Better Than Me (A Remington Medical Contemporary Romance) Read online

  “Popsicles?” Annabelle asked, and there, there was the hope in her eyes that Natalie had been after.

  “Yes, ma’am. Popsicles!”

  “I heard we even got blue ones last week,” Boldin said, and Natalie made a mental note to praise his bedside manner once they left the room. She ordered the appropriate scans and labs, with Boldin nodding and putting them all into Annabelle’s chart, confirming the details before reaching out to squeeze Annabelle’s hand.

  “I’ll page Connor for the blood draw and Dr. Boldin will take you to radiology as soon as we can get you in there without a ginormous wait. I’ll talk to Dr. Hoover, and we’ll let you know what we find.” Looking across Annabelle’s bed, she gave Rachel an encouraging smile. “If you need anything, have one of the nurses page me. Even if it’s after hours, okay?”

  “We hate to bother you after hours,” Rachel said, shaking her head. “You must be so busy.”

  “You do look kinda tired today,” Annabelle said, making her mother turn roughly the shade of a pomegranate.

  “Annabelle! That’s not very nice.”

  But Natalie threw her head back and laughed. “That’s okay, Mom. It’s still important to be nice to other people,” she caveated—her number-one rule was to honor a parent’s word as much as she possibly could—“but in this case, you’re right, kiddo. I look tired because I am. In fact, a very crazy thing happened to me last night.”

  “It did?” Annabelle asked.

  Natalie nodded solemnly. “A bathtub came crashing through my ceiling and landed—plop!—right in my living room!” She embellished with a swooping hand motion and whooshing sound effects, and Annabelle giggled.

  “Nuh-uh!”

  “How could I make that up?” Pulling her phone out of her pocket, she showed Annabelle and Rachel the photo. They chatted for another minute before Natalie excused herself to finish her rounds, with Boldin right beside her.

  “See if you can get her into radiology for those scans sooner rather than later? I want to try to rule out a tumor before I talk to Hoover.”

  Boldin nodded, but asked the glass-half-empty question a second later. “What if it is a tumor?”

  Nope. Natalie wasn’t going to think about it unless she had to. She had to tackle what was in front of her. What she knew for sure.

  So she said, “Then I’ll go in there and take it out. But one way or another, I’m going to do every single thing that I can to get that little girl healthy again.”

  4

  Somewhere between a tracheostomy and a surgery to repair a gastrointestinal perforation, Jonah realized he was being an idiot. Yes, he’d had some wildly sexy thoughts of Natalie, and okay, yes again, he wasn’t exactly wild about sharing his space with anyone, much less anyone in possession of a XX chromosome. But she wasn’t some woman he’d met in a bar or on a blind date from some app. She was his best friend, the person who made sure he drank a glass of water and called an Uber after they did one too many tequila shots together, and who made fun of him when he ate his pizza crust-first (not that he could help it that she was wrong there). Surely they could cohabitate without the universe coming to an end.

  Even if he had stayed up far too late last night thinking of the fact that she and her XX chromosome were snoozing away in the very next room.

  “Okay,” Parker said, tearing the surgical mask away from around his neck and slam-dunking Jonah back to the here and now of the scrub-in room where he was washing up, post-surgery. “Mr. Baumgartner is safe and sound in the post-anesthesia unit. His chart has been updated, and the PACU nurse is monitoring his vitals. She’s going to page you when he wakes up.”

  “Great, thanks.” Jonah gave in to the thought that had been flickering in the back of his brain all day. “Hey, I didn’t get a chance to tell you earlier, what with how busy we’ve been today and all, but congrats on the, ah, you know.” He held up his left hand, wiggling his ring finger.

  Parker laughed, his dark eyes lighting unmistakably at the mere suggestion of his impending wedding. “Thanks, man. Second time’s the charm.”

  “If you say so,” Jonah said, keeping his expression intentionally laid-back and his cynicism far from his tone. “But really, I’m happy for you and Becker. Although, I guess we’ll have to come up with a way of distinguishing between the two of you in conversation if she takes your name, since you’ll both be Dr. Drake.” He tilted his head. “He-Drake and She-Drake kind of have a nice ring to them.”

  “Oh, Charlie will love that,” Parker flipped back with a snort. “We’ll be sure to have throw pillows made. Or maybe monogrammed towels.”

  Jonah knocked back the irony of the fact that his one and only wedding registry had held a metric shit-ton of both throw pillows and monogrammed towels, along with hundreds of other high-end items he’d have never used. “Better than an electric wok or a set of cut-crystal brandy snifters.”

  “That, my friend, is the whole truth.” Parker laughed for a second before his expression coalesced into something more dangerous. “Look, I know weddings aren’t your thing, but…well, you were kind of instrumental in getting me and Charlie back together, so thanks. I don’t know how I’d have made it if I’d lost her again.”

  Weddings aren’t your thing. His mind flashed back to a night, three years ago, when he stood outside the empty ballroom at The Plaza hotel. The vintage silk of Vanessa’s rehearsal dinner dress wrinkled from where she’d wrapped her arms around herself. The clack-clack-clack of her Louboutins as she’d paced on the marble floor. The wobble in her voice as she’d said things that had shifted his world on its axis. I’m sorry, Jonah. I’m so sorry…

  He straightened, ignoring the combination of pain and bitterness threatening to expand in his gut. Everything with Vanessa had turned out for the best, and anyway, this wasn’t the same. Parker and Charlie would last. They were the exception to the rule. Any fool could see that.

  Just like Jonah would be a fool to go down that road again. Long-term relationships might work for some people, but for him, keeping it casual wasn’t just smarter. It was self-fucking-preservation.

  He just wasn’t a long-haul kind of guy, and that’s exactly how he liked it.

  “No sweat,” he said with a smile and a shake of his head. “And for the record, you did all the heavy lifting to get back together with Charlie, dude. All I did was offer moral support.”

  Parker grinned. “I still appreciate it.”

  “Enough to stick around to see Mr. Baumgartner through recovery?” Jonah asked, brows arched. He wouldn’t normally cut out after a surgery, but the procedure had been textbook, and the patient had sailed through with near-perfect vitals. After sleeping like crap, leaving his apartment in favor of the gym at o-dark-thirty to avoid having to trade showers with Natalie, then spending all day on his feet in the OR, Jonah was beat.

  “Sure,” Parker said. “Danika’s still here, too. Between the two of us, I’m sure we can hold down the fort.”

  At the mention of the third-year surgical resident who was as sharp as Parker would be when he reached his third year, Jonah’s mind was made up. “Page me if anything changes. I’ll round on Mr. Baumgartner first thing in the morning to see how he’s feeling.”

  “You got it, boss.”

  Jonah made his way to the attendings’ lounge to trade his scrubs for his street clothes, then aimed himself toward home. It was already late enough that he was sure Natalie had left, and a quick scan of the employees’ parking lot confirmed that her car was indeed gone. He’d only seen her in passing today, one or both of them running in opposite directions. It had felt weird, to be honest—they usually grabbed lunch, at the very least, a cup of coffee at some point during a shift. He’d kind of missed her stories, the upbeat way she looked at all of her cases. The way nothing seemed to ever rattle her. Her enthusiasm was catching, always sneaking in to balance out his distrust. It had been his favorite thing about her from the minute they’d met as residents.

  Yep. He’d been an
idiot.

  The trip back to his apartment was as quick as it was uneventful, both of them a win. He keyed his way over the threshold, the smell of something warm and hearty and goddamned delicious greeting him before he’d even made it three steps in.

  “Oh, hey! You’re out of surgery. Charlie said you and Parker caught a good one,” Natalie said, looking up from the iPad and the empty bowl in front of her at the breakfast bar. She was dressed in a pair of leggings and a loose T-shirt that read I Run On Coffee and Christmas Cheer, her hair slightly wild and her smile bright.

  Jonah laughed softly, unable to do anything but. “Perforated ulcer. But we fixed the guy right up. I left him with Drake and Brooks.”

  “Good hands, both of them.” Natalie gestured to the bowl in front of her. “I didn’t know how long you’d be stuck at the hospital, so I went ahead and made dinner. Nothing fancy, just some chicken and dumplings. It’s probably still warm, though.”

  “It smells insane.” Jonah’s mouth watered at the prospect of a belly-warming meal that didn’t take the direct route from his freezer to his microwave, and he shrugged out of his leather jacket to make his way to the pot on the stove.

  She waved a hand in a no-big-deal motion. “Oh, that recipe is super easy. There’s plenty left. I’ll give you some privacy so you can eat in peace.”

  She shifted to get up and, presumably, head to his den…her room…whatever, but Jonah shook his head.

  “You don’t have to. I mean, unless you want privacy,” he added, and oh for fuck’s sake. This was Natalie. He needed to stop being an ass, once and for all. “Look, I know last night was a little bit…”

  “Awkward and totally weird?” Natalie supplied, and Jonah laughed.

  “I was going to say uncomfortable, but okay.” He paused to toss a nearby dish towel at her, waiting out her laughter before turning to the pot on the stovetop to dish up some dinner. “Anyway, I’m not used to sharing space, and it just took me a second to get used to having you here. But everything’s fine now.”

  “You sure?” Her expression marked the question as one hundred percent genuine, and so he answered her the exact same way.

  “Yep. Very.” Jonah brought his bowl full of goodness over to the breakfast bar, parking himself on the high-backed stool next to hers. “So, what are you reading? Anything riveting?”

  “Well, I guess that depends on whether or not you find research on alternative therapies for non-Hodgkin lymphoma riveting.”

  Ouch. “Patient?”

  “Eight-year-old,” she agreed with a sigh.

  Familiarity flickered in the back alleyways of Jonah’s brain, facts clicking against each other like dominoes, until—“Wait, the same one from a couple of months ago?” Anne-Marie? Annabeth?

  “Annabelle Fletcher,” Natalie said, and ah! Right. Annabelle. Natalie had been really subdued the day she’d confirmed the little girl’s diagnosis, even though she’d bright-sided the situation with it being a fairly early catch and the fact that the best pediatric oncologist in the city had been able to take Annabelle’s case.

  “Isn’t she Hoover’s patient?” Jonah asked, taking a bite of the chicken and dumplings and fighting the urge to moan blissfully at the flavors turning his taste buds into goddamned Disneyland. “Jeez, Nat. This is delicious.”

  That earned him a smile. “Thanks. And yes and no. Hoover is treating her cancer, but Annabelle is at Remington Mem with belly pain. The scans show a partial blockage in her small intestine, and it looks like she’s going to need surgery.”

  “Which also makes her your patient. You think it’s a tumor?”

  “I’m not sure what else it could be. I’m glad we caught it and that I can remove the thing, or at least part of it, but…”

  “It sucks that you have to,” Jonah finished. Managing adults with serious conditions was hard enough. Treating kids? God, she was made of better stuff than he was.

  “It does.” Natalie nodded, propping one elbow on the breakfast bar and pointing to the iPad with her opposite hand. “The chemo has been really hard on Annabelle already, and she’s only done two treatments. I was just looking for a good clinical trial she might be eligible for, but so far, nada.”

  Jonah thought for a second. “I know a pediatric oncologist in Tampa—I operated on his sister a couple years ago after she was in a car wreck, and we still keep in touch every now and then. Want me to email him to ask if he’s heard of any trials that might take her?”

  It was kind of a long shot. Hoover was no slouch, and she probably had a pretty good line on trials her patients would benefit from. But Natalie still straightened fast enough for her T-shirt to slide off one shoulder, revealing the petal pink strap of her bra.

  “Oh, my God. Would you?”

  Jonah purposely kept his gaze fixed on Natalie’s, even though a tiny, filthy part of him wanted to know if that strap was satin or lace. It’s just Nat, you ass. She’s not for you. “Of course. I’ll do it as soon as I’m done eating.”

  “Did anyone ever tell you that you’re the best?” she asked, her grin bright enough to light up a tunnel.

  “Only you,” he said with a laugh. He ate for another minute in comfortable quiet before looking at the stove and the countertop next to it. “Honestly, I had no idea I even had that many pots and pans.”

  Natalie rolled her eyes, but her smile marked the gesture as far more playful than rude. “Okay, first of all, that’s one pot and two mixing bowls. And secondly, you don’t.”

  “I don’t?” He was looking right at them, for Chrissake. Although, yeah, still not familiar.

  “Nope,” she confirmed. “After I dug through your cabinets for a minute or two this morning, it was pretty clear I was going to have to grab a couple things from Target or else we’d both starve. Seriously, you didn’t even have a stockpot. Who lives like that?”

  “People who have excellent taste in takeout?” Jonah asked, because it was better than admitting that he didn’t know what a stockpot even looked like, let alone how to use one properly. “Anyway, let me pay you back for them.”

  She waved him off, her T-shirt staying put on her shoulder. Satin. Nice. “You wouldn’t have needed them if I hadn’t moved in. Don’t worry about it.”

  He knew her better than to think she’d budge, so he said, “How about we split them, and I’ll cover my half with takeout from the Thai place up the street this weekend? You shouldn’t have to cook every night.”

  “Mmm. You just don’t want to do the dishes every night.”

  “Okay, fair. But don’t we both deserve a break?” Jonah loaded his smile with all the charisma he could spin up, and Natalie shook her head, her blond hair swaying over her shoulders.

  “You know that charm thing doesn’t work on me. Your logic, however…that, I will take.”

  “You don’t give yourself much of a break, do you?” he asked. Now that he gave it some undivided thought, he realized just how many things she did for other people, and how little must be left for herself when she was done.

  Her brows took a one-way trip toward her hairline. “Of course I do. I go to yoga twice a week, and have girls’ night with Charlie and Tess on the third Friday of every month. I’m even reading one of those sexy romance novels Connor brought in.”

  Jonah bit back a laugh at the fact that their pro-wrestler-looking ICU nurse was addicted to romance novels, and he seemed to be converting everyone in his path to the language of love. Everyone except Jonah, that was.

  “Okay, but I’d bet good money that you always bring the food or the wine to girls’ night in, and that if one of the nurses asked to read the book you wanted first, you’d hand it over without a second thought.”

  The frown tugging at the edges of Natalie’s mouth told him he’d hit pay dirt. “Well, yeah, but we all usually bring something to girls’ night in, and the book thing is just courtesy. There are plenty of other titles to go around, and those nurses work hard.”

  “They do,” Jonah agreed. “But so
do you. When was the last time you took a vacation?”

  “Last week. It was Thanksgiving, remember? Big holiday, everyone eats turkey.”

  Oh, Jonah remembered. He’d worked—voluntarily—but now wasn’t the time to trot that little gem out. “Taking one of your days off for the week on a Thursday instead of a Saturday or Sunday so you can go to your parents’ house for a couple hours, then come home to catch up on research doesn’t count. I’m talking about a vacation, Nat. The kind where you went wherever you wanted and did whatever you felt like doing. Not what you should do, or what anybody else wanted to do.”

  The fact that she was quiet for a full minute was testament enough to the fact that her answer might well be never. “I don’t know,” she finally said, slowly, as if she were walking on icy pavement. “It’s not like vacations are my norm. I was diagnosed with leukemia at ten, and with all the remission therapy, I didn’t get a totally clean bill of health until I was fourteen. We couldn’t exactly take a lot of family trips. You know the deal with cancer patients. The airport alone probably holds six billion different types of germs that could be hazardous to a person with a compromised immune system. Plus, time and money were kind of at a premium.”

  Jonah had known about Natalie’s battle with childhood cancer for nearly as long as they’d been friends. Although she didn’t tend to divulge the information to just anybody, and almost never to patients or patients’ parents (“their own experience has nothing to do with my history or health. It should be all about what they need,” she always said), it was common knowledge to those close to her. She treated it as she did everything else. Glass half full.

  Still… “That’s kind of a bummer,” he said. Not that he’d gone on any childhood trips, himself. His dad’s idea of a big vacation was to take Christmas Eve and Christmas Day off, and even then, he’d only done it sparingly. They hadn’t been close then, and they weren’t close now.

  “Oh, it’s no big deal,” Natalie replied. “I can’t miss what I never had, and anyway, I love my job. I don’t mind not taking fancy vacations. I get to help kids be healthy. That’s way better.”