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

17. Emily

CHAPTER 17

EMILY

E mily finally caught up with Dominic again late that night, when almost everyone else who wasn’t assigned to the night shift had gone home for the day.

He wasn’t in the break room. That was the first sign that something was wrong. They had taken to getting coffee together at the beginning of the night shift, but he hadn’t shown up for that.

She found him in his office, rifling through a large stack of papers. He didn’t look up when she came in.

“What’s all this?” she asked him, taking the seat facing him.

“Don’t you knock?” he said brusquely.

Emily frowned. “I’m sorry,” she said, though she wasn’t, really. “You’ve told me countless times that I don’t need to knock.”

“Well, now I think it would be a good idea if you did.”

“Okay, so fine, I’ll knock next time. How come you didn’t come get coffee?”

“Is there something you need, Emily?”

“Do I have to need something to talk to you all of a sudden? What’s going on, Dominic?”

“Dr. Berger,” he said.

She raised her eyebrows. “It’s like that?”

He let out a sigh. “Emily— Dr. Swinton—” He shook his head, obviously unclear on what he should be calling her. “We almost lost a patient today. You do realize that.”

“Dominic, this is the emergency room. We almost lose patients every day.” She said it as gently as she could. “This is what we do. You know that better than anybody. You’re the one who taught me that. I know you feel bad about what happened today, but it wasn’t your fault. There are a lot of people who work here.”

“I was on call, and I missed a page.”

“I know,” Emily said. “But you did get it in the end. You saved that little boy. You should be proud.”

“I should be proud ?” He looked up at her suddenly, with such ferocity in his eyes that she almost didn’t recognize him. “I should be proud because I turned my back on my responsibilities and a child almost died?”

“Dominic, you’re not the only doctor in this hospital!” she said. “You’re not the only one who was on duty. There were plenty of people who could have done what you did.”

“There weren’t. If that were true, they would have done it. He wouldn’t have been clinging to life by his fingernails when I got there. You know I’m right, Emily.”

“Maybe you are, but that’s not your fault. You can’t do everything. You physically cannot do everything, Dominic. At some point, you have to let other people take responsibility.”

“Not when it might cost someone their life, I don’t.”

“It’s costing you your life! Don’t you get that? You can’t even forgive yourself for spending an extra fifteen minutes in the cafeteria.”

“I missed a page.”

“Dominic, you weren’t even on call!” She threw up her hands. “You should have been able to take a longer lunch. God knows everyone else does. And everyone else goes home at night, and everyone else has a social life outside the hospital, and meanwhile you and I have to sneak around like we’re doing something scandalous every time we have a conversation.”

“You and I?” Dominic shook his head. “There is no you and I, Emily.”

Emily felt as if her veins had turned to ice. She sat very still, staring at him.

“I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong idea,” he said. “But I can’t afford to have a relationship. What happened today is all the evidence I need to convince me of that.”

“What happened today had nothing to do with you and me,” Emily said hotly. “Maybe if you gave yourself permission to do the things you want to do, you would be able to organize your life a little bit better. Maybe we could see each other outside of work like normal people instead of trying to cram it into working hours.”

“We’re not seeing each other,” he said. “We’re not going to be seeing each other. Listen… I know this is my fault. I know I gave you a false impression. I let myself get carried away, because I do like spending time with you — I won’t deny that. But this is as far as things are going to go. I can’t let anything like this happen ever again. I can’t run the risk that someone will die because I indulged my selfish desires. I couldn’t live with myself if that ever happened.”

“You’re being too hard on yourself,” she told him. She did her best to make her tone gentle, trying one more time to convince him.

“No, I should be hard on myself,” he said. “I should have been a hell of a lot harder on myself than I have been. I’ve been allowing myself to get away with things when I shouldn’t have, and that’s the reason this happened. You get that, don’t you? What happened today happened because you and I let ourselves bend the rules. It really is that simple, Emily.”

“So we won’t let it happen again,” she said. “We’ll keep our lunches to the appropriate amount of time.” She could hear the anxiety in her own voice, as if she was afraid of losing something — her body hadn’t caught up to the feeling yet. “We can even make sure we get back early from now on. And we’ll put our pagers on the table while we eat, both of them, so we’ll be sure to never miss a page again. That will fix things, won’t it?”

“No,” he said. “That won’t fix anything. The problem is that this — all of this, the whole connection between you and me — it’s gotten too far away from the professional and into the personal, and that can’t continue. We’re supposed to be having mentorship lunches. Tell me, are you feeling mentored? Do you feel like you’re getting a lot of professional benefit from our time together?”

“Yes,” Emily said hotly, not sure why this felt like such an argument. “You’ve taught me so much already, Dominic — don’t you realize that? I know so much more about what it takes to succeed as a doctor because of you. And I’m so grateful for it. I don’t know what I would do without your guidance.”

“Well, I can tell you one thing,” Dominic said. “We weren’t doing anything relating to your career at the end of our lunch today. We weren’t talking about ways you could improve as a doctor. I wasn’t giving you any sort of advice. We were just… chatting .”

“Okay,” Emily said. “I don’t know how many ways I can say this to you, or how many times you need to hear it. I understand that what you went through when your mother died was traumatic. I understand that you blame yourself, even though you shouldn’t. But, Dominic, doctors are allowed to have lives. Doctors are allowed to have friendships, romantic partners, even children.”

Dominic snorted. “Children.”

“You can, you know. If that was something you wanted, you could.”

“That’s not something I can even think about,” Dominic said. “That’s not something that fits into my plan.”

“Okay, fine, so you don’t want children. I’m not going to try to convince you about that. But you have to have some kind of personal life, Dominic. It isn’t healthy to turn your back on those things, to pour yourself into work the way you do. Eventually, something will break. You won’t be able to handle the pressure anymore.”

“I can handle the work just fine,” Dominic snapped. “What I can’t handle is you coming in here and pestering me for a romantic relationship. I might have been unclear with you at some point, and I take responsibility for that, but I think by now I’ve made my stance apparent. Are you still confused?”

“I’m not confused.” Emily said tightly. It felt like all her muscles were locking up. She couldn’t believe he was speaking to her like this.

It wasn’t really him. It couldn’t be. This was the version of him she had met when she had first come to the hospital, all those weeks ago. The stern, unforgiving doctor who had called her into this very office and warned her that she might be on the road to being cut from his internship program.

This wasn’t the man she had gotten to know in the time since then. This wasn’t the kind, gentle man who worked hard because he was afraid of loss, who had let his walls down and allowed her to get a look at who he really was. She felt as if that man was lost to her.

A part of him longed for him deeply and wanted to search for him, to try to bring him back.

A part of her knew that was hopeless. Dominic was just too stubborn. If he was sitting here and telling her that she had lost him, the best thing she could do for herself was to believe him — even though it made her feel as if a black hole was opening up inside of her.

She got to her feet.

“Are we done here?” Dominic asked her.

“Yes, I think we are,” Emily said. “It’s just like you said. You’ve made your feelings very clear. You want nothing more to do with me. You blame the time we’ve spent together for the mistake you made today.” She paused a moment, allowing that to sink in — the mistake had been his, but he was including her in the blame.

If her words affected him, he didn’t allow it to show. He turned his attention back to his paperwork, and Emily knew she had been dismissed.

Well, that was just fine.

She turned and walked out the door, head held high, and didn’t allow her emotions to take over until she had made it out into the hall.

Once there, though, it was a race against the tears that threatened to spill over, and she made it to the on-call room and pulled the door closed behind her just in time to keep her breakdown private. She locked the door quickly, knowing perfectly well that if anyone came by they would assume someone was hooking up in here, and she curled up on one of the cots, pulled a blanket over her head, and allowed the tears to course down her face freely.

She had allowed herself to trust him. She had allowed herself to believe that he really cared for her.

A part of her still believed it. He couldn’t possibly have opened up to her as much as he had if he didn’t care at all, could he?

But then, he couldn’t have pulled away from her like this if she’d really mattered to him. He didn’t care. That was at the only thing she could truly believe. He didn’t think of her the way she thought of him. All those lunches that she’d thought were so significant… maybe he really had been just trying to boost her career. One thing was certain — he hadn’t been trying to recapture the magic of the night they had spent together, the way she had let herself believe he was.

It probably hadn’t even been magical for him. He probably didn’t even think about it anymore.

The idea that he could let go of what was between them — whatever it was, whatever they wanted to call it — made her heart ache. She couldn’t have let it go. She certainly couldn’t have done it as easily as he seemed to.

She knew he had been affected by what had happened today, and it made sense that it would affect him given his past. But even so…

I deserve better than that.

Emily sat up and dried her eyes.

She knew that was true. She did deserve better. She deserved to be with a man who appreciated her, who would try to overcome his own issues if it meant he was better able to be with her. Dominic wasn’t even going to try. And at the end of the day, that made it easier to do what she had to do.

She had to pull away from him.

She had to give up on her desire to be with him, because it was never going to happen, and because the price he would make her pay for it was just too high.

Enough sneaking around. Enough pretending their relationship didn’t exist, sitting opposite each other at cafeteria tables and acting like it meant nothing when she knew it did — when they both knew it did.

If a professional relationship was what he wanted from her, that was what he was going to get.