Page 1 of Resisting You

Chapter One

Frey stared at his cup of coffee, betrayal making his heart beat faster than normal. His beloved brew—the one thing that allowed him to function like a rational, semi-normal human being—was ruined. He had exactly six minutes to fuel up before he had to be back on the floor, and it was going to take at least seven minutes to clean up the grounds and brew another cup with enough time to drink it.

He stuck his finger in the warm liquid and stared at the little flecks of coffee grounds.

He didn’t know how this had happened, and he still didn’t know why, but he did know who was responsible.

Dr. Dickhead.

Or, more accurately, Dr. Renato Agosti.

The asshole with the beautiful face and the sexy accent and the name that belonged on some model in a Gucci ad.

The asshole who had decided to make Frey’s life a living hell ever since his transfer request from labor and delivery was approved. He thought he was getting a better deal out of the whole thing. Better shifts, less screaming—at least, he assumed less screaming since most people in ortho weren’t pushing babies out of their vaginas.

Frey wasn’t moving departments because he didn’t enjoy being around babies and recovering parents because he did. The babies were cute, and the parents were always adorably clueless and happy to have a nurse who cared. Frey was a parent, after all, so he remembered exactly what it felt like to look down at a tiny, vulnerable little thing that depended on him for survival.

But he’d started to realize it was that exact reason he was good with the maternity ward that he was spiraling.

His son was now a happy, healthy six-year-old without a care in the world, but Rex hadn’t always been that way. His birth was difficult and traumatic. He was born early, and the pregnancy had been hard on the mother. And within hours of his birth, he’d turned blue, and his vitals crashed. Frey had felt unbearable panic with no idea what to do in spite of the fact that he did this for a living. He remembered yelling for the nurse and watching as they rushed in, then took Rex’s little bed and disappeared.

Hours later, Frey and his now ex got to peer through the NICU door window at Rex’s small bed, where he was hooked up to oxygen and so many tubes Frey could barely make out his little body. He was diagnosed with severe endocarditis, and there was a medication that would save his life.

Neither Frey nor Jace had hesitated in giving the go-ahead. They were warned of the risks that came with it, but Frey was pretty sure neither he nor his ex had really heard what they could be. And several days later, after a barrage of tests once Rex was stable, they learned their son hadn’t escaped entirely.

He was profoundly deaf.

It was not how he imagined his and Jace’s surrogacy story going. It was supposed to be a fairy tale. They’d found the surrogate, and while Jace had been cagey and refused to ask his sister for a donor egg, he was happy to help in the selection process at the clinic. They made jokes when Frey went in to give his sperm collection, and they’d cried when they got the news that the surrogate’s test had come back positive.

It was a dream.

Until it wasn’t. Until she was seven and a half months and they were getting a frantic call at two in the morning because the false labor she’d been feeling wasn’t false at all.

He didn’t sleep for weeks after the birth, waiting to see if Rex was going to pull out of it without any major complications. Frey got familiar with the NICU, and in the background, he watched his husband slowly shut down, bit by bit.

And by the time Frey got to lay Rex down in his little crib without an oxygen monitor or the constant worry that his tiny, struggling little heart was going to stop beating, Jace was gone, and Frey was a divorced single dad. And Rex was a child with only one parent because the courts had agreed since Jace hadn’t contributed anything biologically, he was allowed to back out.

And that was that.

So yeah, when a spot opened up in ortho, Frey had jumped at the chance. He loved the tiny babies, but going home to his son with the stark and constant reminder that nothing had gone to plan for him the way it did for most of the families he took care of every night was too much.

But it seemed like the universe was fucking with him because instead of peace, it had given him a doctor who hated him on sight and had apparently decided it was appropriate to fuck with Frey’s coffee machine.

“Do you think I could mortgage my house for bail money if I murdered him?” he muttered.

The nurse beside him, Cole, just laughed into his protein shake. “I mean, probably. You’ve got prime property. You’re what, ten minutes from the beach?”

More like an hour with the shit traffic, but Frey didn’t bother correcting him.

He walked over to the sink and dumped his mug, watching the coffee ground sludge move toward the drain like it was sentient. “I mean, I could get off by reason of insanity, couldn’t I? That’s not just a TV thing. And no judge would convict me if I told him that someone messed with my coffee.”

“He didn’t mess with your coffee,” Cole said tiredly.

Frey knew everyone was probably getting tired of his accusations, but there was no way this much was going wrong at work without there being a reason for it. He was a logical guy. He believed that most things were coincidences—not some sign from the universe. But at some point, people had to admit that he was clearly someone’s target.

And that someone had to be the one doctor who hated his guts more than anyone else on the floor.

“I’m going to cut the ass out of all of his scrubs, I swear to God. He’s going to stroll into the OR with his big, bouncy cheeks just…hanging all out there.”

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