Better Than Me (A Remington Medical Contemporary Romance)

by Kimberly Kincaid

  Natalie had promised to stay out of his hair—a promise she’d meant, since he was doing her such a colossal solid and she knew he favored his space—so she’d made good use of the linen closet to cover the futon he’d unfolded for her, used the powder room in the hallway to wash up and brush her teeth, and turned in. But between the bathtub/ceiling disaster and the weird feeling of lying all pajamaed up in bed less than fifteen feet from where Jonah did the same, actual sleep had eluded her for hours. She hadn’t been restless, exactly. At least, not in the usual toss-and-turn sort of way. No, last night, Natalie had been almost keyed up, like a current was humming, low and insistent beneath her skin. Like she was missing something—wanted it badly, even—but didn’t know specifically what it was.

  The whole thing sucked, because she couldn’t say anything about it to the one person she’d normally bounce this kind of thing off of. Things between her and Jonah were unusually awkward, and that weird feeling she’d had? If she didn’t know better, Natalie would say it had felt an awful lot like arousal.

  Which was a joke, really, considering that there was exactly one thing she’d never told him about herself. One secret she’d just never been able to share that made their friendship far more ironic than he knew.

  After all, the odds of Remington’s only 32-year-old virgin and its most commitment-shy, sex-positive bachelor being BFFs had to be one in a million.

  The fact that he’d treated her panties as if they’d been a time bomb with one tick left before detonation? Meant her V-card was safe, no matter how active Jonah’s sex life might be.

  Natalie took a long draw from the lukewarm coffee in her hand and chastised herself for being silly. Okay, yes, she’d always found Jonah attractive—just because she hadn’t met a guy she wanted to give p-in-v privileges to yet didn’t mean she was without a pulse. Between that tousled-but-not-messy blond hair, those inexplicably blue eyes, and the leanly muscled body that made Michelangelo’s David look like a third-grade art project, Jonah was hotness personified. But they were best friends. Of course he didn’t look at her that way. And normally, she kept her attraction to him firmly under the heading of an objective observation. She’d even built up an immunity to the preposterously chiseled abs she caught sight of every once in a while when he changed out of his scrubs in the attendings’ lounge.

  Or, at least, she thought she had…until she’d stretched out under sheets that smelled like Jonah, wondering how many times he’d slept under the very same ones. Whether the cotton wrapped around her had touched his bare skin. What it would feel like if she touched his bare skin…

  Natalie released a nervous laugh into the empty room. Last night must have been a blip due to all the craziness. That was all. They’d get used to cohabitating in a few days, and everything would go back to normal. No problem. Easy-peasy.

  God, his abs were really freaking chiseled.

  The door to the lounge swung open, the sound of the two familiar female voices that followed grabbing Natalie’s attention and depositing her back to reality.

  “Hey, Natalie.” Charleston Becker, their relatively new attending in general surgery, smiled in a warm greeting as she and Tess Michaelson, emergency department attending and Charlie’s best friend, made their way into the lounge.

  “Good morning! And, oh, my God, congratulations. You and Parker are getting married. Again!” Natalie found a genuine smile somewhere below her exhaustion, unfolding herself from the couch to give Charlie a big hug. Charlie had returned to Remington after a six-year absence, and been reunited with her ex-husband after a few bumps along the way, one of them being that Parker was now an intern at Remington Mem.

  “I told you to get used to it,” Tess teased in her blunt, no-holds-barred way. To Natalie, she said, “It took her, like, fifteen minutes to get through the lobby and the ED. Plus, Connor brought cake.”

  Natalie laughed. Their flight medic-slash ICU nurse who sometimes filled in down in the ED was always looking for an excuse to eat cake. Not that his former Air Force medic physique showed it. “That sounds like Connor.”

  “Right?” Charlie asked, pausing in front of her locker for a smile that could light up lower Manhattan. “I don’t mind getting waylaid a little. It’s nice to have good news to share.”

  A pang of guilt squeezed through Natalie’s belly beneath her dark green scrubs. “I’m so sorry I had to run last night before I got to congratulate you properly. I had kind of a, um, situation at home. But it’s all fine now.”

  “Yeah, what happened?” Charlie asked, concern flickering through her green stare. “We just saw Jonah downstairs and he said a bathtub fell through your ceiling?”

  Natalie bit back the weird hop-flip thing her stomach did at the mention of Jonah’s name. By the time she’d dragged herself out of the few hours of dreamless sleep she’d finally managed to get, he’d been gone. He hadn’t mentioned having to round early when they’d turned in last night, but she’d been secretly grateful not to have to deal with swapping turns for the only shower in his apartment.

  “Oh, it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds,” Natalie said, dialing her smile up two notches. No need to worry her friends over something that was said and done.

  Not that Tess seemed to buy her story for a single nanosecond. “Really? Because it sounds like a hundred-year-old cast-iron bathtub wiped out your apartment and a bunch of your stuff along with it, rendering you temporarily homeless.”

  “Okay, so that did happen,” Natalie admitted. “But my neighbors’ insurance company is covering most of my losses, and my neighbors have promised to pay for anything left over.”

  She’d spoken with Max on her way to the hospital this morning. He’d practically fallen over himself apologizing for everything that had happened. “And I found a place to stay while my apartment gets repaired,” Natalie continued. “So it all worked out.”

  “Yeah, so we heard.”

  Charlie shared a smile with Tess, who tacked on, “So everyone heard.”

  Natalie froze. “What do you mean?”

  Charlie bit her lip apologetically. “Jonah told Parker about it this morning when they did rounds, but I guess Don overheard them, and…” She trailed off, but the rest came through as if she’d shouted it through a bullhorn.

  “Oh, no.” Natalie groaned. Don might run the ED’s intake desk like a drill sergeant, but he gossiped worse than a middle schooler. The entire hospital and half the patients must know that she and Jonah were sharing space by now.

  “You know how it goes. The only thing that spreads faster than the flu around here is gossip,” Tess said, shouldering her way into her scrubs.

  The back of Natalie’s neck prickled with heat. “There’s nothing to gossip about.”

  “Do you have any idea how many women would commit actual murder to be you right now?” Tess asked, but only after she’d finished laughing at Natalie’s claim.

  “The number has got to be at least three digits,” Charlie mused.

  Natalie had to nip this in the bud before it got any worse. Things were already weird enough between her and Jonah, thanks. “Come on, you guys. I’m crashing on the futon in my best friend’s den because my apartment needs repairs. I can promise you, there’s no reason to commit a felony.”

  Tess looped her stethoscope loosely around her neck, waggling her caramel-colored brows. “And yet, you’re the only woman in years who’s actually slept in Jonah Sheridan’s apartment until the sun came up.”

  Okay, so now that Natalie thought about it, that was true. Still… “I’m sleeping on his futon, not in his...you know, bed.” The heat on her neck traveled down her spine, but ugh, this was crazy. “It’s not even close to the same thing.”

  Charlie seemed to realize Natalie’s discomfort, because she softened her voice and said, “We know, Natalie. And we told Don as much, too.”

  “Thanks,” Natalie said, sinking back onto the couch. “I just don’t want things to get uncomfortable for Jonah. He really likes his sp
ace, and he’s doing me a huge favor by letting me stay. The last thing he needs is to have to field a bunch of weird rumors that aren’t true.”

  Charlie tilted her head in thought as she poured coffee into a travel mug she’d taken out of her bag. “Forgive me if I’m being forward by asking, but you guys have been best friends for four years, right? Jonah is—and I say this objectively, because I adore my fiancé—hotter than homemade sin, not to mention, a pretty smart guy. You two have really never ever…”

  She swung her index finger in a circular motion, but Natalie got the message, loud and clear. For a sliver of a second, she was tempted to tell Charlie that she’d really “never ever” with anyone, let alone Jonah. But even though she had a decent amount of experience with other intimate acts, admitting that she was technically still a virgin—even to friends as good as Charlie and Tess—was kind of embarrassing. Not that she was ashamed of it, per se. But it certainly made her the odd woman out in pretty much every social circle she belonged to, and even more of them that she didn’t. For God’s sake, Jonah didn’t even know.

  So Natalie settled on saying, “Nope,” with as much ease as she could manufacture. “We’re just friends. Always have been. Always will be.”

  “Well, you’re a damn good friend for wanting to make sure Jonah doesn’t get weirded out by the gossip mongers,” Tess said. “Once they figure out there’s nothing to talk about, they’ll settle down, anyway. Don’t pay them any mind.”

  Natalie knew Tess was right. “Thanks.”

  Realizing that it was too late to try for even a five-minute power nap to perk herself up, Natalie downed the rest of her coffee and headed to the nurses’ station in the ED, along with Charlie and Tess. Parker was clearly on Jonah’s service, the two of them Lord knew where, which left doctors Young, Boldin, and Vasquez up for grabs.

  “Okay, people, what do you say we save some lives today? Or, at the very least, stitch some people up.” Tess looked at all three interns, who—with three months under their belts now—knew just enough to be dangerous. But they were also eager and still mostly optimistic about medicine, and that made Natalie happy to coach them through the stuff they didn’t know.

  All three interns straightened, Vasquez speaking first. “Dr. Becker, I took the liberty of making sure the labs on all of your post-op patients were up-to-date per your overnight orders. And also, um, congratulations.”

  “Nobody likes a kiss-ass, Vasquez,” Tess said, but Charlie tugged an electronic chart tablet from the charging rack and passed it over to the intern.

  “When she checks my labs, I do.” To a smirking Vasquez, she said, “You’d just better hope your work is flawless, Dr. Vasquez. A kiss-ass, I can handle. Sloppy work, not so much.”

  “Yes, Dr. Becker,” a more subdued-looking Vasquez replied as she scrambled to catch up to Charlie, who was already moving toward the elevators to check the woman’s work.

  Natalie looked at Young and Boldin. “I’m doing the workup and pre-op labs for an infant with biliary atresia today. Which one of you can tell me what that is and what the surgery to correct it is going to entail?”

  Both interns’ hands shot into the air—after all, Natalie had said the magic word (surgery was better than please, pretty please, and abracadabra combined)—but Boldin was a fraction of a second faster than Young.

  “Biliary atresia is a congenital malformation that prohibits the liver from emptying bile,” he said, and okay, he was one for two. Natalie looked at him in a wordless keep going, and so he did. Much to Young’s dismay, if her expression was anything to go by. “To correct it, you’ll have to surgically reconstruct the bile ducts, then reattach them to the liver.”

  “So cool,” Young murmured, and Natalie lifted a brow at the woman.

  “Not for the infant. Or his parents.”

  “Oh!” Young’s eyes widened in trepidation. “Oh, God, no, of course not. I just, um. I meant…”

  Natalie didn’t have the heart to let the poor woman stew in her panic for more than a second. “I know what you meant. The surgery is really cool,” she agreed. “But it’s attached to a little person, and that little person is going to be pretty sick until I can get him into the OR for a very extensive procedure, so just keep that in mind.”

  “Yes, Dr. Kendrick.” Young nodded.

  “Tell you what,” she said. “If there’s room in the OR when I do the surgery tomorrow, you can scrub in, too, to see that firsthand. But you’re going to have to earn it. Good?”

  This time, Young’s “yes” was a lot more enthusiastic.

  Tess shook her head at Natalie, although her smile was obvious underneath all the tough-girl armor she wore even better than her scrubs and doctor’s coat. “One day, I’ll teach you to be a hard-ass.”

  “And steal your thunder? Never,” Natalie said with a laugh. Turning toward Boldin, who had earned his way onto her service, she said, “Okay, doctor. Let’s take care of some sick kids.” She grabbed a tablet, tapping the thing to life and moving through a few of the screens to pull up a patient chart before starting for the elevators leading to the peds wing. “I want to go check in on Annabelle before we do rounds and start prepping for tomorrow’s surgery.”

  Boldin’s dark brows lifted toward his nearly shaved hairline. “Annabelle’s back? Is she doing chemo this week?”

  The intern had been on Natalie’s service often enough to know the little girl and her general health history. Natalie had diagnosed the eight-year-old with non-Hodgkin lymphoma two months ago, and done the surgery to place a catheter into one of the little girl’s arteries to lower the number of needle sticks she’d have to endure in chemotherapy. She was mostly under the care of a pediatric oncologist, now, but Natalie had formed a fast bond with the little girl and her mother. Whenever they were here, she always made it a point to make sure they had everything they needed.

  “She was, but she’s experiencing some complications. Here’s her chart for this go-round.” Natalie passed it over and remained quiet as the elevator cruised up to the third floor, letting Boldin get up to speed.

  He frowned. “Belly tenderness, vomiting, dehydration, fatigue…do you think it’s a reaction to the chemo, or something else?”

  “I don’t know,” Natalie said. “I’m going to meet with her oncologist, Dr. Hoover, today to talk about it. It’s possible it’s just the chemo, but there could be a tumor in Annabelle’s intestine causing a blockage. If there is, it’s likely she’ll need surgery to correct it.”

  Boldin asked a few technical questions that told Natalie he’d been doing his homework as far as peds and lymphomas went, and the medicine nailed both her calm and her focus into place.

  This, she knew how to do. Examine the problem. Find the answers.

  Make sick kids better, just as a team of doctors had once done for her.

  “Knock, knock!” Natalie said brightly, rapping on the door in front of her even though it was partially open.

  “Dr. Natalie!” Annabelle lay in the bed in the center of the room, her face pale even in contrast to the sheets and pillows. But Natalie chalked it up as a win that the little girl had at least perked up a little as she and Boldin came into the room.

  “And Dr. B,” Annabelle’s mother, Rachel, added, pushing up from the recliner at Annabelle’s bedside to greet them. “It’s so good to see you.”

  “It’s good to see you, too.” Natalie paused to dose her hands in sanitizing gel before hugging Rachel, then—more carefully—Annabelle. “And good to see Mr. Flufferkins, as well.” She hugged the stuffed fox that was pretty much never more than two feet from Annabelle’s side. “I heard your stomach hurts and you’re throwing up, too, huh?”

  “Yeah.” Annabelle frowned. “It feels a little better today, though, and I haven’t thrown up since the middle of the night.”

  Natalie knew part of that relief was due to the poor kid being taken off all food and liquids by mouth, but she chose to look at the bright side, because there was one.

&
nbsp; “That’s really good.” She turned toward Rachel, but made sure not to leave Annabelle out of the conversation. “The anti-emetics look like they’re helping, and the IV fluids should continue to make Annabelle feel better.”

  “Anti-emetic is just a fancy name for the medicine that keeps you from throwing up,” Boldin said to Annabelle, who nodded sagely.

  “You have fancy names for everything,” she said, and Boldin laughed.

  “That’s nothing. Try cholecystojejunostomy on for size.”

  Annabelle narrowed her eyes at him. “You made that up! Dr. Natalie, he made it up, right?”

  “Nope. He’s my student, so he’s super smart. And the good news is, you won’t be needing a cholecystojejunostomy.”

  Rachel still looked concerned, and as a single mom to a kid with cancer, Natalie didn’t blame her. “So, you think this is all just a bad reaction to the chemotherapy? Her regimen is really aggressive.”

  “It’s aggressive because it has to be,” Natalie said gently. “It’s possible that Annabelle’s just reacting to the treatment. But it could be something else, so we’re going to run some tests and scans and see if we can figure it out.”

  “More pinches?” Annabelle’s brow furrowed, and she looked at her mother. “I don’t want more needles, Mommy. They hurt.”

  Natalie’s heart used her sternum for batting practice, but she kept her expression dialed in to its happiest setting. “I promise we won’t do any more than we have to, and I can even get Connor to come do your draws. You know he’s fast, like a superhero, and he makes the best goofy faces.” All true. For a big guy, Connor was one of the most laid-back people she’d ever met. “Once we get the scans back, we might even be able to let you have liquids, and you know what that means.”