Back To You (A Remington Medical Contemporary Romance) Page 6

  “Sometimes you’ve got to trust more than just what you see.” Charlie shook her head and looked from Parker’s arm to the mannequin. “Guess I’m not the only one around here who offers decent advice.”

  “I told you we’d make an excellent team.”

  He made sure his smile reached not just his eyes, but his tone, too, and bingo, she laughed.

  “You did,” Charlie agreed. Her smile had returned, the one that made him wonder if it tasted as saucy as it looked, and even though Parker knew that what he was about to say might get him shut down without ceremony, he didn’t care, nor did he hesitate.

  “In fact, I think we work so well together that you should let me take you out for coffee once this shift is over.”

  The flare of her pupils was the only sign of her surprise. Well, that, or it was possibly a sign of her arousal. Parker would gladly take either, as long as it meant she’d say yes.

  But she didn’t. “Once this shift is over, we’ve got only ten hours before the next one starts,” she pointed out.

  “That’s true,” he said slowly, trying to read her and failing in spectacular fashion.

  Charlie continued where she’d left off. “And in those ten hours, we need to do approximately four hours’ worth of studying in order to be prepared for tomorrow’s shift.”

  “Minimum.” Parker nodded. She wasn’t wrong there.

  “And we should probably get some sleep since who knows when we’ll get the chance to do that again. Yet, with all of that said, you still want to use your precious time to take me out for coffee?”

  She punctuated the question by crossing her arms over her chest, and ah, hell. He was a dumbass. Of course a smart, ambitious woman like her would have her eye on the prize. Logical thought over gut reaction. Still, if he was going to go down in flames—and it definitely looked as if he was about to get toasty—at least he could do it with honesty. “What can I say?” he told her with a grin. “You look better than sleep.”

  Parker waited out her silence for only a beat before opening his mouth to tell her to forget he’d asked. He could, after all, take a hint, and even though he was attracted to her, he still respected a no when he got one, every time.

  But before he could make his mouth form so much as a syllable, Charlie stunned him by matching his grin with one of her own.

  “I’ll meet you in the main lobby ten minutes after our shift is over. Bring your books, and we can kill two birds with one stone.”

  “You’re saying yes?” Parker asked, shock filling his veins. Moving close enough for him to catch the scent of coconuts and tropical citrus in her hair, she leaned in, the edges of her lush mouth ticking up just enough to make his heart race and his cock stir in an irrepressible response.

  “Call it a hunch,” Charlie murmured. “But I think you and I are going to have a really good time losing sleep together.”

  6

  Present day

  Charleston let go of a slow exhale and welcomed the all-too-familiar ache in her muscles like an old friend. Whether it had come from working three fourteen-hour shifts in as many days or from the craptastic mattress in the apartment she’d sublet a few blocks from the hospital, she couldn’t be certain. Either way, she didn’t mind.

  She had an extra-large coffee in one hand and a stethoscope in the other, and she was all too happy to sing the second verse, same as the first.

  Bring on another fourteen-hour shift.

  “Good morning, Dr. Becker,” came a cheery, feminine voice from the doorway to the attendings’ lounge, which also doubled as a glorified locker room.

  “I should’ve known you were a morning person,” Charleston said, although the smile she sent in Natalie’s direction smoothed any sharp edges the words might’ve carried.

  Jonah, who’d dragged himself into the lounge on Natalie’s heels, snorted. “She’s an all-the-time person. It’s nauseating, really. So nice.” He punctuated the claim with a laugh and a healthy nudge to her shoulder.

  “I prefer to look at the glass as half-full. Especially when it contains coffee,” Natalie said brightly as she nudged Jonah back, then liberated the travel mug from his hand and took a long sip.

  “Hey!”

  The pang that unfolded in Charleston’s chest at the banter that followed between the two of them surprised her. Okay, so she wasn’t nearly that friendly with anyone she worked with in Nashville—she certainly didn’t feel comfortable enough with any of her colleagues to do the shoulder-bump thing, let alone snag their caffeine fix. But at work, she was all work. Blurring the lines between that and anything personal wasn’t on her agenda. Not even with friendships, like Jonah and Natalie’s.

  Her job was her priority. It was dependable. Constant.

  It would never leave her.

  Natalie moved over to the wall of double-wide, wood-paneled lockers, having relinquished Jonah’s travel mug. “Have you talked to Tess recently?” she asked, and Charleston blinked herself back to reality.

  “For a few minutes last night. She’s still pregnant, much to her dismay.”

  Technically, baby Jackson wasn’t due for another week. But between Tess’s physical discomfort at trying to keep up in a hectic emergency department and the way her blood pressure had kept edging higher and higher with each passing day, she’d finally given up the ghost and officially handed all of her shifts over to Charleston two days ago.

  “At this point, I bet,” Natalie said. “The last week or so can be really tough.”

  Charleston rubbed a hand over the strange tightness behind her breastbone. God, she should probably ease up on the coffee, for the sake of her esophagus. “Oh, do you have kids?”

  “Me? No. Not yet.” Natalie paused to tug her T-shirt over her head and replace it with her scrubs. “Kids are definitely in my game plan at some point. I’d love to have two, or three, even. But since I don’t want to fly solo, and right now, I’m sans husband, all my knowledge of pregnancy and childbirth is strictly occupational. You?”

  The tightness behind Charleston’s breastbone bloomed into a full-blown ache, and she reached for the roll of antacid tablets she’d stashed in her purse, which she’d hung in her locker. She needed to get this heartburn under control if she was going to have a prayer of making it through this day. “No spouse, no kids. But I’m excited to spoil Tess’s baby once he finally decides to arrive.”

  Jonah, who looked for all the world as if the topic of husband-getting and baby-having was giving him golf ball-sized hives beneath his jeans and leather jacket, popped his locker open with a clunk. “So, Charleston, are you working a full shift again today?”

  She nodded, her heartburn subsiding a bit. The only thing she liked more than talking about work was actually doing it. “No rest for the weary, which I’m sure you understand. Haven’t you both been here for the last four days, too?”

  “Now it’s five. And don’t remind me. I am so out of here on time tonight. Hello, Friday.” Jonah paused, his laugh turning thoughtful. Shrugging out of his leather jacket, he said, “Nat and I were going to head to The Crooked Angel after work to throw back a few beers. Why don’t you come with us?”

  Charleston rummaged for a polite decline. But before she could pull one out of her database of them, Natalie had nodded in excited agreement.

  “Oh, yeah! That would be fun. A lot of cops and firefighters hang out there. Those rescue squad guys are pretty easy on the eyes,” she said just suggestively enough for Charleston’s cheeks to warm. Time to bow out, girl.

  “Thanks, but I’m kind of focused on my career right now.”

  Natalie nodded, but didn’t quite let go. “In that case, I’d love to grab lunch and get a firsthand account of that Whipple you did four months ago.”

  “You heard about that?” Charleston asked, unable to cage her surprise.

  But Natalie just laughed. “Lots of people heard about it. Surgeries like that don’t come along every day, and Tess said you handled it like a boss.”

  She was so genuinely nice that not liking her was pretty much a statistical impossibility, and Charleston’s normally ironclad separation between work and everything else slipped a notch. “I had a great team and a very experienced mentor who I worked with pretty extensively to prepare, but yeah. That surgery was definitely complicated.”

  Not to mention the first time she’d done the procedure solo, even though she’d assisted on a half-dozen of them over the last two years. God, she was itching to get back in the OR. Emergency medicine was fine—great, even. But the order and precision, the focus needed to make sure a surgery was a success? There was nothing like it.

  “Ah, you surgically removed a guy’s duodenum, a chunk of his common bile duct, his gall bladder, and—oh yeah! A portion of his stomach before you went all jigsaw puzzle with resecting the healthy part of his intestine and bile duct to his pancreas,” Jonah pointed out with a grin. “That’s not just complicated. It’s highly advanced. Also, really fucking cool.”

  Charleston buried her smile in her to-go cup. “The patient thought so.” He’d recovered beautifully to prove it. “Anyway, according to Tess, you’ve both done some pretty cool procedures, yourselves.”

  Natalie, who had finished swapping her street clothes for her white coat and scrubs, paused from twisting her blonde hair into a bun on the crown of her head to nod. “I’ve been re-living some of the more complicated cases for the interns. They keep asking about all the crazy stuff. You know how they are when they first start. They hear hoofbeats and think zebras.”

  “Yeah,” Jonah agreed. “Once they see enough sprained ankles and chest pain due to indigestion, they’ll figure out that the big cases aren’t exactly the norm. This class doesn’t seem so bad, though. Vasquez is pretty smart, even if she is kind of
intense.”

  Intense was a good enough euphemism for the woman’s borderline harsh demeanor, Charleston thought, although Jonah wasn’t wrong about her intelligence level. Still…

  “She didn’t take too kindly to observing when she was on my service yesterday,” Charleston said. As a general rule, the first time she worked with an intern, she limited him or her to eyes-only, along with a bunch of Q and A and tasks like running labs and interpreting the results, to gauge their capability before she let them do any hands-on patient care.

  “There’s a shark in every tank,” Jonah agreed.

  “Great.” Natalie’s arched brow was probably as far into the sarcasm zone as she ever ventured, but it was enough. “I’ve got her today. How about you?” she asked Jonah.

  “Ahhhh, I think Higgins said Boldin was with him, so I guess I’ve got Young. She seems a little hesitant, but not too bad, otherwise. At least, for an intern,” he said, and Natalie nodded. Charleston knew what was coming, mostly because she’d been caught squarely between dread and denial over it since she’d rolled off of her crummy mattress at the crack of too-early-for-this. One five-mile run, a scalding-hot shower, and two cups of coffee later, and yep, she’d still rather pass a fucking kidney stone than have Parker on her service.

  The kidney stone, after all, would be less painful.

  But Parker was her kidney stone to bear, so to speak, so she’d work with him despite not wanting to. He’d quit soon enough when things got difficult. Given the level of chaos that seemed to be the norm in Remington Mem’s ED, it shouldn’t take too long.

  “So, you get Drake today, huh?” Natalie asked, and even though Charleston had been braced for it, her pulse betrayed her by speeding up. Especially when Natalie added, “Lucky you.”

  “Lucky how?” Charleston had blurted the question before her better judgment could squash it.

  Jonah tossed the scrubs he’d pulled from his locker onto the bench beside him and looked at her as if she’d taken temporary leave of her senses. “Are you kidding? He was a paramedic for five years. He might still be adjusting to the ED, but he was all too happy to dive right in and get to work on sutures and starting lines when I had him the other day. The guy knows as much as some second-year residents I’ve seen.”

  Well, of course he did. He’d damn near been one, once upon a time. And, God, he’d had great hands from day one. Close your eyes and go by feel…

  Charleston snuffed out the thought before it could wreak havoc on her composure, trading it for a haphazard shrug. “They’re all eager in the beginning.”

  “Yeah, well, his bedside manner is great,” Natalie said. “He was super reassuring with a couple of the parents we dealt with yesterday, even when one kid had a seizure right there in the trauma room and things got a little hairy. Not even a hint of nerves as I stabilized her.”

  Charleston wanted to be surprised, but damn it, she wasn’t. Parker had always been calm under pressure, to the point of absurdity. She’d been envious of his ability to put a kill switch to his adrenaline. No matter how dire a situation became, how much a patient bled or how grave the injury, he’d just clip off his emotions and act.

  And then, one day, he’d clipped off his emotions and left.

  “I’m glad everything worked out with your patient,” Charleston said, jamming down on her thoughts of the past once and for all. True, her relationship with Parker had been complicated. But it had also been over for six years, and she couldn’t risk anyone finding out they’d been married once. Not even Jonah and Natalie. It would turn her hard-earned—and well-deserved, thank you very much—credibility into Swiss cheese, not to mention, it would probably encourage Langston to show her the door. So, working together or not, she had to put her memories of Parker where they belonged.

  Back in the box where she’d locked them and far away from the job she’d promised Tess she’d do.

  “Anyway. I suppose I should go find Drake and put him to work.” Charleston turned toward the door, but Jonah’s voice stopped her mid-step.

  “You sure you don’t want to grab that drink after your shift? All work and no play…”

  “Is exactly how I like it,” Charleston said, making sure to accompany the words with a smile. “Thanks for the offer. Really. But I’ll pass on drinks.”

  Moving through the door, she headed down the hallway, toward the emergency department. Technically, her shift started at eight, but she always jumped in about ten minutes early, just in case they got a crazy case right out of the chute.

  And, funny, she wasn’t the only one with that bright idea. Parker stood at the central nurses’ station, scrubs fresh and coffee in hand. His back was mostly to her as he talked easily with Connor Bradshaw, the flight medic-slash-ICU nurse, who stood on the other side of the counter delineating the rectangular space. The nurses’ station took up the front end of the ED’s main open area, far enough removed from the waiting room and the intake desk by the ambulance bay to ensure that only patients and staff got this far. The adjacent curtain areas and trauma rooms were either empty or closed for privacy, the ED quiet with the impending shift change, and that, coupled with Charleston’s vantage point, offered her a few seconds to take Parker in.

  His lean, powerful build was nothing new, although his muscles themselves seemed to have been refined over the last six years. They’d grown harder. More angular. His dark brown hair was longer now, tousled in a way that suggested a wind-blown spin on a motorcycle rather than a lack of grooming. The stubble on his jaw was also tidy enough to be intentional, but just natural enough to make him look dangerous, especially coupled with those thickly fringed lashes and the firm, full curve of his mouth.

  Charleston’s eyes traveled lower, even as her brain cautioned them to stop. Shoulders, arms, back…of course, Parker’s ass just had to still look magnificent in a pair of scrubs, to the point that her fingers actually twitched with the urge to splay over the strong, taut muscles and squeeze. Her breath grew suddenly heavy, the space between her legs even more suddenly slippery and hot, and she tore her stare to the floor beneath her cross-trainers.

  Jesus. Maybe she should take Jonah and Natalie up on that drink, after all. She could load up on firefighter eye-candy, grab fresh batteries on her way home, and perform a good, old-fashioned sexorcism on herself to set her brain to rights.

  Not that it was her brain that needed to be set to rights. Nope.

  Her vagina had just totally stolen that crown.

  “Morning, gentlemen,” Charleston said, taking care to ensure that her voice was perfectly level as she looked at Connor, then Parker, with an equally controlled smile. Really, hadn’t she learned her lesson the hard way? Parker might be as sexy as she was unlaid, but he’d walked out on their marriage. On her. Any thoughts she had of him needed to be purely professional.

  “Hey!” Connor’s grin was a direct contrast to his closely shorn auburn hair, his pro-wrestler build, and the brightly colored tattoos that swirled up from his wrists to reach beneath the sleeves of his scrubs, ending who knew where. “Good morning, Dr. Becker. Nicely done on the books and pastries in the nurses’ lounge the other day.”

  “I’m glad you liked them,” she said. “I heard you’re an even bigger fan of the romance novels than the pastries.”

  He reached beneath an electronic chart sitting next to the keyboard on the desk in front of him to reveal a dog-eared book with a muscular, tattoo-decorated man who, huh, looked an awful lot like him on the cover. “Guilty as charged, but not ashamed to say so.”

  “That’s a pretty curious genre for a guy to enjoy. Not that I’m judging,” Parker added, his tone backing up the claim one hundred percent. “It’s just kind of unexpected.”

  If Connor took offense, he hid it damned well, and he didn’t strike Charleston as the sort to get shy about throwing his weight around if the occasion called for it.

  “I know, right?” he asked with a laugh. “But a buddy of mine from the Air Force started modeling when he retired, and he landed on the cover of one of these last year. I wanted to support him—decent friend, and all—so I grabbed a copy. One night during a really slow shift, I figured what the hell and gave it a go. I’ve been hooked ever since. Seriously, you don’t know what you’re missing. You should give these books a try.”