Priya in Heels (Entangled Embrace)

by Ayesha Patel

  Love doesn’t conquer all…does it?

  Priyanka Patel is the epitome of an obedient daughter. She’s finishing up her medical residency at one of Houston’s busiest emergency departments, and has agreed—albeit reluctantly—to marry the man her family has chosen for her. The only thing that can derail the “perfect” life laid out before her is the sexy musician down the hall who wants into her life…and into her bed.

  Tyler O’Connor has been infatuated with Priya since she treated his sprained ankle in the ER, and after saving her from a brutal attack, he can’t get her out of his head. When Priya puts her family’s wishes before their relationship, agreeing to an arranged marriage with another man, Tyler is devastated.

  But love is fierce and unreasonable and clashes with the carefully sculpted life her parents want for her. Is going after her heart such a big deal, or will it truly unravel Priya’s world?

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Priya in Heels Glossary:

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Discover more New Adult titles from Entangled… Claimed by Light

  The Summer of Jake

  Midnight Dawn

  The Possibility of Us

  The Mean Girl Apologies

  Full Measures

  Unfixable

  Trouble Comes Knocking

  How We Lived

  If Only

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Ayesha Patel. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

  Entangled Publishing, LLC

  2614 South Timberline Road

  Suite 109

  Fort Collins, CO 80525

  Visit our website at www.entangledpublishing.com.

  Embrace is an imprint of Entangled Publishing, LLC.

  Edited by Erin Molta

  Cover design by Heather Howland

  ISBN 978-1-63375-055-5

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition September 2014

  For Mummie and Papa, who loved me, no matter what. You are my first blessing.

  Chapter One

  Priya

  Women who wore heels all day belonged in a mental institution for heinous self harm. Residency taught us to always look professional, and I envied the female docs who rocked nice shoes every day, but I drew the line with heels. Hello, plantar fasciitis, anyone?

  Even in sneakers, pain bubbled around my ankles and prickled up my calves. One month of fifteen-hour days in one of Houston’s busiest emergency departments had turned my ankles into dainty twigs ready to snap in half.

  I tried not to wobble to room twenty-three, and the wheelchair in the corner called my name. Maybe the ED tech could wheel me to the next patient?

  The nurses giggled as I hobbled past station two.

  “Oh, honey, try doing this for a living,” Mara said.

  “You’ll get used to it,” David encouraged.

  Right.

  I skimmed over the file I’d been using to fan myself with. It belonged to a man who lived in epic STDville. Eww. Thank goodness his numerous venereal diseases couldn’t attach to his folder and fly off onto my mouth.

  “Oh, wait, this one.” Dr. Lemur snatched that folder from me and replaced it with a thinner one.

  This man thought he had a broken ankle. Much better! On my last day in ED rotation, I wasn’t in the mood to deal with another nasty sexaholic. I had already had one last week, and the guy had persistently hit on me. He had been lucky that he’d walked out with his genitals intact.

  More times than not, the reality of a person’s illness paled in comparison to what they thought they had. This broken ankle was more likely a sprained one, and that was an easy fix.

  Still attached to my notes, I opened and closed the glass door to room twenty-three, then closed the curtain behind me before looking up. What a mistake! I almost stumbled over my aching feet. Okay, I had to close my mouth now before the patient slapped a piece of tape across my forehead that read, “Idiotic Buffoon.”

  The patient straightened and gave me a lazy smile. Yeah, he knew he had the looks. Shimmering green eyes like emeralds. Auburn hair, a little wavy, wisped across his forehead, curled over his ears, and flirted with his shirt collar. Kissable lips curved upward, set above a firm, square jaw. He almost had me stuttering like a boy-crazy teenager, the way his intense eyes held my attention.

  Icy air puffed down from the ceiling vent and tickled the back of my neck, jolting me back to my senses. It was one of those weird moments when time stopped and all of a sudden you couldn’t remember what you were doing or how long you’d been mentally gone. It was a moment that made me think, Damn!

  “Tyler O’Connor?” I managed to say, playing off my unprofessional reaction to the stunningly handsome man and quelling any interest.

  “Yep,” he replied in a thick, low voice. Either too dreamy to be real or sleepy from pain medicine.

  “Think you sprained your ankle or broke it?”

  “Yep.”

  “Okay, let’s take a look.” I snapped on a pair of white gloves from the triage cart, pulled up a rolling stool, and sat down. All the while, I surreptitiously noticed that Tyler was focused on my face, so meeting his eyes again was impossible.

  With shoe off, sock on, Tyler rested the injured foot on a chair. The butcher paper crinkled underneath him as he shifted on the gurney while I lifted his foot onto my lap. At six-foot-one and a muscular two hundred pounds, according to his chart, his leg felt like dead weight.

  I pulled down his sock to check for bruising and wounds, then pressed and felt for swelling. He hissed.

  “Hurts?”

  “Yep,” he responded in his amazing verbal repertoire.

  “What were you doing when you injured yourself?”

  “Walked off stage and buckled on a step.”

  The image of this
tall, brawny man stumbling down a few steps tickled me. I stifled a giggle. When I looked up, he rested his forearms on his thighs and leaned in, his face way too close for comfort.

  “Oh, sorry.” Apparently, the giggle had escaped.

  He flashed an insanely swoon-worthy smile. “Do I need an X-ray?”

  “Only if you want to spend a bunch of time in our lovely hospital.”

  “Do I get a meal and you at my bedside?”

  I responded dryly to subdue his flirting, “You get a hit of high-energy electrons and an hour of sitting alone.”

  “It’s not even broken, is it?”

  “No.” I couldn’t help myself. I thumped his ankle. He jerked forward. “A broken ankle would hurt much worse.” I returned his foot to the chair and rolled away.

  “Yeah, I figured. Bar owner demanded I get it checked.”

  “Guess he thought you’d sue?”

  He shrugged and I wrote a few notes as he craned his neck to look over the folder’s edge. “Thought you guys had electronic notes.”

  “We do. This is for my personal notes to take to clinic. I’m a resident, so…” I responded as if that explained anything because, of course, everyone knew residents made their own notes to study and report back to their attending doctors.

  “Cool.”

  “Are you in pain? I can prescribe something.” This tactic tended to flush out drug abusers, those who went straight to narcotics.

  “Nah. Rest, ice, compress, elevate. Right?”

  “You got it.”

  “Guess I wasted two hours and a hundred bucks for nothing. I should make the bar owner pay.”

  “Look on the bright side, Mr. O’Connor, at least you have good insurance.”

  “Better than that, I have a good doctor. Are you working late?”

  “No. You’re my last patient.”

  “Are you doing anything after work?”

  I peered up and tried very hard to hide an impending grin. My lips quivered in the futile effort, and the boy-crazy teenager inside of me giggled with excitement. “I’m not allowed to date patients, Mr. O’Connor.”

  “Ah. Well, in half an hour I won’t be your patient, right?”

  “You know what I mean. We would have had to meet a different way.”

  “Well, how about you come by The Harmon’s where my band’s playing? We could meet there.”

  “The bar? Your bar? Where you tripped?” An image of him falling crossed my thoughts.

  “You think it’s funny?”

  I frowned. “Sorry. Of course it’s not funny, Mr. O’Connor.”

  He chuckled. “Anyway, check us out. We’ll be going back on at eleven.”

  Standing, I handed him a piece of paper to end the conversation before it traveled down personal roads. “Here’s a prescription for pain medicine, in case you need it. Eight hundred milligrams of Tylenol.”

  “I could just inhale four over-the-counter Tylenol, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t catch your name.”

  “I’m sorry. I failed to introduce myself. I’m Dr. Patel.”

  “And your first name?”

  “Irrelevant.”

  He lowered his eyes to my chest and slowly dragged them back up. “Pry-anne-kah?”

  I flipped the name badge and slapped it against my chest. “Observant, aren’t you?” I said curtly, hating that the residents had both first and last names on our badges.

  “Did I pronounce it wrong?” He grinned again.

  “Yes. It’s pronounced Pree-ahn-ka. Priyanka.”

  “That’s kinda hard. Think I’ll call you Pree.”

  “You can call me Dr. Patel.” I gritted my teeth.

  “Is that offensive?”

  “Houston only has a million Indians, and a million other ethnic people. You should try harder to properly pronounce names instead of being lazy and assigning unwanted and unwarranted nicknames.”

  “Ouch!”

  I shook my head and forced a smile. “Don’t overdo it tonight. Have a good one, and take care of that ankle.”

  “Bye, Dr. Patel,” he said in a somewhat amused tone.

  There were many things I couldn’t tolerate, including people who judged, those who expected doctors and nurses to be at their beck and call, and people who thought they couldn’t pronounce a three-syllable name. “Priyanka” wasn’t that difficult, especially in comparison to some names. Snapping at a cocky patient wasn’t acceptable, but Tyler would walk out of here unscathed by my anger. Mostly.

  Like the rest of the patients who wandered in and out of the ED, Mr. Tyler O’Connor faded from memory soon enough. Despite his remarkable good looks, perhaps the hottest Irishman ever, only patients with interesting reasons to visit stayed with me. Like the STD guy, and the woman who had lacerated her vulva because she had decided to crawl over a bathroom partition to get out of her locked stall…as opposed to crawling under on a dirty floor in her pretty dress. The partition had broken beneath her weight, and well, the rest had been a painful, tear-filled adventure. I tingled with sympathy for her.

  My shift officially ended, and hell month in ED would soon be a haunting memory. Another hour of electronic charting and handwritten notes for myself and I was ready to skip right on out. Well, I would’ve stayed if a car accident came in, a stroke victim, or the always emotional pediatric case—for the experience—but nothing of the sort happened.

  I changed out of my hospital-assigned blue scrubs and into jeans and a snug, black top. I slipped on my favorite plaid pink and purple backpack because, of course, I intended to bring plaid back, and hurried out to my car just as my cell rang.

  “Hey, Vicki. What’s going on?”

  “Are you coming to dinner, or what?” my roommate asked in a high-pitched voice above the clamor of what sounded like a party in the background.

  “I’m just leaving work. Where are you?”

  “The Harmon’s.”

  “Oh, uh, sure.”

  “We just got here, waiting for a table. We should be seated by the time you get here, but you can still grab some food from the bar menu.”

  The thought of running into a patient outside of work, particularly to a place he had invited me to, caused me to hesitate. “It’s late.”

  “Have you eaten?”

  “No.”

  “Not all day, right? Get some food, hang with us, come out once in a while!”

  “Ugh, sure. Be there in twenty minutes.”

  Though I dreaded being seen by Tyler O’Connor, because he would assume I went there for him, The Harmon’s Brewery & Restaurant had the best food, a rocking vibe, and was centrally located for my friends. We ate there at least once a month. The only problem with the place was its downtown location, which meant a ton of one-way streets, horrible parking, outrageous parking fees, and weekend crowds half drunk and wholly pushy. But I was starved because I hadn’t had time for lunch or dinner again, and the fridge at the apartment was a little sad.

  Vicki cooked more than I did. She had a nine-to-five job, Monday through Friday, and loved the Food Network. But she never cooked on Fridays, which were knighted “leftover day.” She never cooked on Saturdays, either, because it was girls’ night out. Sometimes I believed Vicki didn’t cook on those days to dwindle down our food supply so I had no choice but to meet her someplace if I wanted to eat.

  It worked.

  Chapter Two

  Tyler

  I pushed past the crowds with guitar in hand and cocked my chin in silent salutations to my band members, Mike and Dale. Mike offered a hand, drawing me into a one-hand-pat-on-the-back/man hug and laughed.

  “Where’s the cast?” he taunted. “Thought it was a fatal wound.”

  I snickered and dragged another chair onto the stage. Sitting down, I propped my swollen foot on the extra chair, and tuned the guitar. “Whatever the owner wants. You guys played without me?”

  “The show must go on.”

  “Sounds like the radio did a good
job in my absence.” I smirked.

  “Coincidence. We just got back from break.”

  “Let’s get this going, bums.”

  “Hey, check out the new dancer on the floor.”

  I followed Mike’s gaze across the room, landing on the sultry redhead in a tight blue dress and black heels high enough that they could be used as a stake. Meagan, my ex, danced in slow rhythm, grinding and air humping alone because no one was around her. Yet. Ah, there. Four guys swarmed around her.

  She giggled and brushed them away as we made eye contact. A wink. A smile.

  “Are you still hitting that?” Mike asked.

  I resumed tuning my guitar, shoving the vixen out of my thoughts. “No.”

  “Since when?”

  A grin played at the corners of my lips. “Since I met someone else.”

  “Yeah? Who?” Mike asked, raising his brows.

  “Her name’s Priyanka. She’s cute, feisty, smart, and those eyes…” I whistled, remembering the almond-shaped eyes, hazel with specs of gold and jade and outlined in thick, black lashes. I could get lost in those eyes.

  “Priyanka? Sounds Indian.”

  “She is. The girl down the hall.”

  “Ah. I remember you mentioning her. Finally talked to her, huh? Thought she did nothing but run in and out of her apartment whenever you saw her?”

  True, Priyanka had the habit of always being in a hurry. Now I knew why. Doctors were busy. Since I’d moved into her building a couple of weeks ago, I’d made it a point to take the trash out early on the off chance I’d catch her before she hit the gym, or so was my assumption drawn from her outfit. Plus, I could see her in those tight little capris, and man, did she have a nice backside. And then, again in the evening I’d hang out to check the mail on the off chance I would catch her on her way home from work. It never happened.

  “She was my ER doctor,” I said.

  “That’s what she does? Damn. Good luck, bro.”

  “You don’t think I have a shot with her?”

  “She’s Indian, right? Like her people might stone you for trying to even talk to her. She’s a doctor, and that’s way over your head.”

  I glared at him. “I work at NASA, remember? I could give her a lesson or two.”

  “I bet you’d love to teach her a thing or two.” Mike laughed.

  “I gotta go to the bathroom. Be right back.” I hobbled down the steps but with my sore ankle, I couldn’t evade the redhead.