Free Dream Runner by Gail McFarland Page B

was a dream. Her eyes were tired, felt as if they had been filled with sand, and Marlea struggled to open them wider. Focusing on the slender peanut-colored man at the foot of the bed, she swallowed a wave of nausea. Something was wrong. The fast, cold creep of gooseflesh along her arms was a bad sign, and she knew it. “I’m awake.”
    “That’s a good sign.” He snapped an expensive-looking pen from his pocket, made fast notes on a chart, then clicked both pen and chart back into place, and headed for the door.
    “Hey,” Marlea ignored the shiver that ran through her. “Good signs are fine, but why am I here? Have I been here all day? And who are you?”
    An indelicate snort erupted from the chair in the corner, and Libby’s head popped into view. Fully alert, she stared from Marlea to the doctor and back again.
    Aware of Libby’s silence, Marlea aimed her questions at the man in the white lab coat with the stethoscope tucked into the pocket. “Your nametag says doctor. Is that for real?”
    “Yes.”
    Not trusting the indulgent smile and confident voice, Marlea lifted her right hand. “Somebody stuck an IV in me, and I’m lying in a hospital bed. You’ve got the degree, so I’m guessing you can tell me why.”
    “I can do that.”
    “What’s your name, anyway?”
    “Reynolds. Dr. Parker Reynolds. I’m a trauma surgeon, and I was your doctor. There was an accident. You were driving and you had an accident.”
    “Accident? No.” Marlea’s full lips thinned. “No, no accident. I would remember if something happened to me.”
    Moving closer to the bed, Reynolds reached for her wrist, then hesitated when she pulled free of his grasp. “I don’t know you like that, and I don’t know anything about an accident, either.”
    “Ms. Kellogg, I’m not entirely surprised that you have no memory of the accident, but I assure you, it did happen.”
    “What kind of accident?” Searching her memory, coming up with nothing, and waking up in a hospital bed with a doctor in front of her was bad enough, but seeing the anxious look on Libby’s face was frightening. Marlea struggled to hold on.
    Dr. Reynolds straightened his shoulders, and though he tried to arrange his features, Marlea saw something flit across his face. “It was a car accident,” he said.
    “Car accident, huh?” Okay. Marlea willed herself to relax and think. That means I’m going to be sore for a while, and I guess I’ll be in bed. It will throw my training off, and I’m going to have to scramble like a crazy thing… A memory edged around the headache. Because I missed…something…Why are they looking at me as if my puppy just died? It was just an accident. Is the doctor edging closer to that door? “I had an accident, and now I’m here for observation, right? How soon will I be able to leave? How is this going to affect my training schedule?”
    “It’s a bit more involved than that.” Reynolds’s voice went deadly calm and clinical. “You’ve had some surgery. We’ll monitor your progress, and then I can give you a more definite release date.” His hand was against the metal doorplate, and he was pushing. There was no sound from the chair in the corner. Libby had stopped breathing.
    “Wait a minute.” He said I was in a car accident, just a car accident! Marlea’s eyes darted to her hands and her hands flew to her chest, moving on to check her face and her head. Finding them intact, she held her hands to her cheeks. What’s happened to me? What is he not telling me? “What kind of surgery?”
    The doctor shoved his hands into his pockets and allowed the door to shut softly at his back. “I am a trauma surgeon, Ms. Kellogg. I specialize in immediate treatment of life-threatening injury.”
    “Uh-huh.” The shivers that began in her belly radiated, and the hands at her cheeks fisted. “You…treated…me?”
    “Yes, I did. In your case, the treatment was radical.”
    “Radical.” The bed began to rattle around