Page 38 of Auctioned to Dr. Daddy

Ambulance lights are briefly visible as they skid around the corner, but the rain devours even them. “It’s crazy,” says Demi. “I knew that Seattle could get some bad storms, but this seems like a lot.”

“It is a lot. I think that—” Both our buzzers go off.

Demi pulls hers off and frowns. “The ER?”

“They must be overcrowded.” I show her the one on my hip, too. It says the same thing. “Come on.”

I lead the way to the stairs.

The elevators might be quicker, but they can get a little finicky during storms like this. The generator has a hard time making them work right. The janitorial staff has already gone through and put OUT OF ORDER signs on them. There are nurses in the area keeping an eye out for anyone in a wheelchair that might need help getting to a lower floor.

“You know, I’m impressed with how easily you keep pace,” I say as we take the stairs two at a time.

I can see the pride in Demi’s features. “I’m not going to let a storm have me lagging behind.”

“I know that,” I tell her. “It’s still impressive.” We hit the ground floor and burst out into the hallway, skidding as the tile turns slick beneath us.

Demi squeaks and stumbles. I grab her by the arm and pull her steady at the last minute. She shoots me a love-struck, grateful look, then turns her attention to the layer of water on the floor. “What the fuck, Nate?”

“I don’t know. Maybe that burst pipe is worse than we thought,” I say, grimly.

We’re more careful moving away from that stretch of the hallway. There are yellow caution signs set up everywhere in the aisle. The tile goes dry beneath us, and our rubber shoes squeak noisily as we head through the lobby, take a sharp left, and veer into the ER wing.

Instantly, we’re assaulted with the wail of two crying babies, three crying adults, and an old woman screaming at the head nurse at sign-in. The rain comes crashing into the room every time the sliding doors pull open, and most of the patients are soaked through to the bone.

Tammy, one of the members of the janitorial staff, is trying to keep up with mopping up the water. Carter is passing stiff but warm blue blankets out to the waiting patients, so they have something dry to wrap themselves into.

My gaze catches on an older gentleman, one hand pressed over a bloody rag curling around his arm. Costas comes out of the side room where the ER beds are kept and gives me a grateful smile. He’s a bull of a man, almost seven feet tall and built like a quarterback, to the point that even though his scrubs fit him, they look borderline too tight.

His dark brown hair has been swept out of his face, and there’s nothing shy of graciousness in his expression. He swings to one of the nurses up front. “Tell Natasha that reinforcements have arrived.”

The nurse nods but doesn’t look up from what she’s frantically trying to type into the computer. “It looks like you all are having a hard time,” I say.

“I’m going to go help Carter,” says Demi, easily stepping into the action. She grabs another stack of blankets from the cart that’s been pulled out and starts handing them out. She moves with a grace that’s impossible to ignore; steadfast and confident in her actions. Fucking gorgeous.

“We’ve got every room full,” says Costas. “And a few gurneys in the hall.”

“I’ve got the gurneys,” I tell him, heading into the hallway, where I’m met by Natasha Duboi. She’s got sharp blue eyes and a sharp nose, her short black hair ensuring that she doesn’t need to worry about anything getting in the way as she works.

“Dr. Stone,” she says. The ER staff don’t deal with specialists like me very often. We’re not close, but we fall into the motion of working with each other easily enough, the two of us handling the poor woman sitting in the hallway with a broken wrist, and then the woman with what’s clearly pneumonia.

Briefly, Natasha is pulled away to handle something in one of the rooms, and Demi comes back to help instead.

We put in stitches under less than swell circumstances, wrap bandages and gauze around cuts that we don’t have time to stitch up and send patients upstairs for x-rays, MRIs, and cat scans.

The old man that has the split open arm ends up in a room that I’m handling, Demi as my second, and gives us both a smile.

“It’s my own fault. I didn’t have the house battened down ahead of time and was trying to get a tarp over a leaky spot on the roof,” he admits.

He pulls the rag away, revealing a nasty-looking cut on age spot mottled skin.

“Did you fall?” Demi asks.

“Sliced it open on the gutter,” says the man. “The ladder slipped.”

“You didn’t have anyone holding it?” Demi’s eyebrows knit together. That’s the curse of the ER. They see patients that come in with strange cases and with cases like this one; injuries that should have been easy to avoid or to skip completely.

The man shakes his head. “My kids are in Florida.” He perks up a little. “My daughter works with NASA.”

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