Forbidden Doctor - R. S. Elliot Page 0,30

saved that no one thought could be, and that same fiery spirit flowing through all of it.

I wasn’t going to let her lose that.

On the same note, however, I wasn’t quite willing to let my own career fall down the drain. I felt strongly for the girl in my lap, but my first great love had been surgery, had been medicine. I knew I was great at what I did and took risks no one else dared to. My new pet project, inspired by my most recent project, would be furthering the research into total artificial hearts for children that had failed or rejected transplants, even for children that needed hearts but weren’t high enough on the UNOS list. It could make them better candidates for transplant and it could save other organs from needing treatment or transplant. I couldn’t do that if I was a disgraced doctor working in the scummy private clinics that saw working in medicine as a form of retail. Aside from all of that, I had worked damn hard to get where I was, and I wasn’t going down without a fight.

But we could try, and there was a clause in my contract that said we were allowed to try.

It took Stevie another hour to wake up, and I wondered if it would be worth either of us going home to only return to the hospital in a few hours.

“Ugh, what time is it?” she asked, sitting up.

“Almost three,” I answered, smiling gently at her. “You slept for a little while.”

She rubbed her neck and glanced at me skeptically.

“Three a.m.?” she clarified.

“Yep.”

She winced.

“Shit, my shift starts in four hours. I haven’t even been home. I need to shower, I need—”

“You stayed late in the first place because of the surgery. You can come in a couple of hours late. The hospital has rules anyway, and interns are required to have at least eight hours between shifts—unless they’re on call, of course.”

She nodded gratefully and slumped against me. The matter of our sleeping together was a source of tension in the room, and I wanted to broach it before it became an elephant.

“Stevie,” I said, not wanting to break the bubble of calm, but needing an answer to my question. “I think we need to talk. I-do you, um, do you have feelings for me?”

Chapter Eleven

Stevie

Adrian was mad at me.

Of course, I couldn’t definitively prove that he was mad at me because the stubborn ass of a man was avoiding me. At least, I was pretty sure he was avoiding me. Honestly, it was hard to tell with everything going on. I had been transferred off of his service, and although it was simply because I was moving with Smith and Lehaney to be on Jonah’s service, I couldn’t help but feel the timing for the rotation was oddly fortuitous.

Jonah kept us busy. Bones were always doing that annoying thing of breaking, and we spent our days watching arm after arm after leg after clavicle be set by the expert hands in the orthopedic department. It really was a very gory business, which should have been rich coming from the girl that had her heart set on cardiothoracics, but there was just something deeply unsettling about the way bones looked when they were protruding from the body. Sometimes they stayed under the skin and bulged like an alien egg, and other times they burst through the epidermis and made me cringe with sympathy pains. It was so raw and brutal, the way they were treated in the OR as well. The surgeons worked with saws and drills, the kind I’d have expected to see more in a workshop than a place of healing. It seemed almost crude, the way the orthopedic surgeons held bodies together with nuts and bolts, with the great rings of halos and hard plaster casts. I could understand Lehaney’s obsession with it though—the body wasn’t a delicate map of veins and arteries to him, it was an infrastructure that needed repairs and maintenance. He had the eye of an architect, and Jonah took to him almost immediately.

I grew closer to Lehaney during our orthopedic rotation, and it was a good thing too—without Adrian, I would have felt completely isolated in the hospital. Jonah was nice enough to me and flashed the sort of smiles I knew were reserved for the people he enjoyed the company of, but he never crossed the boundary between student and teacher. I didn’t mind at all, but