Page 3 of Baby for Dr. Damaged

Amanda taps me on the chest with one finger before rocking back flat onto her feet. “That’s good, but I wasn’t talking about my parents’ place. I was talking about mine.”

A huff of laughter slips through my lips. “Is that so?”

“I think it’s only fair. You don’t take it easy on me just because I’m Lawrence’s kid, and I make you a killer dinner once in a while.” Amanda looks genuinely pleased with this arrangement.

And there’s no harm in it—unless she cooks like her mother—so I laugh, and smile, and agree.

Chapter two

Amanda

Ihaveneverhad worse luck.

Groaning, I drop down onto the soft leather couch in the doctors’ lounge, letting my head drop backwards against the ridge of it, my eyes shut. If someone could just send a bolt of lightning down now to kill me, that would probably be for the best.

I’ve only been sitting there for a few moments when another resident, Cara, drops onto the cushion next to me. She’s all long legs and freckles, her wrists covered in massive silver and blue bangles. Her uncle owns a boat and her mother is an architect, and the fact that she’s chosen to do this is some kind of a big deal, though I couldn’t keep up with the story enough to figure out why.

She pets me on the knee. “Rough first day?”

“You have no idea.” I scrub my face with both palms and then sit up, trying to make myself seem more human.

Cara laughs. “Who did you get?”

“Jackson Hawk?” I tell her, a questioning lilt to my voice. It’s hard to keep my expression neutral but there’s no way I can just tell them what was so rough about my first day.

Cara’s face lights up. “Oh, wow! You lucked out!” She swats me on the chest. “He’s like, a living legend!”

From the other side of the room, at the fridge, Carter, a gawky-looking resident with a mullet, asks, “Who?”

He’s got one ear pierced and changes the piercing to a different colored stud every few days.

Cara twists around in her seat, folding her arms over the back of the couch to face him. “Jackson Hawk! Have you seriously not heard of him before?”

Carter shoves the fridge shut and cracks open his can of soda. “Nope.”

“He's the one that headed the cure for Systocin disease,” says Cara. “He was in his late twenties when he managed to figure it out.”

“Twenty-seven,” I say. “Same age as me.”

Which is part of the issue: he’s a lot older than me. I’ve got to keep my head on straight. I can’t let my feelings for him get in the way of everything else. Especially since Cara already knows him.

I’ve heard all about him, growing up. I know that a lot of people tout him as some sort of prodigy, but the truth is… Jackson just had a really good reason to do it. His wife, Erica, suffered from it. Systocin disease was no joke. It wasn’t a form of cancer, but it attacked the white blood cells in the body in much the same way.

It was notoriously hard to diagnose. In most cases, by the time that the doctors had realized a person was suffering from Systocin disease, it was too late to do anything to help them. They would have a year to live, maybe less.

That’s what happened with Erica.

She was diagnosed with it during the final stage of the illness, and there wasn’t anything that could be done. Most people claimed that Jackson had created a cure or a treatment for it, but the truth was, he had figured out a better way to diagnose it.

By creating a blood test that could actually pick up on the way that Systocin’s early stages affected someone’s blood, the diagnosis could be made when there was still time to treat the patient.

It was too late to save his wife. To do anything for her. Erica died, in the hospital, in pain.

I’ve heard the stories, and I think about it a lot. I don’t want that to happen to Harris. And it would be so, so easy for that to be how things go.

It’s the whole reason that I’ve become a doctor. I want to make sure that I’m able to fix him before there’s nothing left to fix.

“That’s insane. Girl, you are going to learn so much.” Cara drops backwards onto the couch, clearly a bit of a drama fan. She leans against the arm of it, pulling one leg up onto the cushion. “I’ve got Bradley Frust. He’s only a second-year. I’m going to learn hardly anything.”

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