With Love from the Inside Read Online Free

peeled back the overly fried top layer. “Did you know she and Stephen were having problems?”
    Thomas leaned back in his chair and tossed the empty packet of soy sauce in the trash. “I think I heard Eva say something about it when she was dropping off samples at the office the other day.”
    â€œEva’s working again?” She didn’t know what to be more shocked about—Stephen and Mindy or Eva’s access to Thomas.
    â€œA couple days a week. The drug company gave her a salary she couldn’t refuse. She’s taking samples around to a few offices in the area.”
    Great
, Sophie thought.
Not only do we have to live in the same neighborhood with Malibu Barbie, but Thomas gets to see her at the office, too.
    â€œCan you hand me a napkin?” he asked, interrupting her jealous thoughts. “I missed you today.” His wide smile reinforced his words.
    Most parts of her believed him. The other jagged misfit pieces still felt unworthy and lost, frantically trying to find their way back to where they fit and felt protected. To her once-unbroken place, her existence before her mom killed William and shattered Sophie’s life.
    Thomas’s pager went off before dinner was finished.
    â€œIt’s the hospital.” He pushed his plate back and looked at the numbers on his pager. “Have a kid not doing so well.”
    â€œThe little girl with the scars?”
    â€œYou saw the paper?” Thomas paused the twirling of his noodles around the fork.
    â€œI saw Eva.” Sophie leaned over and wiped some sauce off the corner of Thomas’s mouth. “I knew my husband had a soft spot for children hidden somewhere inside there.”
    He hated treating kids, and Sophie knew it. Not that he didn’t like children—they were just more challenging and he didn’t like to make them cry. Most of their problems were a result of birth defects, accidents, or because of an incompetent ER doc who couldn’t sew. The parents were usually overprotective and hovering, making Thomas’s job even harder. The child would inevitably squirm, shift on the exam table, and eventually cry before Thomas would have to ask his nurse to hold the kid down.
    â€œI’ll call the hospital from the car. Come with me and you can see Mindy. I think she’s on tonight.”
    â€œI’d love to,” Sophie said as she stuffed down the rest of her spring roll. “May be the only way I can spend time with my popular husband.”
    â€”
    T HOMAS RAN AHEAD OF S OPHIE DOWN THE LONG, deserted hospital corridor. The phone call from the car hadn’t gone well. Sophie had listened over the speakerphone as Anna, the nurse on two west, said, “Your six-year-old postsurgical graft patient in room two-sixteen, she’s not doing so well, pulse is rapid and irregular, temperature 104.9. Her mother called the nurses’ station because she seemed confused.”
    â€œOkay,” Thomas replied, then paused. Sophie could tell by his silence he was trying to find the reason why the girl had gone south after a routine surgery. Before he could come up with any good explanation, thenurse shouted in the phone, “Dr. Logan, better get here quick; oxygen levels are dropping. She doesn’t look good.”
    Sophie followed him as he rushed toward the girl’s room, giving orders to the nurse on his cell phone. His six-foot-three-inch build exuded confidence and commanded respect. Even in a crisis, Thomas remained composed and certain.
    Sophie paid attention to the way other women looked at him. The way they followed his instructions without hesitation or doubt. She noticed details like the way his graphite eyes tapered when he concentrated but became almost round when he had something important to say. His steady hands had propelled him to the top during his plastics fellowship, and then to a position at one of the top hospitals in the Southeast. He was as talented