Better Than Me (A Remington Medical Contemporary Romance)

by Kimberly Kincaid

  Jonah stepped in next to her, nodding. “Fair enough. How can I help?”

  “Oh, you don’t have to.” A wisp of hair that had never made it to the loose knot on top of her head drifted forward to frame her face as she waved him off. “Omelets are easy. Especially now that you actually own a skillet,” she teased.

  Annnnd nope. “If they’re easy, then you can teach me,” he said, moving to the sink to wash his hands. “After today, I’ve discovered that I like working side by side with you.”

  “Smooth talker.” Her arched brow made the word an accusation. Her sugar-sweet smile? Made it something else entirely. “You really don’t have to help me.”

  “For someone who’s trying to let other people take care of her a little, you kind of suck at seizing your opportunities.”

  Natalie pressed her lips together, but her smile still peeked out at the edges. “You are no longer charming.”

  Ah, the disguise he could wear in his sleep. Jonah dished up his best chin lift/quick wink combo. “Oh, yes I am. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll let you split the dishes with me when we’re done,” he said, taking the carton of eggs and the bag of spinach from her.

  “We’re using paper plates,” she argued.

  Not that it made him budge. “Great. Less work on the back end for both of us.”

  “You’re a pain in my ass.”

  “Yep. I’m also still helping.”

  Seeming to see that she was in a no-win situation—good Christ, she was tough—Natalie laughed. “Fine. Grab the cutting board from that drawer. And as much as I enjoy the view”—she paused to send an appreciative gaze from his face to the sweatpants he’d slung over his hips for the sake of decorum—“you should probably put on a shirt, just in case the oil pops.”

  “Party pooper.”

  Natalie’s smile was angelic even though her wild hair and tissue-thin tank top made him think nothing but purely wicked thoughts. “Trust me when I say it hurts me more than it hurts you.”

  One minute and one T-shirt later, Jonah was back in the kitchen. Natalie put him on chopping duty (“you’re a surgeon,” she’d pointed out) while she put together the egg mixture. They worked comfortably together even though the tat-tat-tat-tat of the whisk against the bowl and the snick of the knife on the cutting board were the only sounds in the kitchen, and soon enough, there was nothing left to do but construct the omelets.

  “I’ll just give the onions and spinach some quick heat first,” Natalie said, sight-measuring a turn of olive oil around the skillet she’d placed on the burner in front of her.

  “Huh. You can’t just throw them into the egg mixture, like you did with the ham?”

  “I could.” She shrugged. “But then the onions taste kind of harsh and the spinach gets unruly. It’s easier to cook them first. See how the spinach wilts down to less than half its volume?”

  Jonah eyed the skillet, surprised. “Hey, that’s pretty cool. Who taught you how to cook?”

  “Both of my parents, actually.” She stirred the onions and spinach, which were starting to smell freaking delicious, then added a pinch of salt. “For as sheltered as I was, they did teach me a lot of life skills. That, and I pestered them out of sheer boredom.” She paused to grin. “But they always split everything right down the middle, from cooking dinner to mowing the lawn. They were equal opportunity about teaching me to do both.”

  “Yeah, not so much in my house.”

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit. The residual high from all the great-sex endorphins must be making him loose-lipped. How could he have let something like that slip out? And in front of Natalie, no less, who was looking at him with those curious brown eyes and that kind, wide-open expression that made him want to do the opposite of clam the fuck up, like he should.

  “I know you said you and your father aren’t close. Has it always been that way?”

  She kept cooking as she spoke, tapping the wooden spoon against the edge of the skillet and turning off the burner like nothing-doing. Jonah’s heart thundered against his ribs, his defenses screaming at him to deflect her question and one-eighty the subject with a flirty smile. He could make Natalie come, and he could take her virginity, but he could not let himself feel for her. Definitely not enough to tell her this, the one thing no one else, not even Vanessa, knew.

  Except you already do.

  He considered the devil’s advocate that had clearly taken up residence in his grey matter. Okay, so he did have feelings for Natalie. Not in a falling in love sort of way—Christ, he knew better than that. But he did like her, and what’s more, he trusted her. They’d never really gone the pour-your-heart-out route, and he wasn’t keen on changing that. But she’d been straight with him about her cancer guilt. If she could spill something she’d kept that close to the vest for years, the least he could do was cough up a little family history.

  “Pretty much,” Jonah said, the words not sticking in his throat the way he’d expected them to. “I mean, we never had a fallout or a fight over anything big. It’s not like that.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  Natalie passed him the bowl full of the egg mixture to hold while she slid the spinach and onions into it. Whether it was the nonchalant way she worked or the ease in her expression, he couldn’t be sure. But something made him keep talking.

  “My old man has just never been a really emotive guy. Even before my mother left, he was always pretty quiet and reserved. He worked a lot of long hours—he was a foreman at a steel mill—so all the parenting fell to my mother. At least, it did until she left.”

  They were quickly veering into territory Jonah didn’t want to touch, so he was relieved when Natalie stuck to talking about his father. “I didn’t know that’s what he did for a living. That’s a pretty labor-intensive job. He must have one hell of a work ethic.”

  Surprised at both the thought and the fact that it had never occurred to him before now, Jonah nodded. “He does. Or did, I guess. He’s been retired for four years now. No, five.” Had it really been that long? “He didn’t want to leave, but the plant where he’d worked for most of his career had grown pretty automated. The company didn’t want to let him go, but they also didn’t need him anymore, so they nudged him into retirement. To be honest, I’m not shocked he hung on until the very end. That job was everything to him.” More than Jonah ever had been, that was for sure.

  “Sounds like that’s where you get your dedication from.”

  Natalie continued to cook while Jonah continued to be whammied by her words. “I guess, but he and I aren’t really that much alike. It’s not that he doesn’t love me in his own way. I never doubted that there would be a roof over my head or plenty of food to eat, and he was there for the big stuff, like when I graduated from college and med school. But we were never close. I always…”

  He broke off. But Natalie was right there, listening without a shitload of emotion or wah-wah sympathy, and the next thing he knew, he kept talking. “I always got the feeling I reminded him of my mother, and how much he missed her made it hard for him to be close to me. He’d always been a man of few words, but after she left, the distance between us grew bigger.”

  “If he’s a quiet man and he didn’t do a lot of hands-on parenting stuff before your mother left, maybe he didn’t know how to bridge it,” Natalie offered.

  “Maybe. But he also might not have wanted to.”

  Jonah could see the desire to get defensive on his behalf was right there on Natalie’s face. She was his best friend—of course she’d argue that his father not wanting a close bond with him was crazy, even though Jonah knew it was entirely probable, given how one-sided his father’s love for his mother had turned out to be.

  But, to Natalie’s credit, she acknowledged the possibility by way of pragmatism. “Did you ever ask him about it?”

  “No. At first, I was too young to really grasp anything other than the fact that my mother wasn’t coming back.” He’d spent years, really, grieving the loss
of a woman who had never died. Well, she might be dead now, he reasoned. She’d never once tried to contact him, so he had no way of knowing, and he damn well knew he shouldn’t care.

  He stuffed the emotions that went with that part of things back into their hole, where they belonged. There was a difference, after all, between sharing and skewering himself over shit he couldn’t change. “After that, I guess I figured the damage was done. Things weren’t picture-perfect, but they weren’t so bad. Now we talk a few times a year, just to check in. But the conversation is always pretty short.”

  For a minute, Natalie said nothing, busying herself with getting the first omelet, now done, out of the skillet and the mixture for the second one into place. “You could try asking him now. Just because you aren’t close doesn’t mean you can’t ever be.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” The answer escaped with sharper edges than Jonah had intended, and he sanded over them with a smile. “He seems happy living in Charleston. The retirement community he moved to is one of the best in the area, with lots of activities and things like that. I don’t want to disrupt his routine by bringing up a bunch of painful things better left in the past.”

  Natalie frowned, her bright side/happy ending tendencies made of some seriously strong stuff. “But Christmas is in two weeks. Maybe you could take a few days off and go see him,” she tried.

  “Maybe,” Jonah said, and even though he hadn’t technically lied with the evasion, it still made his gut pang. Damn it, this was supposed to be a night full of sexy fun. He’d already had a hell of a time keeping his emotions out of his head and off of his face when they’d been in bed. He didn’t want to have to worry about it on a whole new level. “So, once you get the egg mixture into the skillet, you just do that flip-thingy to cook the other side?”

  Natalie looked at the spatula in her hand as if she’d forgotten she’d been holding it. “Oh. Well, yeah, there’s a bit of technique to it, but it’s easy enough with practice.”

  Jonah pulled together a grin to seal the subject-change deal. “I’m here to learn, Obi-Wan.”

  Even after he’d massacred the omelet (which Natalie had, of course, then salvaged), conned her into watching Die Hard while they ate, then carried her back to his room for another round of mind-altering sex, Jonah couldn’t quite shake the feeling that he didn’t just want Natalie. He felt safe with her.

  Which meant he needed to tighten the knot on his emotions, because after this weekend, they were going back to business as usual.

  NATALIE ROLLED over to turn off the alarm on her cell phone even though she’d been awake for over an hour. No, scratch that. She’d been awake for most of the weekend. But it wasn’t her fault, really, that she’d never had a nooner, or that she’d never been the recipient of gloriously good oral sex in the shower, or that Jonah had decided she really should experience both before their time together was up. Their one night had turned into all weekend, and all weekend, Natalie had felt startlingly good.

  She took an extra second to burrow beneath the covers, the scent of laundry detergent mingling in with something distinctly more masculine sending a pang through her belly. She hadn’t been surprised by the fact that Jonah was highly attentive in bed, nor had she been terribly shocked that there had been very little awkwardness between them after they’d first done the deed. After all, they were best friends, and they’d agreed to the terms of their sexcapade (Tess’s word, not hers) ahead of time.

  What had thrown her for a hey-now was the way he’d opened up about his father. Although the conversation hadn’t been particularly lengthy or earth-shattering, the details had been far more than he’d ever shared before. The emotions banked way down deep in those Bahama blues had told her it was the tip of the proverbial iceberg, and even though neither of them had brought it up again for the rest of the weekend, Natalie knew there was a whole lot more there that Jonah had been keeping under wraps.

  How had she never noticed it before?

  Blowing out a breath, she sent her gaze to the ceiling in Jonah’s bedroom, hating how empty the bed felt without him. He’d been on call starting at midnight, and sure enough, he’d been paged a couple of hours ago to tend to a nasty MVA. He’d kissed her gently on top of the head when she’d stirred, and Natalie knew it was a true kiss goodbye. Yes, their promise of all night had turned into all weekend, but now that it was Monday morning, she knew she had to face facts.

  Her between-the-sheets experience with Jonah had been incredible. Even more than she’d hoped it would be. But now it was over.

  No matter how badly she wanted to relive it one last time.

  Throwing the covers from her body, she planted her feet over the floorboards and padded to the bathroom. She had a jam-packed day, and an even more jam-packed week, ahead of her. Now that Annabelle was infection-free, she had another round of chemo on tap, and until Natalie could find an alternative, they had to move forward as planned.

  After a quick run through her get-ready/get-out routine, Natalie made her way through the morning rush, heading toward Remington Mem. Although traffic wasn’t horribly bad, she still dragged herself from her car into the building, then to the lounge to get changed so she could start her day. Her muscles were achy and her eyelids felt far heavier than normal, but she only had herself to blame for losing far too much sleep.

  Oh, how it had been worth every. Single. Toe-curling second.

  “Good morning, Dr. Kendrick.” Parker’s voice tugged her from Fantasy Island, depositing her back in the staff lounge in the ED, lickety split. “I’m on your service today.”

  “Great,” Natalie said, far too brightly. Ugh, she needed to stop thinking about the sex she’d finally had and get a grip. Life was still normal, for pity’s sake. Just as it had been last week and month and year. She really had to start acting like it.

  “Go ahead and check the board for emergent cases, then pull the post-op patient charts and get up to speed so we can round. Annabelle Fletcher is coming in today for her next chemo session, and unless there’s an emergency in the ED that requires our attention, I’d like to be in the peds ward to get her settled in when she arrives.”

  “Already on it,” Parker said, holding up a tablet with their first patient’s chart, locked and loaded.

  “Perfect. We’ve got a busy day ahead of us. Let’s take care of some sick kids.”

  17

  Natalie was living on bad coffee and dry shampoo. She hadn’t showered in days, thanks to a huge influx of back to back (to back to back to…) peds cases that had required her full and immediate attention in both the ED and the OR. The one time she’d been able to escape long enough to head home, she’d spent every possible second on her futon, face planted, eyes shut. That had been two days ago. Before Annabelle had started suffering from adverse reactions to her chemo regimen.

  Although they were wildly rare, there were days when Natalie wondered why she hadn’t aimed herself at a nice, low-stress, eight-to-five job, where things like bathing and meals involving more than half a protein bar were a daily occurrence.

  Leaning more heavily on the counter at the nurses’ station than she normally might, Natalie lifted her cup of coffee to her lips, making a face when she got a taste of the cold, murky contents. Before she could turn to toss the cup into the nearest trash bin, where it well and truly belonged, her cell phone buzzed in the pocket of her doctor’s coat.

  Hi, sweetheart! Nine days to go Just triple-checking that you’re coming for Christmas Eve dinner. Dad is making his famous twice-baked potatoes.

  Natalie couldn’t help but eke out a weary smile. Her father’s signature side dish was a ridiculous combination of carbs, butter, and crack cocaine (okay, fine. Technically, there was no crack in them, but Natalie still swore they should be labeled a Schedule 1 narcotic for their addictive qualities). Plus, she’d been so busy over the past few weeks that she hadn’t been able to visit, or even really talk with either of her parents at length, and she missed them.
>
  Of course. What can I bring? Natalie thumb-typed in reply.

  Just your holiday spirit, sweetheart. Love you!

  Natalie held on to her smile and slid her phone back into her pocket, making a mental note to try and squeeze in a cookie-baking session this weekend so she could at least bring something to her parents’ house besides presents and Christmas cheer. But since it was…she counted backward on her fingers…shit, Thursday morning and she and Dr. Hoover still hadn’t found a way to keep Annabelle comfortable or a better way to treat the cancer that was slowly making her sicker and sicker, the chances she’d get cookies made from scratch looked slim enough to be a runway model. Natalie picked up her coffee, getting it to her lips again before realizing it was—ugh—still cold, and a new cup of fresh, hot coffee appeared in front of her like a mirage.

  “Thought you might need a caffeine fix,” Jonah said, leaning in next to her, and Natalie let out a happy moan.

  “Oh, my God, I could seriously kiss you on the mouth right now.”

  The words flew out before she could stop them, and sweet Lord in heaven, could she be any more graceless?

  Jonah froze, but to his credit, it lasted for less than a second before his camera-ready smile made an appearance. “I doubt the coffee is that good. But you’ve been here all night. At least it’s a little boost.” He nodded toward Annabelle’s room. “How is she?”

  Natalie had seen Jonah in tiny pockets of time over the past four days, just long enough to realize that she was A) comforted by his presence, and B) still missing his kisses. Since she couldn’t do anything about her residual desire except wait for it to wane, she focused on what she could get; namely, the comfort.

  “Truth?” Natalie asked, her stomach sinking even as she plied it with fresh coffee. “Not great. The treatment is aggressive because it has to be, but it’s making her so sick that we had to admit her last night.”