“No, but look—I’m fine,” Taylor insisted. “See?” She wiggled her fingers and toes for the doctor’s benefit, although being fully dressed in her suit and high heels meant the toe part of the demonstration wasn’t particularly impressive.

“I’m sorry, but that’s hospital policy. Blame it on you lawyers for making us so careful.” He grinned at the joke.

Taylor groaned, not because of the lame attack on her profession, and not even because her head felt worse than it did when she was seven years old and her brother Patrick had dropped her on the sidewalk in a chicken fight against the O’Malley brothers gone awry, but because she really, really hated hospitals—possibly even more than airplanes. They had a funny smell.

The doctor looked at Taylor sympathetically. “Isn’t there anyone you can call to come pick you up?”

Taylor silently debated the ethics of asking one’s secretary to babysit one’s concussed self on a Friday night. Then her cell phone rang.

She sheepishly gestured to her ringing purse, which sat on the chair in the corner of the examination room. “Sorry,” she apologized to the doctor. “I forgot to turn it off.”

The doctor was wholly nonplussed. “This is L.A., Taylor. I’ve seen women deliver babies while on their cell phones.”

Taylor jumped off the table and pulled the phone out of her purse. She saw it was Scott calling and answered with surprise.

“Hello?”

“Hey! Gorgeous!” Scott’s voice rang out cheerfully. “I was just calling to see what time I should pick you up tomorrow.”

Shit—she had forgotten all about their date. Again.

“Um . . . Scott, hi . . . there’s a slight problem.” Taylor moved to the corner of the room and lowered her voice, not wanting the doctor to overhear.

“I was kind of in a car accident,” she whispered into the phone. “Nothing serious—but I guess I have a concussion or something. They say they won’t release me today unless someone comes to pick me up. I guess it’s hospital policy.”

Taylor paused, debating whether to continue. She decided to go for broke, driven on by dreaded thoughts of staying in the hospital overnight.

“So I don’t suppose you have any interest in changing our date to tonight, do you?” she asked Scott, laughing lightly to cover how stupid she felt. “You’d just have to make sure I don’t vomit after eating or anything. Although I suppose in Los Angeles, that’s more a sign of peer pressure than a concussion, right?”

Instead of a reciprocal (or even polite) laugh, there was a long, silent pause on the other end of the line.

Okay, so that hadn’t been her finest one-liner, Taylor thought. She had a concussion, after all. Cut her a little friggin’ slack.

Finally, Scott answered, sounding even more uncomfortable than her. “Shit, Taylor, you know . . . normally I would love to help you out, but see—we’re in the middle of filming right now, and I can’t leave the set. Plus I don’t know how long the director wants to go tonight. You understand, don’t you, gorgeous?”

Taylor nodded. What had she expected, anyway? She’d had one date with the guy. “Sure, no problem,” she said lightly, hoping to cover her supreme lameness. “Why don’t I call you later, when things settle down?” She hurriedly said good-bye and hung up.

Taylor turned around and saw the doctor watching her. Clearly, he had heard every word.

“It’s not like jail,” he said with a kind smile. “You can make more than one phone call. I know you’re new in town, but you must know someone else.”

Of course, Taylor’s mind did indeed turn right then to the one “someone else” in Los Angeles she knew.

Oh sure, like that was a possibility.

Maybe, in Valerie’s fantasy world, Taylor would call up Jason Andrews, the (alleged) Sexiest Man Alive, and he would ride up to the hospital like a knight in shining armor and whisk her off to his magnificent palace far, far away.

But this was the real world. And Taylor happened to know for a fact that Jason was tied up at that very moment, filming. She certainly wasn’t about to ask another man for help, only to again be rejected. Especially this particular man.

So Taylor took her seat on the examination table. She shook her head definitively.

“No—I can’t think of anyone else to call,” she told the doctor. “At least, no one any less busy.”

“Not even a colleague from work?” the doctor asked insistently. “I’d really hate to keep you overnight.”

Taylor shrugged. “I guess I don’t have any choice, do I?”

The doctor nodded reluctantly. He sighed and opened his mouth to say something when—

“She’ll stay with me.”

The voice came from the doorway. Taylor turned around to look—

And saw Jason standing there.

Ignoring the surprised look on the doctor’s face, he stepped into the room.

“You’ll stay with me, Taylor,” he said firmly.

She stared at him in shock. “What are you doing here?”

Jason shrugged her question off with a grin. “I heard you were here,” he said, looking a little embarrassed.

And when his eyes met hers, Taylor—who as a matter of pride never, ever, let people see her rattled—suddenly found that she had absolutely no idea what to say.

Jason waited for some kind of reaction from her. When she remained silent, he turned to the doctor worriedly.