Chapter Two
Dr. Alex Derjian watched the scene unfold with a mischievous pleasure that he hadn’t felt in years. He’d done a double-take when the crew walked in through the main emergency doors as he’d been charting, documenting the last hour or so of work on patients. A rotund and deeply pregnant, gorgeous blonde woman was flanked by an incredibly tall Nordic man and a smaller but more muscular Italian guy who looked like he could be on the cover of GQ. And then behind them a slim, tiny little buzzing dynamo he recognized instantly.
Josie. From the research trial his grandfather was in. Holy shit, he thought. Of all the places to run into her.
The pregnant woman must be her friend…or her wife (if so, his gaydar was broken). He saw one of the certified nurse midwives, a serene and businesslike old hand at all things birthing, meeting up with them. Unless there were complications severe enough to warrant calling him in on a consult—he was one of two residents on call in OB/GYN-- he probably wouldn’t have any contact with Josie or her…whoever the laboring woman was. The only time that midwife would call him in would be in a true surgical emergency.
Unlike some other obstetricians, he wasn’t a slicer, preferring a medical approach as much as possible before resorting to surgery. It didn’t earn him any favors and it hadn’t landed him any top internships or residencies anywhere. Without the killer instinct to cut, he’d been told, he should have just been a midwife.
They said that as if it were a bad thing.
A deep smile crossed his face, dimpling either side of his mouth. A mixture of Finnish and Armenian blood coursed through his veins, making him not particularly anything anymore, though his Armenian last name won him some points in Watertown, a western suburb just outside the city lines where a cluster of Armenians all lived. If your name ended with I-A-N you were instantly assumed to be a local Armenian and treated as such, regardless of the truth. Josie’s coloring was similar to his, dark brown hair and eyes, but otherwise there were no similarities. She was petite, and he was a solid foot taller. She would easily fit under his arm, an image that flickered past his mind’s eye, brief and unsolicited.
What is she doing here? he wondered. Was she working as a nurse? Or with her friend? Or her wife? And who were the two guys with them? Deeply curious, Alex closed the chart and looked up, startled to find a pair of big, wide green eyes lasered right in on him. It was Lisa, one of the nurses who had a crush on him—one that was absolutely unrequited.
When he’d started here ten months ago she’d asked him out for coffee. It had gone about as well as a root canal performed by a sadist with Parkinson’s. Since then, she’d stalked him as much as was professionally possible without losing her job. He’d struggled to find ways to be kind, finally resorting to completely ignoring her. Cruelty would be the next step, and he really didn’t want to reach that point unless he had to.
Her eyes tracked Josie as the group loaded onto an elevator headed, he knew, for labor and delivery. “Do you know her?” Lisa asked. She was about the same size as Josie, but a good fifty pounds heavier. Like Josie’s lovely pregnant…associate…Lisa had blonde, wavy hair and green eyes, though a completely different profile. Where the woman he’d just seen come in with Josie had a kind, open face, plump, sweet cheeks, and frightened but beautiful eyes, Lisa had a much more closed-off look, a pinched expression, and something to her features that spoke of scarcity, of life as a zero-sum game.
That had been the problem on their one and only date. All she wanted to do was complain about the coffee, the pastry, schedules at work, supervisors, her student loans, her cat—pretty much everything. Who the hell complains about their cat – and on a first date? Alex, who was sometimes working hundred-hour weeks, didn’t want his precious free hours spent listening to that.
“As a matter of fact, I do know her,” he said, absentmindedly. “I’m going to go and head up to labor and delivery and see if they need some help.”
“But you have charting to do,” Lisa said in a clipped tone, pointing to the seventeen or so charts stacked in front of him.
He waved his hand and broke eye contact, marching toward the elevator, decision made. “I’ll deal with it later.”
“But - but…” she sputtered as he walked away, the sound of her voice receding along with his tension.
For the past six months, he’d taken his grandpa Ed to the Alzheimer’s research trial at the nondescript medical building in Boston where Josie was the nurse in charge of clinical data and interviews. Alex would wait for thirty minutes or so before Ed would emerge with a big grin on his face and a small reward like a gift certificate to a coffee shop or a new set of golf balls, and then they’d go out to lunch. Alex enjoyed the carved-out time away from the craziness of the hospital.
His mom had asked Alex to make that one promise, that once a month he’d take an hour out of his schedule and help out. And with rare exception he’d managed, happy to take some of the burden off his mom, his aunts, and his grandpa’s girlfriend. It seemed like such a small gesture. The first time he’d taken Ed, he had been in the bathroom when Ed’s name was called. The second month he’d missed because of a work commitment. But on month three he had gone and seen Josie for the first time and that had made him resolve to be there every month.
She probably wouldn’t know him from Adam, because every time she came into the waiting room to call Grandpa Ed’s name, she barely looked up from her paperwork. And she absolutely was not his type, had never been his type, would never be his type—and if you had put a gun to his head and told him he had to say she was his type, he probably would have to accept death. He went for luscious, curvy, brown-haired, Slavic-looking women with bright red lipstick and asses that went on forever. That’s who he dated, that’s who he bedded, and that’s who he assumed he would eventually marry and have kids with.
Even her friend, the blonde pregnant woman, was more Alex’s type than Josie. Staring at this skinny little pixie of a woman, he’d been dumbfounded to find every sensor in his body going mad. Four months ago he had seen her for the first time, and the sad part was that he had squandered every single opportunity to say something, anything, other than “hi” to her.
When she walked in the room wearing a lab coat and whatever clothes were on under that, it was as if her mere presence was enough—actually interacting with her was too exquisite. What a great lie he told himself—the bottom line was that he was too much of a pussy to actually come out and introduce himself, get to know her, ask her out and see if whatever triggered this animal instinct in him that made him clam up and be a stupid eighth-grade boy was real.
Life was hectic. It was easier to go to a bar, pick up some chick, take her home, bed her, date her for a few weeks, and then end it all amicably—or not—than it was to actually understand why Josie triggered that reaction in him.
Hot breath on his shoulder surprised him as he waited for the elevator. “You don’t have to do this, you know?”
He turned, stunned out of his own thoughts to find himself staring down at Lisa, who looked up at him, her nose piggish and bulbous, nostrils flared as if she were pissed off about something. “Don’t need to do what?” he said.
“Don’t need to go up on labor and delivery. Collins is up there, so they don’t need you right now.” Collins was the other OB resident on shift tonight. Known as the Barber of Boston, he was ready to slice and dice at will, with a C-section rate that pushed forty percent. If Collins got to that case first, Alex knew the inevitable outcome.
“So he’s up there,” Alex said as derisively as he could. He turned away and stared at the silver doors, willing them to part so that he could get on the elevator.
Lisa took a step away. “It’s about that woman, isn’t it?”
Hardening his body, Alex steeled himself and said, “What I do is absolutely none of your business, Lisa. Go back to whatever work you have.”
Sniffing, she turned away and flounced off, to the extent that someone with a stick up their ass could flounce. The elevator doors opened and as he took a step forward his mind processed, atom by atom, molecule by molecule, the fact that there before him, in the flesh and in full, stood Josie.
She stared at his chest and then looked him dead on and said, “Alex Derjian?”
“Yes?” he said, taking two steps onto the elevator and turning toward her. How did she know his name? He touched his chest, the spot where she’d just stared, and realized his name tag had it in block letters. His heart began to race and an impulse to reach out and touch any exposed flesh on her body permeated him, making him take a long, slow, deep breath to hold back. What the hell is this? he wondered, the elevator air starting to swim, the heat transmitting out of his skin and seeking to envelop hers.
“Sherri Newsome asked for you up on labor and delivery,” she said in a neutral voice, clipped like a nurse coming to a doctor with a request.
“Oh. Oh,” he said. “Is it about a patient?” he asked, hoping it was about her friend, the blonde.
“Yes. She needs a quick consult.” Her eyes were full of fear and concern, but also something harder, the chocolate irises outlined by the whites of her eyes and almond-shaped sockets that framed everything and gave her a pixie-ish look.
She really was quite enchanting, almost Icelandic looking, like a softer version of the singer Björk. She had the body of a dancer but no height. If she was five feet tall he’d be surprised, and she made him feel like a moose of a man.
With a practiced turn she pressed the L&D floor button and the pneumatic hiss of the doors caught his attention, making him turn and look out to find Lisa glaring at them both, her face like stone as the doors closed. He turned back to Josie, stunned to be in her presence and relieved to be away from Lisa.
“Hi, I’m Alex.” Reaching his hand out to shake her hand, he was giddy with the opportunity to have a social convention he could use to access her skin.
She reached back and shook his hand, eyes widening at the genesis of their touch that connected the two. His palm embraced hers, soft and hard at the same time, commanding and tender as if he had to wring as much as possible out of this gesture. He pumped her hand two times and then slowed.
“Josie,” she said, quietly. “Hi.” She broke eye contact, looking over his shoulder and then directing her attention back, the skin around her eyes warming and narrowing a bit, face breaking into a smile. “Josie Mendham. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you, too,” he said, maintaining contact for as long as possible. Knowing that he would look like a creeper if he didn’t let go, he reluctantly withdrew his hand, the feeling of losing contact like having the wind knocked out of him.
*
Either a fireball entered the elevator and exploded in her body or she had just met her equivalent of Laura’s two soulmates in a single man. With one touch, Alex—just another resident, just another doctor in a hospital working a twenty-four-hour or forty-eight-hour shift, the kind of guy she’d met hundreds of over the years—had transformed everything. Transformed the air in the elevator, transformed the entire experience of bringing Laura in to L & D into…transformed something about Josie herself.
His touch had seismically split her in two, tectonic plates altering her emotional landscape. How could one person do that? she wondered as their eyes locked and he shook her hand slowly, the tactile sensation of his palm pressed against hers like a battery recharging every cell in her body, warming her, making parts of her throb with a frequency that she hoped he could feel with his tongue someday.
Or now. Now would work.
Very, very naughty thoughts flashed through her mind as they locked eyes. And then a second series of thoughts berated her, guilted her over thinking about anything but her poor best friend, who was about to have her vagina split open by a speeding eight-pound flesh ball, all the nibbly parts on display for a crew of eight or nine people, not including the dads and Josie.
This was a teaching hospital, after all, and the only way the interns, residents and the nursing students going through clinicals could learn was to watch people like Laura, to make notes, to get the queasiness over with and to learn by doing.
Right now she’d like to learn some really nice hands-on sexual lessons, lessons involving his hands on her naked ass, his mouth on other parts, her body entwined with Mr. Alex Derjian here—Dr. Alex Derjian, she corrected herself. Ever since a very messy failed affair her first year of nursing—an entangled, sweeping disaster that involved two doctors at work—she’d had a pretty firm rule: no dating doctors. But rules were made to be broken, right?
Introductions complete, he pulled his hand away, leaving her drained and empty and full of self-doubt. Had she been alone in the feeling that had just jolted through her? She wasn’t imagining it, though—he seemed to feel it too. Fidgety and a little ill at ease, Josie pretended to study the silver doors as the elevator hummed its way up to an even bigger, more chaotic mess that they both encountered as the doors wheezed open.
There stood Mike and Dylan and Sherri outside Laura’s door, engaged in an angry whisper campaign with another nurse. The pained expression on Dylan’s face was shifting more and more into anger, while Mike coiled with a tension diametrically opposite his normal state. Snippets of their conversation floated into Josie’s awareness as they approached.
“But there’s a limit…”
“I don’t care about the limit…”
“Why can’t we…?”
“Does it really matter?”
“Is there a reason why we can’t…?”
“What’s going on?” Alex said, his voice commanding and clear.
It made Josie stand up straight and listen intently—not that she had any choice. She could have listened to him read a Windows 7 installation guide and been in a state of bliss for hours on end. A melodic baritone, he didn’t have the standard Boston accent that so many men had, and there was a lilt, something foreign, but not quite. He wasn’t a Midwesterner, not a New Yorker, and nothing from the South came into his voice. The sound of his voice was more his own accent, as if he had honed it carefully himself, born of an internal core that made him something distinct and unique and well worthy of everyone’s immediate attention.
As he spoke, her eyes combed over his body. Brown, shiny waves in hair that needed a cut, but looked perfect tousled the way it was. Dark brown eyes, similar to hers, but with little specks of orange in them. His face was wide, with high cheekbones but the sprinklings of early five o’clock shadow. She knew, too well, that shadow would end up quite thick by the end of his long shift, the kind of stubble that left a slight, rough, red rug burn on a woman’s face after a perfect, intense kiss…or twenty.
Broad shoulders and a body that indicated that he worked out. His scrubs lay flat against his skin, not too tight, but not the baggy, shapeless look that so many men acquired as residency added some paunch to their under-exercised, over-carbed forms. This was a man who took care of himself. And as the conversation continued, she recognized that he was a man accustomed to finding solutions and having them carried out.
Sherri turned to him. “Thank you, Alex. I’m glad you’re here. I need you to consult on Laura’s polyhydramnios case,” she said, pulling him aside. “But we also have another issue here that has nothing to do with you.”
The nurse who stood next to them was arguing with Dylan and Mike, and Josie heard, “But there can’t be two fathers in the room.”
“But there are two fathers.”
“No, there can’t be two fathers. It’s biologically impossible. Our rooms are small and we can only allow one support person and one father.”
“I’m the support person,” Josie said. “I’m also an RN. What’s going on?”
The nurse gave her a grateful look, as if Josie were an instant ally in whatever argument she was having with the men. Josie didn’t like the assumption because she had a feeling that this was going to be one of those moments where she got ripping pissed and lost her cool. Doing that in front of Alex was one hell of a first impression she didn’t want to make.
“Did Lisa call you, too?” the nurse asked.
“Lisa?” Josie shook her head, confused. The sly look on the woman’s face pinched off instantly, shifting from a conspirator’s countenance to one of officiousness.
“Both of these men say that they’re the father.” The nurse was in her mid-sixties, no nonsense. She had extremely short gray hair, thick bifocals, and the body language of someone who didn’t take crap, ever. And Josie could respect that. If she worked here for forty years she’d be an impenetrable fortress of rules, too.
“Haven’t you heard of a kid having two dads?” They were quite a crowd in the hallway now— Mike, Dylan, Josie, and the nurse clustered together, Alex and Sherri just behind them. The OB and midwife, whispering, backed up a few paces.
“Is this a surrogacy case?” the nurse asked, arms crossing over her chest tighter. A loud scream poured into the hallway from a nearby room, followed by the muted sound of a man’s soothing voice.
Dylan and Mike exchanged a glance, and Dylan said, “If it was, could we both be in there?”
“Well, that depends. Is it?” The nurse was so cynical and challenging that Josie wondered if there was something personal going on here. Maybe she was homophobic and assumed Dylan and Mike were gay? Overt discrimination was rare in the Boston area, but it did happen.
“No, it’s not,” he admitted reluctantly, shoulders slumping in defeat. Honesty prevailed, Dylan’s instinct to lie not strong enough, Josie noticed. Ironic considering he had no problem lying when it came to other things. Maybe he really has reformed, she thought.
The nurse pointed to Josie. “So, you’re the support person.”
“Yes.”
“Who is the dad?”
“I am,” both men said in unison.
Out of the corner of her eye Josie saw Alex do a double-take and then whisper something to Sherri, who whispered something back. Alex’s jaw dropped. Oh, boy, she thought, this is getting interesting. Who was she kidding? This had been interesting about ten minutes ago—no, make that nine and a half months ago.
“Don’t make me do eenie-meenie-minie-moe on you,” the nurse said, pointing her finger at Dylan, and then at Mike.
“They’re not exactly a binary-oriented crowd here,” Josie tried to explain.
The nurse shot her a WTF? look. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s complicated,” Dylan muttered.
Understatement of the year, Josie thought as she tried to check out the gorgeous doctor’s reaction, all of her senses on fire as she realized how turned on she was by his mere presence. A keen sense of familiarity made her think she knew him from somewhere. But where?
Sherri and Alex wandered back. “Have we decided the whole ‘who’s allowed in the room’ thing yet?” Sherri said, clearly exasperated.
“There is a written hospital policy about how many people can be in the room,” the nurse said, clearly not for the first time. A quick glare at the nurse showed exactly how Sherri felt about that. “It is rarely enforced, but it is on the books.”
“What’s the policy?” Alex looked at the nurse, then added, “I’ve been here for a while and the only support person policy I know of is that only one person can be in the operating room for a C-section.”
“One support person, one father.” The nurse clamped her lips together in disapproval, not touching Alex’s leading comment. “And she”—the nurse pointed at Josie—“is the support person.”
“Who’s the father?” he asked.
Silence. Josie, Mike, and Dylan sighed.
Sherri said, “I’m going to go and be with the actual patient and do patient care here.” She gave the nurse a withering look. “Meanwhile, let’s make the decision that’s best for the patient. If she wants all these people in there, why can’t they be in there?”
“If we need to get a crash cart in there it’s too many people.”
Josie had a thought. “Wait a minute—”
Alex interrupted her, which caught her off guard—she wasn’t used to being interrupted. Normally, she was the one who interrupted.
Again that deep voice, that melody in his vocal cords strumming something in her that made her sit and listen attentively. “One support person is allowed,” he said to the nurse.
“Yes.”
“And one father is allowed.”
The nurse pursed her lips. “Well, yes, normally there only is one father.”
“Okay, fair enough. One father. Anyone else allowed?”
“No.”
“What about a doula?”
The nurse tilted her head left and right and said, “Well, yes, we have had cases where—”
Josie was about to open her mouth and offer to back out of being in the room for the sake of Dylan and Mike when Dylan jumped up and shouted. “I’m the doula!”
“You’re the doula?” the nurse questioned, incredulous.
“I’m the doula.” Dylan’s emphatic words showed in his new stance, the slumped shoulders long gone, body tight and defensive, ready for action.
“You don’t look like a doula.”
Dylan preened a little, pumped up his chest and said, “I’m a licensed paramedic and I’m a doula. I’ve got a therapy ball at home and some patchouli oil in my car. I do energy work.” He waved his hands in front of him like a mystic, coming within inches of the nurse’s head. “Your energy is very negative. Maybe you need to get a sage stick and smudge yourself.”
Josie bit her lips trying not to laugh. The male doula story was about to make the nurse’s gossip rounds for the next six months at this hospital, as if Dylan didn’t have his own notoriety when it came to Boston. And, unfortunately, here it came.
The nurse took a really long, good look at Dylan and then pulled back, her face shocked. She pointed and said, “I know who you are. You’re the billionaire bachelor.”
Dylan shot her a smug, charming smile. “Yes, I am.”
“Then why do you need to be a doula?” she said. “You don’t need to work.”
That caught him off guard. “That’s right. That’s right,” he said, fumbling for words. “I am a doula because I love the work and I want to support women in their birthing options.” Josie motioned her hand in a circular manner that indicated to keep going. “And besides, there’s nothing that you can do about it. I’m the doula. You go in there and you ask Laura and she’ll tell you that I’m the doula and—”
The nurse pointed to Mike. “That makes you the father?”
“I guess so,” Mike said, looking at Dylan with a very, very skeptical expression.
Dylan stood up on tiptoes and whispered in Mike’s ear, “This doesn’t mean that I think you’re the father.”
“I know that,” Mike whispered back.
“Okay, just clarifying.”
“Jesus Christ, Dylan, can we cut this out?”
“As cute as your conversation is,” Josie said, a fake smile plastered on her face yet again. She was getting tired of this. “Let’s just call it done.” She put a hand on the shoulder of the nurse and said, “Can we just cut the bull and let all three of us in? Because right now we’ve wasted the past five minutes arguing about this and our friend needs us.”
“You’re not the doula,” the nurse whispered, now unsure. It was three—make that four, if you included Alex, who had turned out to be their savior—against one, and the nurse was losing badly now.
“Ask Laura. I am the doula, and my client needs me.” He waved his hands in the air around her, then clasped them in a namaste gesture.
The nurse softened and said, “All right. I’ll let it go but,” she said, taking a step closer to Dylan and sticking a finger on his chest, poking twice, “you better be the best damn doula I’ve ever seen in this hospital.”
“You’re on,” he said. “Wait until you see what I can do with a massage wand!”
*
Josie walked into Laura’s hospital room and found a weeping, hormonal mess sitting on a large therapy ball, rocking her hips and sighing through occasional mumblings of “Nobody told me this would hurt so much” and “Why the hell didn’t I get an epidural in the parking lot?”
As Mike and Dylan entered closely behind her she could sense their absolute feeling of panic, compassion, confusion, and expectation—with just the slightest hint of excitement coming through, thankfully. Laura was going to need every drop of support from the three of them that she could get to emerge from this birth as unscathed as possible.
“Unscathed” wasn’t exactly the right word, Josie knew. Having every mucosal section of skin in the nether regions shredded like mozzarella cheese over a pizza wasn’t quite her personal definition of unscathed—and she knew that for the next three days after the baby was born Laura’s best friend wasn’t going to be Josie, Mike, or Dylan.
It was going to be ice packs and Lidocaine gently placed over her crotch and those stretchy, mesh panties that were anything but sexy, but that became a woman’s life line as she recovered postpartum.
All of that, though, Josie had to push out of her mind because right this moment she had one thing to think about—and that was getting Laura through this. Dammit, she thought. Make that two thoughts, because right behind Mike and Dylan she sensed another presence, a masculine, self-possessed, and oh, so seductive presence. One that somehow managed to push Thor and his sidekick aside about as readily as a lion bats an annoying mouse.
How could the hot OB do this to her, to the room, to the world? How did someone she had just met ten minutes ago suck all of the negativity out of her atmosphere and fill it with a keening, sultry desire that made everything else go away? Her poor friend was sitting here, perched on top of an oversized playground ball, her head down, her breathing labored, her back wrenched as her hips split to let her baby emerge.
And all Josie could think about was grabbing Alex and finding a quiet room and riding him like a bull. A good friend would have anything but sex on her mind right now.
Apparently, Josie was not a good friend.
She happened to be standing at the end of the bed, and Alex came over to her left and reached across her to grab the chart. Her eyes were drawn to the smattering of dark hair that peppered the skin of his outstretched arm, the taut muscles of his wrist, the way the bones all moved so fluidly. Of course, he had surgeon’s hands, with long, slim fingers that grasped the metal chart as if he were a catcher in a baseball game receiving a ball. Flipping open the chart, his forearms flexed with movement, the sinew and bulging veins speaking to outside activity that made him athletic and active. Her mind wandered once more to the bedroom. Was he athletic and active there?
She closed her eyes and squinted, trying to drive the thought away as he was mere inches from her. The scent of something citrusy, spicy, and a bit musky all mingled to make her hum even more vibrantly, like a magnet drawn to iron shavings— except the magnet was her nether regions, a familiar warmth pooling in her belly, threatening to make her breathing as labored as Laura’s. The muscles that were clamping inside Josie may have been in the same area as Laura’s, but they were producing a noticeably different sensorial effect.
“Excuse me,” Alex said, looking over with a flirtatious tone to his voice.
“By all means,” she said. “You are the doctor.”
His eyes narrowed slightly at that and he shot her a puzzled look. “But I’m not in charge here,” he reminded her. “Sherri is.”
Could you be any more perfect? she thought. A humble OB? Impossible. There was no such thing. She wanted to say that, to test him, to push him, see where his limits were, but this wasn’t the time. At that exact moment Dylan walked over to Laura and began rubbing her back while Mike poured a glass of water.
“Laura, you okay?” Dylan asked, bending over her shoulder.
“Am I okay?” said a demon voice from deep inside Laura’s core. “Am I okay? Do I look okay?” she asked.
Josie winced. Dylan was about to get it. “No, I just mean…”
For the first time since they’d arrived, Josie got a good look at Dylan. He was wearing a navy polo shirt, some torn jeans, flip-flops, and a baseball cap. Red Sox. Must be a game day.
“It’s okay, Laura. It’s all right, babe,” Mike said, coming over with a glass of water, trying to soothe her and glaring at Dylan. Dylan looked back, shrugging, his palms up in the air in a what did I do? kind of motion.
“It’s not okay!” Laura shouted. “Quit telling me it’s okay! You!” She pointed at Dylan. “And you!”—now at Mike—“aren’t the ones who are about to have this baby come out the hole where you put her in. If one more person in this room,” she shouted, looking around, her eyes wild and angry, “tells me it’s going to be okay, I’m going to order you out of here. I’m going to strap you down and I’m gonna load a bunch of Pitocin in your veins and I’m gonna make you feel how it feels to have your asshole clamp down for forty-five to sixty seconds every two to three minutes and then I’m gonna make you shit an eight-pound brick. Are we clear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the men said in unison. Josie almost said it too, and then bit her lower lip, afraid to piss off Laura any more.
Alex leaned down and Josie could feel his breath before he said a word, the heat tickling her earlobe, making her lose about ninety-nine percent of the thin thread of resolve that was left. “I’m going to assume,” he said, his voice like a soft touch, “that she’s not always like this.”
“No,” Josie answered, whispering, her mouth so close to his earlobe she wanted to stand on tiptoes and bite it. “Only when she’s shitting an eight-pound brick.”
He nodded somberly. “Most of my patients find the brick is worth it.” His smile lit up his eyes as he studied her face. “You have kids?”
The question shocked her. It shouldn’t have—she was getting to that age where it was becoming more common—but it still did. “Um, no. I kill house plants and the only reason my cat is still alive is because he’s smarter than I am.”
He chuckled. “Not everyone’s ready at the same time, right?”
What was that supposed to mean? “And some of us aren’t ready even when reality is staring us down the birth canal,” she said, nodding at Laura.
“Her level of denial must be pretty extreme,” he said.
“You don’t know the least of it.”
Dylan was attaching an MP3 player to Laura’s shirt as she batted away the earbuds. “I don’t want to listen to that crap,” she said, bursting into tears. “I just want someone to hold me.” A loud, winding-down cry like a toddler’s poured out of her as she melted into a puddle of tears, sniffling against Dylan’s chest, his body twisted in an awkward pose. He looked at Mike and shook his head, eyes begging for help.
What do I do? he mouthed. Josie started laughing.
She turned back to find Alex going over Laura’s chart, his frown deepening as he read further. She stood up on tiptoes, raised her eyebrows, and tried to get a look, but he was too tall and the chart was too far away. “Anything to be worried about?” she asked in a low hiss.
“Nothing so bad that we can’t continue with the midwife,” he said. “But this is one I’m going to have to watch very, very carefully.” Snapping the chart shut, he kept a very neutral—almost too neutral—look on his face, his voice professional and moderate.
His hand brushed against hers as he lowered the chart, and she felt a zing of every form of energy in the universe coalesce into that point of contact. “Unfortunately, it looks like you’re stuck with me for most of the night on this case.” Avoiding eye contact, he looked at a spot above Laura’s head. “If Sherri agrees,” he added in a slightly deferential tone. Unreal. Doctors didn’t do that—defer. To anyone.
“Unfortunately?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”
He seemed to consider that, breathing in through his nose, taking his time to answer. When he did, one hundred percent of his attention was focused on her. She liked that very much. “The unfortunate part is that her case is high risk enough that she needs an OB consult for most of the night,” he explained, a practical tone in his voice that made her think she had completely misread what she thought was a flirtatious signal, her stomach clenching and her heart hardening to save herself the social embarrassment of thinking that someone this hot and this interesting would have any interest in her.
“But,” he said, his finger touching the inside of her elbow, making a slow, steady trail into the soft inner flesh and then writing tiny circles in the middle, a pretty obvious symbolic move on his part, “the fortunate part is that, given the amount of time I’m going to need to focus on the case, and the nineteen hours left on my shift, I think you and I are going to become very well acquainted.”
“Me?” she squeaked. His fingers stopped and she nearly sobbed with the exit of his touch, her solar plexus, her abs, her everything all tight with anticipation and with a paradigm shift in the universe that made everything about him, him, him.
“Yeah, Josie. You.”
“I need to pee!” Laura shouted. Josie deflated on the spot. Way to kill the mood, she thought, and then clamped down on her brain, which was far better than clamping down with some of the other muscles in her body that were pulsating right now.
What in the ever-loving hell was she doing?
All her attention needed to be focused on Laura, not on Dr. Alex Derjian. Flashing him a smile, she got herself out of the situation, extracting her ego, her attention, and her sex drive from this diversion. Two out of three of those should be focused on Laura and the third—well, she had a box of electronic toys to handle that one. She didn’t need another crazy romantic entanglement right now, and certainly not in the middle of Laura’s birth.
She should be focused on her friend’s vagina—not her own.