Heart Like Mine (6 page)

He put out a placating hand. “Temporarily.”

“
How
temporarily?”

“Until you get the information you need.”

She uncrossed her arms and leaned her elbows on the desk. He swallowed when he caught another glimpse of purple lace under her very proper blouse. Was she purposely trying to distract him?

“Has it occurred to you that maybe I already
have
the information I need? That maybe I'm just being polite by involving you at all?”

“You don't. You aren't.” He pushed his eyebrows upward. “You need me.”

He paused, the words feeling strangely enticing on his tongue. Her cheeks darkened. She'd heard them, too.

“You're awfully confident, doctor.”

He leaned back, creaky chair be damned. “I am. But I'll sweeten the pot. I will promise to answer your questions, give you access to whatever numbers you need, and be fully invested in this exercise.”

“If I live down here on your floor.”

“For two weeks.”

“Two—no.”

A flush crept up her neck as she looked out the window into the hallway. He watched her eyes skate back and forth, tracking on the bustling nurses, and when he slid his own eyes down her face, he caught on the pulse flipping madly just below her earlobe.

He saw her swallow hard, then reach down to adjust her boot. When she was upright again, he could swear her eyes were shiny, but she blinked quickly.

Uh-oh. He'd just hit a nerve.

She took a deep breath and turned back to him. “Fine. I will come down here. But I will do it for
one
week.”

He toyed with agreeing, but something made him push. “Two.”

“One.”

He smiled at her fierce pose.
Fine
. Let her win this one.

“One, then.” He stood up, opening the door for her. “But I bet you'll be begging for a second week by the time you finish the first.”

She brushed past him into the hallway. “We'll see.”

As she went by him, he caught her vanilla scent, and he caught himself leaning to catch another whiff before she was gone.

She headed down the hallway, then stopped and turned to face him.

“I hope you don't regret this, doctor.”

*   *   *

“He wants you to move into a closet for two weeks? Because he thinks that will somehow convince you not to cut his budget?” Megan sat down in Delaney's guest chair fifteen minutes later, sliding a salad across the desk, then opening her own.

“Something like that.”

“I can't believe you agreed to it.”

“It didn't feel like there were a lot of other choices, Megan. He's convinced I'm just another clueless sixth-floor exec.”

“Which, of course, you are not.” Megan raised her eyebrows. “Right?”

“Of course I'm not.” Delaney looked out her window, taking in the lake view, and suddenly felt guilty. From her two brief forays downstairs, she now knew that most of the rooms on the pediatric floor looked out on the facades of parallel wings. All day long, her sixth-floor office was flooded with natural sunlight, while down on the third floor, the only view was … brick.

While she worked in her quiet office on a quiet, carpeted wing of a quiet, security-code-required floor, the floors below her buzzed like beehives, chronically understaffed and overpopulated with patients.

But did that really make her disconnected? It was her
job
to be up here on the sixth floor. She spent her days poring over budget sheets and projections and expenditures, working her hardest to make decisions that would have the best possible impact on patient care. Did people like Dr. Mackenzie not believe that? Did doctors and nurses really feel like the sixth floor was so isolated from the rest of the hospital that its residents had no idea how the medical facility really ran on a day-to-day basis?

She swallowed.

Could they be … right?

Megan propped a foot on Delaney's desk. “Maybe he's looking for an excuse to work more closely with you. Have you considered that?”

Delaney swallowed a snort. The man oozed sex appeal, and from what she'd seen downstairs, he was surrounded by young, perky, blond nurses who would probably love to have his babies. She, on the other hand, was a nerdy sixth-floor accountant.

Fat chance.

“No, Megan. Attraction—mutual or otherwise—is definitely not at play here.”

Megan's eyes widened. “You just said
mutual
.”

Delaney rolled her eyes and shrugged. “He's sex on a stick, for God's sake. He's like an underwear model mixed with a linebacker mixed with a television doctor. It's a wonder we don't have moms faking their kids' illnesses just to come in and be treated by him.”

“Not funny. That happens, you know.”

“I know.” She grimaced. “Bad word choice.”

Megan leaned forward. “So he's just as hot up close? Better than his online profile?”

“To-die-for hotter.”

“Lucky.” Megan frowned and went back to eating her salad.

“Ha. Lucky would be me and Dr. Mackenzie getting assigned to some awesome project where we had to spend endless hours deciding how to spend oodles of money. Instead, I get to spend the next few weeks on a floor that gives me hives, slashing the heck out of a budget while pissing off the most gorgeous eligible bachelor in the entire hospital. Go, me.”

“Okay, so maybe not ideal.”

“You think?” Delaney put down her fork, her appetite dismal. “I don't know, Meg. What if Dr. Mackenzie's right? What if budget cuts really
would
do serious damage to pediatrics at this point?”

“Do you have the option of recommending that the current budget stand?”

“No. Gregory said the cuts have to happen across the board. You and I both know people try to build insulation into their budgets, but we've had three rounds of cuts in the past three years. I'm starting to wonder if there's any insulation left.”

“I can't believe he dared to mention firing you.”

Delaney shrugged again, exhausted. “Money has to come from somewhere, right? It'd be one less salary to pay. And in his defense, he included himself on the could-be-fired list.”

“You really think it could happen?”

“I really do. You've seen the numbers. It's never been this bad. And now the board's compressed us into a thirty-day window, so we don't have time for the normal back and forth. I need Dr. Mackenzie to sit down with me, go over my proposed cuts, and come up with some sort of working compromise. Like, yesterday.”

“Okay. Sounds like a plan.” Megan put her fork down and pulled out her phone. “When are we doing this?”

Delaney felt her eyebrows rise. “We?”

“Yes, we. Aren't I your humble, trusty assistant?”

“Who just wants an excuse to sit in a meeting with Dr. Joshua Mackenzie?
That
assistant?”

Megan shrugged innocently. “Can I repeat the part about humble and trusty?”

“Right.” Delaney laughed. “No. I need to do this on my own. My assignment, my head on the chopping block if I fail. If I were you, I'd keep your distance.”

“If you get fired, I'll quit.”

“Aw, Meg. That's really sweet of you. Dumb, but sweet.”

“It's not about you.” Megan shook her head. “If you get fired, Gregory'll assign me to work for Kevin. And I will
not
work for a man who analyzes his trans fats more carefully than this hospital's budget numbers.”

She looked at the floor for a long moment, then tapped her fingers on the desk. “Don't hate me for suggesting this, but—have you thought about asking your dad for help? He's been around the block with this stuff a million times. Maybe he could give you the inside scoop? You know—from the doctors' perspective or whatever?”

“No.” Delaney shook her head firmly. “Enough people think he's the reason I
got
the job in the first place. Can you imagine how it would look if people thought I'd used him to unfairly keep it? Or—God forbid—to push my way into the CFO's office?”

“So what's your strategy now?” Megan asked.

“Still working on that. I've only just seen my new office.”

“Closet.” Megan raised her eyebrows. “I'm sure, being the super-intelligent person that you are, that you've already concluded that's why he
gave
you that office, right? He doesn't
want
you to sit in there. He wants you out on the floor.”

Delaney smiled tightly, trying to quell the relentless grasshoppers in her stomach. “You might be right. And you know what? I'll be all
over
that floor. I'll ask questions till I'm blue in the face. He'll be so sick of me by the end of one day that he'll send me back up here.”

The words came out all confident and brave, but inside, Delaney felt like a bowl of Jell-O with ginger ale added to it. On her way back up in the elevator just now, she'd sworn silently a few times, stomped once, and then closed her eyes, realizing he'd backed her into a corner.

Dr. Mackenzie wasn't going to cooperate unless she met him on his terms, and as much as it irked her, she respected his stance. The guy had probably sat through more budget meetings than he could stand, and here she was, showing up on his floor to ask for more.

As she looked out her door to the carpeted, wallpapered hallway … as she spun slowly in a desk chair that had probably cost more than Joshua's entire office of furniture … as she looked out at a view only ten people at this hospital really ever got to see, she swallowed hard.

She
was
disconnected. She
did
sit up here in this cushy office all day while the real medical professionals ran themselves ragged taking care of the actual patients.

But her disconnect was purposeful, in some ways—inherited, in others. Her father never knew patients' names when he came into the OR all scrubbed up. He called them by their disease or their problem of the day, and once they'd cleared the recovery room, he usually never saw them again.

It was perfect for him. No attachment, no loss. When he wasn't able to pull someone through surgery, he felt it as a professional failing, but he'd never attended a patient's funeral. He'd never visited a family in the chapel as they prayed for recovery. He'd played golf or he'd swum laps or he'd tinkered with the antique car in the fourth bay of his massive garage.

It sounded cold, and maybe it was—but it was also survival. Delaney knew that better than anyone. He'd only ever grieved one heart patient … and that hadn't been his patient.

It had been his son.

“Laney?”

Megan's voice snapped her out of her thoughts.

“You okay?” Megan closed her plastic salad container, but her eyes were locked on Delaney's.

“Fine. Sure. Yes. Why?” Delaney tried to swallow another bite of lettuce, but it got stuck. She took a swig of water, hoping Megan wouldn't notice.

“I asked if you really think you can handle being on pediatrics, given—you know—everything.”

Delaney took a deep breath, looking toward the ceiling, trying her hardest not to picture Parker on his hospital-issue tricycle, careening down the hallway on one of his better days.

She breathed out, clenching her fingers under her desk.

“Piece of cake.”

 

Chapter 6

“Wow, buddy. You look like something the cat dragged in.” Josh's friend Ethan clapped him on the back as he sat down at the big kitchen table at Avery's House early Saturday morning. The hospital had been all kinds of crazy this week, but when he stepped onto the wide front porch of the old hotel he and Ethan had converted into a pediatric home-away-from-home facility, he felt like
he
was home.

When Ethan had pooled grant money and his meager-at-the-time life savings to buy this place years ago, he'd only done it after Josh had agreed to serve as the staff physician. Together, they'd redesigned the old hotel, creating top-of-the-line rooms for patients and their families so they could stay at Avery's House, enjoy the adjoining Snowflake Village theme park, and relax in an environment that felt like a B and B, rather than the hospitals they'd all spent too much of their young lives in already.

Two years ago, Ethan's high school girlfriend had finally come back to Echo Lake, and with Josie in the picture, Ethan's life had settled into a rhythm Josh tried not to envy, because it went with a lot of damn hard work … and past pain that made their current happiness well earned.

In addition to his work at Avery's House, Ethan also ran Snowflake Village, the theme park Josie's father had built when they were just kids. He'd been second-in-command until Josie's dad's stroke two summers ago, and now he had the proverbial reins of the entire place while Josie did psych counseling at Avery's House and Mercy Hospital.

“You been up all night again?” Ethan motioned to the coffeepot, and Josh nodded gratefully. “A patient? Or a woman?”

Both.

“I'm pleading the Fifth on that one.” He took the coffee. “Thank you.”

“Then no offense, but you'd better have a better story before Josie gets down here. She'll never let you get away with pleading out if she thinks there's a woman in the picture.”

“There's no—” Josh looked at the clock. “What are you still doing here, anyway? Shouldn't you be at the park?”

“Changing the subject?” Ethan laughed. “There
is
a woman. Who is she?”

“Who's who?” Josie, clad in a T-shirt and yoga pants, pushed through the French doors that separated the owners' quarters from the main house. She wound her way to the coffeepot, rubbing her eyes as she felt blindly for a mug. “There's a woman?”