Millionaire M.D. Read Online Free PDF Page A

say she could arrive at a crash site topless. There were times she fantasized about giving Wayne an attack of apoplexy—God knew her boss was a hard-core chauvinist—but not today.
    She pulled a sports bra over her head, burrowed in a drawer for an old black sweater…then jerked her head up again.
    Damn. Somewhere there was a sound. An off-kilter, didn’t-belong-in-her-house sound. A puppy crying? A cat lost in the neighborhood somewhere nearby?
    Silently, still listening, she straightened the sweater, pulled on socks, shoved her feet into boots, grabbed a brush. Her hair looked like a squirrel’s nest, but then that’s how it looked when it was freshly styled, too. A glance at her face in the bathroom mirror somehow, inexplicably, made her think of Justin again…and that dream in which his gaze had been all over her naked body.
    She scowled in the mirror. First, strange dreams, then strange sounds—she’d seemed to wake up in la la land today, and on a morning when she needed to be her sharpest.
    Swiftly she thumbed off the light and started hustling for real. In the kitchen, she poured coffee, then backtracked to the hall closet for her jacket, scooping up the stuff she needed: car keys, an apple, a lid for her espresso, some money for lunch. Almost the minute she finished collecting her debris, her feet seemed to be instinctively making a detour. One minute. That’s all she needed to check all the rooms and make absolutely positive that nothing was making that odd sound from inside the house. It wasn’t as if she lived in a mighty mansion that would take hours to check out. Herranch-style house was downright miniscule—but it was hers. Hers and the bank’s, anyway.
    She’d put a chunky down payment on it last year. She was twenty-eight, time to stop renting. Time to start making sure she had a place and security and in a neighborhood with a lot of kids and a good school system. Her bedroom was cobalt-blue and white, and, since decorating choices scared her, she’d just used the same colors in the bathroom. A second bedroom she used as a den, where she stashed her TV and computer—and anything she didn’t have time to put away. The third bedroom was the biggest, and stood starkly empty—Winona wasn’t admitting the room was intended for a baby, not to anyone, at least not yet. But it was.
    The kitchen was a non-cook’s dream, practical, with lots of make-easy machines and tools, the counters and walls covered with warm peach tiles that led down into the living room. A cocoa couch viewed the backyard, bird feeders all over the place, lots of windows… damn. There, she heard the sound again. The mewling cry.
    Either that or she was going out of her mind, which, of course, was always a possibility. But she unlatched the front door and yanked it open.
    Her jaw surely dropped ten feet. Her ranch house was white adobe, with redbrick arches in the doorways. And there, in the doorway shadow, was a wicker laundry basket. The basket appeared to be stuffed with someone’s old, clean laundry, rags and sheets…but damned if that wasn’t where the crying sound emanated from.
    The car keys slipped from her fingers and clattered to the cold steps. The apple slipped from her other hand and rolled down the drive, forgotten. She hunched down, quickly parting the folds and creases of fabric.
    When she saw the baby, her heart stopped.
    Abandoned. The baby had actually been abandoned.
    â€œSsh, ssh, it’s all right, don’t cry….” So carefully, so gingerly, she lifted out the little one. The morning was icyat the edges, the light still a predawn-gray. The baby was too swathed in torn-up blankets and rags to clearly make out its features or anything else.
    â€œSsh, ssh,” Winona kept crooning, but her heart was slamming, slamming. Feelings seeped through her nerves, through her heart from a thousand long-locked doors, bubbled up