Kat didn’t even release a sigh of relief when she turned into her drive. The drive to her house was long and even more treacherous than the roads. The drive was dirt and gravel, which could make for good traction … unless it was drenched wet and then frozen. Then it was nothing but ice at an incline. Right then it was a mixture of both. The tires slipped and spun in places, the drive dropping off into a gully on the right side and threatening to skid her right off into it. But eventually she reached the final curve to the house, pulled right into the garage, and then came the well-earned sigh of relief. She didn’t spend more than a moment at it before she was out of the car and bursting into the house.

Karma was on her like white on rice the next instant. The dog whined and threw her big body into Katrina as if she’d been gone a year. She’d been trained not to jump up only because that kind of love from that big of a dog would most likely kill Katrina. But that didn’t keep Karma from body bumping her like a maniacal kid in the bumper cars.

“Yes, yes. Hello, hello,” she said, giving the dog a hasty pet or two before plowing past her and heading for her bedroom. She didn’t even bother taking off her coat. She fished the Cipro out of her pocket and headed for the master bath to fetch a glass of water.

When she entered the bedroom she once again found the bed emptied of her patient and he was nowhere in sight.

“Damn it to hell and back!” she growled. God only knew what shape he was in and where he was in her house. And so help her, if he went about bleeding on something else she’d kill him herself!

Thumping the antibiotics onto the bedside she then shimmied out of her coat as she marched through the house in search of him.

“He can’t have gone far,” she said aloud as she stalked through the rooms of the ground floor.

And sure enough, she found him out cold on the kitchen floor, right in front of her refrigerator. Apparently fever had not ruined his appetite and he had come in search of something to eat. There were jars of things like pickles and olives on the floor near him, all of which seemed to be empty. She found herself praying he didn’t throw up later. That wasn’t going to be a pretty experience for either of them.

Anyway, in the here and now she had an unconscious behemoth lying on the floor and she had the pleasure of trying to figure out how to get him up and back in the bed … preferably without his usual groping and fondling and kissing.

Katrina tried to keep from acknowledging the warm, gooey heat that swirled around inside her as she remembered the kissing and fondling with no small amount of craving for more. A craving that she quickly stomped down inside herself. She had enough to worry about without tripping off into fantasyland. He was a stranger. A stranger. There was nothing about any of this that should engender trust in him, never mind the comfort level she required before considering becoming intimate with him. And she didn’t want to become intimate with him. Not him or anybody, but especially not him. The guy was a Neanderthal for Pete’s sake. He kept pawing at her and trying to … to screw her ever chance he got. And it was very clear he was an old hand at tumbling “wench”-like persons.

With a sigh, Katrina went back to the bedroom. She took the opportunity to change out the soiled bedding, shoving it all immediately into the washer and dumping a hefty amount of bleach in the dispenser. It might damage the quilt, but so would blood. She had to take her chances.

As for herself, she had showered and changed her clothing before heading to Dr. Sloan’s, but she had been covered in blood herself at one point. So much for universal precautions. If he had blood-borne anything, she would definitely be exposed. She suddenly felt a twinge of fear. What if that strange stonelike condition were catching?

She shook that off. Partly because she simply couldn’t deal with the idea. She began another debate in her head, weary already from so much thinking, realizing she was tired because by then she would have already been tucked into bed. It was this nearly panicked rapid thinking that she had happily left behind when she’d left her life as a PA in Manhattan General Hospital. It was this kind of stress that had caused her to lose her hair, develop an ulcer, and gestate a major case of anxiety, her whole existence about being on edge for the next thing that walked through the door … even when she wasn’t working.

Who would have thought she’d be dragging this kind of stress through her own front door years later, ulcer healed, anxiety at bay, and hair, thankfully, regrown. But she wasn’t interested in reverting to her previous state so she needed to relieve herself of this potentially high stress environment as quickly as possible. But … what if it were catching? Oh God! She’d potentially exposed Dr. Sloan to it!

“Okay, don’t panic. Don’t panic,” she muttered to herself rapidly. He’s snowed in along with everyone else. No one is going to come into contact with him. The odds of anyone else being as stupid and reckless as she had been by driving down the mountain were extremely nonexistent.

She hoped.

She tried not to think about it as she stripped out of her wet, snow-saturated jeans and wriggled into her favorite pair of heather-blue sweatpants. The house had warmed considerably in her absence, what with the fire and all, so she traded her sweater for a T-shirt that said NEW YORK FUCKIN’ CITY! on it. It always made her smile for some reason. True, she’d never had the guts to wear it in public, her conscience paining her that some small child somewhere might be able to read it and repeat it. But she loved the idea of it. The idea of being brave enough and bold enough to don it in the first place.

But it was not even a blip on her self-conscious radar as she hurried into the kitchen and kneeled beside her own personal feverish giant. She touched his skin and, as expected, he was burning up. Actually, she needn’t have touched his skin at all. He was radiating heat like a furnace and she could feel it all against the front of her body.

Before doing anything else, she carefully capped and moved the empty jars around him to the kitchen counter. “Oh man!” she whined. “You ate all my pepperoncini!” How the hell does someone eat a whole jar of the fiery pickled peppers? They were a favorite of hers, but in small doses. She knew the jar had been nearly full because she’d just opened it two nights earlier, eating a small pile of peppers with her pizza. “Hey, does this mean you picked a peck of pickled peppers?” she joked to her unconscious patient, snickering through her nose as she lightened her mood a little.