Loving Control Read online

  An Ellora’s Cave Romantica Publication

  www.ellorascave.com

  Loving Control

  ISBN 9781419917813

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  Loving Control Copyright © 2008 Ann Jacobs

  Edited by Sue-Ellen Gower.

  Cover art by Syneca.

  Electronic book Publication August 2008

  With the exception of quotes used in reviews, this book may not be reproduced or used in whole or in part by any means existing without written permission from the publisher, Ellora’s Cave Publishing, Inc.® 1056 Home Avenue, Akron OH 44310-3502.

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means, electronic or print, without the publisher’s permission. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000. (http://www.fbi.gov/ipr/). Please purchase only authorized electronic or print editions and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted material. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the authors’ imagination and used fictitiously.

  Club Rio Brava:

  Loving Control

  Ann Jacobs

  Trademarks Acknowledgement

  The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:

  Dr. Phil: Peteski Productions, Inc.

  JAMA: American Medical Association

  Oprah: Harpo, Inc.

  Velcro: Velcro Industries B.V. LTD

  Prologue

  Trauma surgeon Elijah Calhoun squelched the need that nearly took his breath away when he walked Margaret back to University Hospital’s physicians’ lot, kissed her briefly, helped her into her car and watched her drive away. As much as he’d like to, he wasn’t about to get off on the wrong foot by putting the moves on third-year resident Margaret Berman even though the ache in his cock almost made him reconsider.

  Up until now he’d kept their relationship professional, as an attending’s should always be with the residents on his service. But they’d both needed to unwind after the long, dicey surgery, and now it was three a.m. A haunting melody floated from the nearby lounge where they’d just shared a drink and danced, its frankly sexual lyrics firing his libido even more. Holding her, feeling her warmth beneath his hands, imagining he was caressing smooth skin and not a set of scratchy scrubs, had felt good. Right. Damn, it scared him how having her in his arms had fed his libido in a way not even the most experienced subs at his club outside San Antonio had been able to do lately.

  The chilly night breeze, typical of fall in south central Texas, made Eli shiver. It had been a hell of a night for him, too. He should have sent Margaret straight home when they’d finished the case but she’d looked so drained. Unusually vulnerable, as if the tight control she maintained at work had suddenly snapped and she needed a friend to hold her. He told himself that was why he’d asked her to dance and why, when she’d tilted her head back and smiled up at him, he’d kissed her.

  The heady taste, the softness of her lips, had left their marks on his mind. It had started out innocently, a brief meeting of lips as they swayed to the tune of something mellow, slow and sexy. But she’d responded as though she was starving. As though she needed a man, wanted him. He’d managed to keep the kiss practically platonic until she ran her tongue along the seam of his lips, tangling it with his as soon as he opened up and let her in.

  He’d been shocked at the instant sexual tension that crackled between them when she tangled their tongues with an enthusiasm he’d never have expected, never have dared to initiate. He’d gone instantly hard, was still painfully aroused.

  You should have followed her home. If you had, you wouldn’t be hurting now. As he climbed into his own car and started the engine, he regretted momentarily that he hadn’t. But then he thought about his lifestyle and tried in vain to imagine Margaret as the submissive of his wildest fantasies. It didn’t compute. She was too competent, too controlled. For all he knew, she might be a Domme. She certainly hadn’t been shy about initiating that French kiss.

  If he wasn’t mistaken, and he didn’t think he was, he’d felt something on her tongue. Not a ring or anything he would definitely have noticed if she wore one at work, but rather a small plastic disk resting on her tongue. A tongue piercing retainer? Seemed damned out of character for Margaret to have one, but he’d felt it again when they kissed goodnight beside her car.

  Could he have read Margaret wrong all this time? Eli doubted that. Although he hadn’t seen much of her outside the hospital setting, she sure as hell gave everybody there the impression that she never let go, never let emotions override reason. Still…none of the vanilla dates he’d kissed had ever had a pierced tongue.

  Get Margaret Berman out of your head. Eli sat for a few minutes, listening to the hum of the engine and trying to quit picturing Margaret going all soft and submissive, responding to his orders in the bedroom the way she did when he stood behind her in the OR and instructed her on a new technique for reinflating a collapsed lung.

  Damn. It was too late to go home. He’d no more than get there before having to come back here again. He’d catch a few hours’ sleep on the couch in his office. He turned off the car and got out, hit once more by the hot, dry August air. Letting out a breath, consciously pushing Margaret from his mind, he crossed the street to a glass-and-chrome building. Gleaming, contemporary and imposing, the place represented professional and financial success. Something Eli noticed after having spent the past six years working out of the house staff’s offices at a series of military hospitals.

  He glanced up at the prominent but tasteful logo that had been set into the chrome just last week. Blackstone, Silverman, Calhoun and Associates, P.A. Trauma Surgery and Rehabilitation. Eli had worked too damn long and hard to get this far in his profession. He’d repaid the Air Force for having put him through medical school and had earned a partnership in one of the best-known trauma associations in Texas. There was no way he’d risk his future to make a pass at a resident assigned to his service. Not unless he knew for a fact she wanted the same thing he did.

  Not for the first time, Eli envied his senior partners Kurt Silverman and Mark Blackstone for having gorgeous, loving wives and a handful of kids between them.

  Chapter One

  A month later

  The fates must have known she’d be covering the thoracic surgery service tonight, alone except for two green first-year residents. All the post-op patients seemed to be resting well, and that was what third-year resident Margaret Berman was about to do. She stationed the junior residents to keep watch over their sleeping patients, grabbed a blanket from the warming cabinet in Recovery and headed to the residents’ sleeping lounge to get what she hoped would be a few hours’ uninterrupted sleep.

  She sank onto a narrow cot, enjoyed the quiet as she took off her shoes and massaged tired feet. The pillow beckoned. Just how long had it been since she had any sleep? Unfolding the warmed blanket, she wrapped it around her and lay down, her eyelids heavy.

  The sound of a siren in the distance penetrated the thick concrete walls of the hospital suite, resounded in her ears. Margaret slid further under her blanket, prayed the impending emergency wouldn’t be for her. Told herself serious chest traumas couldn’t possibly happen twice in the same twenty-four hours. And she’d scrubbed in just before noon with senior attending,
Eli Calhoun, on what had been a fatal gunshot wound.

  They’d lost the burly SWAT team leader despite making every effort to save him. She’d managed to hold on to her emotions, follow Eli’s lead. She’d even gotten a tight hold on her feelings and gone through the rest of her day, hopefully without anyone noticing the slight tremor in her hands, the sheen of unshed tears that blurred her vision. Maybe someday she’d be able to handle losing a patient better, so long as she knew the team had done its best.

  Eli Calhoun was definitely the best when it came to chest traumas. The burly surgeon never hesitated, went straight to the problem, faster and more painstakingly than she’d have believed anybody with his huge hands could manage. She remembered that night a month or so ago when he’d comforted her after another case, his incredible control, the hard heat of his big body when they’d danced at a nearby club.

  The kiss she’d wished would go on forever but known mustn’t happen again.

  He must have felt that way, too, because he’d kept their conversations strictly business, the physical contact limited to a steadying hand on her shoulder, his hands on hers as he’d shown her how to tie off an artery that had kept slipping away from her.

  Stop it, now. The last thing you need to do is lose sleep over a man you can’t have. No matter how masterful he seemed when he’d known she needed company to hold on to her sanity that night.

  She’d just buried her head under the covers and quieted the sense of foreboding when a strident voice boomed over her pager. “Dr. Berman. Emergency Room. Stat.”

  Instantly awake, Margaret shoved her feet in her shoes and sprinted for the elevator, running her fingers through her mussed curls as she went.

  So much for the fates.

  Tim Case, the orthopedic resident on call, was already there, barking orders to nurses. A man lay on a gurney, desperately pale even though a nurse was pushing whole blood. Margaret could see his femur was shattered, the leg bent at a grotesque angle. “’Bout time you got here, sleepyhead. We’ve got to get this guy to surgery quick, or he’ll bleed out. Bullet nicked the femoral artery.”

  She stepped closer, saw what looked like an entry wound high on the patient’s chest. Blood seeped out, obscenely red against the pallor of his skin. “X-rays?”

  A nurse snapped two films into readers. Not even a first-year med student could have missed a flattened bullet lodged in the pericardium, or the one that had turned his leg into a shattered mess. Margaret assessed her choices. There weren’t any. If this patient was to have any chance at all, they had to get him to surgery right away, stop the bleeding in his leg and get that bullet out of his chest. “Get him to surgery, and put in a call for a senior attending. Tim?”

  “Dr. Silverman’s on his way,” the ER charge nurse said when she poked her head through the door.

  Lucky Tim. Maggie turned to her. “Try to reach Dr. Calhoun.” If there was a God, Eli would be somewhere close by, like in his office across the street. Fat chance. He’d told her after the case this afternoon that he was off call for the first time in weeks. He’d mentioned something about chilling at his cabin, catching some fish. Why had Jerry, the fellow in thoracic surgery who’d ordinarily get summoned for a case like this, picked this week to go interview for a new job in Hawaii? “We’d better go scrub.”

  The elevator seemed to take forever, its low groan punctuating the panic building in her gut. You can do it. Maggie repeated that in her head, a mantra. Or was it a case of false bravado? You’ve cracked chests before.

  But not when five minutes’ time might mean the difference between life and death.

  When the elevator finally ground to a halt, she took a deep breath, settled down. She’d manage. She had to. The motions long ago memorized, she switched out of her clothes and hurried into OR Three where several nurses and the anesthesiologist were prepping their patient. “Please try to contact Dr. Calhoun again,” she told the circulating nurse as she started to scrub her hands and arms.

  When she looked down, she realized she’d scrubbed them nearly hard enough to draw blood. No matter. Holding out her arms for gloves, and letting a circulating nurse tie on her gown, she shoved aside her trepidations and stepped up to the table.

  “He’s out,” the anesthesiologist said.

  None too soon. This was her show now. Hers and the orthopedic surgeon’s who had already opened the leg wound. She drew on the remoteness, the self-control she’d learned to rely on early, when she’d been trying to please her demanding parents.

  “Scalpel,” she said, holding out her hand and feeling the satisfying smack of the small instrument when it hit her palm. And so it began, the small line of blood marking the spot for the cut, the whir of the bone saw, its heaviness in her hands reminding her how a big man—Eli—was far more suited for this particular job than she. Finally, she had the patient’s chest cracked, barely registering the anesthesiologist’s voice when he told a scrub nurse to hang another unit of blood. It had only been a few minutes, but it seemed like hours since she’d made that first, tentative cut.

  * * * * *

  Eli wasn’t with it tonight. Not really. As badly as he needed to pour out his frustration into the dark-haired sub he’d chosen when he walked into the cool, dark atmosphere of Club Rio Brava, it wasn’t working.

  Six months ago, when he was still in the Air Force, he would have relished this very private BDSM playroom a radiologist had built years ago on some rural property he’d inherited. But he wouldn’t have been able to afford belonging to it then, had to satisfy himself by doing mask and leather at a club in a town as far away as possible from the base, and hope no one ever saw him coming or going.

  Now that he’d gotten a good start in private practice, Eli had jumped on the chance of joining a BDSM club where he could show his face and have no fear that any of the other members might out him. Each member had as much need for privacy as the next, similar professional reputations to protect. Nobody had to worry, either, about being seen coming or going because the place was in the country near Riomedina, close enough to get back to San Antonio in a half-hour or less but isolated by acres of land owned by the club and sold in parcels to members who wanted to build a weekend home. He’d bought his own place down the road, where he often went to relax and fish in the river.

  Tonight, though, he was having a hard time immersing himself in sensation, letting go of the other Eli who’d just lost a battle of a different kind to a warrior more powerful than he. He hated losing control, and he’d lost it big time in the OR. SWAT team leader Elton Gaskins shouldn’t have died. His supposedly bulletproof vest should have kept that steel-tipped bullet from penetrating his chest. But it hadn’t, and Gaskins had died twenty minutes into the desperate surgery meant to find and plug the bullet hole. Ever since facing Gaskins’ sobbing widow a few minutes later and telling her Elton hadn’t made it, Eli hadn’t been able to shake an unfamiliar feeling of inadequacy. Half of him was back at the hospital, going over the OR report, trying to see if they could have done anything different to save the man’s life.

  Strong men don’t cry.

  Eli hadn’t. Not then. He’d managed to hold his emotions in check, feign strength in the face of the widow’s tears. Later he’d sequestered himself in a shower stall in the surgeons’ lounge and tried to pretend the hot, salty trickle of fluid down his cheeks was nothing more than errant spray from the shower head.

  After seeing patients in his office and doing a workout at the gym that should have left him drained, he’d come directly here and chosen his sub from a handful of unattached women. He hadn’t even bothered to change into one of the leather costumes he kept in his locker here. No need to bother. He was in no mood tonight for complex scenes or ménages. He’d immediately brought his partner to pleasure with his hands and mouth. No toys, no restraints. Just raw sensation. The giving of satisfaction to another human being, the same physical release she now was trying to bring him. Eli closed his eyes, trying hard to concentrate on the arousi
ng heat of the woman’s mouth on his cock, the tickle of her damp breath against his groin, the softness of her fingertips when she rolled his testicles between them.

  It wasn’t working. Not that his partner wasn’t trying, because she was on her knees before him, her slender fingers digging into his ass, her mouth working his cock with practiced skill. He sank his fingers into the silky mass of her hair, watched another couple—married to each other, if their matching wedding bands meant anything—playing out a scene that had started with the guy doing some damn competent work with a cat o’ nine. It was winding up now, her husband and another Dom fucking her cunt and ass while she lay suspended in a rope contraption that left her open for the double onslaught.

  What he was seeing and feeling should have had him ready to go off. Hell, he should have come by now from nothing more than the blowjob that was getting more intense with every passing minute.

  But he wasn’t. Not at all. When he looked at his enthusiastic partner, he thought of Margaret Berman, imagined her pierced tongue running along the pulsating blood vessels on his cock, wondered if she was having a quiet night on call. When he imagined himself losing his cool, crawling into her narrow cot in the residents’ sleeping room and mastering her there, his cock finally came to full attention.