Her Doctor's Orders

Her Doctor’s Orders

By

Emily Tilton

Copyright © 2014 by Stormy Night Publications and Emily Tilton

Copyright © 2014 by Stormy Night Publications and Emily Tilton

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Published by Stormy Night Publications and Design, LLC.

www.StormyNightPublications.com

Tilton, Emily

Her Doctor’s Orders

Cover Design by Korey Mae Johnson

Image by Jimmy Thomas at RomanceNovelCovers.com

This book is intended for
adults only
. Spanking and other sexual activities represented in this book are fantasies only, intended for adults.

Prologue

“I’m headed out,” Lori called up the stairs.

“Okay,” Kendra called back. She hesitated a moment, then added, “Have a good time.”
But not too good, please. Please.

Kendra closed her eyes there at her little desk in the little bedroom she would soon leave behind, and sent a prayer winging upward:
Help Mom stop drinking. Please. Especially now that I’m going to college.

Kendra returned to packing, trying to turn her thoughts away from worrying about her mother, toward the excitement she had been feeling before Lori left. California: if Kendra could think about California, and all the amazing things that would happen there, she would be able to forget to worry.

She looked at her bookshelf, trying to choose a few of her books to take, because she obviously couldn’t take all of them. She chose her favorite fantasy novel, and her worn copy of
The Scarlet Letter
. She smiled, remembering how she had been the only student in her tenth grade English class to defend the book against the charge of being the most boring, most pointless book in the history of boring, pointless school reading.

Kendra turned to her dresser, looking at her track trophies, knowing she couldn’t take them but wishing she could take something to make her think she could do this—could overcome obstacles, jump hurdles the way she had on the track team. She pulled open her desk drawer, and saw the journal she had maintained faithfully when she was in middle school. She picked it up and started to read, smiling at the memories of the time before things had started to go wrong. She curled up on her bed—just for a minute, she told herself.

She awoke to the sound of the telephone in the middle of the night, ringing and ringing.

“Kendra Jackson?” asked an official-sounding voice.

“Yes?” Kendra said, the dread already seeming to choke her. Lori wasn’t home, she had realized as she had stumbled toward the phone, and this call could only be bad news—very bad news.

“Your mom’s been in an accident. You need to come to County Hospital as soon as possible. Please drive carefully.”

“Is she okay?”

“She’s been seriously injured. Please try to get here as soon as you can.”

Frantic with worry, Kendra drove the empty roads to the hospital. At the emergency room, the receptionist directed her back into the unit, and the desk nurse pointed to a room down the hall.

There was a policeman outside the door of the room. Kendra closed her eyes and felt herself starting to cry. At that moment a nurse emerged from the room and saw her. “Kendra Jackson?” she asked.

Kendra nodded, her lips set in a tight line, trying to stop her tears from flowing.

“Your mother is going to be okay,” the nurse said, clearly cutting her words off before saying something much worse, that Kendra would have to hear very soon.

“Thank you,” Kendra whispered. She glanced at the policeman, a state trooper, standing outside the door impassively, then turned her eyes back to the nurse.

“She hit a car carrying a family of four.”

“Oh, my God… Are they…? Did she…?”

“The mom and dad are stable, but… we’re very worried about the two girls. They’re in the ICU.”

“Oh, no,” Kendra sobbed. “No… this can’t…”

“Your mom has a broken collarbone, and she has a severe case of alcohol poisoning. She’s not conscious right now, but she should wake up by morning.”

Kendra closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She nodded.

“Why don’t you go in and sit with her? Dr. Hunter will be in a little while to talk to you, and…”

“The police,” Kendra finished, hearing in her voice all the despair she felt. The nurse nodded, looking sympathetic for the first time.

Kendra opened the door without looking at the policeman at all, and entered the room. Lori lay on the hospital bed with an IV in her arm, looking infuriatingly unhurt. The only sign of her broken collarbone was a very small sling around Lori’s left shoulder. She even seemed to be sleeping peacefully.

“Oh, Mom!” Kendra sobbed. She sat down in the chair next to the hospital bed, and buried her face in her hands.

It had been Kendra and her mom since before Kendra could even remember. Lori never talked about Kendra’s dad; Kendra found that she sometimes even had trouble remembering his name, so infrequently did he come up in conversation. Lori’s parents had kicked her out of the house when she had gotten pregnant with Kendra, and Lori had simply gotten on the bus and headed west, and finally found a job working at a diner in Tucumcari, New Mexico. There Kendra had been born, and there she had grown up. Lori had prospered, at least by the standards of girls who had been thrown out and fetched up in diners: Lori worked in a big chain clothing store now and had lots of friends, and after Kendra had gotten to an age where she could be left home alone for a few hours, Lori had boyfriends, too, though she had firmly maintained a rule against bringing those boyfriends home.

Until Tom. Tom had been really wonderful, and it had looked really great for about six months. Kendra, aged thirteen then, loved him, and asked him all kinds of questions about boys, all of which Tom had answered in a patient, caring way.

Sitting there in the hospital room, Kendra remembered sitting with Tom at the kitchen table one night after dinner, with the dishes washed and put away, and Lori off somewhere, perhaps talking to a work-friend for a few minutes.

“So,” Tom said, “who’s your boyfriend these days, Shotgun?” He had begun calling her ‘Shotgun’ ever since she had gone with him to the hardware store to get some lumber he had used to build a deck for Lori and Kendra’s tiny house.

“Tom!” Kendra said, laughing. “I don’t have one!”

“Like anybody?”

“Well, there’s this guy in my English class…” she started.

“Oh, that guy,” Tom said with that broad smile that meant that even if he gave you the hardest time in the world, it was all always in good fun. “He’s no good for you.”

“That’s what I think,” Kendra said. “But he really likes Melville.” She knew that would get Tom going, because he loved literature and stuff like that.

“Marry him!” Tom said.

Then Kendra had asked about whether the things that boy (a shy boy named Leo who ended up being Kendra’s boyfriend until he moved away) did when he was around her meant that he liked her, and Tom had said he thought yes, and that had settled the matter.

“Shotgun, you probably won’t marry him. Still—go for it, okay?”

But Tom was in the National Guard, and Tom died in Iraq. Now Kendra felt those memories flooding in, as if to balance the sweet ones: the day the men in uniform had come to the house, before Lori went to work; the uncontrollable scream she had let out and the way she had collapsed in her doorway.

“Mom? Mom? It’s going…” Kendra was going to say, “It’s going to be okay,” but she knew at that moment that it would never be okay.

“Oh, God,” Lori sobbed. “Oh, God. Tom… why?”

The men in uniform had stood there, awkwardly but kindly, until Kendra said that she would take care of Lori.

“I’m here, Mom,” she said. “I’m here.” She tried not to emphasize the ‘I’ too much, but she began to feel that she wanted to emphasize it—to say that
she
, Kendra, Lori’s daughter was still alive, and still needed her mother.

To love Tom that much meant that Lori fell apart when she lost him. It made Kendra think hard about what happened when you loved someone and the way it opened you to getting hurt the way Lori had been hurt—no, not hurt, shattered—when Tom died.

The drinking had started in earnest after Tom’s funeral, and it hadn’t stopped in the five years after that. Kendra had watched her mother go from a fun person who was serious about getting ahead and making a future for Kendra to an unpredictable person who was serious about having fun, as Lori defined it. More and more, fun involved drinking herself into oblivion and pouring herself into bed so she (Kendra thought) wouldn’t think about Tom.

When the time came to fill out the college applications, and there was a place to put what Kendra thought she would major in, Kendra had written, without hesitation, psychology. The consuming intellectual interest of her life had become figuring out how to get Lori over Tom, and away from gin.

There was a knock, and the door opened. A doctor entered and came toward her, his hand outstretched. Kendra could only see his white coat, distracted by her own reverie of grief.

“Kendra?” said the doctor’s soft, kind voice. “I’m Dr. Hunter.”

That startled Kendra, because the doctor loomed over her, and she would have thought he must have a very deep, loud, even angry voice. Or maybe that was because she wanted someone to be angry with her, with her mom.
I let her go out. Night after night I let my mother go out, knowing that eventually people would die, and hoping that if anyone died, she at least wouldn’t kill anyone else.

As she shook his hand, she asked, “Are the girls… the ones in the other car… do you know?” She finally looked up into his face, registering somewhere deep in her mind that Dr. Hunter had a chiseled jaw and dark blue eyes of a shade she had never seen before. The face was kind, and it smiled reassuringly.

“Things are looking up for them, thank God,” Dr. Hunter said.

“Oh, thank God,” Kendra breathed.

Dr. Hunter got a chair from a corner of the room, wheeled it over, and sat on it.

“The nurse told you that your mom’s going to be okay?”

“Yes,” Kendra said. Then she couldn’t help herself; she said, “But…” She stopped there, realizing that if she had continued she probably would have said, “…if I could sacrifice her health to save those girls, I would, and I hope she would too.”

Kendra turned her face away and down, so she wouldn’t have to look at him. She felt a sob rising in her throat, and she tried to suppress it, not wanting to show this doctor the conflict that seemed to be tearing her apart, between her love for her mother and the terrible wish that things were different. She wiped the tears away from her eyes fiercely, before they could drop onto her cheeks, and she swallowed hard.

“Hey,” Dr. Hunter said, “don’t worry. I know how terrible a time this is for you.”

“Oh, God…” Kendra said. “I just… I let her… I mean, I didn’t stop her…” She started to sob.

To her astonishment, Dr. Hunter put his arms around her. “Shh,” he said. “It’s going to be okay.”

“How is it going to be okay?” Kendra said. “I was supposed to go to college tomorrow, and now my mom is going to jail, and those little girls…” She let out a wracking sob.

“It just is,” said Dr. Hunter, gently. “It just is.”

Part of Kendra’s mind thought,
what a stupid thing to say
, but another part thought,
why have I never thought of it that way?

Chapter One

Levi Hunter sat at his kitchen table watching the news and eating Chinese takeout. A psychologist’s hours were better than an ER doc’s—definitely. It was just taking a while for Levi to internalize the difference, after finishing the psych residency with the rigors any residency brings. His reason for staying at his new office until nine, on the face of it, was that he had three articles to read, but he had a nice little office in his house, perfect for reading—
a
nd the kitchen table was a better, homier place to read than his office, if he were being honest. But he had sat in that office reading, until nine, at which point takeout—for the third night running—would be the only option.

At least he could come home to his comfortable, if small, house and watch the news.

He had finished his first dumpling when he realized the story about a spectacular crash just an hour before on Main Street concerned a young woman he recognized.