Ryker: Bring them too. They can’t be worse at cards than Jace was last week.
“Dr. Morrison?” A nurse materialized at my elbow. “Room seven needs an attending.”
I nodded, already stepping through the controlled chaos of the emergency department, expecting to find another stranger whose life hung in the balance. But when I walked into room seven, a set of achingly familiar eyes made my feet stop dead.
Tessa.
3
BLAKE
Tessa Kincaid. My own personal torment since I was a teen, wrapped up in a five-foot-three package of sunshine and sass that had no business making my heart rate accelerate every time she walked into a room.
When I was younger, I told myself I noticed everything about her because that’s what outcasts do: we watch from the shadows, cataloging details about the normal people. And in the Kincaid household, no one was more luminously, impossibly normal than Tessa. The way she’d dance through their kitchen, making pancakes at midnight, how her green eyes lit up like she’d mainlined caffeine whenever she talked about her latest passion project. How her small frame moved with a grace that made my hormone-addled teenage brain short-circuit, especially when she’d reach past me for the syrup.
At night, when insomnia kept me company like an unwanted best friend, I’d lie awake, analyzing every interaction. The way my stomach would drop when she’d brush against me … completely accidentally, because why would Ryker’s little sister touch the brooding mess who haunted their couch? The urge to check her room when I heard her come in late, just to make sureshe was safe. The way I’d count the minutes until she came home from dates, pretending I wasn’t listening for her car.
It was all just … brotherly concern. After all, the Kincaids had taken in this stray when my own home became a war zone. It was natural to feel protective. Natural to want to murder any guy who made her cry.
So what if I’d memorized her laugh like a favorite song, or noticed how her hair caught the sunlight just so, or the precise shade of pink her cheeks turned when she was embarrassed?
The dreams I sometimes had about her were clearly just my subconscious taking the whole guardian role too seriously. And that white-hot rage when guys tried their luck with her? Pure big-brother instinct. Had nothing to do with wanting to shatter jaws when they made her smile in ways I couldn’t. And if I happened to accidentally break the nose of the quarterback who tried to pressure her at homecoming? Well, he shouldn’t have been standing where my fist was going.
Tessa was family, nothing more.
Even if, sometimes, late at night, in those moments between sleeping and wake, my mind wandered to dangerous territory, Ryker was my best friend, and I wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize that.
Plus, Tessa deserved far better than me. She deserved someone who didn’t have more issues than a medical journal, someone who’d kept my darkest skeletons hidden from her.
When I found myself having to remind myself of that, after I’d almost crossed a line, I decided to put some space between us. Two years of silence hurt like hell, but it made it easier to sell myself the brother-sister story.
But now, here she was in my ER, somehow more beautiful than my memories had preserved, making me realize that two years of distance hadn’t done a damn thing to stop these unwanted thoughts of her.
I had less than thirty seconds to figure out how to be her doctor without my unprofessional behavior destroying my career, my friendship with her brother, and any chance of Tessa ever talking to me again.
4
TESSA
Kill me now.
I mean, my God. It was cosmically unfair how Blake Morrison kept aging like a fine wine while the rest of us mere mortals just … aged. Those faint lines around his eyes had deepened since I’d last seen him, but in that infuriating way that made him look distinguished rather than older. Like time itself had decided to be his wingman, chiseling his features into something even more breathtaking than before.
And his body. Good Lord. Those dark blue scrubs were fighting a losing battle with muscles that made his teenage self look scrawny in comparison. Which was saying something, considering teenage Blake’s body had been the star of approximately ninety-eight percent of my high school daydreams. Okay, fine. A hundred percent. Apparently, Dr. Morrison had found time between saving lives to become camera-ready for a Calvin Klein underwear commercial. Which was just rude. What …did he do push-ups between patients? Curl medical textbooks in his spare time?
Also, why did he have to succeed at EVERYTHING? Successful doctor wasn’t enough. He had to go allER trauma savior in a sexy white coattoo. His stethoscope was probablymade from the tears of every woman who’d fallen in love with him. And who could blame them? Blake had that whole brilliant-doctor-who-looks-like-he-walked-off-a-medical-drama thing going for him.
Not that he noticed. In true Blake fashion, he remained either completely oblivious to his effect on the female population or just supremely uninterested. This was the same guy who’d once asked me, with genuine confusion, why women kept finding reasons to bring him coffee in the hospital cafeteria. As if his face alone wasn’t a walking invitation for cardiac episodes.
At least the universe had thrown me one bone today—exactly one—and had waited to stage its hostile takeover of my consciousness until after I’d showered and made myself presentable. If I’d landed in Blake Morrison’s ER sweaty from my morning workout and looking and smelling like an armpit, I might have asked them to pull the plug right then and there.
Blake’s stormy eyes remained locked on mine, and time ceased to exist. Every stolen glance from our teenage years rushed back—him watching me across my parents’ dinner table, that scorching hot August afternoon by the community pool when he’d taught me to dive, his hands gentle on my waist, my skin buzzing beneath his touch. Or that one night by the bonfire, when orange embers danced into the ebony night, and he’d touched my hand, his lips parting like there was something he was working up to saying. Only for the moment to slip through my grasp the second he let go of mine.
Even now, all these years later, he looked at me with that same unreadable intensity. The one I’d spent my teenage years desperately decoding, wishing my brother’s best friend saw me the way I saw him.
Back then, I’d told myself him going away to college would cure me of Blake Morrison, that four years of distance would finally shake him from my system. Wrong. Instead, his absencecarved deeper hollows. I caught myself searching for him in every corner of my childhood home: the empty chair at Sunday dinners that had been unofficially his, the garage where he and Ryker had spent countless hours tinkering with that old motorcycle they never got running, even the porch swing where he’d sat with me the night before he left, promising to look after my brother at school. When Ryker’s calls home were peppered with stories of Blake’s latest adventures—the fraternity they’d both gotten into, the parties he’d attended—each word felt like swallowing shards of glass. Which was stupid. What did I want? For Blake to be miserable because he was too busy pining after me to have any fun?
Answer. Yep. Evidently, that selfish desire was exactly what my heart wanted.
