by Vanessa Vale
Even with music coming from the jukebox and the start of the happy hour crowd, the high backs of each bench seat made it seem as if the three of us were alone. “You’ve said that. Several times.”
“Four,” I replied. I bit my lip, realizing my analytical mind was vomiting stupid words.
The corner of Hardin’s perfect lips tipped up. Yes, they were perfect. Kissable. I amused him. Both of them.
“You’re very precise, aren’t you?” he asked.
I nodded, pushed my glasses up. “I am. I can’t help it, actually.”
A waiter came over, tossed coasters onto the table. “Drinks?”
“Yes,” Mac said at the same time I said, “No.”
Mac looked to me. “If there’s anyone who needs a drink, it’s you.”
Hardin nodded in agreement but stayed silent.
Back at their auto shop, Hardin had lifted me down from the tow truck, his big hands spanning my entire waist. Mac had detached my car and went in search of a replacement tire. He’d returned, stating that since it was late and if it was all right with me, one of them would fix it in the morning, wanting to take me to dinner—and then drop me at home after—to make up for the ER mix-up. They hadn’t given me much choice since I wasn’t walking the mile to my house in the cold. And I was hungry. And they were hot. I owed it to women to go out with two hot, brawny guys.
I pursed my lips at Mac’s words, knowing I’d been classified as everything from uptight to frigid. He was right. I needed a drink. Probably several.
“What do you like?” he asked.
“Decide for me,” I said, not sure what to pick and not wanting to give that gem of cluelessness away.
They ordered beers for themselves, a vodka and something for me.
“Not much of a drinker?” Mac asked.
I picked up the coaster, twirled it in my fingers. “Not a drinker at all,” I replied. “I was in my third year of medical school when I turned twenty-one. I haven’t had much of an opportunity since.”
Hardin frowned, then said, “Twenty-one your third year in medical school? That made you… fifteen when you graduated high school?”
“Fourteen.”
His auburn brows shot up. “You went to college at fourteen?”
“Yeah, Harvard.”
“Holy shit,” Mac whispered, slowly shaking his head. “So you’re pretty smart.”
“Yes.”
As we talked, they listened. Focused. Seriously stared, Mac’s dark eyes and Hardin’s hazel ones taking in mine. Mac’s dipped to my lips. He made me uncomfortable, but not in a creepy way like Dr. Knowles, even after what Mac had done in the exam room. If Dr. Knowles had pulled out his penis—no way was I calling it a dick—I’d have lost my shit and HR would definitely have to listen.
The waiter dropped off the drinks. As I took a sip of mine, I thought of the confrontation I had with Dr. Knowles as I’d gathered my things from the doctors’ lounge to meet Mac in the parking lot.
“Dr. Smyth,” Dr. Knowles had said.
I’d frozen when I heard the voice. Closed my eyes. Maybe if my eyes were closed, I wouldn’t have to confront him. I was off-balance from the thing with Mac. Fuck. I’d wanted to avoid the surgical lead before I left, but no such luck. He’d found me. Alone.
I took a fortifying breath to face the only person I disliked in Cutthroat. In the entire state of Montana.
I spun on my sneakered heel and tipped up my chin. “Yes?” I asked.
I had to forget about Mac, what had just occurred, that I was meeting him by my car.
“Good work on the surgery.”
His praise was familiar but only because it was usually followed by something else. It was the segue he always used to strike up a conversation.
“Thank you,” I replied.
“I want to talk with you about your suture tying.” He approached. “Perhaps we can discuss it over dinner.”
Suture tying? I’d been tying sutures since the first practical in medical school. That was what he was going with?
“We can talk of any issues you have out at the nurses’ station,” I replied, not even mentioning the over dinner part of his sentence. I needed a public place for our conversation… and inside the hospital. Every discussion had to be about work and nothing else. I’d given in to small talk with him when I’d first arrived, but that had been a mistake. It led to… well, this. Advances on his part that were unwanted. Cutthroat was a small town, and people talked, made assumptions.
He took a step closer, and I spun about to face away from him, grabbed my things from my locker and slammed it shut. I wanted to flee, which would have given him the upper hand. I also wanted to knee him in the balls, but that would get me fired.
He advanced farther so he was pressed against my back. I could smell the slight scent of his cologne, feel every inch of him in his scrubs… and what was beneath. My skin crawled, and I was freaked out. He’d never made contact with me before, only a handshake when we’d first met, and never like this.
Just looking at Mac had made me hot, made me flustered. Wet. But Dr. Knowles, the feel of him, made me want to vomit.
He was an attractive man—I would admit to that—but I had no interest in his forty-something ass. Or any other part of him. Nurses batted their eyelashes at him, practically tossed their panties his way as he made his rounds. I’d heard stories and the fact that he’d made his rounds through the hospital staff, too, and the fact that I was next made him even worse. Was I the only one to rebuff him? Was I the only one who wasn’t wired for a one-night stand? For a quick fuck with my mentor?
Was I supposed to be hot for him? Why was I turned on by a blatant bad boy like Mac?
Dr. Knowles’s hair was salt-and-pepper, but it made him look mature, not old. He kept himself in good shape and had the whitest teeth I’d ever seen. The other nurses could have him. I knew men like him. Lots of doctors with god complexes, who expected everyone to fall into line… or their beds. Men like him saw me, the young prodigy, as one to teach more than medicine. They all wanted to not only work with me, they wanted to play with me, giving the whole playing doctor a whole new meaning.
And that was sooo not happening. I was fine with my vibrators. Mac’s dick would be fun, too. He definitely knew what to do with it, I had no doubt. Mac might have been forward, but he wasn’t seeking an advantage, abusing a position of trust. I’d told him to pull his pants down and he had. A misunderstanding, yes, but it was all outside the boundaries of interoffice relations.
He was a stranger, a stranger I knew to a certain degree intimately.
I sashayed sideways to get around Dr. Knowles and speed walked for the door, opening it so that we weren’t in private any longer. I had my coat and bag in my arms.
“You rebuffed a conversation on removing the duodenum during the Whipple procedure and your op notes for the appendectomy. Your lack of participation in the program will show on your work record.”
That had me pausing, hand on the doorknob, but the door was open enough where people walking down the hall could see into the room and know nothing was happening.
“Lack of participation in what, exactly?” I asked, my eyes narrowing. I was very familiar with my work record since all I did was work. It was exemplary, and I wouldn’t have him tarnish it. He might question my interpersonal skills but not my work. My heart was beating out of my chest, but I wouldn’t let any of my nerves show. I wouldn’t give him that pleasure.
“Furthering your medical knowledge.”
He’d spoken of the Whipple procedure in detail with the entire surgical staff, myself included.
“As I put in my op notes, the CT was worrying for possible perforation, but when I had the scope in and visualized it, it was clear it was inflamed and distended but not ruptured.”
“Yes, but we should analyze your performance further.”
I didn’t need my IQ of 176 to know he meant sex education and my performance while being fucked by him.
At the rate sleazeballs like Knowles came on to me, my sex toys were going to be the closest things to my vagina… ever. Not that I wanted to have battery-induced orgasms for the rest of my life, but I was selective. The guy who took my virginity at least couldn’t be an asshole. I wanted to burn from his touch, not freeze. And that made me think of Mac. He made me hot. Ache. Want.
And he was waiting for me outside.
I met Dr. Knowles gaze head-on. I wouldn’t tell him to fuck off, which was what I wanted to do, but I wouldn’t submit either. I’d stay professional, keep things public.
I’d had my ass pinched in the past. I’d been propositioned. I’d been the focus of bets, of who could bed the smart chick. I’d learned the hard way at an early age. The guys at Harvard had pretty much avoided me since I’d been jailbait. Being a freshman at fourteen had seen to that. But medical school had been different. I’d been legal and fair game. Fresh meat.
I looked him in the eye. “We can discuss this further at the nurses’ station,” I repeated. I’d had years to project a calm facade, and I put it in place now. “I’m sure the others will be interested in whatever experiences on the transection or suturing you have to share.”
With that I fled, tried to calm my racing heart as I leaned against the high counter. I didn’t talk with anyone in the ER—they were busy working—and waited, held my coat in my arms as goose-down armor. After a few minutes Dr. Knowles finally came out of the lounge but turned away from me and down the hall. He didn’t even glance my way. I went to the phone, left a voice mail with HR about the incident so it was documented, but I doubted it would do any good. He wasn’t backing off.
4
HARDIN
* * *
“You okay, Sam?” I set my hand on her wrist, rubbed my thumb back and forth over her bare skin. So fucking soft.
She blinked, then pushed those sexy glasses up her nose. She’d gone off in her mind somewhere, even missed the fact that she’d finished her drink. I flagged down the waiter and indicated we wanted another round.
“Sorry, I’m fine.” She gave a quick smile, raised her glass to her lips and realized it was empty.
“You were telling us about going to college at fourteen.”
The waiter arrived with our drinks, and I pushed the second vodka cranberry toward Sam. She took a big swig before she replied.
“Right. Fourteen.”
“That must have been hard. Homesick a lot.”
She blinked. “Homesick? Of course not. My parents discovered my abilities when I was three. I never went to school, being homeschooled by a variety of tutors they thought would push my abilities. Piano. Violin, you name it. I was raised by the tutors, by the housekeeper. My parents were never home.”
What the fuck?
“Why not?” I asked.
“My father runs a multinational oil company out of Houston. My mother was a trophy wife. I was not what they expected, being able to do quadratic equations and speak two languages fluently by the time I was four—being bilingual because the housekeeper was Swedish. They couldn’t take me places because they said I embarrassed their friends and colleagues with being too smart.”
She spoke fluent Swedish, and her parents needed a serious fucking talking-to. She wasn’t a simple blonde to pick up at a bar.
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Mac murmured, his fingers white around his beer bottle.
She took another sip of her drink, and while she was sharing shit that made me want to track down her parents and knock their heads together, she was relaxing. Her body, beneath those god-awful scrubs, lost all that tense energy. Her cheeks were flushed a pretty pink.
To say I was becoming more protective of this woman by the minute was an understatement. Who the fuck was raised by a housekeeper and tutors? My brother and I had grown up with two loving parents. We were a Norman Rockwell family and all that. Who the fuck went to Harvard at fourteen? I wanted to hug the child she’d been, beat up any of the college fuckers who’d thought about her young pussy.
“If I said Harvard was easy, would you hate me?” she asked, then bit her lip.
“Easy?”
“I’m pretty smart,” she replied.
No fucking kidding. I was trying to picture her as a young teenager—a girl—at Harvard. Books and lectures would have been safe for her. The rest?
“So you’re smart, like you said. That doesn’t define you,” I told her.
She looked at me as if I all of a sudden spoke in Swedish. “Actually it does.”
I shook my head. “No, it doesn’t. I’m not stupid, but I’m not a genius either. No one thinks of me as the average-IQ guy.”
“That’s a reasonable statement,” she said finally. “What do you do, then, that is noteworthy?”
I took a pull of my beer. “Not much. Mac and I, we run the shop together. I’m good with fixing farm equipment, snowmobiles. That has me going out to ranches across the county.”
Her eyes lit up. “You make house calls for sick machinery.”
“You could put it that way.”
“How wonderful,” she added. “Your patients don’t talk back. You are mechanical physicians,” she said, then giggled. She looked to Mac. “And I guess you are a vehicular podiatrist since you are going to fix the tire on my car.”
I stared at her because her words were fucking ridiculous. True, but ridiculous. I smiled because she giggled, which I guessed for her was pretty rare.
“I don’t know anything about combustion engines,” she added. “I guess I shall have to get a book and learn about this topic, although that will do nothing about the fact that my car doesn’t have a spare.”
I thought of the slashed tire, knew someone had it in for the little Einstein across from us. Vandalism was a hands-off way to fuck with her. Had it been a one-time thing, or did someone hate her? I had no idea, but she was safe with us, and we meant to keep her that way.
“You’ve been busy. I’m guessing you didn’t party. I mean… fourteen,” Mac said, thinking the same as me. “Your parents must have watched over you like crazy.”
She shook her head, tucked a strand of her blonde hair behind her ear. “At Harvard? They weren’t there. This is good,” she commented, looking down at her glass, tipping it so the ice cubes clinked.
She’d steered clear of talking about her parents, but it didn’t seem like she was trying to avoid talking about them, rather stating a fact and moving on. Mom and Dad didn’t seem to mean much of anything to her, and it was obvious they didn’t think shit of her. My brother and I had no doubt our parents loved us. They were spending the winter in Arizona, but when they were in town, I saw them probably twice a month. My brother was eight years older, but we were tight. We went out for beers and during football season—and when he wasn’t working—spent Sunday afternoons watching the game.
I also had Mac. Other friends. Between family and buds, I knew I wasn’t alone. Sam, though? I had to wonder if she’d been alone her entire life.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Vodka cranberry. Drink up,” Mac replied.
I didn’t want her drunk, but I did like her talking. Mac, too. She took another sip.
“You’re from Texas, went to Harvard and finished medical school, at what? Twenty-two?” I asked.
She nodded. “I’m a surgeon, that’s my specialty, but today I covered a shift for an ER doc. That’s how I ended up meeting you.” She looked at Mac through her pale lashes.
My brother was a doctor and worked at the hospital, too. No fucking way was I mentioning him to Sam. The guy wasn’t short on companionship when it came to women. I swore I heard about a new one every time we talked. Any more notches in his bedpost and it would collapse. He liked his women experienced, worldly, and neither of those adjectives was Sam. No fucking way. He’d take one look at Sam and move on.
I, however, wasn’t going anywhere. She was exactly what I wanted.
“How did you end up here?” I wondered.
It was a long way from Houston and Harvard.
“In Cutthroat? When I was twelve, my parents came here to ski. I had to come with them since the housekeeper went back to Sweden for a funeral. I loved it here. The pretty Main Street, the people, the snow. God, it was a winter wonderland. I identified the perfect length of ski for my height and weight, learned how to ski by the angle of my skis in relation to the slope of the hill. I even invented a polymer to improve drag.”
At fucking twelve.
I’d lifted my beer to my mouth but paused it halfway as she spoke, then set it back down. “Let me guess, you patented it.”
She nodded, not aware of the sarcasm.
Mac laughed and a little V formed in her brow. She glanced at him, then at me, then laughed, too.
“I liked Cutthroat. Wanted to come back. When I was close to finishing my residency, I applied, got the job.”
Fuck, I was a goner. Now I understood what Mac meant, and I hadn’t had her tell me to pull my pants down. No wonder his dick got hard. I had to shift to get more comfortable here in the bar. Her guile was charming. The pert nose with the spray of freckles. The pale eyes, the messy hair. And, as Mac had said, the glasses.
She wasn’t flirting; I doubted she even knew how. Her decision to move to a small town in Montana was something I had to think about. I wasn’t sure if it was youthful exuberance or fucking sad.
“Whoo, is it warm in here?” she asked, fanning herself with her hand. Her nails were short, unpainted.
“Don’t drink much, do you?” Mac asked, amused.
She rolled her eyes, then finished her drink as if she were afraid Mac might yank it from her fingers. “I’ve been on call for literally three years, and I don’t get out much.”
Oh, she had a shit-ton of experience and knowledge packed into her young age. She was smarter than I’d ever be in three lifetimes. Yet she looked around the bar as if we’d taken her on an African safari, studying all the wild animals in their native land. A stranger observing.