TEASER TUESDAY! Patrick MacNeill

At one-twelve in the morning, Kate emerged from her dinky office clutching her fifth cup of coffee and an armload of charts. The unit was never totally dark or entirely silent. The halls vibrated with a fluorescent hum and the blips and beeps of monitors. From behind closed doors, she heard a cough, a moan, a muted television. Laughter and chatter drifted from the nurses’ station as they celebrated somebody’s birthday.

Solitary Kate hadn’t been invited, though she knew that if she stopped by the charge nurse would offer her a piece of cake. She turned the other way, down the hall, toward the patient rooms. The kernel of doubt hadn’t gone away. It swelled under her breastbone, a small, indigestible lump, a tiny hot spot that upset her stomach and her concentration.

She wasn’t on call tonight. Roberts, the attending, had taken the four o’clock rounds. She had no real reason to drop her sliding stack of paperwork and squeak down the brightly painted, dimly lit floor like a ghost in orthopedic shoes. No reason. Only a burning in her gut. Quietly, she depressed the handle to Jack MacNeill’s room and opened the door.

A pale rectangle of light spilled across the bed to the raised footrest of the recliner on the other side. Between the tall metal guardrails, Jack sprawled with little-boy abandon, covers pushed down and arms and legs every which way. A teddy bear with a limp bow and well-loved plush supported his bandaged hand. In the chair, facing his child, slept Patrick MacNeill.

Even relaxed in sleep, he looked hard and male and faintly dangerous. His wide shoulders crowded the oversize recliner to its limit. Ignoring her reaction to that long, well-muscled body, Kate slipped to the foot of the bed to check Jack’s chart. But she couldn’t dismiss the queer twist of her heart at the sight of Jack’s face turned confidingly to his father, or the way Patrick’s large hand protectively spanned his son’s knee as they slept.

Don t let it get to you, Katie Sue.

She forced her attention back to the patient chart, angling it to catch the light from the door. Blood pressure, temp, intake and output all looked normal. Good. Stepping to the side of the bed, she reached for Jack’s swaddled hand.

And then something made her look up, across his out-flung legs, into the deep-set, dark blue eyes of Patrick MacNeill.

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Teaser Tuesday! The Passion of Patrick MacNeill

“Kate.”

Her hands stilled on the shoulder strap. She looked out at the moon- and fluorescent-washed parking lot. “What? “

He shifted on the seat beside her, checking to see if Jack still slept, and his knee brushed her thigh. With the engine shut off, the car’s interior was warm and close and very silent.

“I respect that you don’t have room for a grand passion in your life. Neither do I. Thing is,” he continued slowly, “I’m already spending too much time thinking about you. Wanting you. Imagining how it could be between us. Maybe it would be less...distracting for us both if we found out.”

She turned to face him, choosing indignation over the quaking in her stomach. “Are you suggesting we sleep together to get it out of our systems?”

“That’s one way to put it. Neither one of us wants a complicated relationship in our lives.”

With an effort, she kept her voice low, to avoid waking the child in the back. “And am I supposed to be flattered by this limited offer?”

He shook his head, his smile gleaming in the darkness. “Not flattered. Interested, maybe.” She was interested, all right. More tempted and more scared than she’d ever been in her life. She folded her hands tightly together in her lap to disguise their shaking. “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.”

“Kate.” His deep voice was gentle. “I don’t want to hurt you. I like you. But you need to know up front how things are with me. I may want you until my teeth ache with it, but Jack is the center of my life right now. If that’s not enough for you, if I misunderstood you, just tell me no.”

Her nails dug into the backs of her hands. Kate had long ago accepted that she wasn’t the kind of woman men wanted to marry. Wade, brutally breaking their understanding, had gone so far as to suggest she wasn’t the kind of woman men wanted, period. But Patrick wanted her. And maybe she owed it to herself, just once, to experience a man like Patrick MacNeill.

From THE PASSION OF PATRICK MACNEILL, now on Kindle and Nook

Teaser Tuesday!

Kate’s spine straightened another degree. Maybe she was no man’s dream date, but as a surgeon she’d learned to value herself and her time. She hadn’t endured the slights and rigors of her male-dominated surgical training to let one cocky pilot dictate to her now. She marched down the hall, banged through the glass and steel doors—and stopped short.

For an instant, she was convinced she was seeing double. The waiting room appeared full of MacNeills. Patrick paced, fists jammed in his pockets, his wide shoulders and contained intensity dwarfing his surroundings. She felt her heart trip into double time at the sight of him.

But nothing could dwarf the man beside him.

Taller and younger than Patrick, his companion had the same dark hair, longer and curlier, and the same male assurance. He wore a gold hoop in his ear, like a pirate, and exuded cheerful good nature and unabashed sex. There were at least three nurses craning for a look at him, and one patient’s mother was openly fanning herself.

Three months ago, such blatant good looks would have frozen Kate into a cold and inarticulate block of insecurity. She discovered now that after knowing Patrick, his brother didn’t alarm her at all. No more than she would be afraid of a wolfhound after petting a wolf.

She tapped her pen on her clipboard. “So. Which Mr. MacNeill can’t wait to see me?”

Three dark heads turned. The shortest one dashed forward.

“Dr. Kate!”

A corner of her heart melted at the boy’s exuberant greeting. “Hey, Jack-o. Are you sick?”

“Nope.”

“Pining for you,” the younger man offered.

Kate smiled down at the boy’s bright face. “I find that difficult to believe.”

“Okay,” the pirate said agreeably. “Maybe Patrick’s the one pining.”

The listening nurses goggled. Kate felt her cheeks flame. With gossip breeding in the hospital like bacteria in a wound, she’d always resolved to keep her personal life private. Not that it had been much of an issue. Until recently, she hadn’t had a personal life.

She swallowed. She still didn’t have a personal life. Patrick might want to go to bed with her, but they hadn’t even been on a date.

“Sean,” Patrick said warningly.

“So it’s me. I need a doctor. Take my pulse.” He snatched her hand, enclosing the pen with it, and laid it on his muscled chest, just above his heart. “What do you think, Doc?”

Kate lifted her chin, refusing to be flustered. “You feel normal to me.”

“Not just a little hot? “ His dark eyes were wicked, inviting her to share his joke.

“No. Sorry.”

“You don’t think maybe I need some bed rest?”

“You don’t let go of her hand,” Patrick growled, “and you won’t be getting up for a week.”

from THE PASSION OF PATRICK MACNEILL

Teaser Tuesay!

Kate pressed her legs together on the edge of the mattress, hoping to make her thighs look thinner. Downstairs she could hear Patrick moving around, talking to the dog. Nerves jitterbugged in her stomach.

She was cold. The skin of her arms and legs bumped like uncooked chicken. But her cheeks were hot. She could feel the blood heating there, and beating in her throat and in her chest, and pooling warm and liquid in her lower body.

Look before you leap. Think before you speak. Analyze before you act.

She would not be foolish like her mother or trusting like her sister, both of them mothers and alone before their thirties But how could she examine her options when all she could see was Patrick’s intent face? How could she hear herself think over the drumbeat of her blood?

He was the worst man in the world for her. A patient’s father, a grieving husband. A man too used to getting his own way and too aware of his effect on women.

But he had granted her rights, given her welcome, shared his house and his son and a piece of his soul with her. She admired him, perhaps more than any man she’d ever met. His utter reliability, the way he supported his mother and loved his son and was simply there for every member of his family in a way that no one had ever been there for her...Oh, she liked that a lot. It made her want him. It made her want to be there for him.

Kate might have held out against her own desire. She could not resist Patrick’s need.

She shivered, thinking of Wade Preston, the blond Apollo of Jefferson University Medical School. He’d told her he needed her. He’d even claimed to love her. But his need hadn’t outlasted their shared residency, and his love hadn’t survived the discovery of her background, so unsuitable for a doctor’s wife in Baltimore.

This is different, she thought, rubbing her hands nervously on the goose-bumped flesh of her thighs. Wade, pledging his future, had been miserly with praise and stingy in bed. Patrick promised her nothing. But she suspected, with a newfound feminine instinct, that he would be generous with his passion. At the very least, he seemed really to want her. And she wanted him.

The door opened, and he was there.

The Passion of Patrick MacNeill

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The MacNeills are coming!

I'm having so much fun revising my backlist for release in ebook format. But - gulp - I actually found my hero using a pay phone at one point. Lots of technology tweaks to do! The emotions, though...The emotions still feel fresh and true.

***

He rested one hand on the wall above her, close enough for her to feel the warmth emanating from his body, close enough for his breath to touch her face. She saw his eyes, with their thick, short lashes, his pupils nearly swallowing the blazing blue. Her stomach squeezed into her chest, crowding her lungs. She couldn’t breathe. She felt the warmth of his arm, close by her head. She heard her blood thundering in her ears, and the rasp of his quickly indrawn breath.

He kissed her.

It was over before she could say if she liked it, before she had time to react. He lifted his head, and she felt the absence of his mouth more keenly than she had felt its pressure a moment before.

“Well?”

She lifted her chin. She had to, to meet his gaze. “Well, what?”

His firm, well-shaped lips curved at the corners. “Are you going to object?”

She dug deep for a cool response, her hands pressed flat to the wall behind her. He was probably the most vital, potent man she’d ever met, and she was merely unattractive Katie Sue Sinclair, too smart for her own good and stupid with men. She couldn’t let him see how he got to her, how she was affected by his nearness. He would eat her alive.

Maybe she wanted him to.

--from THE PASSION OF PATRICK MACNEILL