Secret Agent Affair. Marie Ferrarella

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      To

      Misiu and Marek,

      and

      growing up in New York City

      Love,

      Marysia

      Chapter 1

      She knew better.

      Of all people, Dr. Marja Pulaski knew to be alert when she was sitting behind the wheel of a moving vehicle.

      It really didn’t matter that the vehicle in question, a car she shared with her sister, Tania, was going at a pace that, in comparison, would have made the tortoise of “the Tortoise and the Hare” fame change his name to Lightning. A car was a dangerous weapon, an accident waiting to happen unless it was parked in a garage.

      Hadn’t she seen more than her share of auto accident victims in the E.R.? Marja was well versed in the kind of damage just the barest distraction could render.

      Her excuse, that she’d just come off a grueling double shift at Patience Memorial Hospital, wouldn’t have held water with her if someone else had offered it. And everyone knew that the cheerful, outgoing Dr. Marja Pulaski, the youngest of the five Pulaski physicians, was harder on herself than she was on anyone else.

      Other than being somewhat vulnerable and all too human, there was no real reason for Marja to have glanced over at the radio just as one of her favorite songs came on. Looking at the radio hadn’t made the volume louder, or crisper. And it certainly wouldn’t restart the song. It was just an automatic reflex on her part.

      The song had been hers and Jack’s. Before Jack had decided that he was just too young to settle down, especially with a woman who’d let him know that, although she loved him, she wasn’t going to make him the center of her universe.

      Trouble was, for a while, Jack had been the center of her universe—until she’d forced herself to take stock of the situation and pull back. Pull back and refocus. Being a doctor was not something she knew she could take lightly, especially not after all the effort that had been put forth to get her to that point.

      Her parents were naturalized citizens. Both had risked their lives to come to the United States from their native country of Poland. At the time, it was still bowed beneath communist domination. They’d come so that their future children could grow up free to be whatever they wanted to be.

      Once those children began coming—five girls in all—the goal of having them all become doctors had somehow materialized. Her father, Josef, and her mother, Magda, worked hard to put their firstborn through medical school. Once Sasha graduated, any money she could spare went toward helping Natalya become a doctor. Natalya, in turn, helped Kady, who then helped Tania. And it all culminated in everyone working together so that she, Marja, could follow in the firm footsteps that her sisters had laid down before her.

      She didn’t do it because this was the way things were, she did it because, like her sisters before her, she really wanted to become a physician. Looking back, Marja couldn’t remember a day when she hadn’t wanted to be a doctor.

      But there were moments, like tonight, that got the better of her. She’d spent her time trying to put together the broken pieces of two young souls, barely into their permanent teeth, who’d decided to wipe one another out because one had stepped onto the other one’s territory.

      So when the song came on, reminding her of more carefree times, she let the memories take over and momentarily distract her.

      Just long enough to glance away.

      Just long enough to hit whoever she hit.

      The weary smile on her lips vanished instantly as the realization of what had just happened broke through. The sickening thud resounded in the August night, causing the pit of her stomach to tighten into a huge, unmanageable knot and making her soul recoil in horror. Perspiration popped out all over her brow, all but pasting her golden-brown hair against her forehead—not because the night air was so damp and clammy with humidity but because the flash of fear had made her sweat.

      Her vow, to first do no harm, exploded in her head, mocking her even before Marja brought the vehicle to a jarring stop, threw open her door and sprang out of her car.

      She worked in the city that boasted never to sleep, but at two o’clock in the morning, the number of Manhattan residents milling about on any given block had considerably diminished. When she’d turned down the side street, determined to make better time getting back to the apartment she shared with Tania, her last remaining unmarried sister, there hadn’t been a soul in view. Just a few trash cans pockmarking the darkened area and one lone Dumpster in the middle of the block.

      You are knowing better than to go down streets like that.

      Marja could all but hear her father’s heavily Polish-encrusted voice gently reprimanding her. He’d been on the police force over twenty-eight years when he finally retired, much to her mother’s relief. Now he was the head of a security company that had once belonged to his best friend and was no less vigilant when it came to the female members of his family.

      He was especially so with her because she was the last of his daughters—through no fault of her own, she often pointed out. He always ignored the comment,