A Surgeon To Heal Her Heart

Not once had he questioned whether or not she’d say yes. He’d swear she was interested, that she enjoyed their light, fun conversations as much as he did.

Just the previous day, he’d asked her friend Rosalyn about her. Surprisingly, Rosalyn hadn’t been able to tell him much about Carly’s personal life. They’d worked together for five years, Carly didn’t attend any of the hospital’s social functions, rarely talked about family and never about anyone special.

None of their other co-workers had been able to tell him anything more.

He was a young healthy man who’d been used to an active social life since his divorce. Staying busy, active, was how he’d kept sane after Stephanie had left him. The fact his social life had been on hiatus from the move and job change was probably why he got so twisted up inside when he looked at Carly.

Although thinner than his usual taste, she was a beautiful woman, had a great sense of humor, and a quick smile.

When she smiled, his breath caught.

Rosalyn was right.

He had the hots for Carly.

Although he’d been in several relationships since his divorce, they’d all been light, fun, about mutual pleasure. From the moment he’d met her, Carly had tugged at something deep that made him question the meaningless relationships he moved in and out of with the ease of a broken heart that didn’t allow anything more.

Memories of the past hit him, freezing him in place and making him question his interest in Carly.

Was she playing hard to get? Had he misread her? Or was there something more going on?

CHAPTER TWO

“SORRY I TOOK so long to bring your medicine,” Carly apologized to the elderly man lying in the hospital bed.

Although partially dozed off, he wore a thick pair of glasses, along with oxygen tubing and a nasal cannula. He opened his eyes and stared in her direction, blankly at first, then with vague recognition.

Carly was used to that reaction. Wasn’t it one she saw with increasing frequency from her mother?

Just as she did at home, Carly pasted on her brightest smile.

“I don’t need medicine anyway,” the man muttered grumpily and without making eye contact.

“Your medicine helps keep your heart in rhythm and will help get you out of this place and back home soon.”

The man snorted. “I don’t have a home.”

Carly had been taking care of Mr. Taylor for three days, knew his personal history, and understood his frustrations that his family felt he could no longer live alone. With forgetting to eat and frequent falls, he couldn’t.

“That’s not what your daughter told me when she was visiting yesterday,” Carly reminded him.

“She lied.”

Carly handed him the plastic cup that held his pills. “You don’t live with her?”

He thought a moment, then shook his head. He didn’t say more, just took the medications.

“Is there anything else I can get you, Mr. Taylor?”

“A new body.”

Carly smiled. She’d heard that many times over the five years she’d been a nurse.

“I wish I could,” she admitted. She wished she could do a lot of things when it came to making someone well.

Especially with her mother’s Parkinson’s and dementia.

What she wouldn’t do for there to be a cure to such horrific diseases that robbed one of their mind and body.

She checked his vitals, made sure his nurse-call button was within his reach, and left his room to check on another patient.

Mrs. Kim. A lovely little lady who’d had a surgically excised abscess on her chest. Due to the amount of infection and her weakened system, she’d been admitted for a few days for intravenous antibiotics to make sure the infection was knocked and to build up her strength.

Mrs. Kim’s family had been taking turns staying during the evenings and night, but during the daytime her family worked and the woman was usually in her room alone.

Carly popped in frequently to check on her.

Most of the time the pleasant woman would be enthralled in whichever game show she was currently watching, but the vision that met Carly’s eyes had her pausing in the doorway.

Looking distraught, Mrs. Kim was crying. Stone was at her bedside, holding her hand, offering comfort. Carly couldn’t make out his exact words, but she could feel their soothing balm.

Could feel her own eyes watering in empathy at Mrs. Kim’s distress.

Mrs. Kim grasped his hand in hers and was voicing her frustration over the wound that refused to heal in her chest, over how it was keeping her from her very busy life, and how she missed her two cats.

Whatever he said, Mrs. Kim weepily smiled, pulled his hand to her lips and smacked a kiss there.

“Thank you.”

She said more, but Carly couldn’t make out the words, just saw the woman’s lips move and then Stone throw his head back and laugh.

A real laugh. One that reverberated through Carly. Made her long to share such a laugh with him.

How long had it been since she’d laughed like that? Carefree through and through? With all her worries set aside in the joy of the moment?

Since she’d felt any real, all-the-way-to-her-soul sense of joy?

No, that wasn’t fair. She was happy, appreciative that she had her mother to go home to every day. It was what she wanted, what she’d choose given the choice. Every day was a blessing and to be cherished.

She did cherish life. She was not just going through the motions.

Thinking she’d come back later to check on Mrs. Kim, she turned to go, but the movement caught Stone’s eye.

“Carly?”

Pasting a smile on her face, she stepped into the hospital room.

Ignoring Stone, she met her patient’s gaze. “Hello, Mrs. Kim. I wanted to make sure you didn’t need anything. I see you’re in good hands.”

Mrs. Kim’s hand was locked between Stone’s and the woman smiled. “Very.”

“Is there anything you need?” She checked the woman’s IV settings and vitals. Feeling Stone’s gaze, she did her best to breathe normally, to function normally, and not make some total klutz move.

“Just to get better so I can go home.”

“We’re working on it,” she promised, then wondered if she should have deferred to Stone.

She’d never gotten the impression he was one of those high-ego docs, but she’d only known him a month.

One month, four days.

Okay, so she was counting.

He didn’t seem to mind her having answered for him. Possibly because he was too busy watching Carly’s every move. As a doctor concerned about what his patient’s nurse was doing? Maybe, but his expression was more inquisitive, as if he was trying to figure out what made her tick.

Good luck with that, she thought.

Actually, she was pretty dull. She worked and she took care of her mother. There wasn’t time for anything more.

Just ask her ex-boyfriend.

“I’ll be back in a little while to check on you,” Carly promised, heading out the door.

When she reached for the handle, she couldn’t resist glancing back. Her gaze collided with brilliant green.

His gaze holding hers, Stone smiled.

Something kicked in her chest.

Hard.

It might have been her heart skipping a beat or giving the strongest one in its twenty-seven-year history. Either way, she felt a little dizzy.

Carly’s lips parted, because she should say something, right? The man moved her in ways she’d forgotten she could be moved.

Or had never known she could be moved.

But nothing came out of her mouth and she scurried out of the room, before she did something crazy.

Like admit that the problem with Stone was that he made her long to explore all the emotions sparking to life inside her.

But she wasn’t free.

She needed to forget Stone.

Which was easier said than done since she saw the hospital’s prized new surgeon every day she worked and every time she closed her eyes.

* * *

Stone wasn’t wrong. He wasn’t sure why Carly had said no to going to dinner with him, but she was as interested in him as he was her.

Desire had flashed in those eyes of hers.

Desire, longing, and so much more.

Which left him in a quandary.

He’d been rejected before, didn’t have any desire to set himself up for another woman to walk away from him. But he needed to know why she’d said no when her eyes were begging him to sweep her off her feet.

* * *

“Hello,” Carly called as she walked into her quiet house. The same house she’d grown up in. The same house she’d probably live in the rest of her life. “I’m home!”

She was. The small once white, but now faded, house was home, was where her heart and lots of wonderful memories were. Memories of better times when her mother had been well, full of spunk and energy, sharp-witted and capable of doing anything she wanted.

But those days were long gone.

For once Carly had gotten off work on time so hopefully her mother would still be awake, would hopefully be clear-minded, and not in the fog her memory often got enveloped by.

Joyce, her mother’s nurse, came around the hallway corner and into the living room. “Busy day?”

Carly smiled at the sixty-something woman with gray hair she kept cut short and in loose, no-nonsense curls. A pair of thin gold-rimmed glasses sat on the bridge of her nose. She wore a Rolling Stones T-shirt with a big tongue on it and baggy, faded, rolled-up jeans that exposed slim ankles and flat white sandals.

Carly smiled. She and Joyce had an agreement the nurse wouldn’t wear a uniform. She wanted her mother to feel she had a friend, not a medical professional. Joyce appreciated not having to don scrubs any more, too, as she’d done so for almost forty years prior to “retiring”.

“They all are,” Carly said, putting her handbag on the small dining table in one corner of the room. “But that’s okay. I like to be busy.”

“Which is a good thing because goodness knows you have enough on your plate for three people.” Joyce tsked, shaking her head. “You need to slow down a little, and enjoy life before it passes you by.”

“I’m fine.” She was. Really, she was. So why did Stone’s face pop into her mind and doubt fill her heart? She. Was. Fine. “There will be time for slowing down long before I’m ready.” Which squeezed her insides and put things into proper perspective. “Speaking of which, how was Mom today?”

Joyce’s expression tightened. “Not great. Getting her to eat is a major ordeal these days.”

Carly winced. She knew from her own attempts to get her mother to eat. She seemed to have lost the will to live. “But she did eat?”

“She got her feeding tube meals, but by mouth.” Joyce shook her head. “She just doesn’t want anything.”

Carly nodded, knowing the nurse would have done all she could to get as many nutrients into Carly’s mother as possible.

“She struggled to communicate today,” Joyce continued. “Not that she tried saying much, but, when she did, understanding her was more difficult than normal. And most of the day she called me Margaret.”

Carly’s grandmother, who’d passed away years ago.

Taking a deep breath, Carly nodded again.

“But in other news,” the older woman began on a false hopeful note, “Gerald texted to say he picked up ten lottery tickets and one was sure to be a winner this time.”

Rubbing the back of her neck, massaging a knotted muscle, Carly smiled. Joyce’s husband struggled with a lifelong gambling problem. These days, he limited himself to no more than ten tickets in each week’s Powerball lotto.

“He says when he wins we’re gonna put your momma somewhere real fine and move you out of this place.”

Carly shook her head. “First off, I’d never let you do that and, second, I don’t want to move. You know this is where Momma wants to be. I’ll keep her here as long as I am physically and financially able.”

Always. She’d always keep her mother at home. She hoped and prayed.

Joyce waved her hand. “You know what I meant.”

She did. Joyce wanted to help, as did Gerald, to lighten Carly’s burden. But Carly had this. Precariously, but she was making ends meet. She’d worry about sorting out all the tangles and knots later...hopefully, much later.

“Thank you for all you do. Nothing more is needed.” She hoped it never was. “Just you taking care of Momma.”

Joyce made another loud tsking sound. “I don’t do nearly enough.”

“You’re here and that frees me to work without worrying about what kind of care Momma is getting. That’s huge.” As she thought about how different life would be without someone she trusted to care for her mother, Carly’s eyes misted. “If I don’t say thank you often enough, please know how grateful I am that I met you while doing my clinical rotation at the nursing home where you worked.”

Joyce’s eyes filled with love. “You say thank you about every other breath, and you know the feeling is mutual. Gerald and I love you and Audrey.” The woman hugged Carly in a big bear hug, gathered her belongings, and got ready to leave. “Don’t work too late into the night. You have to rest, too, you know.”

Carly nodded. She worked a side job for an insurance company going through medical claims. The more claims she processed, the better her extra pay. While sitting next to her mother’s bed, she’d work late tonight, processing as many claims as she accurately could.

“See you bright and early in the morning,” she told the woman she truly didn’t know what she’d do without.

Carly peeked in at her mother, saw she was resting, and went to the bathroom to grab a quick shower. When she’d finished and was dressed in old gray sweats and a baggy T-shirt, she checked her mother again, then went to make herself a sandwich before logging into the insurance company’s website.

Work waited. It always did.

But when she went back into her mother’s room, Audrey was awake.

“Hi, Mom. How was your day?” Some days her mother would answer. Some days her mother just stared blankly.

“S-same a-as a-always-s.” Although slurred, her mother answered, which made Carly’s heart swell. Did she know who Carly was today?

“Mine, too. Busy, busy, busy. Some of my patients are the same ones I mentioned to you last night, but I did have a couple of new ones.” Carly never gave names or identifying information, but chatted about her patients. She tried to make her stories interesting, to give her mother a link to the outside world as often as she could.

Audrey rarely left the house these days. When she did it was usually to go to a doctor’s appointment.

Before Carly knew it she was telling her mother about walking in on the new surgeon and how he’d been holding his patient’s hand, comforting her.

“I-i-is h-he h-h-handsome?”

“Gorgeous,” she admitted. “He’s also very kind and funny. The man makes me smile.”

Realizing she was going on too much about Stone, she glanced at her mother.

Her mother who was staring oddly at her. “Y-you l-like h-him?”

Oops. Not the first time today she’d been asked that.

But, unlike at the hospital, to her mother, she nodded. “He seems like a great guy.”

“Y-you sh-should g-go out with h-him.”

Her mother knew her. If she thought Carly was Margaret, she’d be scolding rather than encouraging her mother to cheat on her father.

“Mom, he’s a doctor. I’m a nurse. How cliché can you get?” She tried to keep her voice teasing and fun and similar to conversations they might have had during Carly’s teenaged and college years when Carly had dated, when she’d been wrapped up in Tony and thought he was her forever person. “Besides, Stone’s way out of my league.”

“Wh-why?”

“Because he’s such a great catch.”

“S-so a-are y-you.”

“You, my dearest mother, are the tiniest bit biased.” Carly stood, bent over and kissed her mother’s cheek. While her mother was with her, really with her, Carly wanted to milk the moment for every precious second. “Truly, he’s out of my league. Even if he wasn’t, it would never work.”

“Be-because of m-me?”

“Of course not,” Carly gasped. Never would she want her mother to think such a thing, never would she want her feeling guilt over Carly taking care of her to the exclusion of everything else. It was a privilege to take care of her mother. One Carly treasured and had never thought twice about...until Stone.

Darn him. That he made her discontent with the status quo was enough that she should dislike him.

“To-Tony,” her mother began.

Despite the slight thrill that her mother’s memory was working at the moment, Carly stopped her. “Tony was an idiot and I was lucky to be rid of him.”

She was. Any man who couldn’t understand that Carly had to take care of her mother, that her mother came first, well, he needed to hit the road. She’d needed Tony’s support; instead, he’d resented everything about Audrey.

“Tony has nothing to do with why Stone and I would never work. He and I are just not physically or economically compatible. That’s all.”

“I-if h-he th-thinks that then y-you are b-better off wi-without h-him.”

“Exactly.” Before her mother could talk more about Tony or Stone—why on earth had Carly mentioned him?—Carly launched into a tale about another patient, exaggerating to make the recounting more entertaining.

Because tonight her mother looked at her and saw her daughter. Sometimes that wasn’t the case.

Sometimes it was all Carly could do not to cry.

Sometimes she did cry.

But not tonight. Tonight she smiled and enjoyed talking to the weak woman lying in the hospital bed that took up a good portion of the bedroom.

Tonight her mother was mentally her mother.

* * *

“Any regrets?”

Having just stepped out of a patient room, Carly spun toward the sound of Stone’s voice near her ear and almost collided with him.

“About what?” she asked, stepping back because of his close proximity. He wore dark navy scrubs that made his green eyes pop.

She glanced up and down the empty hospital hallway. Although the nurses’ station was within view, no one was paying them the slightest attention.

“Not going to dinner with me last night.” His voice teased, but his eyes asked real questions.

“Not a single one.” The truth. She prized the evening she’d spent with her mother until she’d dozed off and Carly had worked on insurance claims late into the early morning hours.

Stone’s sigh was so dramatic someone should give him an award. “Pity.”

Despite knowing the best thing was to walk away, to not encourage him in any shape, form, or fashion, she couldn’t resist asking, “Why’s that?”

His gaze locked with hers, sparkled like an emerald sea. “We’d have had a good time.”

She rolled her eyes. “Spoken like a true man.”

“Meaning?”

“Men automatically think you getting to spend time with them means you’ll have a good time.” Tony had thought that. “That’s not always the case, you know.”

His grin was quick. “We should test that theory.”

Step away, Carly. Don’t get pulled in by his charm.

“By?” she asked, unable to follow her own advice, and wondering how long they could linger in the hallway prior to someone taking notice.

“Going to dinner with me tonight.”

Her gaze met his. “I’ve already told you no to going to dinner tonight.”

“That was yesterday. Today’s a new day.”

“My answer hasn’t changed.”

“It should.”

Rosalyn stepped out of a patient room, glanced toward Carly and Stone, and stopped to stare.

“That’s a matter of opinion,” Carly quipped.

Obviously, Rosalyn’s opinion ran more along the lines of Stone’s. Grinning big, she gave a thumb up.

“Your opinion is that you should deprive yourself of dinner with me?”

“Deprive myself?” Carly snorted, then shook her head at Rosalyn. “I’ll survive just fine if we never go to dinner.”

Turning, Stone shot a grin at Rosalyn, who smiled back, then headed toward the nurses’ station.

“You won’t know what you’re missing.”

Shifting her weight, Carly squinted at him. “Is that supposed to bother me?”

His eyes flashed somewhere between serious and teasing. “It should.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s something between you and I.”

Her breath caught. She felt it. He felt it. Thoughts of her mother were all that kept her from throwing herself at the mercy of whatever he wanted. She had no time for a relationship, no energy for a relationship. Everything she had, and more, was already claimed.

“You’re wrong.” She smiled tightly. “There’s nothing I want from you.”

“Why don’t I believe you?”

Because I’m a horrible liar and usually pride myself on being a person who tells the truth, but with you...

She didn’t want his pity. Or his rejection if he felt the same as Tony had.

“I don’t know,” she replied, not meeting his eyes. “Why don’t you?”

“Because you’re not telling the truth.”

She hadn’t expected him to call her bluff, and her gaze shot to his. “How dare you say such a thing?”

“Because it’s true.”

She lifted her chin in indignation, partly feigned, partly real, at his arrogance. “So your word gets taken as the truth, but not mine?”

“In this case, yes.”

“What an ego you have, Dr. Parker.”

“Stating facts doesn’t make me egotistical.”

Carly put her hands on her hips and glared at him with the sternest look she could muster. Not an easy thing to do when he was grinning at her with his brilliant smile and twinkling eyes.

“Is there a point to this conversation?”

“Just enjoying your company.” His tone was teasing, but the glint in his eyes said he told the truth.

If she were honest, she’d admit she was enjoying his company, too. Which was ridiculous considering what their actual words were. Was she really that desperate for any scrap of his attention?

“I’ve work to do.” She glanced down the hallway and caught Rosalyn and a nurse’s aide watching them.

“Am I interfering with your work, Carly?”

“Yes.” Carly’s head hurt. Or maybe it was her heart.

“How so?”

“You’re distracting me.”

His eyes danced. “You’re admitting you find me distracting? Finally, we’re getting somewhere.”

She bit the inside of her lower lip, then shook her head. “Dr. Parker, I shouldn’t be having lengthy personal conversations while on the clock.”

“Which is why you should go to dinner with me tonight. We could have lengthy personal conversations to our hearts’ content.”

She wanted to. She wanted to say yes, go to dinner with him, and stare into his eyes all evening. Longer.

But, even if she could, how unfair would that be to him? Very. To lead him, or anyone, on was wrong.

She should tell him, should apologize for smiling when he sat with her at break, for laughing at his corny jokes, for looking at him and longing for things outside her grasp.

But she couldn’t find the words, so she hurried away, dodging into a patient room to avoid both the man she could feel watching her and her two co-workers anxiously waiting to question her.

She didn’t think of herself as a woman who ran from her problems. But, at the moment, running from temptation, and the questioning thereof, seemed the best course of action.

CHAPTER THREE

“CAN I HELP you with that?”

Carly peeped at Stone from over the top of the box she carried through the hospital corridor. He’d changed out of his navy scrubs into his own clothes, black trousers and a green polo shirt that perfectly matched the color of his eyes. She fought sighing in appreciation. The man should be in movies, not a hospital operating room.

“I’ve got it,” she assured him. “Thanks anyway.”

Ignore him and maybe he’ll go away. Not likely, but maybe.

“That box is bigger than you are.”