Chapter 12

Lainey

It turns out his brothers had always been the sort of lovable goofballs they were now. Sam wasn’t shy about rolling out some of their more embarrassing stories, like the time a snake bit Will on the butt cheek during a camping trip. Or how Conner had drunkenly proposed to his now-wife, blacked out, and then forgotten about it until he saw the ring on her finger the next morning.

He looked kind of indulgent whenever he talked about his mom, which made me melt a bit. Over the course of our conversation, he thumbed open the top two buttons of his shirt, and I had to roll the beer between my palms to keep cool.

“I can’t imagine it. Three kids on a landscaper’s salary. And living in the city, too.”

Sam smiled softly. “She’s amazing. She had to travel to the suburbs a lot. When we got a little older, I took care of Will and Connor. She made it work. None of us are in jail, at least.”

“You’re all incredible.”

The sides of his mouth perked up as he surveyed the courtyard. “You think?”

“Absolutely! You’re a heart surgeon, for God’s sake. Look where you live. And Will and Connor own the gym and the physical therapy business. She won the jackpot with you guys. Three for three.”

His attention shifted from the yard. Every time I thought I was getting used to that heavy, focused consideration, I realized how wrong I was. I could practically hear it between us, the question on his face. Did I think they were all equally incredible? Did one brother stick out a little more than the others? The lift of his lips told me he’d already guessed the answer. I gripped the bottle tighter.

“Tammy!!!” A child’s scream cut through the moment. I turned to see a toddler running full-tilt through the grass. He fell twice, a floppy pile of flailing limbs, before picking himself back up and resuming his sprint to Sam’s garden gate. Sam was already there, opening it to scoop the boy into his arms.

“Hey, bugle-boy.” He gave the curly-haired boy a big, smacking kiss on his cheek. Something in my heart wobbled, which could not have been correct, or medically accurate.

“Eli! I told you to wait!” A woman trudged across the grass, chest heaving. She cupped an arm around her belly.

Pregnant .

I sipped my beer.

“I’ve got him, Jas,” Sam assured. She huffed, hands planted on her hips.

“Doesn’t matter. I told him to wait .” She shook her head at her son, braids swinging together. He grinned and clung to Sam’s neck.

“You should sit,” Sam muttered as she followed her son inside the gate.

“YOU should sit. I’ve been sitting all day and I can’t sit at home because it’s a wreck in there and we’re out of the lime seltz—Oh. Hi.”

Up close and personal, this woman was absolutely knock-out gorgeous. Even swollen and waddling up the porch stairs (where she’d frozen as soon as she saw me), she was a snack.

I wiggled my fingers at her, pretending I hadn’t just surreptitiously swiped under my eyes just in case there was any leftover mascara streakage. "Hi.”

“Eli, we gotta leave Tam—Uncle Sammy alone. He has a friend over.” The boy shrieked when she reached to pull him away. Sam’s face twisted. His big hand dwarfed the toddler’s back where he patted it.

“No, stay.” Maybe my ovaries weren’t ready to relinquish the image of Sam cradling a small child in his tree trunk arms. Or maybe I was greedy to collect new pieces of him, even if that meant squeezing them out of his family members.

“No, I really, really don’t want to intrude. Come on, E, we can do bubbles at our house.”

“I’d actually appreciate it. Sam’s given me tons of stories about his brothers. Haven’t heard one about him, yet.”

She paused, cocking her head at Sam before trudging up the final two stairs.

“You’ve been holding out on her, Tammy. I’m Jasmine, Conner’s wife.” She offered her hand before collapsing into one of the patio chairs.

“I figured. I’m Lainey.”

“I figured.”

Sam murmured something as he set a green can of seltzer in front of her. It sounded like a warning, which she promptly ignored. She popped the top. “Let’s start with the college years.”

◆◆◆

Eli loved bubbles. Sam set up a machine that kept a constant stream of them blowing, and if the solution ran out before we could refill it, Eli’s screams became so loud they could quake the bricks of Sam’s house and his neighbors’. Even with six gallons of the stuff in the weatherproof cabinet on Sam’s deck, I worried we’d run out.

We kept a close eye on the bubble levels as we chatted. Sam mostly played with Eli, or sat quietly and listened to Jasmine’s increasingly outrageous stories of the three brothers. She’d been with Connor since high school, so she had more than enough material to satisfy my curiosity and fill in some blanks about my attending. Sam provided a spattering of commentary.

The time Will crashed his car and Sam helped him get it fixed before their mother came home (“He crashed it again three weeks later, idiot.”). When Connor had gotten pre-wedding jitters and Sam had attended six weeks of ballroom dance classes with him in secret (“He wouldn’t let me lead.”).

When they’d all chipped in to pay off the mortgage on their mother’s home. He hadn’t added much to that one.

Jasmine herself was delightful. A financial analyst at a major firm in town, she had her sights on a big promotion after the baby was born. Another boy, she lamented a few times, smiling. Yoga and Pilates interested her more than her husband’s circuit gym. She expressed her thoughts openly and showered her son with love without letting him run around completely unchecked. I loved her.

At some point in the evening, she whipped out her phone, claiming the guacamole was making her crave Mexican food. Conner magically appeared twenty minutes later with three massive takeout bags full of tacos.

Sam’s fingers on my forearm stopped me when I got up to leave them to it. The four of them—Eli included—convinced me to stay for dinner. I shivered at the feeling of those fingertips dragging across my shoulder, Sam’s eyes asking wordlessly if I wanted another beer.

Crowded around the table, tubs of queso and taco wrappers strewn around, I felt more and more like I really had fallen into Wonderland. Underneath the smell of grease and jalapenos, the scent of gardenias wafted from where they grew against Sam’s fence. The breeze cooled as the sun sank. Porch lights flickered on around us. We talked about the gym, how insane it was to be a heart surgeon, that new Netflix show that was getting good reviews, and Will’s ridiculous dating escapades.

Jasmine and I shook our heads and rolled our eyes at each other when Sam and Connor argued over who would take the bags of trash out to the curb. Sam won when he pointed out that someone had to carry Eli home, since he was nodding off in Jasmine’s arms.

“Please come back. I like you so much.” Jas surprised me into a hug before they departed across the yard.

I laughed, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “You don’t like the other girls Sam brings home?”

“Lainey.” Jas slid her hands to my shoulders. Jiggled. “There are no other girls, girl. You get what I’m saying?”

I did. I flicked through my phone apps, calling a rideshare while she waddled across the lawn, catcalling Conner. That done, I gathered the few remaining bottles and empty water glasses from the table.

“I can take care of those.” Sam plucked them out of my hands before I could insist.

“You’re very polite,” I accused, watching him set the glasses in the sink and toss the bottles in a recycling bin. He recycled. I wasn’t sure why that was hot, but it was.

“My mother’s doing.”

“I had fun tonight. I like your brothers. And Jasmine.”

“She’s great.”

“Hmm.” At some point, he’d folded the sleeves of his button down to his elbows. Watching him load the dishwasher was tendon porn. I had to rip my eyes away when I felt his gaze on me, lest he catch me mentally undressing him.

“What.”

“What, what?”

He crossed his arms, settling against the sink. “You’re being quiet. Is it about earlier with…?”

“No.” The truth was, I’d hardly thought of Katie at all once Jasmine and Eli had shown up. His family had been fun. Their closeness was intriguing, even if I didn’t really understand it. In addition to the industrial-sized bubble solution on his deck, Sam kept a folding booster chair in his hallway closet. Maybe it was normal to make space like that for the members of your family, and I was just out of practice. I didn’t have a room in my mother’s apartment in New York, let alone any designated closet space.

Something to think about another time. For now, Jasmine’s words stirred in my brain. I felt like I was circling around something, hesitant to fully grasp it. “You should have asked,” he’d told me earlier. I bit my lip, wondering if I could take his advice to heart.

He waited for me to decide. Patient. The way he looked at me made me think he was willing to stand here like this, with me, for days, simply because he was interested in what I had to say. That, more than the bubble machine or the forearms or the recycling, loosened my tongue.

“Jasmine says you’re not seeing anyone. At least, not right now. Or maybe not for a while.”

“Hmm.” His eyes flicked out the window to his brother’s house. I wondered if Jas was going to get an earful later, or as much of an earful as Sam could deliver. Maybe a full sentence or two.

“Is that…” I flushed, feeling like an egomaniac. But I had to know. I knew he liked me, just not to what extent, and it was becoming increasingly critical that I know how deep his attraction went. “Is that because of me? You said you’d been attracted to me for a while. I mean…do you like me? Or do you, like, like like me?”

I took a page out of Sam’s book and shut my mouth after that masterpiece of grammatical tomfoolery. It didn’t get any easier to stand there feeling like an idiot when it took Sam an extra-long time to answer, even by his standards. Once, he opened his mouth, sucked in a breath, then closed it. He stared at the ceiling, measuring every word in his head.

“I’ve dated women since I’ve known you.” He paused. “I like you more than I liked them. Not that they weren’t lovely.” Another pause. While I waited, I tried to reconcile the sharp prickling in my brain at the thought of him with other “lovely” women.

“I have found it hard recently to…” Pause. He rubbed at his forehead. “To have feelings for you and pursue other relationships.”

“Feelings for me.” That didn’t sound like just attraction.

“Hmm.”

“Took a long time for you to come up with an answer that didn’t really answer my question.”

The kitchen was dark, only the oven light and the twinkle lights on the porch illuminating us. His smile flashed in the gloom. “Probably best if I filter a little bit.”

“What if you took the filter out?”

“You’d run for the hills.”

No, he hadn’t directly answered my question, but that didn’t matter anymore, because for the last two weeks, I’d been grasping at straws with him, trying to uncover every piece that I could. And he’d been hiding some of it. Or, as he put it, filtering . Eff that.

All my noticing and watching and thinking about him crystalized into an overwhelming need to know exactly what the man in front of me was like, unfiltered. I wanted to meet the real Sam. Listen to his slow words. Peel him apart until he was completely exposed to me.

I stepped closer. It wasn’t smart, I reminded myself, to poke this particular bear. Not with The McDaniels hanging over my head. Not since hospital policy said we couldn’t date, anyway. Not when the thought of tangling every area of my life again with one person made me want to pass out.

I’d already learned my lesson there. Once one thing went south, it all did. It was in my best interest to keep those aspects of my life separate. Except…Except I wanted to poke the freakin’ bear! Even as it felt reckless and crazy, his quiet, measured patience with me felt safe. Sturdy.

“What would you do, Sam?” It drove him just as batty when I used his real name as when I called him Doctor. A real win-win for me. “What would you say if you didn’t have to hold anything back?”

Something feral slashed across my mild-mannered attending’s face. Just as fast, it was gone.

“Whoa.” My breath sucked in.

He muttered a curse, rubbing his hands down his face, erasing any trace of the unfiltered hunger that had blazed there just a few seconds ago. “We shouldn’t do this.” His eyes weren’t piercing. No, the blue of his eyes was softer. More tempered. Like him.

“I know. Hospital policy.”

“Yes. And Lainey policy,” he reminded me. It didn’t stop me from taking another step closer.

“Right. That, too. It’s a good policy.” Except was it? Was it really? He was close enough for me to feel the heat of his body. It charged the air between us. It made me want to press up against him because I knew he’d wrap his arms around me tight. I freaking knew .

“I will not push that boundary with you.” He sounded like he was trying to convince the both of us, which I appreciated. I told him so.

“But…” My eyes snagged on those top two buttons he’d undone earlier. I was close enough to see the threads running through the holes. “But what if I took that boundary out of the way? Would you still be…interested?”

His laugh barked. “Uh, yeah. But you have reasons for that line, Lainey. I understand it today better than ever. You have to be sure, if that’s what you want.”

Oh, I was sure. I was practically salivating, I was so sure. Still, a little voice in the back of my head piped up, reminding me that Katie and Nate were potentially about to become permanent fixtures in my life, so now maybe wasn’t the best time to go throwing my long-held rules out the window.

But, geez, he smelled good. And he’d gotten a bunch of cardiac residents all fired up this afternoon. And this white knight stuff suited him. I remembered the gentle press of his fingertips to my ribs and I wanted more. All of it.

Stupid personal rules. Even if I made an exception (which that little voice was sternly warning me against), the stupid hospital rules would get in the way. What kind of organization had policies against two people dating, anyway? How would they even know in the first place?

I stilled, staring at the buttonholes and the dip of skin at the bottom of his throat. How would they know?

“What if…” The idea formed all at once in my head. The little voice started yelling, threatening. I talked over it. “What if we didn’t date?”

“I…of course. That’s your call. We can be friends.” He shuffled backwards, as much as the counter would allow. I didn’t remember him moving toward me while we talked. I lunged to bring him back.

“No! You don’t understand.” My fingers twisted in his shirt, pinky ending up between the buttons. His skin practically burned. “What if we just prepared to date? Like a trial period? But not the real thing.”

When I said it out loud, it sounded crazy, but it didn’t feel crazy. Not to me. Not right now when his skin was so close and I was getting high off his scent of laundry detergent and coffee.

“A trial?”

“Like Netflix!” I blurted the first subscription service that came to mind. “You know, you get thirty days free, no strings or whatever, to try it out.” My eyes bored holes into his, clutching his shirt and willing him to come even closer, to huff whatever fumes I was on. “I’m only a few weeks away from finishing my fellowship. Whether or not I get the job at Cedar, we’ll still be in the clear from a hospital standpoint.”

“Lainey, you’ll get the job.”

“And in the meantime, it’ll give me some time to adjust, too. We can ease into it, right? Just try it out. No strings. We can see how that feels. All the boundaries and policies will remain intact.”

His hands clenched and unclenched at his sides. I got the impression that he wanted to put them on me, somewhere (Yes, God, please anywhere!), but wasn’t sure he should. “So, we try a relationship before we commit to…a relationship.”

“Yes.” He was getting it. “Exactly!”

“Hmm.” He scratched at his beard. The sound made me wonder what the hairs would feel like under my hands, too. “What does that look like? I mean, would we go on dates?”

“Yes.”

“Mmm.” He liked that answer. His hand ghosted along the side of my body, resting on my hip. “And kissing. Do people who are only trial-dating kiss?”

“Oh, well, of course. I think they’d have to, don’t you?” My throat was dry or clogged or something, and my heart had migrated to the base of my larynx. I felt all fluttery, and it was challenging to breathe correctly.

“Absolutely. To ensure they’re physically compatible.” He put zero emphasis on the last two words, but my brain emphasized them anyway, leaping straight to the conclusion I hoped he was aiming for. Yes! Compatibility! Take your clothes off, Sam. We can get compatible right here on the counter.

I swallowed, attempting to move my heart down to its normal position in my chest. “That seems wise.”

“It kind of feels like we get all the perks of dating without actually dating.” He slid a hand down my back, making me shiver.

“Genius.”

“Truly,” he murmured, pulling me in closer. “You’re sure? You want this?” He growled my name when I nodded. He felt hot; palms searing through the thin fabric of my dress. I felt that heat spread right between my legs. By the time his lips brushed against mine, I was a goner.

Some awful, pained whimper fluttered out of my throat, but I didn’t care because it matched what I was thinking. Not enough. I pulled him closer at the same moment he rocked me forward, plastering our bodies together. When I gasped, his tongue darted in, teasing. His beard whispered across my skin, rough where his lips were so smooth and warm.

He groaned my name again, backing me against the counter, hands threading through my hair to tip my head exactly how he wanted me. I moaned when he kissed me deeper, invading now, taking everything he wanted.

Zzzz. Zzzz. Zzzz.

We froze, gasping the same air. My phone vibrated on the counter. I took a breath, blinking down at it. It was hard to concentrate with his lips still a whisper away from mine, blowing warm, panting breaths across my skin.

Another look and my brain reengaged. “It’s my Uber.”

I reached up, feeling his beard again and lifting my head for another kiss. Two. Three.

“I could have taken you home.”

“I didn’t want to impose,” I whispered, closing my eyes when his thumbs brushed slow circles across my belly.

“It would be a bad idea for me to ask you to stay, right?” His mouth skimmed against my jaw. One of his hands crept slowly around to my back, heading towards my ass.

“I, um. Yes.”

Sam froze, pulling away just a few inches. “Yes? Bad idea?”

“Yes. Yeah,” I repeated, shuffling further away. The modicum of space between us opened the floodgates to the irate, protective voice in my head that had been muffled by his lips. It was reiterating—rightly so—that I’d had a major shock seeing Katie today and I’d only just agreed to not-date this man and even if I’d known him for years, it was entirely too soon to get compatible with him on his kitchen floor, no matter how tempting that sounded.

He followed me to the front. We stared at each other in the doorway as a black sedan idled on the curb. “Thank you, Sam, for today. For everything today. The tacos and the rescue and…all of it.” Now that I was breathing in the fresh night air, thanking him for kissing the crap out of me seemed a little too desperate.

“You’re welcome. For all of it.” The car beeped from the curb. He stopped me when I turned to go. “Wait. One more, please.”

I grinned so wide our teeth clashed together, but something about even that was still sexy. My driver honked louder this time, and I broke away, panting. “Not dating.”

“Not even a little.”

He watched me check the plates of the car before I hopped in. He was still watching as I rolled away.