Pursued by the Playboy by Jill Blake

felt sufficiently back in control to face her graduate students with the semblance of calm.  She had submitted her grant proposal the previous day, and rescheduled the usual Wednesday afternoon meeting for Thursday morning .  Last night she had actually had the first relatively restful night of sleep since her mother had appeared at her door.   Or at least she hadn’t spent hours tossing and turning in her lonely bed, staring at the ceiling and wondering when the hollow feeling in her chest would finally pass.
    Even Marc’s unannounced appearance in her office that afternoon failed—at least initially—to shake her composure. 
    “You haven’t returned any of my messages,” he said.
    She looked up from her desk.  Drank in the sight of his tall powerful frame in scrubs.  Behind him, the door to the lab clicked shut, shaking her out of her bemusement.  “Sorry.  It’s been a rough week.”
    “Look, if you’re involved with someone else…”
    “What?”  Her eyes flew to his.
    He slowly advanced toward her, each movement tightening the thin fabric of his draw-string scrub pants over the flexing muscles underneath.  “Jake answered your cell.”
    She forced herself to relax.  She had to give him credit.  For a playboy with a seemingly unending capacity for juggling women, he certainly had the righteous tone down cold.  “I’ve been busy, Marc.  Besides, I don’t need to account to you or anyone.”
    “Are you sleeping with him?”
    That shook her equilibrium for a moment, before she managed to reign in her temper. “What are you talking about?”
    “I don’t share,” he growled, rounding the edge of the desk and hemming her in.
    “Oh, please.”  She pushed her chair back as far as the wall allowed and rose.  “I’ve seen photos of you with the bimbo flavor of the week just the other day.”
    He stared at her.  This close, she could see the heat in his smoky gray eyes, the faint laugh lines fanning out from their corners.  She breathed in his scent—woodsy, spicy, with the hint of hospital antiseptic from his morning surgeries.  It was all she could do to restrain herself from reaching up and brushing a hand across the faint stubble of his afternoon beard. 
    She backed away from him, scooting around the opposite edge of her desk until the entire expanse of its battered wooden surface separated them.  “Don’t try to deny it,” she continued, though he had made no move to do so.   “It was in the Sunday paper.  A glam shot of you at some gala, rubbing elbows with heads of state.  They didn’t get your good side.”    Resentfully, she acknowledged to herself that from the perspective of any camera—or any woman—every side of him looked good.
    He had the gall to laugh.  “You’re talking about Tuesday, last week?  The Mann Center thing?”
    At her terse nod, he grinned.  “That was Emma.  My sister, Emma.  You would have known that if you had come with me to the kids’ party on Sunday.”
    For a moment, Kate felt almost giddy with relief.  The tightness in her chest loosened, and she felt as if she could breathe freely for the first time in days. 
    Marc, apparently oblivious to the emotions flooding through her, continued.  “Her husband was out of town on business, and she had tickets to the concert that she didn’t want to miss, along with a babysitter for the night.”  He moved carefully around his side of the desk, edging closer to her, like a hunter stalking spooked prey.  “Sounds like the paper got the rest of it wrong, too.  There were no current heads of state in attendance as far as I know.  And the closest we got to the former Secretary of State was several hundred feet, or however far our seats were from the stage.”
    He stopped directly in front of her.  She could feel the heat radiating from him.  She backed up a step, bumped into the desk.  He smiled and leaned forward, arms boxing her in, hands resting on the desk surface on either