Endeared (The Accidental Billionaires #5) - J. S. Scott Page 0,3
known that one of those seemingly innocuous pieces of correspondence I picked up that night would change the course of my entire life.
CHAPTER 1
LAYLA
The present . . .
“Everything looks good, Layla,” Dr. Owen Sinclair told me as he closed the last file on his desk and handed it to me. “You’re probably the best nurse practitioner I’ve ever worked with, so I don’t know why you even wanted me to look at these cases.”
I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes at him. Like I really had a choice? Unfortunately, California was still one of about half the states in the country that required a nurse practitioner to work under the supervision of a doctor.
Okay, I didn’t review all of my cases with Owen, but I liked to go through some of the more complicated ones to get his input. It just seemed like the right thing to do, even though I could barely stand to be in the same room with him.
“If I remember right, Dr. Sinclair, I did sign a practice agreement with you when you bought this clinic from Dr. Fortney a few months ago. Until the California laws change, I’m required to work under your supervision.” My comment was a tiny bit sarcastic, but I couldn’t help myself.
Honestly, working under the gray-haired, elderly Dr. Fortney, who had just recently retired, had never bothered me. He’d been my mentor during my first year of practice, and a partner of sorts near the end.
Maybe it rankled just a little that I now had to clear some things with Owen, who was fresh out of his residency and exactly the same age I was right now.
No, correction—he was actually a few months older than me.
No doubt, Owen’s age and lack of experience practicing as a physician probably wouldn’t have been a factor if we hadn’t been friends in high school and the bastard hadn’t been the person who turned my entire life upside down back then.
Owen had betrayed me.
And no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t forget that, even though I was now a completely different person than I’d been back then.
Owen lifted a brow. “Does that bother you, the fact that you have to work under me? It’s not like I’ve ever breathed down your neck, Layla. I know you’re perfectly capable of handling your own patients. I didn’t demand to oversee your cases; you brought these files to me.”
I squirmed in my chair just a little, because he was right. I had asked him to review the cases because it was what I’d done with Dr. Fortney. Old habits were hard to break.
I’d always thought it was better to have an extra set of eyes on some cases, and Dr. Fortney had felt the same way. We’d often gone over cases at the end of the day in this office, just like I was doing with Owen right now, and they hadn’t all been my files we’d reviewed together. Some had been perplexing cases of Dr. Fortney’s, too. The now-retired physician had been the one to teach me that sometimes it was wise to get a fresh perspective on a case from another practitioner.
The reason I’d continued to maintain that habit with Owen when he’d taken Dr. Fortney’s place a few months ago escaped me at the moment. Maybe I just wanted the best for the people under my care, even if it meant consulting with an asshole to get that. “Sometimes I just appreciate a second opinion,” I told him curtly.
Okay, that had sounded a little too defensive, but it was the truth. “My priority is to give the best treatment possible, so it helps to see if I may have overlooked something. Dr. Fortney and I reviewed a lot of cases together. It’s just habit, I guess.”
“I don’t mind looking at them at all, and I’m all for sharing our expertise on any of the patients here at the clinic. However, you didn’t really answer my question,” he reminded me, his green-eyed gaze pinning me to the chair I was sitting in across from his desk.
Dammit! Why had Owen needed to become so damn attractive as a grown adult?
In high school, he’d been a nerdy guy with thick glasses and a brain way too big for his lean teenage body.
Now, a decade later, he looked good enough to be a male model, and I was strangely uncomfortable with those changes.
His intelligence had always been intimidating, so it definitely didn’t help that his sharp