accepted an assignment where he felt useful—and Paisley had one less person to worry about.
“She’s my world. Especially now with Michelle gone.” Gray’s voice hollowed out on the last word. “She’s as much my kid as if she were biologically mine. Loving someone more would be virtually impossible.”
And when he met Emmitt’s gaze, a blast of raw agony hit him square in the chest. It was almost as humbling as the guy’s love for Paisley. That was what always kept Emmitt in check. That another man in the world loved Paisley as fiercely as Emmitt.
Last night, Annie had implied he rattled people for amusement, and he’d quickly laughed it off. Listening now to Gray, Emmitt didn’t feel much like laughing.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “She isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Where she wants to stay is her choice. I don’t like that it’s your place, but I’d never put her in a situation where she felt she had to choose between us. And I’d never stand in the way of her happiness.”
“Same,” Gray said with a rough chuckle, calling a truce.
Emmitt didn’t mind ruffling the good doctor’s lab cost occasionally, knocking him off his high horse. Michelle had always let the guys have their fun with each other—because they were all jackasses—but now they’d lost their buffer.
They’d lost the heart of their patchwork family. And they were all feeling her absence. The loss of her love.
“Paisley loves you, Em. She loves when you are around, and when you’re gone she talks about you constantly. You’re the fun dad, the one she brags about. Her love for me doesn’t detract from the way she loves you.”
The warm burst Emmitt usually experienced when talking about his daughter was slow to come. This time it was overshadowed by a dull longing that had slowly built over the past few months.
God, he was homesick. But for some unexplained reason, Emmitt didn’t feel as if he’d made it home yet. In thirty minutes he was going to see his baby for the first time in months, and he felt about as uncertain as the first day he’d met her.
Chapter 8
For once, Annie wanted to know where she was going to land before she took off.
As Rome General’s newest floater, her schedule was in constant flux. Besides the afternoons, when she filled in for Dr. Tanner, her shifts consisted of one surprise after another. Annie hated surprises, almost as much as infuriating landlords who dropped in unannounced.
Her new job was a lot like men: inconsistent and predictably unpredictable. Only on the hospital floor there was no window to crawl out of. No door to hide behind. And absolutely no room for error.
Annie had left Connecticut with the intent to shake things up a little, put some of the fun and excitement she’d been missing back into her life. But a little stability here and there would be nice. She missed the comfortable rhythm she’d mastered at her previous job. The friendships she’d fostered, the confident stride she’d adopted the moment she slid on that lab coat.
She was unflappable and unstoppable.
But here, every day seemed like a new opportunity for the universe to flip her the big one. It was as if she were trapped in a bizarre Groundhog Day loop that played the same twenty-four hours over and over. Only the obstacles were different, the learning curve steeper, and she was always the new kid on the ward.
While her morning had started out great, with Gloria laughing and telling stories about growing up as a triplet, by the time Annie was ready for her shift, she was still feeling a lingering ickiness from her call with Clark that she needed to shed.
Annie pulled on her lab coat and waited for Alicia Keys’s song “Girl on Fire” to start playing in her head. Waited for the bass of life to kick in, the crackle of energy to thump against her chest.
All she felt was heartburn.
Resigned, she went to the nurses’ station and checked the posted schedule: ER duty followed by a few hours in oncology and ending with the only constant in her day, family practice.
She started off strong, treating a set of siblings with strep throat, a sprained ankle, and three cases of the flu. Then the attending doctor asked her to take a patient to radiology to get an MRI, which the doctor assured her was scheduled.
It was not.
By the time she straightened things out, she was informed the MRI was no longer needed. From there,