His Forbidden Love (Manhattan Billionaires #2) - Ava Ryan Page 0,31

problem to solve. We’re not talking organic chemistry here.

Funny thing, though: temptation is a lot easier to resist when you avoid it the way you avoid vampires after dark or werewolves during the full moon.

And Ally looks as though she’s close to tears. She never cries. I’ve rarely even seen her frazzled, which makes this so startling and compelling.

Ally’s really in pain. She needs someone. I need to be the someone.

I hesitate, drowning in ambivalence.

The tension between my wife and me lately has been so thick that I wonder if she’d even care if I, say, registered for an online dating site or got myself hit by a speeding bus.

And my patient is unlikely to die in the next five minutes without my input on how many staples he needs to fix his noggin. The dumbass is lucky to be alive. He should’ve been wearing a helmet.

So I round the nurses’ station and head straight for Ally.

Which was, I suppose, always a foregone conclusion.

“Hey,” I say, startling her.

“Dr. Jamison.” She hastily ducks her head and wipes her eyes. “Hey.”

I give her a second to collect herself and pretend I don’t see what she’s doing.

Pretend I’m not way too invested in making sure she’s okay.

“What’s all this?”

“My patient died.”

“I’d pieced together that much. What happened?”

“Ah… Aneurysm, we think,” she says, her attention fixed on some distant point over my shoulder that I can’t reach.

“Did you do everything you could do?”

“Yeah.” She swallows hard, and there’s that chin tremble I knew was in there somewhere. “I did.”

I believe her. She’s cool-headed in emergencies and meticulous with her patients from everything I’ve seen. She’s just starting out, but yeah. I believe her.

“Then let it go. Wall it off. Put it in a box. Move on.”

Her attention zooms back to my face with a new intensity. I can almost feel her drawing the red bead in the dead center of my forehead.

“Like you do, you mean,” she says sharply.

I hesitate. There’s a trap here somewhere. I sense it even if I can’t see it.

“Yeah. Like I do.”

“Great.” Her eyes glitter as she flashes a chilling smile, the kind designed to strike you dead on the spot. “I’ll try to be more like you. Thanks for that life-changing advice, Dr. Jamison. If there’s nothing else?”

Without waiting for me to answer, she wheels around and bangs into the nearest supply closet, her back ramrod straight.

I watch her go feeling hamstrung and impotent, fuming because I know there’s something here that I don’t get and because she makes me feel like my skin is way too tight.

Instead of letting it go and finding my patient, I barge into the supply closet after her.

“What’s the issue, Harlow?” I demand gruffly, looking around to see where she’s gone.

And discover her leaning against the wall with her hands over her face.

Sobbing.

My heart contracts hard enough for me to need one of the nearby crash carts. I don’t know what I’m feeling here—I’m afraid to diagnose it—but I know it hurts.

“It’s nothing,” she says, now hurriedly wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “I just need a minute.”

“Don’t lie to me.”

I’m sure she puts my sudden harshness down to me being an inveterate asshole. Which is ideal. As long as she never knows that I can’t take the sight of her tears. Not like this. If she needs me to kill someone for her, I will. Resurrect someone. Find someone. Buy something. Build something. Anything she needs, I’m here.

Anything to stop her from hurting like this.

And maybe there’s a part of me that’s spoiling for a fight because my world has been off-kilter since she showed up and I can’t figure out how to set it straight again.

“My patient was a thirty-four-year-old man whose new fiancée brought him in because he had an episode of vertigo while they were cooking dinner.” Ally’s face is red and contorted. Her voice sounds thick and shaky. “Spaghetti with sausage. His name was Saul. I was asking him whether he also felt nausea when he grabbed his head and started screaming. Screaming. It was downhill from there. He crashed. I paged Dr. Smith. Who did everything he could.”

I watch her, stricken. Fascinated.

“Saul died. I’m a medical professional and I’m still trying to figure out how someone could be alive and excited about getting married one minute and dead ten minutes later,” she says, pausing to press her lips together. I get the feeling she’s trying to hold back more sobs, and I can’t