CHAPTER 1

LIAM

The hospital that day was pure pandemonium. A non-stop flood of sick and injured people rushed through the hallways. I did my best to help in any way I could, but my job was made difficult by the patients’ family and friends.

I understood their concern, of course. But if these people were so damn worried about the patient getting better, they’d stop following me around while screaming in my ear as I tried to do my job.

My fellow doctors and nurses darted through the chaotic building. We did all we could to keep the surge under wraps and in control. To me, the hospital almost seemed like its own entity at times. It was as alive as any of the people that came through its front doors, and like people, the hospital had good days and bad days.

Recently, it felt like the bad days outnumbered the good ones. The hospital seemed to take pleasure in beating me and the other doctors down. It was like it wanted to see just how much we could take until we snapped.

I had been working at the hospital for a little over three years. I started here as a medical intern, fresh out of med school and feeling invincible. By the end of that first year, I knew that none of my med school training had prepared me for actually working with patients.

At the time, I assumed that would be the worst of it. It just made sense that once I graduated from that lowly position and had some experience under my belt, things would get better. Three years later, I've found out the hard way that's not the case at all. Not even close. The longer I worked at the hospital, the harder things seemed to become.

It was a Friday, which really meant nothing, as I worked almost every weekend anyway. I hadn't had a break in at least four hours, but this was pretty standard. The patients came first. Still, I’d be no good for anyone if I couldn’t find a way to take a quick break.

I ducked off to the break room in the hopes of sitting down and relaxing, even if it was only going to be for five minutes. Just the chance to put my feet up and maybe shut my eyes for a prolonged period of time would make me feel, and function, infinitely better.

Getting to the break room was an art form. I needed to know how to avoid the nurses, as their station was located right in front of the room. But even before I get to them, I needed to know how to duck around the families of patients who had a tendency of pulling me aside and asking me questions that I didn't know the answers to. And even if I managed to avoid them, I had to hope and pray that my pager didn't go off. Once that little thing starts beeping, I can kiss any break goodbye.

I sighed loudly as I sunk into the first chair I spotted in the break room. It was a crappy, industrial looking thing. Probably made in a prison somewhere. But to me, it felt as soft as a cloud. "Holy shit. That is—"

"Can you keep it down," a husky voice cut me off. The voice came from the couch on the other side of the room, tucked out of the way. Without even having to turn around, I rolled my eyes, knowing who the voice belonged to. "Some of us are trying to sleep."

Doctor Clint Burrows laid out on the couch as he attempted to get, what I assumed was at most, a five-minute nap. Clint was my best friend in the hospital. We had started on the same day and had both harbored similar ideas when it came to imagining what being a doctor was going to be like.

It was a romanticized image that came from watching too much television. We came to find out there was nothing glamorous about this job. We were in the trenches every day, fighting against impossible odds. The only good thing about this job was that I got to help people. I couldn’t help all of them, but when I could, it made all the long, shitty, tired days worth it.

"How long?" I asked as I leaned back in my chair with my eyes closed.

"Three minutes. Maybe four." Clint groaned as he sat up. "I got one of the interns to cover me, but I don't trust leaving him alone for too long. You know how they are."

"I'm surprised that you got four minutes," I said, seriously impressed. In this profession, any break longer than two or three minutes was worthy of admiration. "Did you think it was going to be like this, Clint?"

"Like what?" he asked.

"You know, like this? The non-stop, balls to the wall, relentless chaos of being a doctor. I always thought it might be a little different."

"A little cooler?" Clint offered as he got to his feet, stretching himself out. "Yeah, I thought there’d be a lot more banging hot nurses in storage closets. And maybe a little more money. I’ll be paying off my med school debt for the rest of my life."

I nodded. I'd been having similar thoughts lately, especially in the last few months. Being a doctor wasn't exactly what I thought it would be. I loved helping people and I loved making a difference in any way that I could, but sometimes I had to ask myself what the cost of all that was. And if that cost was worth it.

I had almost no social life. It would be totally non-existent were it not for Clint. And the lack of a romantic life really hit home and bothered me. I always thought I’d be married and settled down by now. I’d followed all the right steps: I went to college, went to med school, and got my career going as a doctor. Now, it was time for my next goal. I wanted to meet a good girl and fall in love. I thought I’d met the right woman before, but that hadn’t worked out exactly like I thought it would, either.

Worrying about this often kept me up at night when I should be getting much-needed rest. I wondered if I had made the right decision to become a doctor. I hadn't so much as been on a single date with a woman in nearly a year. And even that date wasn't a spontaneous thing. It was with my ex who I tried not to think about anymore.

I broke off these worrisome thoughts and turned my attention back to Clint. "Yeah, lately I've been thinking that maybe there is another way," I began as I got to my feet. I'd been sitting down for about three minutes and that, to me, was the equivalent of hours. "I've even thought about going into private—"

At that moment, my pager began vibrating on my hip. My pager was my lifeline to the hospital. Whenever something went wrong, or a new patient came in that needed desperate care, or an intern didn't know how to do a simple procedure, or anything happened really, my pager let me know. This page told me that I was needed in the ICU.

"To be continued," I said to Clint as I turned and rushed from the break room, toward the ICU, wondering what it was that was going to greet me there. As it was the ICU, I knew that it couldn't be anything good.

--

"OK, what have we got?" I asked the first nurse I saw as I entered the ICU. The ICU was the Intensive Care Unit, where all the most urgent medical cases were sent. These patients hovered on the razor’s edge between life and death, and it was our job to keep them from tumbling off into oblivion.

"Car crash,” she shot back. “Two victims, one male, one female. The female is stable and has already been moved to a room. The male has suffered serious head and torso injuries. Swelling of the brain, possible internal hemorrhaging."

The nurse rattled off the man’s medical issues in a dry, clinical manner. This was typical of someone who had been working at the hospital for a long time. As she filled me in, she led me toward the male patient she was referring to.

True to her description, he looked like twice run over dog shit, which was the official medical term. His face was a bruised, lumpy mess, and his limbs were twisted in unnatural ways. Luckily for this poor bastard, by the time I got to him, two other doctors already tended to him, doing all they could to keep him alive.

I would only get in the way If I tried to help the two doctors. Best I leave them be. And besides, the mood I was in it was probably better that they take it from there. That left the man’s female companion. Her condition wasn’t nearly as bad as his, but she still needed help.

"Nurse, take me to the female patient. I'll take a look at her instead.”

The nurse led me out of the ICU and down the hall to the room where the female patient waited for me. It was noticeably quieter down there, and I guessed that once the female car crash victim had been stabilized, the doctors had opted to leave her on her own so that they could attend to the more seriously injured male.

I had been a doctor for three years, so there was very little that caused me to pause. I had seen terrible things. Crazy things. Nightmare things. But as I entered room 301, I was not at all prepared for what greeted me.

"Here she is," the nurse said as we entered. She walked up to the side of the bed, completely unaware of the fact that I was still stuck in the doorway, dumbstruck.

The reason for my shock was that I knew the victim lying unconscious in the bed. I had known her for four years, although we hadn't spoken so much as a word to one another for a little over a year at this point. Her name was Kate Monroe, and she was my ex-girlfriend.

The nurse looked over her chart. "She was lucky, compared to the guy she came in with. Considerable bruising to her torso and legs, and she also suffered a very nasty blow to the head. But x-rays showed just a little bit of swelling that will almost certainly go down. Really, she should be okay.” She looked up at me, noticing I was still standing in the doorway. “Wait, are you okay, Doctor?"

"What? Oh, yes, yes I'm fine." I hurried into the room, taking the clipboard from the nurse. "Yep, it all looks fine." Really, I wasn't paying too much attention to the clipboard or the information it held. My mind was elsewhere.

Kate had been the love of my life. She still was the love of my life, as far as I was concerned. We dated for three whole years while I was in med school, and then when I was first starting out as an intern at the hospital.

Those three years that we dated were the happiest in recent memory, too. The two of us were just so perfect together. We barely ever fought, we had so much in common, and we were both deeply in love with one another. And then I made a terrible mistake.

As happy as I was with Kate, the rest of my life at the time was pretty damn miserable. I had so much work and so little time, first with med school and then when I started working at the hospital. I barely had time to sleep or eat. The weight of the world weighed down on me. I felt like I had lost control of my life, and I was spinning out of control. Because of that, I made a terrible mistake. A mistake that still haunted me.

I broke up with her.

It was all just too much for me to handle. I was always busy and never had even a moment to myself. And then, whenever I somehow managed to scrounge a few spare minutes of time for myself, Kate would make me feel guilty for not wanting to spend time with her. Even if she hadn’t tried to make me feel guilty, I felt guilty about not spending time with her. I didn’t have time to be with her, and that meant I wasn’t the man she deserved, which made me feel even more guilty and inadequate as a man.

The constant pressure weighed down on me, and I snapped. Looking back, I wasn’t in my right mind. Lack of sleep and exhaustion had me nearly insane. One day I woke up and thought for some ridiculous reason that the right thing to do was break up with Kate. I thought it would be better for both of us.

It took me all of twenty-four hours to realize I had made a mistake. I still remember running to her house in the rain, hoping that it wasn't too late. I thought a grand romantic gesture like that would be enough to win her back.

But Kate refused to forgive me. She broke up with me on the spot, or at least, she maintained that we were still broken up. I spent the next three months trying to get her to forgive me, or even talk to me. But she wouldn't. I knew that if she just heard me out and let me explain, that I could convince her to get back together with me, but she wouldn't even give me that.

That was a year ago. Of course, I still thought about her. In the rare moments I had a chance to slow down and think, Kate would resurface in my thoughts. I knew she was part of my past, but the regret I felt was very much present. But now, here she was.

Seeing her lying there, so helpless and alone, made me realize that maybe me and her weren't as done as I had thought. Maybe this was the moment that I had been waiting for. Maybe fate had brought us back together to give me a second chance with her. Maybe I could fix the mistake I’d made a year ago.

Clint popped up behind me. "Wow, is that Kate?" he asked. “What is she doing here?"

"Jesus, you scared me,” I said, jumping. “Come here." I grabbed Clint and dragged him from the room.

Once we were out of Kate’s hospital room, I felt comfortable talking again. Kate seemed unconscious, but I didn’t want to risk the possibility that she might hear me.

"Do you mind?" I asked.

"Mind what?" he asked.

"Mind saying anything stupid while in the room and around her," I said, more than aware of how ridiculous I probably sounded.

"What? You don't think you might actually have another chance with her, do you?" A smile formed on his face as he held back laughter.

"Well, why not?" I defended.

"After what you did to her? And what she said to you when you did it? Something about never wanting to see you again? Am I right?"

"Okay, you're right," I said, getting angry.

Indeed, when she had broken up with me, Kate was venomous. She screamed, she yelled, and she cursed. She made it very clear that she never wanted anything to do with me again. Even though I couldn’t blame her, I still wanted a chance to make things right with her.

"So, what?” Clint asked. “You think that she's going to wake up, see you, and suddenly fall into your arms?"

"I don't know," I said, trying to mask my anger. "But at least this way, I will finally get a chance to talk to her. I haven’t even gotten that before. Just do me a favor? Please stay out of that room until after I speak to her, okay?"

"Okay, okay," he relented, shaking his head as he turned to head back to the ICU. "Hey, you might get lucky. She might not remember you breaking up with her for no reason. Really, that's the only way I see her forgiving you." He chuckled to himself as he disappeared around the corner and out of sight.

He was right of course. She had to wake up first, and even then, the odds of her forgiving me were slim. But that was fine. I had to try. This was a gift, after all.

There was just something about Kate that made it impossible to let her go. She was so damn perfect for me in every way. Our personalities melded like butter and sugar, and our sexual chemistry had been explosive.

Kate had always been sexually adventurous. There was little she wasn't willing to try, and I was always more than happy to try new things with her. It may have been sick, but seeing her lying on that bed brought back some ridiculous memories of the things we used to get up to. There were many reasons why I wanted to try being with her again, and our sexual chemistry was definitely one of them.

It was these thoughts that pushed me over the edge. As I looked down at Kate, I couldn't help but think about how beautiful she was. Her breathing was deep and steady. Her chest rose and fell so perfectly. The room was empty, too. It was just me and her.

I moved closer and leaned over her. I relished the feeling of her breath as it hit my face. I closed my eyes and tried to remember what it was like when those lips were on mine, when I was allowed to kiss them as I pleased.

Without even thinking about it or how it might look, I bent forward and softly planted a kiss on her lips. My heart raced inside my chest as our lips met. But best of all, it felt right. It felt like it was meant to be, and it was in that moment, I knew what I had to do.

I had to get Kate back.

The moment was short-lived, however. Her breathing increased, and the monitors strapped to her went haywire. The second I pulled my lips away, her eyelids fluttered open. She was awake.