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his pain-in-the-ass tendencies David was giving him the direction he’d needed. His initial plan hadn’t turned out as expected and it had thrown him a bit. His heroic efforts were usually right on. Those efforts, of course, primarily occurring in the emergency department. Evidently he wasn’t such a natural when he didn’t have a monitor telling him the condition of the heart he was working on.
    Well, what did he expect? He’d tried to do the minimum here. In the ER he would have never tried to take the easy way out. He went above and beyond. That’s what he knew, how he worked. So, he knew what he was going to do now, in this situation.
    Whatever it took.
    “I’m not coming home until I’ve done something for Brooke Donovan that, in a brilliant psychiatrist’s words, really counts,” Jack announced over whatever his brother had been saying.
    “Shit,” David muttered. Then, louder, “Don’t you have to be back in San Antonio at some point in the near future?”
    “I have a ton of vacation time,” Jack said. He almost never took time off. The ER was where he needed to be.
    “Well, remember, Jack,” David said, “as a doctor in a huge ER like you’re used to, you’re in charge of helping hundreds of people every year.”
    Jack frowned. “Right.” He could admit, to himself, that the draw to the ER was exactly what David had just described.
    “I’m just saying, if you have to make a choice here, Brooke Donovan is one life while there are hundreds of lives down here that need you.”
    Jack groaned. “David, I hate it when you analyze me.”
    “Then it’s a good thing I do it for free,” David said cheerily.

Chapter Two
    “Hello?”
    “Good morning.”
    Brooke’s heart jumped before she reminded herself that the sexy voice on the other end of the phone was the man who had some news about Mike that would do nothing but add to her regrets. And the man seemed determined to tell her whatever it was.
    She loved his voice, she thought before she checked herself. “Nothing has changed since last night, Mr. Silver.”
    If she kept calling him Mr. she could ignore that he was also the man who’d kissed her senseless yesterday.
    “I was hoping to change your mind today,” he said. “If you would meet me, I could explain that—”
    “Would you say that what you want to talk to me about is good news?” she interrupted as she turned her car onto the county road that would take her to the Nelson’s farm.
    There was a long pause on the other end of the phone and she knew the answer even before he said, “I guess that depends on you. That’s something I’d like to talk about.”
    “So, if it’s not something that will definitely make me happy, why would I want to take time out of my day to hear it?”
    “It’s…important,” he finally said.
    “Is it important to me or to you?” she asked.
    “It’s important to me,” his voice finally rumbled. “I really need to—”
    “No offense,” she inserted, though she didn’t really care at this point if he was offended. “But I’m barely keeping up with the things in my life that are important to me. I don’t really have the time or energy for things that are important to complete strangers.”
    “I want to help you,” he said firmly, undeterred by her statement.
    That made her pause. “Help me?” she repeated.
    “I know what’s going on in your life. You’re on your own professionally and personally now. That can’t be easy,” he pressed.
    Brooke could count on one hand the number of people who had offered to help her or acted like they cared about her situation in the months since her husband’s death. Her pause had nothing to do with the fact that the man offering to help her was also the star of some rather lusty dreams last night where he helped her quite a lot, she insisted as an afterthought.
    “I want to do something for you,” he said.
    He didn’t know that he was talking to the woman he’d practically made love to on a