Free Winning Back His Doctor Bride by Tina Beckett

Claremont had a reputation for losing his temper both on the set and with his fans and paparazzi. He’d been arrested on assault charges on a couple of occasions, but the charges had always been dropped. “Let’s take a look.”
    When the towel came down, James caught his breath. This was no “little cut.” Neither was it the jagged split he would have expected from a hard fall, but a clean, straight, slice that ran from the corner of her mouth up the side of her cheek. Blood immediately gathered along the wound. He swore under his breath and grabbed a sterile gauze dressing, ripping it open and pressing it to the injury to slow the bleeding.
    He didn’t hold back the question, didn’t even consider doing so. “Did Allen do this?”
    â€œNo! Of course not! If the press even suspects, it’ll ruin him.”
    The answer had come much too quickly. As if she’d been rehearsing the words. The nurse came in before he could ask anything else, and Patricia’s shoulders slumped.
    â€œI’ll need to flush it and test your nerve function.” He hesitated to go any further, but she needed to know that this wasn’t something that he could wave a magic wand over. “This is a serious injury. The placement makes hiding it more difficult. And if there are nerves involved, we’ll need to call in Damien Moore, our head of reconstructive surgery.”
    â€œI’ll be able to go back to work, though.”
    That strange slur was still there. The arm holding the cloth to her cheek had obscured some of her mouth movements, but James was worried. There was an abundance of nerves and vessels in the cheek. If the cut was deep enough, it could affect muscle function.
    â€œOf course you will.”
    But at forty-five, she’d already complained that the quality of the roles she was being offered had declined. This injury could be life-altering for her.
    Allen, in his thirties, was almost a decade younger than Patricia. He was a sought-after actor in romantic comedies, for sure, but he was still climbing the ladder. There was talk that he was using Patricia’s success as a way to boost his own, using her contacts and prestige to cement his position. If what he suspected was true, though, Patricia needed to report him.
    But would she?
    â€œI need to leave without the paparazzi wondering why I came here.”
    The clinic valued the privacy of its patients because James insisted on it. With that in mind, one of the first things to go in had been an enclosed entrance where drivers could pull up and drop off occupants and then slide back out without anyone being able to see, thanks to a stone wall that faced the street. The result was a blind spot where it was virtually impossible for photographers—or anyone else—to spy on the comings and goings of patients.
    That reminded him. He’d won a small victory this past week with the board of directors. He’d convinced them that Bright Hope should have an entrance inside the main part of the clinic. The argument that those patients had as much right to privacy as The Hollywood Hills Clinic’s own patients did had evidently held water. They’d scrapped the plans to permanently close the door that connected the two wings. The clinics would now be linked in every sense of the word.
    â€œThat won’t happen for a while. We need to clean out the wound and check for damage to the structure of your face.”
    â€œCan’t you put some of your famous tiny stitches in and make it go away?”
    This wasn’t going away. Not completely. It would leave a scar. Maybe it wouldn’t be noticeable to the cameras of the paparazzi but it would be there nonetheless.
    Kind of like the scar he carried around? It wasn’t an external scar but he still felt the pull inside him when his heart got too involved with a patient. That warning tug that told him to take a few steps back.
    â€œStitches, yes. But