Page 10 of The Marriage Negotiation

I sucked in a breath. "You're a nurse?"

Could he be any more perfect?

Zaq eyed me critically. "Yeah. So what?"

I sent him a friendly smile. "I'm a doctor."

Zaq's eyes rounded. "You're a doctor?"

I nodded.

"Peter said you worked at a convenience store."

"I did back when I was working my way through medical school. I've been a doctor for several years now. Well, I'm a hospital administrator right now, but I just turned in my resignation letter. I want to go back to practicing medicine, not doing an endless amount of paperwork."

"You're a hospital administrator?"

"For the next two weeks."

And then the sky was the limit.

Chapter Three

~ Zaq ~

I smiled as I watched Patrick's eyes sparkled as he talked about his career. I'd been working in the medical field long enough to differentiate between people that became doctors because of the money they could make and people that did it because they truly loved it.

Patrick loved it.

I could tell.

"So, what are you going to do once you're no longer the hospital administrator?"

Patrick shrugged. "Not sure yet. I'm going to take a couple of months off to think about my next move. I do know I still want to practice medicine though. I'm done with the paper part of all of this. I'm not cut out to be an administrator."

"Peter wants me..." I grimaced. "Peterwantedme to quit after we got married."

"Why?"

"He said it wasn't proper for his husband to be working as a nurse. Unfortunately, my father backs him up all the way."

"That doesn't make sense. Nurses are some of the hardest workers in the medical field. Doctors might do the big stuff like surgery and such, but the nurses are the ones on the ground keeping everything going. That's nothing to be ashamed of."

"Preaching to the choir here," I replied. "I love what I do, the day to day caring for my patients, watching the joy on their family's faces when they get batter and are able to go home. I just wished my father saw it the same way I did instead of looking down on me because I didn't go into the family business or become a doctor."

"He wanted you to become a doctor?"

"No, but a doctor would have been more acceptable for the son of Oscar Dinh than a nurse. According to my father, only girls become nurses."

"Bullshit."

I snorted out a laugh. I felt pretty much the same way. "He said it made sense that I became a nurse after he discovered that I was gay since, you know, I was basically a girl."

Patrick's eyes rolled.

"I could introduce you to a lot of men that are captains of their industries," he said. "All of them are gay and none of them are girls. They don't even look like girls."

Patrick dug out his cell phone and opened his picture gallery, swiping through it until he came to a picture with several guys all holding beers in their hands.

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