CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ten minutes later and her hospital room door squeaked open. An attractive but kind-looking bulky black man peeped inside. “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” a confused Maude responded. “Who are you?”
“I’m Donnell McVay. Dr. Keating’s bodyguard. He’s ordered me to be on guard just outside this door, and the same when they move you to the presidential suite, until he returns to pick you up.”
Now Maude was even more confused. “His bodyguard? Why would he need a bodyguard?”
Don smiled. “It’s formality with people of high net worth, ma’am.”
But that didn’t ease her confusion either. “But he’s a doctor? I never heard of a doctor in need of a bodyguard and still working as a doctor.”
Don laughed. “He’s not just a physician, ma’am. He and his family owns twenty-five percent of the world’s oil tankers. He comes from a long line of shipping magnates.”
“Really?” That was really news to Maude. “You mean to tell me he’s old money?”
Don laughed again. “Very old. But just yell out if you need me, and I’ll be right outside this door,” he added. And then he closed the door.
Maude was floored. She knew the man was rich, but dang!
A shipping magnate? That sounded like billionaire money.
No wonder he was so oddball-ish. And a man like that would be willing to take her all the way back to Georgia?
He said it was because of Natasha, but he didn’t have to let her ride along with him so that he could help Natasha.
Besides, he didn’t seem all that enthused about going there to help her last night. What changed? His guilt changed, that was what. And that had nothing to do with Natasha.
But in any event, she was eventually going home.
Stop thinking about that highly unattainable man, she decided, and start thinking about how she was going to use Natasha’s unfortunate arrest to finish her investigative reporting.
That story, she was convinced, would be her ticket back into the world she loved.
The only world she knew. Which reminded her.
The phone she thought would have been lost in the chaos of the attack, along with her shoulder bag, had been recovered and were both in her room.
She pulled the phone out of her bag to review the notes she kept stored there.
And then two orderlies came to transport her, a girl who had no job, no car, and would be homeless in another month if she didn’t catch up all her rent, to the best suite in the entire hospital. Look at God!
But not everybody was looking that way. As she was being wheeled in that hospital bed to the elevators, some of those nurses looked at her with venom in their eyes.
She was supposed to be a nobody. She was supposed to be less than them.
How dare she get the best room in the house?
Their looks were bitter and angry. That was why she looked at them and smiled a beautiful, bright-white, grand smile.
As if all was well with her soul. But that only made them angrier.