Mills & Boon Showcase

He didn’t sleep. He lay there tortured by the naked reminder of what they had done and tried to figure out where they would go from there. He stared at the night’s lights through his bedroom window and played the arguments in his head over and over again. They had passed the point of no return, and the impossible task of saying goodbye to her had just gotten infinitely harder. It had been a night of firsts for both of them. Kate had lost her virginity and he had actually felt like they had made love, unlike his previous physical encounters. With the added emotion he had become out of control with desire and need. He couldn’t think straight. Not with Katie naked, pressed against him. Not while he was hard and using all his energy just to resist waking her up to make love to her all over again.

When morning had come, he awoke to find Katie facing him, her eyes watching him intently. “I’m not going to Boston.” She had been definitive in her statement and Matt felt the ramifications of their night together growing beyond what he had lain awake imagining.

“Of course you are. I’m going to New York and you are going to Boston, Katie. You know that.” He tried to keep the panic from his voice and match her decisiveness.

“I don’t want to go to Boston, Matt. Not without you.” The situation was spiraling out of control. Did she know what she was saying? Medical school, her scholarship, everything she had worked for, she was going to give that up? For him? No way in hell was he going to let that happen. He had spent his life not being able to have his own dreams or plans and he would be damned if Katie was going to give up hers. He got out of the bed and grabbed the nearest pair of jeans on the bedroom floor, wincing slightly as the denim covered his body’s response to her nakedness.

In a single moment he knew what he needed to do and didn’t stop to think before the words came from his mouth. “Katie, last night was a mistake.” She recoiled and he could tell that he had hurt her, but if that was what it took to keep her from throwing her life away then so be it.

“I don’t believe you.” He could tell that she was trying to be brave with her tone and eye contact, but he also saw that she was now clutching the sheet in her fist as she clung to it. She was still so innocent and he wasn’t going to let his family take that from her.

“I told you last night that I was sorry it happened.” Even he wasn’t sure at that moment whether he was telling the truth or not. Would he trade last night not to hurt her this morning? The only thing he did know was that he would not let her sacrifice her dreams for him.

“And I told you last night that I love you. And I think you love me too.”

She was so brave and so beautiful, and at that moment he knew that he did love her, was in love with her, and loved her enough to do the right thing and let her go, by whatever means necessary.

“Katie, you don’t love me. You just think you love me because of last night, because of it being your first time.”

“Don’t tell me what I think or how I feel, Matt. I loved you before last night, during last night, and even now.”

“Katie, I’m sorry. I don’t love you.” And he turned and left the room, but not before he saw the look of pain strike as his words hit her. When he entered the living room, reminders of the previous night were all around. The half-eaten pizza, the couch cushions on the floor, their clothes haphazardly scattered across the room. He had to leave. He couldn’t face any reminders of what they had shared, reminders that might make him weaken and change his mind, go back to her, tell her he loved her, let her sacrifice herself to be with him. He picked up his shirt, grabbed his keys and left without looking back. When he returned hours later the apartment was empty and Katie was gone.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A SLEEPLESS NIGHT turned into a painful morning as Matt arrived at his office. For the first time in his life he had arrived after eight and already regretted the time spent in self-recrimination over a past that he could not change. He walked through the waiting room on a direct route to his office and saw Tate stand and walk towards him.

“We need to talk,” Tate said bluntly. He was looking him directly in the eye and was obviously not going to back down or be dissuaded.

“Not here,” Matt replied, aware that there was potential for this conversation to end in the two men coming to blows, and wanting to keep that event out of the office. “I need a cup of coffee.”

The two men walked out in silence and remained that way for the ten minutes it took them to reach a local coffee shop. They each ordered and sat down at a table, sizing up each other. Tate was not backing down in his gaze or the hard line of his jaw.

“Are you here to tell me to stay away from Kate?” Matt asked bluntly, challenging the man sitting opposite him.

“No. Kate is a grown woman who is capable of making her own decisions,” Tate answered calmly. The man was confident, but Matt would be too if he had just come from Kate’s bed.

“Apparently,” he replied sarcastically. “So what do we need to talk about, then?”

“Whether you are the best person to be representing us,” Tate answered in the same calm tone, unfazed by Matt’s barb.

“I’m the best,” Matt stated definitively. Through the long hours of last night he had questioned that very issue, wondering if he could stand being with Kate and the man who had taken his place throughout the duration of the case. In the end he’d decided to stay on the case because he still wanted the best for her, and he was still the best.

“I don’t doubt that. My problem is that your former relationship with Kate and the unresolved issues between you are not compatible with working well together. You also probably do not have my best interests at the top of your list of priorities either.” Tate was faintly smiling at his last comment.

“So you want me to resign from the case?” Matt asked, feeling no patience for whatever game the other man was playing.

“That was my first instinct. Then I realized that your resignation would lead to a lot of questions. The last thing I want is for anyone else to know about you and Kate.” Any trace of a smile was gone and Matt saw anger in his eyes for the first time since his initial disclosure of their past together.

“Why is that? You don’t like the comparison?” Matt knew he shouldn’t be pushing, but he couldn’t help himself, his burning resentment overtaking his well-practiced interview skills.

“What I don’t want is the hospital administration rumor mill circulating the exploits of Dr. Spence’s sex life. She’ll be portrayed as something we both know she’s not.”

Matt hated Tate at that moment, hated and respected him for putting Kate first. It was sickening to think that she might have replaced him with a man who was better and more worthy of her than him.

“So what do you want?” Matt finally responded.

“I want you to do your job. I want the lawsuit against us dropped so that we all can move on with our lives.”

“And Kate?”

“I’ve said what I came here today to say. You can figure out the rest.” Then he walked out, leaving Matt at the table.

How many casualties did an event have to involve before it was considered to be a mass trauma? Kate wondered. She was sitting in the café near her brownstone, studying for the board exam, and unfortunately drawing parallels between the state of her life and emergency states. Factor A, the man who had broken her heart. Factor B, a lawsuit threatening her career. Factor C, the risk of failing the board exam due to stress from the aforementioned factors A and B. For the first time in years she was distracted; the words she read fleeing her mind as soon as she read them.

She felt overwhelmed. This was not a new state for her as she was constantly overwhelmed by the physical and emotional strain of her job. But now, for the first time, she felt guilt towards Matt, and the mere presence of the new emotion was enough to push her past her tipping point. It was a struggle, feeling anger towards him and his nerve at coming back into her life as if he belonged there and on the other hand feeling guilt for misleading him about the status of her relationship with Tate. She didn’t want to be the bad guy; she didn’t want to be anything. She wanted to let go of her relationship with Matt; she just didn’t know how to do that.

As if on cue, she lifted her eyes away from her textbook for the hundredth time that afternoon, but this time they fell on Matt. He was walking towards her in jeans and a black polo shirt, which made him look younger than his expensive tailored suits did. The effect was still the same, though, and she watched as several female heads turned and admired everything he had to offer. It was odd that she never stopped being taken in by his pure physical beauty. It wasn’t just his tall stature, powerful build, or the face whose features aligned perfectly, from his deep blue eyes to the perfect faint pink lips that sat between the masculine jaw and nose. It was him, his presence, the effortlessness he exuded.

This was not a made-up appearance, this was who he was—a man like no other. She couldn’t look away, even when parts of her reacted treacherously, still apparently remembering the feel of and taste of him from nights earlier.

Aside from unwanted attraction, she couldn’t move past the astonishment of watching Matt walk up to her table and take a seat opposite her, so much like years past that it hurt, and she swallowed the pain she felt rising within her. She waited, speechless, to hear what was going to come next. What else did they have to say to each other? How much more pain could they cause each other?

“Ask me how I found you?” It was more of a challenge than a question. He was resting on his forearms on the table, his body leaning forward, his entire focus on her.

“I don’t know,” she replied honestly, confused with where the conversation was going.

He reached over and pushed a lock of hair behind her ear, twirling it in his fingers before he uncovered her face. “Because, Kate, I know you.”

“No, you don’t.” She lacked his conviction. His single touch had been less physically intimate than most of their contact since his return, but emotionally it tore at her resolve. He seemed to believe every word he was saying, but she still felt the need to contradict him, to protect herself from the temptation of him.

“Yes, Kate, I do. I appreciate and respect everything that you have accomplished, but that doesn’t change who you are.”

“Who am I, Matt?” She couldn’t resist the question. It was a question that had plagued her for years. Who was she in his eyes?

“You’re mine.” His eyes flashed with the same possession his words held. She should have been offended, she should have been afraid, but what she felt was want.

“No.” The word escaped her lips, but in truth it was more a reminder to herself of what she could not have.

“Yes, you are, Kate, you always have been. You and I both know that.”

She had been his. She couldn’t deny that she had been one hundred percent in her feelings towards him, so much so that the memory of their coming together still brought with it as much a memory of completeness as it did emotional pain. She had also never given him up, not completely, not enough to move on and fall in love with someone else. Enough was enough, though. She wasn’t going to let him keep playing whatever game he was playing.

“What do you want, Matt?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I want you.”

“It’s too late, Matt, you can’t have me.” Nothing changed in his demeanor, except that he appeared even more focused and more all-encompassing. He had heard her, but obviously didn’t believe her.

“I already have you, Kate, and this time I have no intention of walking away. The sooner you accept that, the sooner we’ll all be better off.”

Then, without warning, he stood over the table, leaned down and pressed his lips to her forehead. This time he lingered. She could smell his cologne, breathed in his scent, and felt that heat of his body, before he pulled away. Then, just as he had joined her, he turned and left.

Shock seeped through her from her forehead, which he had kissed so sweetly, to all the muscles inside her that contracted at his touch. Several parts of their conversation competed for attention in her mind. Had he remembered the night she had cried about her mother and he had kissed her on the forehead after carrying her to bed, the night she had realized she was in love with him?

Then there were his words, not just the words but the way he had said them. He had left no room for doubt that he had meant everything he had said. But would she know if he hadn’t? She had spent her career learning to trust herself and her instincts, but with Matt she couldn’t trust herself, her feelings, or him. All the words, declarations, and touches couldn’t change the words that had been carved into her soul. “Katie, I’m sorry. I don’t love you.”

The offensive wail of her pager broke through her thoughts and provided temporary respite. She dialed the hospital operator and was patched through to the emergency department. Within a minute she was gone from the shop, her focus back where it needed to be and the past left behind.

CHAPTER EIGHT

SHE REACHED THE hospital within fifteen minutes and was in the trauma room gowned and shielded before the ambulance arrived. Chloe was standing next to her, both women waiting. This time their entire interaction was succinct and directed towards patient care.

The ambulance attendants rolled a gurney into the trauma room and the patient was transferred to the hospital bed. The young man appeared to be in his early twenties and was strapped to a backboard with full C-spine precautions. Chloe took the head of the bed and assessed his airway and level of consciousness while he was hooked up to monitors, and Kate and the trauma-team nurses completed a full body survey, assessing for areas of maximal trauma and prioritizing injuries for care.

“His airway is compromised and GCS is six—we need to intubate,” Kate heard Chloe order. And for a window of ninety seconds the team stood back while Chloe intubated the young man. After the endotracheal tube was in place, she and Kate auscultated the lung fields. She didn’t hear any breath sounds on the right, and Chloe confirmed the finding.

“Set up for a chest tube,” Kate called. A sterile tray of instruments was opened and after quickly prepping the skin and changing into sterile gloves, she made a stab incision above one of the man’s ribs and inserted the hard plastic tube until she felt a loss of resistance and heard the trapped air escaping, allowing the man’s lung to reinflate.

“Breath sounds on the right established. Good job, Kate,” Chloe said.

Once the patient’s airway, breathing and circulation had been stabilized, Kate continued. “Details,” she called to the paramedic team, who remained in the room.

“Unknown male, traveling by bicycle when he was hit at moderate speed by a mid-sized SUV. The patient was found several yards from his bicycle, with his helmet still in place but cracked in multiple locations.”

“Has he been conscious since your team arrived?”

“No.”

“Chloe, once you’re happy he’s stable for movement, we need to move for a full-body CT. I need to know what to worry about first, blood in his brain or blood in his chest and belly.”

“He should be stable enough in five minutes. He needs more volume so that he can maintain his pressure and make up for any ongoing losses prior to going to the operating room.”

“Okay. I’m going to call the OR now and have them set up. Have the team page me once his scans are done so I can review them immediately with the in-house radiologist.”

“Will do.”

“Thanks.”

Four hours later, Kate was finally leaving the intensive care unit, where she had just dropped off her patient direct from the operating room. She was still strapped to her pager as the trauma team leader for the week, but now had a momentary reprieve. The cyclist’s helmet had saved his life. His brain had fared okay in the collision.

Unfortunately, the same could not have been said for his spleen, which had suffered a massive laceration after he had hit the curb. The young man had needed an emergency laparotomy and splenectomy, along with several units of blood and blood products, but was going to recover.

Kate walked back to the emergency department to find Chloe finishing up the paperwork from a shift that should have ended an hour and a half earlier. Kate hadn’t bothered to change out of her scrubs and the clogs she’d worn in the operating room and felt exhausted from the fast pace and physical demands of the procedure. Chloe looked like she felt the same, appearing pale in contrast to her bright red hair and the dark blue of the hospital scrubs the emergency doctors also wore. Kate slumped into the chair beside her friend, losing her normal good posture.

“He’s okay. It was a spleen trauma, but it’s out and he’s stable in the intensive care unit,” Kate reported, knowing Chloe’s desire to follow all of her patients.

“Thanks for coming back and letting me know.”

Chloe stood from her chair and wavered before reaching down to the desk for support.

“Are you okay, Chloe?” Kate asked.

“Yeah, just tired, stressed, busy, the usual. I think I might have some low-grade virus or something that has pushed me over the edge.”

“Is there anything I can do?” Kate asked, concerned that for the first time her perfectly put-together friend was actually admitting to struggling. Chloe had always made everything seem effortless, which made Kate worry that she was feeling a lot worse than she was admitting.

“Don’t you think you have enough on your plate?” Chloe asked, one eyebrow arching upwards, in a friendly, teasing tone.

“More than I ever wanted, but I’m sorting through it the best I can.” She stared at Chloe, knowing what she should say but fighting a lifelong instinct to keep things inside. “I know that you’re tired, but I was wondering if I could drive you home and maybe we could talk a bit.”

Chloe stopped all the other tasks she was trying to finish and looked Kate in the eye. “That would be more than okay. Give me ten minutes to hand over my patients and I’ll meet you by the parkade elevators.”

True to her word, Chloe met her and they managed their escape without further interruption. “Are you hungry?” Kate asked, realizing she had missed lunch and supper while dealing with the trauma.

“A little bit. Do you have anything at your house?”

“No. Do you?”

“No. Eating out, it is.”

Creatures of habit, Kate and Chloe tucked themselves into the back of the small Italian restaurant where the staff knew them by name. Kate waited to order and for their drinks to arrive before she drew in a breath and took the plunge. “Matt wants me.”

Chloe didn’t appear surprised. “What does that mean exactly?”

“I have no idea. At first it seemed purely physical and I thought you were right about it stemming from jealousy over Tate, and I told him that I wanted nothing more than a lawyer-client relationship. Then he told Tate about our past and we had a huge fight, which didn’t seem to deter him at all because he showed up again today.”

“And?”

“He said I was his and that I always have been and I always would be.” She shivered, saying his words aloud having no less impact than hearing them from him hours earlier.

“Is he right?”

“I don’t know. I don’t understand what happened between us all those years ago and I don’t understand what’s happening now.”

“So stop trying to think through and understand everything. How do you feel, Kate?”

“Terrified.”

“What are you terrified of?”

“Of trusting him. Of making the same mistakes, getting hurt and losing myself all over again.”

“Okay, that’s a start. If you could trust him and weren’t going to get hurt, would you want to be with him?”

“Yes.”

“Are you still in love with him?”

“Yes.” She was surprised at how quickly the words left her, but knew in the instant she heard her own answer that it was the truth.

“Can you talk me through what happened last time?”

“He was my everything. We met in my third year of undergraduate studies at Brown and became friends. He still had a long-distance girlfriend back in New York. During our friendship I fell in love with him, but never told him or acted on my feelings. After graduation he was going to law school in New York and I had a full scholarship to medical school in Boston.”

“So what changed things?”

“Our last night together was unbearable. It was the end: he was going to go on with his life and me with mine. I spent the evening torn between telling him I loved him and just saying goodbye. Then before I said anything he kissed me.”

“And?”

“And I thought we made love.”

“I’m confused.”

“We had sex. I told him I loved him and fell asleep in his arms happier than I had ever been in my entire life. The next morning I knew I couldn’t say goodbye and I told him I wasn’t going to.”

“And?”

“He said he didn’t love me and it had been a mistake. Then he went back to New York to be with his girlfriend and I never heard from him again.”

“Oh, my God, Kate, I’m so sorry. I can’t even imagine how devastating that must have been.”

“What’s worse is that I didn’t believe him at first. After he left I waited for him to come back to apologize, to tell me the truth, that he loved me and things were going to be okay. But he never came back. I sat in his apartment for hours, waiting, hoping, and he never came back. Even after I left his apartment, I still thought he just needed time, that there was no way he could touch and hold me the way he had and not be in love with me too.”

“So what did you do?”

“I held on as long as I could. I gave up my scholarship to Boston and managed to secure a place at Columbia in New York. I begged my father to take a second mortgage on our house to cover the lost scholarship and I left messages for Matt to tell him I was in New York when he was ready to talk.”

“He never tried to contact you?”

“No, he never looked back. I believed in him so much that I lost all faith in myself.”

The waitress arrived with their order and Kate was grateful for the interruption. As cathartic as it felt to finally talk about what had happened, it also brought to the surface how she had felt.

Both women were silent as they began to eat. Kate’s mind kept telling herself the story. Matt’s abandonment had left her with a small seed of self-doubt that had germinated over months of loneliness. She hadn’t been able to resist following the coverage of his life in the society pages, and seeing him with other women had intensified her loneliness.

It had been a cold, windy day in November when she’d seen him again, walking across campus. She hadn’t seen him in five months but had recognized him instantly in the crowd. She’d called his name and he’d turned to look and then kept walking. She’d convinced herself that he hadn’t seen her. The second time she’d seen him she’d called his name more loudly and he’d moved his head slightly in her direction but hadn’t turned around.

The final rejection had come in March. She had been sitting in a local coffee shop, studying, determined to make the dean’s honor list so she would qualify for a scholarship the following year. She had been deep in thought when she’d had a sense that she hadn’t felt in almost a year. She’d looked up and seen Matt, the same old Matt, in jeans and a cream sweater, with his brown leather tote bag slung across one shoulder. She’d seen him as he’d been looking at her and turning away.

That time she hadn’t been able to say anything, she hadn’t called out his name or even moved from her seat. She’d watched in horror as he’d walked away from her and out of the shop. In an instant all her fears had been confirmed. She had no longer been able to deny that he knew she was in New York and he’d wanted nothing to do with her.