Page 1 of Attached At Heart
eight years ago
BLAKE
I listened to the phone ring while drumming my fingers on the steering wheel.
The thought, even the anticipation, of hearing her voice made me smile to myself. Fucking pathetic.
And then I actually heard her voice, and my stomach did the violently pleasant flip that should only happen when talking to the person who was going to be your wife.
A slightly problematic and sobering thought, considering there was no way Delaney Delacroix was ever going to let me marry her.
“Hello?”
Her sleep-coated voice made it all too clear that, once again, I’d woken her up, and I found way too much satisfaction in knowing I got to be the first one to talk to her every morning before clinicals. That I was the one who knew how she liked her BLTs and had packed an extra one for lunch today. Because Delaney never woke up in time to pack a lunch on Mondays.
“What the hell are you going to do when I’m not around every day to be your alarm clock?”
A ruffling noise cut through the phone, and I bit down on a laugh as I imagined her springing out of bed.
“What do you mean ‘not around anymore’?” she huffed, sounding more awake with every word. “I thought when you signed up to be my best friend, you knew that this shit was for life, Blake.”
I laughed but didn’t respond.
Mostly because I both loved and hated being categorized as her best friend.
CHAPTER ONE
delaney
GETTING A TEXT MESSAGE from your ex-fiancé in the middle of the workday might put some people over the edge, especially when it was about the date he had planned for later that night. But I responded with an encouraging thumbs-up before pocketing my phone and looking up to see the real wrench in my day.
The brown-haired, brown-eyed, cardiologist-sized wrench.
A handful of weeks had passed since the end of my engagement with Austin Long, but it had been one hundred twenty-seven days—not that I’d been counting—since the last time I’d seen my best friend. Since that night on the hospital bench when the first snow of the season fell in Minnesota, covering the city of Rochester in a blanket of white.
One hundred twenty-seven days since he’d abruptly moved out of the state.
I’d planned to stay at the Mayo Clinic after finishing our fellowships in cardiology. He had, too. Until he hadn’t, accepting a position in Boston instead. He never told me why, but the sight before me had to be a clue.
Because Blake London was here.
In the hospital lobby.
And he was sitting by a woman, bouncing a baby girl on his lap.
Ababy.
I supposed it made sense; he’d always been that guy, the one who looked for a wife in every girl he took out to dinner. But this was extreme, even for him, to already have a baby cradled in his arms. Was it evenpossible?
I mean, of course it was possible. I couldn’t manipulate the situation in my head to beprobable, but of course it waspossible.
Especially considering how he looked at the girl opposite him, smiling.
Smiling.
Blake didn’t smile all that often. Not really, not in a way where you could see his teeth. Usually, it was just a close-lipped tilt of his lips that I kept telling him looked condescending, but he didn’t believe me.
No, Blake didn’t smile like this often.
