by Doyle, Jen
And that’s how he found himself still in the hospital an hour later, upstairs in some waiting room, trying not to pace when he was so obviously not the one who needed support right now. Yet he couldn’t deny his own stress came into play big-time when he stepped out into the hallway, saw two women in scrubs disappearing around the corner and headed after them. Catching up, he said in as authoritative a voice as he could summon, “Excuse me, but we need a damn doct...”
He stopped short as the two women turned. “Karen?”
Considering she’d been on his mind constantly for the last week, he wasn’t entirely sure it was truly her. With her hair up in a tight bun and no makeup to speak of, she looked completely different than the woman he’d last seen on the side of the road.
The woman who’d kissed him on the side of the road and who he should never have kissed back.
No less pissed, however. Confused, though, too. “Tuck? What are you doing here?”
He took a step back and ran his hand over his hair. He still wasn’t entirely sure what had happened with her the week before—although he could probably pull up the tape from the dashcam for a refresh should need be. Which he hadn’t, because although she’d been the one to initiate it, he should have been the one to stop it—immediately—and he wasn’t going to open that can of worms unless absolutely required to. But that was all too much to process, especially while also attempting to get a hold on his irritation. And she obviously wasn’t the cause of his frustration at the moment so he had no business taking it out on her.
It was just that, honestly, it had been an hour, and making small talk with Taylor as she tried to hold herself together was wrenching him apart. He gritted his teeth and answered the question. “Waiting for the doctor to get his head out of his ass and come see his next patient.”
“Which doctor are you waiting for?” asked the woman with Karen.
Right. It would help if he’d gotten the full name. Taylor wasn’t at her most coherent at the moment, however. “Whoever’s supposed to see Taylor Bradshaw.”
The air shifted in an odd way as Karen stared at him. It was the other woman who spoke again, however. “Which room are you in?”
He pointed down the hall. “632B.”
“Someone will be in soon.”
And now it seemed like he was in trouble. He had no idea why, though. Sure, as she’d clearly stated, he’d made the piss-poor decision not to take her up on her offer the other night. But he’d been on duty. And he hadn’t been lying—being one of the few people in the department without a family waiting for him to come home each night, he took on a lot of extra shifts. Forget the ethics of hooking up with someone he’d pulled over for a traffic stop, even if he hadn’t cited her for anything. He simply hadn’t had the time. He was good at a lot of things; adding hours to a 24-hour day wasn’t one of them.
He wasn’t going to say any of that, of course. She obviously worked here—and therefore no doubt needed to deal with doctors all the time. He wasn’t about to make it harder for her. Choosing not to say they’d already been told twice that the doctor was on the way—that Dr. C was the best there was and sometimes it took a little while—Tuck just nodded instead.
Five minutes later, his arm tightened around Taylor’s shoulders when the door opened and Karen walked in, still in her scrubs. She was followed immediately by a tall, surprisingly well built, pretty-boy doctor who took in the scene and gave Tuck a withering glance.
Really, asshole? You kept us waiting for this long and you’re giving me attitude?
Since Karen just brushed by him—prickly, as he was coming to see was her resting state—he merely returned the doctor’s glare, gave Taylor’s shoulders one more squeeze, and then stepped away from her. Whatever Karen’s feelings were toward him, however, her approach to Taylor was compassionate and warm. “Mrs. Bradshaw. I’m so sorry to keep you waiting.”
Tuck could probably have kept himself from glaring over Karen’s shoulder at the doctor, but he didn’t. The guy couldn’t even make his own apologies?
Unfortunately, his thoughts were both obvious and, apparently, wrong.
Moving forward into the room, the guy came up next to Taylor, pulled the blood pressure cuff off the wall and smirked at Tuck before turning to Taylor. “Mrs. Bradshaw, I’m your nurse, Ryan. This is Dr. Carmichael. Dr. C has been in surgery all morning and she means it when she says how sorry she is.”
Oh, shit.
Karen was the doctor?
She was Dr. C?
If that didn’t make Tuck the biggest asshole in the world, then he wasn’t sure what else would.
He found out three seconds later when Ryan continued, “And she hates even more that she kept you and your husband waiting so long—”
Husband?
No wonder he was getting the death glare left and right.
The circumstances were completely wrong for it, but Tuck had to admit he smiled. Because if her nurse was pissed, too, it meant he was aware something had happened between Tuck and Karen. And if he was aware of it, it meant Karen had talked about it. That was potentially fixable.
Ryan’s soothing voice reminded him that they were here because of something that wasn’t nearly as easy to deal with, however.
“—but she’s so awesome she won’t even tell you it’s because we made her take ten minutes to eat something.” He winked at Taylor, laying on the charm. “Sometimes she forgets that food is a requirement and we have a thing here about our doctors fainting while they’re seeing patients.”
That made Taylor smile. It also pulled her out of her fog enough to say, “Tuck’s just a friend.”
Wanting to ensure Karen didn’t misread the hesitation, Tuck added, “Taylor’s husband and I go way back. He’s home with their kids. I ran into Taylor in the lobby and didn’t want her to be alone.”
Which brought them right back to where they’d begun. Because all signs were pointing to this being a really shitty situation. The woman who’d sent Tuck away after that night in Denver—the woman who’d offered him another night of no-strings-attached sex much more recently and then kissed him senseless on the side of the road—was apparently one of the best neurosurgeons in the country. And Taylor’s own doctor had sent her directly here because she needed one. The way Tuck’s mother had been sent to a hospital very much like this one, with doctors not nearly as soft and warm as Karen Carmichael, even after her prickliness was added in.
And that wasn’t easily fixable at all.
Chapter Three
He wasn’t married.
Even more importantly, he wasn’t married to this lovely woman, former kindergarten teacher and now stay-at-home mother of five, who had a Grade II Low-Grade Astrocytoma, known to the rest of the world as a brain tumor. As battles went, it would be harder than some, but easier than others. No guarantees, of course. There were never guarantees. Karen could read a medical chart the way a pitcher could read his catcher’s calls, though—or, at least, that’s what one of her professors used to say about her; she didn’t know squat about sports—and from everything she’d been able to see so far, this was a war that would be won.
Tuck wasn’t her concern right now, so she kept her back to him. And anyway, he was Ryan’s project at the moment. Ryan would keep him in line. But, oh, thank God, the man she’d spent three of the last seven nights dreaming about wasn’t the father of Taylor’s children.
“Tell me about your husband, Mrs. Bradshaw,” Karen said as she conducted her examination. “Dr. Madden told me he sells farm equipment?”
“We have insurance, Dr. Carmichael,” the woman hurriedly said.
Karen smiled as reassuringly as she could and skipped over that comment entirely. “We’re about to get really close. Why don’t you call me Karen?”
Just then the door burst open and a man rushed in,
oblivious to everyone in the room except for, presumably, his wife. Whom he went to immediately, his hands framing either side of her face as he kissed her. Square on the lips and with a passion reminiscent of the one between Karen’s parents. Right up until the day her father was stolen away from them and her mother sank into a depression so deep she still hadn’t come out of it.
“We’ll get through this,” he said, his forehead resting against his wife’s. “Whatever it is, we’re going to be okay.”
Now that was the husband Dr. Madden had spoken about during the twenty-minute conversation Karen had just had with Taylor’s PCP, during which she’d heard all about the devoted Mr. Bradshaw. Ryan had been lying a little bit about the cause of the delay. Although, yes, they had made Karen eat, she’d also had an extra tricky surgery this morning that had gone longer than expected, two separate phone calls regarding referrals coming her way from Oregon and Kentucky, and yet another call from one of the big hospitals in Chicago because they wanted her as the “lynchpin of the new world-class neuroscience team.”
Those phone calls had all been scheduled. But then Dr. Madden had called just as Karen had been on her way down from the office. She’d been heading to the nurses’ station for the charts when she’d turned and seen Tuck standing there. It had taken everything she had not to lay into him. Since her sex life was of great interest to the people she worked with, and since, thanks to Ryan, it had taken all of two minutes for everyone to learn Taylor Bradshaw’s husband was the same man Karen had once upon a time hooked up with, she was just the first in line. Once her team had a patient, they cared about every part of that person’s life. Cheating husbands weren’t a fan favorite.
“Mr. and Mrs. Bradshaw,” Karen said, stepping back into the conversation.
“Please call me Taylor.” Clasping her husband’s hand, she leaned into the man. “This is Gabe.”
Karen smiled. “Taylor and Gabe. I know this is a really hard thing to be dealing with, and I’m sure you have a lot of concerns. So let me tell you how this is going to go and then we’ll answer all of your questions. Since Ryan did make me eat, I’ve got at least a few hours left in me.”
It didn’t take that long, but it was over an hour before Karen and Ryan left the room. She wasn’t surprised—when your job was dealing with the life and death of the person in front of you, you tended to answer a lot of questions. But it was an important part of treatment as far as Karen was concerned. During the months in which her own father had been straddling that line between life and death, his doctors had seemed to care as much about their patient’s wife and eleven-year-old daughter as they had about the man in their care. It had been the only thing to get Karen through it all and she’d sworn she’d one day do the same.
As the conversation came to an end, she leaned in to give Taylor a hug. “Remember,” she said after she pulled away, “you spend every day dealing with five kids. They challenge you, but it’s your job and I bet you’re damn good at it. Brain tumors are what I deal with and we’re going to do everything we can.”
The smile she wore as she left the room was genuine. She’d almost cried in gratitude when she’d looked at Taylor’s charts. She’d had some really draining cases of late and, thankfully, this shouldn’t be one of them. Not that it wasn’t serious—everything that got put in front of her was—but she was glad she was ending out her week with this one. Maybe tonight she’d be able to sleep easy. And although she wasn’t at all thrilled about running into the man again, the realization that Tuck wasn’t, in fact, Taylor’s husband, meant that should her dreams drift in that directi—
“Tuck.”
Again, he surprised her by being right there in front of her in the hallway.
“You’re the doctor,” he said.
From behind her, Ryan said, “Ah. The sexist assumptions never get old.”
She elbowed him. He was a great attack dog. She loved him. But right now she was too tired for Ryan-in-Pit-Bull mode.
“Entirely true,” Tuck answered. He glanced up at Ryan as he spoke but then his eyes came right back to hers. “Not my best moment and I’m sorry.”
She had to give him credit. No excuses, not even anything along the lines of There was a lot of shit going on and I wasn’t thinking. She nodded. “I’m sorry I assumed you were a slimy cheating bastard of a husband.”
He laughed. “Don’t feel like you have to hold back.”
“That was her holding back,” Ryan said.
It wasn’t really. Karen didn’t hold back. She used up all of her holding-back energy on her interactions with her patients and their families. Figuring out how much she could tell them at what times. Making sure they could summon the strength they needed to face whatever came next. Everyone else was on their own.
Ryan knew that. Her entire team knew that. Most people, however, had no clue.
Except then Tuck said, “Funny, I got the opposite impression.” His voice got lower as, ignoring Ryan, he straightened up and put his hands in his pockets, his blue eyes going dark as he stared down at her. “In fact, I remember in vivid detail that you don’t hold back at all.”
If she weren’t so busy keeping herself from flashing back to exactly how much she hadn’t held back that night in her car, her mouth might have dropped open. She was pretty sure Ryan’s did.
“How about I take you out to dinner tonight and apologize for being a jerk in there?”
Karen took a step back—directly into Ryan. She wished she could disappear into thin air. She knew her weaknesses and this was something she didn’t do well. The whole guy thing. Sex, yes. She could even manage a date or two if she knew that’s what it was leading to. But flirting and getting-to-know-each-other-type conversation, absolutely not.
And certainly not with Tuck. Just being in his presence made her think thoughts she shouldn’t be thinking. Naked thoughts. Naked thoughts that involved whimpering and moaning. Plus, the thing about keeping your life compartmentalized was that you had to actually keep the pieces separate. Men who had had parts of them inside of parts of her should not be taking her to dinner after seeing her in action with a patient.
She shook her head.
He persisted, damn him, his voice even lower. “Like Ryan said, you need to eat. I’m happy to take on that responsibility for the evening.”
“Oh, boy,” Ryan muttered under his breath.
There was a sudden rush of heat to Karen’s face. Not a blush so much as a build-up of all the tears she refused to shed until, well, next Tuesday—and the completely unfamiliar urge she had to say yes and let Tuck take her away. “No, but thank you. I’ve got more patients to see.”
* * *
Tuck had been a police officer long enough to know when a woman was flat-out lying. The fact that she walked off without Ryan following was confirmation. But he’d also been around long enough to know when not to push and this was one of those times.
Ryan, on the other hand, hadn’t learned that lesson.
“Bet you’re wishing you didn’t blow her off last week.”
Having watched to see if she would even glance back, Tuck now turned his full attention to Ryan. Is that what she told you? was on the tip of Tuck’s tongue but the answer to that question was clearly “yes.” And he couldn’t really blame her, as he’d given her no reason to think otherwise. Hell, she’d kissed him and all he’d done was stand there. It was all he could do. If he’d allowed himself to give in to the primal urge when she’d touched him, he would have kept her pinned to that car until they were both thoroughly satisfied. Given the dashcam, the potential for random cars driving by and, oh, ethics, that also meant he would no longer have a job.
But all that aside, it seemed as if Ryan was capable of having a conversation all on his own, so why deny him that privilege?
Sure enough, Ryan went on, getting all up in Tuck’s face. “W
e had some really bad cases that day. And then you go and pull her over for drunk driving.”
Tuck had had a lot of training. And he’d spent a large portion of his life diffusing fights his younger brothers excelled at starting. He was known for keeping his head even in the most confrontational of situations and he was the guy who got called in whenever they needed to talk someone down. But it took everything he had not to slam the man back against the wall, and not even because of Ryan’s attitude or clear overstepping of bounds. No, it was because the thought that Tuck had made that night even just a little bit worse for her cut him to the quick.
Which it shouldn’t have, because if she had been drunk—and all outward signs had pointed to that—he wouldn’t have thought twice about pulling her over.
At least Ryan was dialing it back. The fire in his stare dimmed as he retreated. Not very gracefully, though. “She wasn’t drunk. She doesn’t touch the stuff. If it got out you pulled her over the same night she—”
“What did she say about that night?” Tuck asked, cutting the other man off. He didn’t need to know Ryan’s take on the whole thing; he needed to know what Karen thought.
With a huff, Ryan leaned back against the wall and crossed his arms. “That you knew she was completely sober. That you were a cop and seemed like a really decent guy. And that because you already had those two things going against you, she wasn’t about to give you a chance at strike number three.”
“Being decent is a strike against me?” That was a new one. And entirely surprising, given how she’d been with Taylor and Gabe.
“She gives what she has to her patients,” Ryan answered, almost as if he’d read Tuck’s mind. He left unsaid the “So don’t expect there to be a lot left over for you” part.
Well... Fine. Tuck had enough uphill battles to fight—and now, with this new development for Taylor and Gabe, he was about to join in on one more. He didn’t need her baggage, too.