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

13. Emily

CHAPTER 13

EMILY

“ I do get it, you know,” Dominic said.

The two of them were sitting at the hotel bar. The conference had long since wrapped up for the day, and while a few of the other attendees were still around, lingering and socializing with one another, most people had either gone back home or up to the rooms they were staying in.

Emily knew she should follow in their footsteps, excuse herself, and go home. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. Right now, it felt like she and Dominic had created a little bubble of safety away from the hospital. As long as they were here, it felt like they were free to speak to one another as equals, to be whatever they wanted to be to each other. She could forget that she was talking to her boss and pay attention instead to the fact that she admired him for his good looks, for his wit, for his…

Well, not for his charm. He didn’t have a lot of that. And yet she was charmed, somehow, as if there was a gap in her life that he fit into perfectly. As if she had been waiting for someone like him.

And she knew that once she left the hotel, things would have to go back to normal between the two of them. She would have to stop thinking of him as this handsome, intriguing man, and return to thinking of him as just her boss.

It was inevitable, but she wasn’t ready.

She signaled the bartender. She’d switched to tonic waters three drinks ago, wanting to make sure she was clear-headed enough to drive home when the time came — and, if she was honest with herself, to make sure that she was clear-headed enough not to do anything she would regret tonight.

“What do you get?” she asked Dominic.

“Why none of the other interns showed up today,” he said, spinning his glass between two hands. “I know it’s not because they’re all a bunch of underachievers.”

“Well, some of them are…” Emily grinned.

“Yeah,” he said. “Are we thinking of the same people?”

“It would be unprofessional of either one of us to mention names.”

“But I bet we are,” he said.

“Probably,” she agreed with a smile. She was sure he meant Chad.

The bartender dropped off another drink. Emily took a long swallow. She knew that she was running out of excuses to stay here, that eventually she would have to go home. But as long as Dominic seemed willing to continue the conversation, she was going to do the same thing.

“So tell me,” she said, “why didn’t anyone else show up?”

“Because of me,” he said.

“What?” She hadn’t expected that answer.

“I know everyone looks up to me,” he said. “Everyone thinks I’m a great doctor.”

“You are.”

“I know that. But they also avoid me. No one wants to spend any time around me. And it’s not as if that’s a problem for me personally — it’s just that it keeps them from doing things like this, things that would be good for their careers. I’m not sure what to do about that. I don’t want my interns to see me as a friend, but I don’t need them avoiding me, either. If they do that, how are they going to learn?”

Emily paused. “Are you actually asking me to answer this?”

“If you have an answer, I wouldn’t mind hearing it.”

“I get that you’re all about your gruff demeanor,” she said. “But it wouldn’t hurt you to be a little less severe, I think. Not everyone responds to that kind of thing. I don’t think I do, really.”

Dominic sighed. “If I wasn’t hard on myself like that, I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am today,” he said. “You point to me as a really good doctor — well, that didn’t happen by chance. It took me being incredibly exacting with myself. That’s why I treat my interns that way.”

“I get it,” Emily said. “But it’s like I said — not everyone responds to the same treatment. I’ve learned how to ignore you.”

“You don’t ignore me.”

“Well — okay, no, I don’t,” Emily agreed with a laugh. The tension seemed to rise between them. Was he saying that she didn’t ignore him professionally — something she would have been wrong to do, if she had? Or was he making reference to the fact that she paid too much attention to him outside of work hours? Was he talking about the fact that the two of them were sitting here talking long after the conference had come to an end, long after they had any excuse to be spending time together outside of work?

Either way, he wasn’t wrong in his assessment. But if he was referring to the second situation, it was the closest either one of them had come to addressing the tension between them aloud. She really hadn’t anticipated that he would do that.

She cleared her throat. “My point was that I don’t rely on you to validate me,” she said. “When you growl at me at work, it doesn’t affect me the way it does some of the others.”

“I don’t growl at you.”

“Oh, sure you do.” Emily affected a gruff tone. “What are you doing talking to this patient, Dr. Swinton? I told you to do paperwork!”

“That’s what you think I sound like?”

“That absolutely is what you sound like some of the time,” Emily told him. “And if you’re talking about why the other interns might have wanted to take a day off — yeah, I don’t think it would surprise me to find that they didn’t want to be harrumphed at for one day. So since you asked , if you wanted to create a more pleasant learning environment for everyone, I do think it would help if you were a little more cheerful sometimes.”

“ Cheerful ,” Dominic groaned. “Give me a break. Interns shouldn’t need to have their hands held. They shouldn’t need their supervising physician to be their nanny.”

“There’s a middle ground, though, you know,” Emily said. “You don’t have to hold their hands through everything. I agree that’s too much. But you can treat them like people instead of like robots. I know you can, because you’ve figured out how to do it with me.”

He raised his eyebrows at her and said nothing.

Emily blushed, understanding the implication. It wasn’t like either one of them thought it would be a good idea if he treated all the interns the way he did her. And that, more than anything else, served as proof that the line had already been crossed. If he couldn’t treat the others the way he was treating her, that meant she was receiving special treatment. And she shouldn’t be. She knew that.

That didn’t mean she wanted it to stop.

She changed the subject. “Were you treated that way when you were an intern?” she asked. “Did you have a supervising doctor who never connected with you as a person?”

“It was by my own choice,” Dominic said.

“What do you mean?”

He took a sip of his drink. “I was the hardest worker in my group,” he said. “I was always the one to show up early and stay late. If there was any optional work to be done, I did it.”

“Yeah, that sounds like you.”

“There was one night,” he murmured, the look in his eyes distant. “One night when I caved. My friends insisted that I join them at the bar. We had just finished our internships and gotten our assignments. Everyone was happy. We were celebrating beginning the next phase in our careers… and I gave in. I went out to the bar with them.”

“It sounds like you deserved it,” Emily said gently.

“My cell phone died when we were out, and I missed the call from the hospital,” Dominic said. “My mother had had a stroke.”

“Oh my God.”

“I didn’t even find out until the next morning. By the time I made it to the hospital, it was too late. She was already gone.”

Emily felt as if she had been punched in the gut. “Dominic… that’s awful,” she whispered. “I am so sorry that that happened to you.”

“It wouldn’t have happened if I had been at the hospital that night. Any other night, I would have been there, and I would have seen her come in. But on the one night I decided to go out…” He closed his eyes.

Emily could imagine what he was thinking. She wasn’t going to hurt him by putting it into words, but she knew what it was like to lose someone, so she understood the desire to try to claim some responsibility for what had happened. She knew he knew better than to actually believe that he’d caused his mother’s illness, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t feeling it. Because if he could blame himself, he wouldn’t have to face the truth — that what had happened was just a tragedy, outside his or anyone’s control, that could have happened to anyone at any time.

If they had been friends — if their relationship hadn’t fallen under the umbrella of the professional — she would have put her arms around him.

She almost did it anyway. Who cared that they were going to have to work together tomorrow? Tonight they were just two people sharing their stories, and he was clearly hurting.

Dominic swallowed, opened his eyes, and continued. “I know I come across as harsh,” he said. “I know that people think I’m mean. The truth is that I have to be, because one time I took my eye off the ball, and I paid the price for it. I’m never going to let that happen again.”

Emily couldn’t keep herself from saying something. “You know that what happened to your mom would have happened anyway, don’t you?” she murmured. “There wasn’t any avoiding it.”

“But she shouldn’t have died alone,” Dominic whispered. “I should have been there.”

“You didn’t know. You can’t blame yourself.”

“Maybe not — but I can make sure I’m the kind of person she would want me to be from now on,” Dominic said firmly. “She was always so proud of what I was doing, all the work I was putting in to become a doctor. She would love to see what I’ve down. The best thing I can do for her now is work hard all the time and be the best in the field, so I’ll know that she would be proud of me if she were here now.”

“I’m sure she would be,” Emily murmured.

She wasn’t even conscious of the fact that she was reaching out to rest a hand on top of his until she had already done it. If she had been thinking about what she was doing, she probably would have restrained herself. She probably wouldn’t have had the courage.

But her hand was on his, and his hand was warm, and before she knew what had happened, he had turned his hand over beneath hers so that they were palm to palm.

Somehow, that simple act felt as intimate as an embrace. Skin against skin. Emily imagined she could feel his heart beating in time with hers where they touched.

She looked into his eyes and knew that she wasn’t imagining it. He was as electrified by this moment as she was.

The distance between the two of them narrowed. Emily wasn’t aware of drawing closer to him intentionally, but she also knew that she wasn’t capable of staying away. It seemed to be happening without her thinking about it, as if the two of them were being pulled together magnetically.

She wondered distantly if it were even possible to resist this attraction anymore.

It didn’t matter. She couldn’t pull away from him. Not after what he had just shared with her about his past. Dominic had been vulnerable with the first time — perhaps it had been the first time he’d been vulnerable with anybody. It had certainly been the first time in a good long while.

She reached for his face at the same moment as his hand came up to cup the back of her neck, and then there was no more thinking, only sensation. Only the warmth of his touch, the spicy clean scent of him, and then his mouth on hers as, finally, they kissed.

It felt inevitable, like finally allowing a tide to carry her out to sea. It felt like something that had been coming for a very long time, and she couldn’t regret having given into it, because she had never really had a choice.

“Shall I get a hotel room?” Dominic murmured, mouth against hers.

Emily knew what he was insinuating, knew it probably wasn’t a good idea, and knew that she hadn’t a hope of bringing herself to say no to him now.

“Yes,” she breathed.