sleeper.”
“I don’t snore. Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve been up for twelve hours.” The mattress creaked again as he moved.
“Good.” She rolled back over and closed her eyes, trying to will herself to fall asleep, but it wasn’t working.
“You know, of all the ways I imagined us sleeping together, this wasn’t how I envisioned it.”
Jennifer’s cheeks heated. “Excuse me?”
There was a chuckle in the darkness.
“What’s so funny?” Jennifer asked.
“I get under your skin, don’t I?”
“No, you don’t.”
“I do.”
Jennifer cursed under her breath and sat up. “I’m going to sleep on a gurney down in an abandoned hall.”
“No, no. I’ll let you sleep.” The bed shifted again and then the room filled with light. “Have a good sleep, Dr. Mills.”
The door shut and Jennifer lay back against the pillow. She didn’t think she was going to fall asleep after her run-in with Dr. Rousseau, but once she closed her eyes again, sleep came easily.
The pager vibrated in her hand and she woke with a start. She flicked on the bedside lamp and saw it was coming from the ER.
It was her first twenty-four-hour shift, and even then she wouldn’t go home after her shift was done. She had something to prove here and she would stay here as long as it took.
This was going to become her second home. Besides, her condo was sparse and empty. If she went home, there would be messages from her father. Invitations for her to go out campaigning with him, to show the voters she wasn’t a pathetic loser like they all believed she was.
She just wanted to escape the stigma of it all.
She wasn’t any of those things. She was a surgeon, for heaven’s sake.
Only the more you listened to the naysayers, those creeping doubt weasels, the more you started to believe it.
And she hated that loss of control.
She hated that her confidence was all shot to heck.
Jennifer clipped her pager back to the waist of her scrubs and headed down to the ER. When she got there, it was relatively quiet.
“Who paged me?” she asked the charge nurse.
“Dr. Rousseau. He’s in Room Three, needs a consult on a patient.”
Jennifer groaned inwardly. “Thank you.”
What patient had he dug up now?
Did this one have a tiger coming out of his chest? Tassels glued to the forehead? Cards embedded in the abdomen?
“Dr. Rousseau, you paged me?”
Nick glanced at her briefly. “Yes, the patient is adamant that they’re seen by the head of trauma.”
Jennifer approached the bed and then froze when she saw her father was on the gurney. “Dad, what happened?”
“Ah, there she is.” Her father grinned. “I had a fainting spell during a speech at the convention center and they brought me here. Or rather I asked them to bring me here. I said I would be in good hands with my daughter.”
Nick’s eyebrows rose.
Jennifer pinched the bridge of her nose. “Dad, that’s all well and good, but as I’ve told you before on numerous occasions, I can’t assess you.”
Her father looked shocked. “Why not?”
“Because you’re my father. I can’t treat family.” She sighed. “You’re in good hands with Dr. Rousseau.”
Her father looked confused. “Why can’t you do it?”
“I don’t have time for this, Dad.” She turned to Nick. “Please keep me informed, Dr. Rousseau.”
“Will do, Dr. Mills.”
Jennifer turned and left the trauma exam room, but Dr. Rousseau was close on her heels.
“Can I speak to you for a moment?”
Jennifer paused and crossed her arms. “Sure.”
“I’m sorry I paged you. He was making such a fuss. I thought discretion would be the best bet. There’s lots of reporters out there.”
Jennifer’s stomach clenched. The press. She hated the press. The damage they did, looking for sensationalist stories, but then again she was biased.
“It’s okay, Dr. Rousseau.”
Nick cocked his head to the side. “I don’t think it is.”
“No, it really is. Just … just don’t spread it around that my father’s here.”
“Okay. I’ll keep it to myself.”
“Thank you. He doesn’t need any more attention drawn to his campaign.” She turned to walk away and then stopped. “When is your shift over?”
Nick grinned, his hazel eyes twinkling. “Are you asking me out?”
She blushed. “No. I just wanted to implement some changes to the schedule.”
“Oh.” She noticed he looked a bit disappointed, but then he shrugged. “As soon as I take care of your father, I’ll be going home. I won’t be in for another shift until Wednesday.”
Jennifer nodded. “Thank you.”
Nick nodded curtly and headed back to the exam room.
“DRAG RACES? YOU dragged me to a drag race in the middle of the desert?” Jennifer shook her head as her best friend Ginny grinned and handed her a bottle of water. “We could’ve stayed at brunch in the air-conditioned bistro or gone shopping.”
She needed groceries desperately and her condo was full of boxes. She’d been working for a week and still hadn’t had time to sort through her stuff or make her condo a home.
“Chillax. This is fun!”
Jennifer rolled her eyes. “Yeah, because this is how I wanted to spend my day off, sitting on a hard bench watching motorcycles race across the desert.”
“Yeah, but look how hot those guys are.”
Yeah, she remembered that. Clearly.
Jennifer chuckled and couldn’t disagree with her friend. Not that she could see any of the riders’ faces. They had nice bodies clad in leather, and she was always a sucker for motorcycles.
Nick rides a motorcycle.
Her heart beat a bit faster as she thought about that moment she’d thrown caution to the wind and climbed on the back of Nick’s bike. He had been a stranger, a man leaving on a long tour of duty, but she hadn’t cared.
That had been when she’d still been carefree. Before the press had got hold of her and David had publicly humiliated her. Though she was more annoyed by the stolen research than the jilting.
The lack of accreditation of her in his paper had made her look like a fool in front of her colleagues. It had been like they’d all known David would screw her over.
David had broken her heart, but she could never regain her research. All the countless hours she and David had spent together, working on repairing an aortic dissection by trying a surgical grafting procedure with artificial veins, and he hadn’t credited her.
Now the surgical procedure was