Oh . . . Lord above.

The patient on the table was lying still as water and . . . she was probably the most beautiful anything he’d ever seen. Hair was jet-black and braided into a thick rope that hung free next to her head. Skin was a golden brown, as if she were of Italian descent and had recently been in the sun. Eyes . . . Her eyes were like diamonds, which was to say both colorless and brilliant, with nothing but a dark rim around the iris.

“Manny?”

Jane’s voice was right behind him, and yet he felt as if she were miles away. In fact, the whole world was somewhere else, nothing existing except for the stare of his patient as she looked up at him from the table.

It finally happened, he thought. All his life he’d wondered why he’d never fallen in love and now he knew the answer to that. He’d been waiting for this moment, this woman, this time.

This female is mine, he thought.

“Are you the healer?” she said in a low voice that stopped his heart, her words gorgeously accented, and also a little surprised.

“Yeah.” He wrenched off his sport coat and threw it into a corner, not giving a shit where the thing landed. “That’s what I’m here to do.”

As he approached her, those stunning icy eyes slicked with tears. “My legs . . . They feel as though they are moving, but they do not.”

Phantom pain. Not a surprise if she were paralyzed.

Manny stopped next to her and glanced at her body, which was covered with a sheet. She was tall. Had to be at least six feet. And she was built with sleek power.

This was a soldier, he thought, staring at the strength in her upper arms. This was a fighter.

God, the loss of mobility to someone like her took his breath away. Then again, even if you were a couch potato, life in a wheelchair was a bitch and a half.

He reached out and took her hand, and the instant he made contact, his whole body went wakie-wakie on him, as if she were the socket to his inner plug.

“I’m going to take care of you,” he told her as he looked her right in the eye. “I want you to trust me.”

She swallowed hard as one crystal tear slipped out to trail down her temple. On instinct, he reached forward with his free hand and caught it—

The growl that percolated up from the doorway broke the spell that had bound him and turned him into a kind of prey. And as he glanced over at Goatee, he felt like snarling right back at the sonofabitch. Which of course made no sense.

Still holding his patient’s hand, he barked at Jane, “Get that miserable bastard out of my operating room. And I want to see the goddamn scans. Now.”