"Devon, Georgina - Lady of the Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Devon Georgina)

And then there was the patient in the other bed. Joshua leaned against
the wall beside the door and thought about the young woman lying inert
in the room behind him. Jane Doe. The "Doe" part fit. She was
delicately boned and sleek. Her hair, cropped brutally short, was the
soft, misty brown of a yearling. If she moved, he knew it would be as
gracefully as a deer running through the woods. But she didn't move.
She lay quietly in her bed, sometimes opening huge blue eyes to stare
straight ahead. The eyes were like a doe's, too. A doe who has not
survived her eneounter with the hunter.

Jane Doe affected Joshua in a way that no other patient ever had. In
all the years of his training, in his experience with hundreds of
patients, no one had touched him like the young woman lying in room
815. It wasn't the huge eyes or theqalmost transparent skin stretched
tightly over a delicate bone structure that was much too prominent. It
was who she was and who she wasn't. It was the mystery that surrounded
her, the secrets that would never be unlocked. It was the waste of
potential.

Perhaps if she were to awaken from her long slumber, she would sit up
in the bed and destroy his fantasies forever. Certainly if she was
what the police insisted she was, the aristocratic features were
inappropriate. If she was truly what everyone assumed, then she was a
woman who had already given up on herself long before she was found
bleeding and abandoned in a vacant lot.

"What planet are you on?"

Joshua lifted his eyes to those of the big black woman standing in
front of him, hands on her hips and a smile twisting her full, painted
lips. "Betty, I didn't hear you coming," he said, pulling himself back
to the present.

"You looked a million miles away."

"It's been a very long day."

"Come get some coffee."

Obediently-because everyone obeyed Betty-Joshua followed the waddling
woman down the hall. Betty St. Clair ran the eighth floor of N. O. C.
H. with an iron hand she didn't bother to encase in a velvet glove. She
knew everything , everyone and every nook and cranny of the extensive
ward. Nothing escaped her notice, including one Joshua Martane and his
interest in the young woman in room 815.

"When are you going to start dressin' like a psychologist 's supposed
to?"