Page 12 of Merry Little Heartbreak

“No problem.” He took a step farther into the empty lounge. “Just out of curiosity, what about the attendings? Can I date those?”

He was mocking her, in her own ER, on his first day. They both knew she was the only female attending, and he had rejected her years ago.

“Code blue, attending bay nine,” a message rang out over the loudspeaker.

With a sigh, she set down her coffee and moved past Drake to run toward the dying patient. Drake was on her heels but stood by while she and the nurse communicated quickly about the fifty-year-old woman in an elf suit lying still on the gurney. She was unconscious, and the paramedics rattled off details on the suspected overdose.

“Get the naloxone ready,” Margo said, climbing on the side of the gurney to start chest compressions. But the woman had no pulse.

“Paddles,” she said, and Drake was ready.

“Clear,” she said, ripping open the woman’s green costume in time for him to press the paddles to her chest and give the woman a jolt. The nurse handed Margo the syringe. Drake took the patient’s pulse as Margo administered the medicine.

“I can feel a faint pulse,” he said.

“More compressions,” Margo said, handing the syringe off to the nurse and initiating CPR again.

After a bleep on the screen, the woman wheezed and began to cough.

“You did it.” Drake’s smile was like that moment the sun woke up and cast everything in perfect light.

She hated that she could still enjoy his face after everything he’d done.

“Doctor,” the nurse said. Margo still stood over their patient—not a great place to be disoriented.

But Margo didn’t move fast enough as the woman sat up and tossed her Christmas cookies in Margo’s direction, soiling her clean scrubs before the woman collapsed back onto the gurney.

“Yep, it’s going to be another great day in paradise,” Margo said. “Nurse Mary, meet our newest resident, Dr. Drake Maguire. He’s going to take over the patient’s vitals while I clean up.” Not bothering to look at Drake, she walked out of the intake bay and pulled the curtain to give them more privacy. The ER was buzzing with patients, nurses, and doctors—the typical hectic place.

Only twenty minutes into her shift, and it already seemed to drain her energy. Or maybe it was the reappearance of her ex-boyfriend. She needed to clean up and go speak to the director of the department and figure out a better solution for Drake’s training, if he was staying. Because there was no way she could work with him.

Back in the doctor’s lounge, she took the scrub top off and retrieved an old, frayed one off a shelf in her locker where she always kept backups. She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Her big eyes stared back and looked scared.

Working with Drake would be too much. It was bad enough seeing him temporarily. Over the years, she’d read countless articles about his soaring career and almost every time, there was a picture of him with some beautiful woman at a glamorous event. It was pathetic she even looked for the updates on his work in medical journals. But her work in the ER always shielded her from letting her mind wander over how things ended up between them. Today she didn’t have time to still be heartbroken. It was absurd for her to still care after all these years.

“Our patient is asking for some pain meds,” Drake said, leaning in the doorway of the lounge.

“Your patient.”

“Okay, so what do we do? She may be my patient, but this is your ER. Do you request a psych eval because she almost OD’d and put her in for a forty-eight-hour stay for observation? Or send her to a facility to get sober?”

“The reality is, no one gets clean unless they want to, but we look in the system to see if she’s a repeat offender. Call for a psych eval either way, admit her for observation, and if she doesn’t leave of her own free will, maybe she’ll decide it’s her turn to get clean and voluntarily go to rehab.”

She expected him to walk away, but instead he crossed his arms and stared at her.

“Any more questions, Doctor?”

“No.” But he didn’t move from his relaxed stance against the doorway.

“I’ll assign you a senior resident partner once I study the shifts. Did the director say which days or shifts they’d want you in plastic surgery?”

“She said I’d need to stay on the first two shifts in the ER so I could perform surgeries as needed in plastics, but between you and me, I’m hoping to minimize my time in the plastics department and made it clear I would only do nonelective surgeries.”

She was surprised because she knew the elective surgeries were generally the most lucrative.

“Okay, I’ll keep you on the first and second shift. They’re ten-hour shifts. Each shift overlaps the next about an hour for turnover and paperwork. It will be impossible for you to just dip out in the middle of a shift for surgery, so can you work with plastics to set three days with them, and then can you do two with the ER?”

“Let’s do three in the ER and plan for two in plastics.”

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