Outside The Lines (2 page)

“I’m not being stubborn!” A fresh coating of pain scraped her sensitive skin as she winced at the lie, but she dug her boots into the kitchen tiles anyway. “I’m—”

“Going to the emergency room. I know a second-degree burn when I see one, and those blisters are already the color of bricks. So stop arguing and get in the car.”

CHAPTER TWO

Dr. Blake Fisher
tore the blood-tinged trauma gown away from his scrubs, meticulously depositing it in the bright red biohazard bin by the door before following suit with his gloves. Strains of the rapid-fire back and forth between the on-call trauma surgeon and an OR nurse receded down the hall in steady, insistent tones as the two wheeled away his last patient for the shift. Car accidents could bring some brutal trauma to the emergency department, and today’s was no different. But it was Blake’s job to look past the emotion of the moment, to calmly and critically evaluate the situation and find the fastest path to fixing the problem.

Not exact
ly easy when you were up close and personal with someone’s femur.

“Hey, Dr. Fisher.”
A blond nurse in dark blue scrubs stuck her head past the double-wide glass doors to Trauma Four. “There’s one more patient on the board. We triaged her just before shift change, but if you want, I can try to find Dr. Cross instead.”

Her sympathetic gaze slid
over him from his fatigue to his five o’clock shadow, and Blake knew it would be all too easy to use his just-expired double shift as an excuse to bow out. But the chart in her hand was attached to a living, breathing person, a person he could assess and take care of.

And anyhow, n
o way was he going to give Garrett Cross yet another reason to bust his ass. Blake had been paying his new-guy dues ever since he’d landed back in Brentsville six months ago. Okay, so he hadn’t lived here for the better part of a decade, and he had zero seniority at this hospital. And sure, his last name coupled with his Ivy League degree didn’t exactly make great friendship fodder among competitive MDs. But he was still a damn good doctor.

Even if he had to prove it, one double shift at a time
.

Blake
looped his stethoscope under the seen-better-days lapels of his doctor’s coat and tipped his chin at the chart. “What’ve we got?”

“
Twenty-nine-year-old female with a second-degree burn to the forearm from a hot baking sheet. Partial thickness, but blistering is moderate. Vitals are stable.” The nurse rattled them off anyway as Blake took the chart and kicked his New Balance into motion over the linoleum. “She’s had compresses on it for about twenty minutes, but we need a doc to take a look and okay pain meds before we clean it up. I know you’re technically off-shift, but…”

“It’s not a problem, Mia
. I’m happy to take a look.” It sounded pretty straightforward, actually. He could end his shift with a lot worse. “A burn like that’s got to hurt. Let’s get this lady taken care of.”

“Thanks, Dr. Fisher.
” The nurse was already a blur as she moved in the opposite direction toward the triage desk. “She’s in curtain three.”

Blake gathered up a tired breath
and tugged a hand through his hair, even though he’d given up on appearances about ten hours ago. Or maybe that had been ten weeks, because really, this might be the first twenty-nine-year-old woman he’d laid eyes on in…how long?

But
come on. Between diving headfirst into a new ER and dealing with all the reasons he’d left New York City in the first place, he’d barely had time to unpack, let alone think about a member of the opposite sex.

Except now…he
was
thinking about it. How long had it been since he’d had sheet-ripping, toe-curling, stay-up-all-night-just-to-do-it-again-in-the-morning sex with someone? Someone he wanted to be with not just below the belt, but above the neck, too?

Eight years, buddy. It’s been eight. Long. Years.

“Okay. Second-degree burn,” Blake murmured, wrenching his thoughts back to reality. He might not have had a relationship with anyone in…well, a while, but he hadn’t lived like a monk in New York, either. He’d dated a handful of women, and slept with a handful more. There were just more important things on his plate right now. His personal life— okay,
lack
of a personal life— would have to wait.

And his thoughts of eight y
ears ago would have to go back in the vault.

Blake
propped the electronic chart over his forearm, clicking it to life as he snuffed out any thoughts that didn’t involve the upper layer of his next patient’s epidermis. Her health history looked good, and the injury sounded textbook, albeit painful, so this really should be a slam dunk.

“Hello?
Miss…” He pulled back the curtain, dropping his eyes to the top of the chart to locate the woman’s name. But a flash of copper-colored curls yanked his vision to the center of the room, a scissor-sharp burst of
I’m not really seeing this
freight-training through his chest. Tiny fragments trickled past his shock— the woman sitting beside his patient, wearing the concerned look of a friend, the overly-faded jeans hugging a pair of legs that were just as long as he remembered, the tiny silver pendant resting in the hollow of the woman’s throat— but none of it fit in the present tense.

“Julianna?” Christ, he’d been so focused on the medical facts, he’d missed the name on the chart, right there in the first damned box. “What are you doing here?”

Maybe he was mistaken, his eyes playing tricks on him in the face of exhaustion. The woman’s mouth, which Blake just realized was parted in a soft, red O of surprise, snapped shut as she unfolded her spine into a tough, indignant line, and nope. He took it back.

It was
definitely Jules.

“
I could ask you the same thing,” she said, her throaty voice hitting him in the solar plexus as she pulled back against the mattress. “I thought you were gone. In the city.” Her aged-whiskey eyes were still wide with shock, but they flickered with a layer of tenacity that warned she was recalibrating, fast.

For once
, he was going to beat her to the punch. “I was. Work brought me here,” he said, modulating his words with a casual coolness despite the absolute ruckus going on beneath his sternum. Okay, so it had crossed his mind for a fleeting second when he’d first come back to Brentsville that she might still be around, but the city wasn’t exactly a map dot. Even on the off-chance she’d stayed, Blake certainly never thought he’d see her again.

And yet here she sat, just as
tough and brash and beautiful as ever.

“Funny. Work brought me here, too.”
Jules winced ever so slightly at the compress-swaddled arm the nurses had elevated over a stack of pillows at her side. “But it’s no big deal. It doesn’t even hurt anymore. You probably don’t need to look.”

Blake’s gut bottomed out somewhere in the vicinity
of his running shoes. He’d seen enough pain to know she was up to her pretty, freckled shoulders in it, no matter how tough her veneer. But damn it, this woman was no ordinary patient.

She was no ordinary anything.

“From what your chart says, I doubt that’s accurate.” Despite the circumstances, she was still a patient in need of medical care. And as a doctor, it was his responsibility to give it, the sooner, the better. “Let’s just see what we’re dealing with here.”

Blake
stepped in to pluck a pair of gloves from the box on the wall and start the exam, but Jules’s mouth became a slash as she served up a head shake both definitive and tight.

“No.”

Just like that, he was sitting at the kitchen table with the note in his hand, eight years younger and heartbroken as hell.

“No?” His pulse
cranked through his veins, hand still hovering above the glove dispenser. “Are you seriously refusing medical care?”

“I got medical ca
re. The nurse gave me one of these cold-thingys, and I’m feeling much better. Really, I’m good to go.”

Oh yeah, no. Not a chance.
Nobody left against medical advice on his watch. Not even Jules. “You have a second-degree burn that needs to be looked at and treated. You are not good to go.”

“Excuse me?”
One auburn brow shot up, but he wasn’t backing down.

“I said—”

“Okay, I think that’s enough.” The and-I-mean-it voice came not from Jules, but from the spot right beside the bed, and oh hell. He’d forgotten all about her friend sitting there. The woman’s face plucked a chord of familiarity in his brain, and Blake did a hasty run-through of his mental batch files to try and pin down the connection.

She saved him the trouble. “Serenity Gallagher. You treated me a few months ago for a concussion.”

Ah, right. The break-in at the diner. New place over on Fourth Street. “I remember.”

“
He
was your doctor when you got clocked on the head?” Jules asked, the words pinched with surprise.

Serenity nodded, splitting her gaze between him and the spot where Jules sat glued to the gurney. “
Yes. So now that we’ve got the pleasantries out of the way, would you mind telling me what the hell is going on? Clearly, you two know each other.” She turned an expectant look on her friend, and despite the self-preservation instinct that was screaming full-bore for him to cut this conversation in half and just treat Jules’s injury, he crossed his arms and followed suit.

“I…we…uh.” Of course she still fucking blus
hed when she was nervous. And of course it still heated his own face in return.

Along with
some anatomy due south.

Jules tried again. “Blake…that is, Dr. Fisher and I are…we were…”

Nope. He’d never heard her say it out loud, not even when it happened. And he sure as hell didn’t want to start now.

“Engaged,”
he said, refusing to drop her gaze. “Eight years ago, Jules and I were supposed to get married.”

#

Jules sat perfectly still against the pancake-flat hospital mattress lining the gurney beneath her even though every primal instinct in her body screamed at her to run.

“Burns can become serious if they get infected. It was smart of your boss to suggest you stay for treatment.”
Blake positioned a narrow plastic basin over the rolling tray table in front of him, methodically filling it with clear liquid from a plastic container marked with the word
sterile
. He checked, then re-checked all the little gizmos on the tray beside the basin, and damn it. All that precise focus and quiet intensity still drove her crazy.

And not in the bad way.

“She told you she’d personally help restrain me if I tried to leave,” Jules managed, buckling down hard over the emotions climbing the back of her throat. “That’s hardly a suggestion.”

“Do you want to wait for her to come back before we start?”
He snapped a pair of gloves into place, a tiny yet definite smile of satisfaction threatening beneath his light brown stubble. It lasted for just a split second, but it was reminder enough that if Blake Fisher wanted something, he did whatever he needed to get it.

Oh, God, she had to get out of here.
Not even the security blanket of Serenity’s presence was worth drawing this out.

“No. If I know Serenity, she’s
trying to single-handedly run dinner shift right now through the video chat on her iPhone. And since neither of you is going to let me out of here without an exam, you might as well go for it, I guess.”

Blake reached
for Jules’s wrist, his hand hitching just before contact, and her cheeks tightened with the heat of another rampant blush. Of course he probably didn’t want to touch her. Not that she could blame him, but it wasn’t meant to turn out like this. He was supposed to have moved on from the poor northie who bussed tables in the Brentsville University cafeteria four nights a week just to pay the electric bill. He was supposed to become a successful surgeon in the city and marry some perfectly acceptable Ivy League blond. Hell, he was supposed to have some ridiculously cushy car, two-point-four kids and a summer cottage in the Hamptons.

He was definitely
not
supposed to be back in Brentsville, cradling her pan-fried arm like it was made of blown glass and looking exponentially sexier than he had eight years ago.

“Frequently with burns, the skin is delicate enough to stick to the compress. I’m going to s
oak it in a cool sterile water bath to remove the dressing with as little damage to the blisters as possible. Then we’ll know what we’re dealing with and I can treat you from there.” He shifted the basin flush against the side of the gurney, lowering her arm into the water. But in spite of his careful movements, sparks of pain still flared hard under Jules’s skin.

“Ugh.”
The sound broke free from her chest before she could stuff it down, and she forced her expression to blankness as she counted the triangles on the curtain over Blake’s shoulder.

“
Sorry.” Something behind his stare flickered, dark and green and unyielding. “Can you rate your pain on a scale of one to ten?”

Jules
bit down on the irony of the question, even though she deserved every bit of the sting. “It’s fine, really.”

He didn’t let go of her wrist. “
A number, Jules.”