Lover Unleashed (Black Dagger Brotherhood #9)(7)

Among the scalpel set at St. Francis, Manny Manello was at the top of the heap, the head of not just a subspecialty, as she had been, but the whole kit and caboodle. This meant he was a movie star, a drill sergeant, and the president of the United States all rolled up into a six-foot-tall, stacked son of a bitch. He had a terrible temper, a stunning intellect, and a fuse that was about a millimeter long.

On a good day.

And he was an absolute gem.

The guy’s bread and butter had always been high-profile professional athletes, and he tackled a lot of knees and hips and shoulders that would otherwise have been career enders for football, baseball and hockey players. But he had a lot of experience with the spine, and although a neurosurgeon on backup would also be nice, given what Payne’s scans were showing, this was an orthopedic issue: If the spinal cord was severed, no amount of neuro anything was going to help her. Medical science just hadn’t progressed that far yet.

As she rounded the corner of the receptionist’s desk, she had to stop. Over to the left was her old office, the place where she had spent countless hours pushing papers and doing consults with Manny and the rest of the team. The nameplate on the door now read, THOMAS GOLDBERG, M.D. CHIEF, TRAUMA SURGERY.

Goldberg was an excellent choice.

Still hurt to see the new sign for some reason.

But come on. Like she’d expected Manny to preserve her desk and office as a monument to her?

Life went on. Hers. His. This hospital’s.

Kicking her own ass, she strode down the carpeted corridor, fiddling with her white coat and the pen in her pocket and the cell phone that she hadn’t had reason to use yet. There was no time to explain her back-from-the-dead routine or cajole Manny or help him through the mind f*ck she was about to deliver. And no choice but to somehow get him to come with her.

In front of his closed door, she braced herself and then marched right through—

He wasn’t behind his desk. Or at the conference table in the alcove.

Quick check of his private bath . . . not there either, and there was no moisture on the glass doors, or damp towels around the sink.

Back in the office proper, she took a deep breath . . . and the faded scent of his aftershave lingering in the air made her swallow hard.

God, she missed him.

Shaking her head, she went around to his desk and looked over the clutter. Patient files, stacks of interdepartmental memos, reports from the Patient Care Assessment and Quality Committee. As it was just after five in the afternoon on a Saturday, she’d expected to find him here: Electives were not done on weekends, so unless he was on call and dealing with a trauma case, he should have been parked behind this mess pushing papers.

Manny put the “twenty-four/seven” in workaholic.

Heading out of the office, she checked his admin assistant’s desk. No clues there, given that his schedule was kept in the computer.

Next stop was down to the ORs. St. Francis had several different levels of operating rooms, all arranged by subspecialty, and she went to the pod that he usually worked in. Peering in through the glass windows in the double doors, she saw a rotator cuff being worked on, and a nasty compound fracture. And although the surgeons had masks and caps on, she could tell none of them was Manny. His shoulders were big enough to stretch even the largest of the scrub sets, and besides, the music drifting out was wrong in both cases. Mozart? Not a chance. Pop? Over his dead body.

Manny listened to acid rock and heavy metal. To the point where, if it hadn’t been against protocol, the nurses would have been wearing earplugs for years.

Damn it . . . where the hell was he? There were no conferences at this time of year, and he had no life outside of the hospital. The only other options were him at the Commodore—either passed out from exhaustion on the couch at his condo or in the high-rise’s gym.

As she headed out, she fired up her cell phone and dialed into the hospital’s answering system.

“Yes, hello,” she said when the call was answered. “I’d like to page Dr. Manuel Manello. My name?” Shit. “Ah . . . Hannah. Hannah Whit. And here’s my callback.”

As she hung up, she had no idea what to say if he returned the ping, but she excelled at spur-of-the-moment thinking—and prayed that her core competency really hit it out of the park this time. The thing was, if the sun was below the horizon, one of the Brothers could have come out and done some mental work on Manny in order to ease this whole process of getting him to the compound.

Although not Vishous. Someone else. Anybody else.

Her instincts told her to keep the pair of them as far apart as she could. They already had one medical emergency cooking. Last thing she needed was her old boss getting put into traction because her husband got territorial and decided to do a little spine cracking himself: Just before her death, Manny had been interested in more than a professional association with her. So unless he’d up and married one of those Barbies he’d insisted on dating, he was probably still single . . . and under the absence-makes-the-heart-grow-fonder rule, his feelings might have persisted.

Then again, he was just as likely to tell her to go f*ck herself for lying to him about the whole “dead and gone” thing.

Good job he wasn’t going to remember any of this.

On her end, though, she feared she was never going to forget the next twenty-four hours.




The Tricounty Equine Hospital was state-of-the-art all the way. Located about fifteen minutes away from the Aqueduct, it had everything from operating rooms and full-service recovery suites to hydrotherapy pools and advanced imaging. And it was staffed with people who saw horses as more than profit-and-loss statements on four hooves.