safe, never to see them again.

He stood and reached for the woman’s rough and gnarled hand. “I understand your worries. But it’s important that Prince have a test done that we can only do at the hospital. I promise you that I will care for Prince and look after him like I would if he were my own child, and return him to you when he’s well. Will you trust me to do that?”

The suspicious look didn’t completely leave the woman’s face, but she finally nodded. Trent didn’t want to give her a chance to change her mind and quickly gathered Prince in his arms, wrapping the blanket around him as best he could.

“You want to come with us, Anna? You don’t have to, but it might make Prince feel more comfortable,” Charlotte said.

“Yes. I will come.”

“Are you going to hold Prince so I can drive, or do you want to take the wheel?” he asked Charlotte as they approached the car.

“You know the answer to that.” Her gorgeous eyes glinted at him. “You’re in the passenger seat, Dr. Dalton.”

He had to grin. “You really should address this little controlling streak of yours, Ms. Edwards. Find out why relinquishing power scares you so much.”

“It doesn’t scare me. I just trust my own driving over anyone else’s.”

“Mm-hm. One of these days, trying to control the direction the world spins is going to weigh heavy on those pretty shoulders of yours. Drive on, boss lady.”

* * *

Tests proved that Prince did indeed have typhoid, and after a couple days he’d recovered enough to return home. Charlie was glad that Trent’s expertise had led him to insist the child be tested, instead of just assuming it was malaria, as she had.

She was also glad that, in the days that had passed since Trent had come back, she’d managed to stop thinking about him for hours at a time. Well, maybe not
hours
. Occasionally, the man sneaked into her thoughts. Not her fault, since she wasn’t deaf and blind—okay, a little hard of hearing in that one ear of hers she was grateful to have it at all.

His voice, teasing and joking with the nurses and techs, sometimes drifted down the hall to her office. His distinctively tall form would occasionally stride in front of her office on his way from the clinic to the hospital ward until she decided just to shut the darn door.

She’d made a conscious effort to stay away from the hospital ward where she might run into him. She got dinner alone at home, or ate lunch at her desk so she wouldn’t end up sitting with him in the kitchen. She spent time at the school instead of here, where thoughts of him kept invading her brain, knowing he was somewhere nearby.

It helped that Trent had kept their few interactions since the brief kiss in the rain short and professional. When the man said goodbye, he sure meant it, never mind that she felt the same way. Thank heavens he’d be leaving again in the next few days so she wouldn’t have to suffer the embarrassment of thinking about all they’d done in their single night together.

Her door opened and her heart gave an irritating little kick of anticipation that it just might be his blue eyes she’d see when she looked up.

But it was John Adams standing there. “Any word yet on the funding for another teacher?”

She smiled and waved a paper. “Got the green light. I’m sending the final forms today, and they said we should get a check in about a month. Is the woman you’ve been training going to work out?”

“Yes, most definitely.” He dramatically slapped a hand to his barrel chest. “She is smart and beautiful and I am in love with her. Thanks to God I can officially offer her a job.”

“You’re starting to remind me of ladies’ man Dr Dalton. No mixing business with pleasure.” A flush filled her cheeks as soon as the words were out of her mouth, since she’d done exactly that, and the pleasure had been all too spectacular.

“Yes, ma’am.” He grinned. “Anyway, I also stopped to tell you to come look at our little patient this morning.”

“What little patient?”

“Lionel. The one with appendicitis and the hemangioma—or who used to have a hemangioma. You won’t believe what Trent’s done with it.”

Alarm made Charlie’s heart jerk in her chest. She’d worried from the moment she’d agreed to let Trent take care of such a delicate procedure. Had he messed it up? She’d checked on the child a couple of times, but a patch had still covered his eye. “What do you mean? Is it going to have to be redone when we get a plastic surgeon in here?”

“Just come and see.”

She rose and followed him to the hospital ward, her fears eased a bit by John Adams’s relaxed and smiling expression. Still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she might have made a big mistake.

Lionel’s head was turned towards his mother, who sat by his bedside, and Charlie found herself holding her breath as they came to stand beside him.

“Show Miss Charlotte how well you’re seeing today, Lionel,” John Adams said.

The boy turned his head and she stared in disbelief.

The patch had been removed and, considering he’d had surgery only days before, he looked shockingly, amazingly normal.

The angry red bulge that had been the vascular tumor was gone. His eyebrow and eyelid, other than still being bruised and slightly swollen from surgery, looked like any other child’s. His big, brown eye, wide and lit with joy, was now completely visible, just like his other one.

“Oh, my. Lionel, you look wonderful!” She pressed her hands to her chest. “Can you see out of that eye?”

“I can see! Yes, I can! And Mommy show me in the mirror how handsome I look!”

“You even more handsome than your brothers now, boyo, and I told them so,” his mother said with a wide smile.

Tears stung Charlie’s eyes as she lifted her gaze to the child’s mother and saw so many emotions on the woman’s face: happiness; profound relief; deep gratitude.

All because of Trent.

Where was the man? Had he seen the amazing result of his work? She turned to a smiling John Adams. “Has Dr Dalton seen him since the patch was removed?”

“Oh, yes. He took it off himself this morning.”

“Dr. Dalton told me he gave me special powers, too, like Superman.” The child’s face radiated excitement. “Said I have x-ray vision now.”

His mother laughed. “Yes, but Dr. Dalton was just joking and you know it. Don’t be going and telling everyone that, or they’ll expect you to see through walls.”

“I can see so good, I bet I can see through walls. I bet I can.”

“Maybe you’ll become a doctor, Superman, who can see people’s bones before you operate.” Trent’s voice vibrated into the room from behind Charlie’s back. “That would be pretty cool.”

“I want to be a doctor like you. I want to fix people like you do, Dr. Trent.”

Trent’s smile deepened as he came to stand next to Charlie. “That’s a good goal, Lionel. If you study hard in school, I bet you can do anything you set your mind to.”

Charlie stared at Trent, looking so relaxed, like all this was no big deal. Maybe it wasn’t to him, but it was to her, and to Lionel and to his mother. A very, very big deal.

“I can’t believe the wonderful job you did,” she said, resting her hand on his forearm. “You told me I didn’t know who I was dealing with and you were sure right.”

“Now she learns this, just before I’m ready to leave.”

The twinkle in his eyes, and his beautifully shaped lips curved into that smile, were practically irresistible. She again was thankful that he would be heading out of her life very soon before she made a complete fool of herself. “Good thing you don’t have x-ray vision too. Hate to think what you’d use it for.”

“Checking for broken bones, of course.” His smile widened. “What else?”

She wasn’t going where her mind immediately went. “Probably to decipher a bank-vault combination, so you could go on vacation without working a solid year. Speaking of which, the GPC says a general surgeon should be here in a matter of days, so you can have them schedule your flight out of here soon.”

“Great.”

The relief on his face was obvious and she hated that it hurt a tiny bit to see it. “I can’t help but wonder, though, why are you working as a general surgeon when you can do things like this?”

His smile faded. “You think plastic surgery has more value? More than saving someone’s life? I don’t.”

“It’s a different kind of value: changing lives; changing the way someone is viewed, the way they view themselves. You have an obvious gift for this, a skill many would envy.” Did he not see how important all that was? “Your focus should be on plastic surgery. On helping people that way.”

“The way other people view a person, what they expect them to be and who they expect them to be, shouldn’t have anything to do with how they view themselves.” He took a step back and pulled his arm away from her touch. She hadn’t known those eyes of his were capable of becoming the chilly blue that stared back at her. “Excuse me, I have a few other patients to check on.”

She frowned as she watched him walk through the hospital ward. What had she said to make him mad?

“I have things to do too,” John Adams said. But, like her, his gaze followed Trent, his expression thoughtful. “Bye, Lionel. See you later, Charlie.”

“Okay. Listen, can you come have dinner tonight at my house? I’d like to talk to you about some things.”

He nodded and headed off. Charlie watched Trent examining another patient and could only hope John Adams came up with a good idea for how she could accomplish her newest goal—which was to encourage Trent to perform surgery on a few patients in the day or two he’d still be here, patients who’d needed reconstructive surgery long before the plastic surgery wing had even been conceived.

She knew how desperately some of these people needed to have their lives changed in that way. Not to mention that it wouldn’t hurt for her to have a few “before and after” photos that would impress the Gilchrist Foundation with what they were already accomplishing. And, really, how could Trent object?

As she headed back to her office, her cell phone rang and she pulled it from her pocket. “Charlotte Edwards.”

“Hey, Charlie! It’s Colleen. How’re things going with Trent Dalton?”

“With Trent?” What the heck? Did the gossip vine go all the way to GPC headquarters? Besides, nobody here knew she and Trent had briefly hooked up...did they? “What do you mean?”

“Is it working out that he came back until the new temp gets there?”

Phew. Thank heavens she really didn’t have to answer the first question, though their moment together was history anyway. “He’s doing a good job, but I know he wants to move on. Do you have a final arrival date for the new doc?”

“Perry Cantwell has agreed to come and we’re finalizing his travel plans. Should be any day now.” Her voice got lower, conspiratorial. “Just tell me. I’ve seen photos of Trent that make me salivate, but is he really as hunky as everyone says? Whenever I talk to him on the phone his voice makes me feel all tingly.”

If just his voice made Colleen feel tingly, Charlie hated to think what would happen if she saw him in person. She wasn’t about to confess to Colleen that, despite his reputation, she’d fallen into bed with him for one more than memorable night. While she felt embarrassed about that now, she still couldn’t regret it, despite unexpectedly having to work with him again. “He’s all right. If you like tall, good-looking surgeons who flirt with every woman in sight and think everything’s amusing.”