Dr. Grump’s Surprise Baby (Bossy Bachelors #2)

10. Dominic

CHAPTER 10

DOMINIC

“ I must have walked past this place a dozen times and never noticed it,” Dominic observed as Emily led him into the twenty-four-hour diner.

“Well, you’ve got to get out of the hospital more, Dr. Berger,” Emily said.

“You can call me Dominic,” he told her. “Since we’re out of the hospital right now, there’s no need to be formal.”

She nodded. “Okay, then.”

“Do we wait to be seated?”

She pointed to a sign that said Please Seat Yourself . “I like the table over here, by the window,” she said. “Is that okay with you?”

“Sure, anything’s fine.” He followed her over to the table and took a seat. There were already menus on the table, and he picked one up and began to look it over. “What’s good here?”

“I always order off the breakfast menu, but I’m kind of a breakfast food fiend,” she said. “I’ll always opt for a good omelet when it’s available to me.”

“And they’ve got good ones here?”

“Oh, fantastic, trust me.”

“Okay,” he agreed. “An omelet it is.”

A server came by, looking tired and checked out. Dominic glanced at his phone and realized for the first time that it was four o’clock in the morning. He and Emily were amped up because they had been in surgery for three hours, but the staff here must be exhausted.

“So,” he said once the server had taken their order. “That was your first surgery, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Good,” she said. “I mean, a little shaken up, but it wasn’t hard in any of the ways I expected it to be. Staying on my feet the whole time, keeping my hands steady, keeping my focus — that was all fine.”

“What was the hard part for you?”

“I think on some level I was worried that we’d do something wrong and the guy wouldn’t make it. Don’t you worry about that?”

“You can’t really afford to worry about things like that,” Dominic told her. “This is what I mean, Emily. You’re too sensitive when it comes to the patients.”

“You’re saying I shouldn’t be worried about whether they live or die?”

“You should be good at your job. You should be responsible. You should do all you can for them. If you do that, you’ll give them the best possible chance at recovering. But worrying doesn’t do them any good at all. All it does is distract you. You need to learn how to turn down that aspect of yourself.”

“That’s not going to be easy,” Emily admitted with a frown.

“Maybe not, but I’m telling you, it’s necessary. Remember, when you’re treating a patient, it’s not about you. It’s not about your feelings. It’s only ever about what the patient needs.”

“That’s why you’re so robotic with them,” she realized. “You’ve switched off your own emotions.”

“That’s the best thing to do if you want to really help a patient,” he said. “They have friends and family to help them with the emotional stuff. For a doctor… frankly, they need someone robotic. That’s what they want.”

She was quiet, stirring her glass of water with her straw.

“What?” he asked. “You’re thinking something.”

“I said I wouldn’t argue with you if we went out,” she said. “I told you I would just listen.”

“Well, if you’ve got something to say, say it.”

“It’s just…” She let out a sigh. “I haven’t told you why I wanted to become a doctor.”

“You did. You said that patient care was important to you.”

“I know, but I never told you why .”

“Okay,” he said. “Tell me now.”

“My sister, Ruth… she had leukemia when we were kids,” Emily murmured. “She died.”

“Oh.” He closed his eyes. Of course it would be something like that. It made perfect sense. That was why she was so focused on the feelings of the patients. “I’m so sorry to hear that. That must have been a difficult thing for your family to go through.”

“It would have been a lot harder if we hadn’t had the medical team we did,” Emily said. “We were surrounded by doctors and nurses who really cared about Ruth. They did everything they could for her — not just medically, but on a personal level. They brought her favorite foods to the hospital when she was struggling to eat. One of the nurses used to stay up all night with her when she was sick from the treatments and read her books. Her oncologist played video games with her. And when we found out she wasn’t going to make it, they were by our side every step of the way. They even came to the funeral.”

Dominic said nothing. He didn’t want to tell her the truth while they were talking about her sister, but he couldn’t imagine going to the funeral of any of his patients. That would be getting much too close. You just couldn’t afford to let your heart be broken like that if you were going to keep your head above water in the medical profession — you had to detach.

“That’s why it means so much to me to connect with patients,” Emily explained. “I got into this to try to heal people and save lives, of course, but I also wanted to try to be a doctor like the ones that were there for my family. As hard as everything we went through was, it would have been so much worse if we hadn’t had a medical team that cared so much about us. I want to be that for someone else.”

“I can understand that,” Dominic admitted. He still thought it was a mistake on her part, but it was a mistake that he could comprehend. “It’s nice that you’re so passionate about it.”

“You think so?”

“I don’t agree with it, but yes, it’s nice,” Dominic said. “I can see why that experience would make you want to provide the same sort of care for other families.”

“I just think… well, I think it’s what Ruth would have wanted,” Emily said quietly. “I know you think I’m not being careful, that I’m going to get too attached and it’s going to make it too hard for me to do the job, but I think it doesn’t matter if that happens. I think that even if it is hard for me to do the job, it won’t be as hard as it will on our patients. They deserve to feel like they’re in the hands of a doctor who really cares. Someone who will think about them after leaving their room in the hospital. Someone who would come to their hospital and grieve if they died.”

“But you know that you can’t grieve over all of them, don’t you?” Dominic asked her. “Your grief would never stop. No matter how good a doctor you are, we are going to lose some of them. There’s no avoiding it.”

“I know,” Emily murmured. “I know that.”

“Well, I have to say, I admire your passion. I’ve never really met anyone like you, Emily Swinton. I think you’re going to be a good doctor, really. I just hope you don’t destroy yourself in the process.”

“You don’t need to worry,” Emily said. “I can handle myself.”

Their omelets arrived, and for a moment the conversation was derailed as they both began to eat.

“You were right about these,” Dominic said. “They’re fantastic.”

“I told you.”

“Consider me educated.”

They ate in silence for a moment longer.

“What made you bring me into the OR today?” Emily asked. “I know I didn’t do very much — really, what I did in there could have been handled by a nurse. So why didn’t you just have a nurse do it?”

“You need to learn,” Dominic said.

“I know I do. I’m just surprised you were ready to let me into the OR already. I didn’t even think you liked me.”

“Whether or not I like you doesn’t have anything to do with it,” Dominic said. “It’s my job to teach you.”

“But you haven’t let the other interns scrub in on surgeries, have you?”

“No. They’re not ready.”

“But you thought I was ready?”

“You’re more ready than your peers,” Dominic told her honestly. “You know, in spite of the things you and I have disagreed on, I can’t deny that you’re good at what you do, Emily. You have a dedication and a focus that’s exactly what I look for in an intern — it’s how I know someone is going to have what it takes to make it as a doctor. And now that I’ve heard your story, I’m honestly even more convinced.”

“But you’re still worried that I’m going to burn myself out?”

“I think you would be worried about the same thing in my shoes. It’s great to see someone as passionate as you are, but that has a tendency to cut both ways,” he said. “You care for your patients. I love that. But you’re going to be crushed every time you lose someone if you can’t disengage at least a little bit.”

His eyes locked on hers, and Dominic felt as if he was searching her, trying to come up with the right words to say that would sway her.

He was pretty sure that if he gave her the chance, she would tell him that was a waste of his time — there were no words that would change the way she thought about all this.

And also, at the same time, he didn’t want her to say anything at all. He didn’t want to do anything that would make her look away from him.

It was like being on a roller coaster, riding up the ascent hill. His heart was beating double-time in anticipation of what was to come. His breathing was erratic. He was sure his pulse was up. As he looked across the table at Emily, he saw that her cheeks were flushed — he felt hot all over, and he was sure she felt the same way. It had been a very long time since any woman had made him feel like this.

For a moment, he almost wanted to lean across the table and kiss her. To trace those flushed cheeks with his fingertips and see how he could make her respond.

And that moment of realization — of desire — was enough to make him pull away from her.

He shouldn’t be letting it happen now. Not like this — not with one of his interns. There was no potential in this. It couldn’t go anywhere.

And by the way she was looking at him, he felt sure that she returned everything he was feeling. It was entirely mutual. That was the worst part. If he had just been caught up in his own feelings he probably could have walked away without trying to take things any further. But knowing that she felt what he was feeling made it more real somehow. It wasn’t just in his head. It existed in the chemistry between their bodies — it was something real and impossible to ignore.

Dominic was a doctor. He knew all too well that you couldn’t just ignore the physical symptoms of things you didn’t want to be true. If you tried to do that, you would only make matters worse. If he didn’t pay attention to this connection between himself and Emily, it would grow.

He shouldn’t have come out to this diner with her. It was too unprofessional. Too much like a date.

He got to his feet. “I should get back to the hospital,” he said.

Emily looked startled. “You haven’t finished your omelet.”

“I know, but I have a lot more work to do.” She would see right through that, of course. It wasn’t even his shift. She would know that he was leaving for some other reason. But he didn’t owe her an explanation. “I’ll stop by the register and pay for both our meals.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Emily said. “I was going to pay for my own.”

It would probably have been better to let her do that — less like a date, less likely to create the wrong sentiment between the two of them. But Dominic couldn’t quite bring himself to abandon chivalry. “I’ve got it,” he said. “I am your boss.”

It wasn’t just an explanation for why he was going to pay. It was a reminder — a reminder to both of them — that they were approaching a line they couldn’t cross.