Chapter 2

Katy doesn't know this, nor will she ever, but I knew she worked here before I even interviewed for the position. That morning, I was walking into the hospital on my way to the interview with Wes Kincaid along with the chief of surgery when I saw Katy enter ahead of me. I recognized her instantly. She was wearing scrubs and had an elastic dangling from her teeth as she ran her hands through her thick, brown hair, and I was immediately hit with the memory of doing the exact same thing to her once.

Her hair felt like silk beneath my fingers, and she smelled like fucking sunshine and vanilla. Tasted like it too.

Katy Barrows.

The young, bright-eyed, and bushy-tailed medical student who utterly captivated me. So much so that I spent extra time teaching her simply to have an excuse to look at her and talk to her while hoarding her attention all to myself. I had wanted to kiss her from the moment I first saw her, and I only did so that night because she was going into her fourth year of medical school, and I was moving across the country for a fellowship.

I had nothing left to lose.

I figured I'd never see her again, and that was my last shot to do the one thing—well, one of the many things—I had always wanted to do with her. Now she's even more beautiful than I remember, and that day in the lobby, I found myself following her, watching as she grabbed a coffee from the kiosk and then met up with a friend before climbing into the elevator and disappearing.

I knew she had planned to become a trauma surgeon. She had told me all about it that night at the party before I kissed her, and I wondered if I took the job, if she'd be working for me once again. I told myself it didn't matter. Despite the unethical quandary that comes with dating a resident, after what happened in Minnesota, I need this fucking job and have no plans to risk it. Not to mention, I have no interest in dating anyone.

Not after how badly my marriage to Lizbeth ended.

No. I moved back to Boston for one reason and one reason only. My mother. And the job, so maybe that's two. But my mother is my primary reason. She's sick and alone, and I can't abide either for her.

So Katy doesn't enter into my plans. Not even a little.

But I won't lie and say I'm disappointed that I'm going to be seeing her regularly, even if only as my resident.

She's everything I remember her being but with the added confidence and maturity of a great surgeon. I knew the second she got a good look at me that she remembered me, and sitting there in the dark in that stuck elevator, it was easy to suspend time and not think about the hospital beyond the four walls of the elevator or the reality of our situation.

Even if just for a moment.

I touched her. I teased her. I flirted. Though I did manage to keep it somewhat professional. That's where it ends. Toying with the line is dangerous and forbidden, even if she is alluring as hell.

I released her after letting her know I remembered her, and in doing so, I vowed that was it. The simple truth is, I can't fucking touch her. From now on, we're chief and resident and nothing more.

I scrub my hand along my jaw and walk through the emergency department, watching her race toward the trauma rooms. Inwardly, I sigh. It's going to be a long fucking year.

Taking a left, I head out the ambulance bay doors and jog toward the garage in the sweltering heat and torrential rain of a Boston August storm. Instantly, my blue button-down is soaked, sticking to my skin as my hair drips water directly into my eye, making it harder to see. Overhead thunder rumbles loudly, followed almost immediately by a crack of lightning. If that, along with getting stuck in an elevator, are not ominous signs for my first non-official day, I don't know what is.

Wes is letting everyone know he's stepping down as trauma surgery chief, and tomorrow will be my first official day where I greet everyone. And hope that the rumors of why I left don't reach Boston. But today, I have somewhere more important to be, and as I climb into my car and drive across town, I do my best to focus on that. Not on what I left behind or the strings I had to pull to get this job after the way I left my old one or my ex.

And certainly not on the pretty brunette with eyes so blue they almost appear lit from within or the fact that she was so adorably nervous and unsettled in that elevator but seemed just as drawn to me as I was to her. Was it from seeing me again or the situation we found ourselves in?

I growl out a frustrated breath, running my hand through my wet hair and turning up the volume of the song playing through my speakers to drown out my useless thoughts. By the time I pull into the parking garage at Dana Farber, I'm centered on why I'm here and nothing else.

My mother.

After stopping at the restroom to use the hand dryers on my shirt, I weave my way through the building and take the elevator up to the infusion area, the bookstore bag dangling from my wrist. "Good morning, Kimberly," I greet the nurse in the front.

"Good morning, Dr. Lawson." She blushes as she did the first time I was here. "Your mother is just getting started. Would you like me to take you back to her?"

"Sure. That would be great. Thank you." I may be an angry, grumpy prick now, but I'll never be a dick to nurses, and certainly not nurses responsible for my mother's care.

She stands and swipes her badge on the wall and then leads me back to an open space that appears more like a lounge than a hospital with its large, comfy, reclining chairs and sweeping views of Boston out the large floor-to-ceiling windows. Patients can choose to be either in a communal infusion area where they can socialize or in a private space, and my mother has chosen the latter.

Likely because of the books I'm carrying with me.

"Ah, there you are," my mother announces when she sees me. "Perfect timing. They're just starting my infusion. Did you get the books I ordered?"

I hand her the bag and take the recliner beside her. Leaning back, I kick my feet up and toss my hands behind my head. "In all their smutty glory."

My mother and her nurse, Astrid, laugh. My mother is a dirty romance book junky. Minus the dirty parts, I always found her continued faith and love of romance to be a bit baffling considering my father fucked his assistant and then her best friend and left her with nothing except for me after telling her he never loved her. As far as I know, she never dated anyone after him, but somehow loves to live vicariously through the pages of books. I'm only too happy to supply her habit, occasionally being a sucker enough to read some of them to her if she's not feeling well.

My father, as you've garnered, was a class-A asshole to everyone in his life, including his only son and wife. He made all his money after my parents divorced, selling his first company for millions and then his second one for billions, only to divorce his second and third wives and eventually die alone of liver disease. Ironically, as his only surviving heir, I inherited everything and subsequently bought my mother the condo of her dreams, gave her enough money that she'd never have to work again, and sent her on a four-week cruise around Europe.

It wasn't until she returned home and I came to visit her that I heard her coughing. She blew it off and claimed it was just a cold and it would pass. Except it didn't. Finally, I forced her to get a chest x-ray and after that, a biopsy, and now here we are, treating her non-small cell lung cancer that has spread to her nearby lymph nodes.

Sometimes being a doctor sucks. Especially a doctor who currently doesn't have the happiest or brightest outlook on life. Actually, life deserves double middle fingers and can fuck off accordingly. The only thing that's managed to make me smile in I don't even know how long is Katy Barrows.

But despite my less-than-rosy disposition, there isn't anything I wouldn't do for my mother or to make her happy, so we don't talk about her cancer or prognosis, and I let her focus on me when she's not focused on her romance books.

Case in point…

"You're smiling," my mother accuses, and I close my eyes, pretending to rest comfortably and casually when her words make me feel anything but. I hadn't realized I was smiling.

"I got stuck in another elevator today." With a beautiful woman who now works for me though, I still remember what her kisses taste like.

My mother laughs because unlike me, nothing gets her down or holds her there long. "How many times does that make it now?"

"Three," I answer without missing a beat or bothering to open my eyes.

"Remind me never to get on an elevator with you," Astrid teases, and my stupid, traitorous smile grows. That's the same thing Katy said.

"See, and I was hoping that smile was because you were going to tell me that you've met a funny, vivacious, brilliant woman, and you're giving me a grandchild."

I groan. Loudly. "Please, don't start with that again."

"I'll be back to check on you in a bit." Astrid politely sees herself out, leaving me alone with my baby-hungry mother.

"Lizbeth called me."

"What?" My eyes pop open, and I jerk up, bringing the feet of the recliner back down as I sit up and glare at my mother. "Mom, what are you doing? You go from talking about new women and grandbabies to my ex-fucking-wife?"

She ignores the curse. For an Irish woman who grew up in South Boston and swears like a biker at a rally, she rarely tolerates that in me. "She said you're not returning her calls."

I blink at her, nonplussed. "I'm not. Why would I? We're divorced."

"She says she needs to speak to you. That it's important."

I roll my eyes derisively. "Oh, I'm sure it is. And I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that she wants a bigger bank account and a husband to rely on because her trust fund is gone." I raise a you know I'm right eyebrow at her. "Besides, I don't know why you're even bringing her up. You never liked her. She's a lying, conniving, backstabbing, life-ruining snake."

It's a fact my mother can't argue.

When Liz and I met, fell in love, and got married, we talked about starting a family one day. I wanted kids. I've wanted kids for a while. And not just to please my mother. I want to be the dad mine never was. But when I started bringing it up, Liz would always have a reason why it wasn't a good time. And for a while, with the hours I was working, I let it ride. Then I started to push because I was more than ready, we'd been married for four years, and I wasn't getting any younger.

Eventually, she relented, and we started trying and trying, but after six or so months of nothing, I was starting to get concerned. She blew it off, saying maybe it wasn't meant to be. More than that, she refused to go for testing of any kind and wouldn't even discuss fertility treatments. I suggested adoption, but she wouldn't entertain that either.

Anytime I'd try to talk about any of this with her, she'd grow angry and dismissive and blame me for a hundred things that were all out of my control and not related to starting a family. It was wearing on me and silently breaking my heart.

Then one day, after a particularly long, awful shift, I didn't want to go home. Liz was out late at a hospital administration dinner, and the thought of going home to an empty house was too much. I went to a local restaurant and ran into one of Liz's friends who also happened to be her GYN. We got to talking, and I confessed that I was stressed that we were having so much trouble getting pregnant.

She looked at me as if I had three heads and asked me when Liz had her tubal ligation reversed. Naturally, you could imagine my shock, and when I asked her what fucking tubal ligation, she turned pale and told me she couldn't speak further about it and had only mentioned it because she thought I knew. Of course she did. Because why wouldn't I know that while I was out of town at a conference a year prior, my wife went behind my back and had her tubes tied and never told me?

Only that wasn't the final blow. It was simply the tip of the iceberg, and things got worse from there. Much, much worse. So as far as I'm concerned, she's not owed me picking up her calls, and she has a ton of fucking nerve calling my sick mother.

"Fine. You're right. I fucking hated Liz." My mother purses her lips to the side in her universal display of I'm conceding the battle, but not the war. "But there has to be someone else who could do it."

"I tell you what. Instead of romance that doesn't exist in real life, why don't we read the literary fictional type?"

"If you read to me, that's a deal. There's rarely sex at the beginning of these books anyway, which frankly is a shame."

I chuckle lightly, knowing that's a lie and that often there is sex in the first few chapters of her books. I don't comment though, as I pull out the first book my hand touches. "Let's hope so. The last one started with a one-night stand, and I'm still scarred from reading those words to you."

She rolls her eyes. "When you get to be my age and are as sick as I am, you stop caring so much about words like pussy and cock and revel in the notion that someone's getting some good action."

I plug my ears. "La, la, la. Stop! You're still my mother."

"And you're my almost forty-year-old son. Grow up." She throws the wrapper from her straw at me, the white paper landing on my lap.

"Grow up? You're telling me to grow up when you're throwing paper at me?" I ball it up in my hand and chuck it back at her. "And I'm not forty. I'm thirty-eight."

"Excellent. You're still too old to play a virgin when I know you're not. Now start reading and stop being such a prude. No skipping words or scenes either this time."

I pick up the book and groan at the title before I flip the cover around and glare at her, shaking the book and making the pages flop around. "Are you trying to be cruel?"

"What?" She feigns innocence.

"Surprise Baby for the Billionaire Doctor?"

She blinks her wide blue eyes at me. "Is there a problem?"

"Mom." I groan her name, scrubbing a hand up and down my face. "You have the subtlety and grace of a head-on collision."

"You don't have to have love and romance to have a baby," she presses. "With your kind of money, you can hire a surrogate."

"A surrogate?" I utter. "You do realize I need a woman's egg to fertilize and implant in said surrogate, right?"

"Okay then. Forget that. Find a woman who wants a baby too and is willing to have it with you even if there is no love or romance involved since I know you've sworn that off. I won't push that side of this. Yet." She gives me a meaningful look. "But there is no fucking earthly reason why you have to give up on having children, and I have to give up on my dream of being a grandmother."

I sigh, leaning back in my chair, losing steam with this argument. "You're really pushing it today."

She points to the machine on her right pumping chemo into her PICC line or peripherally inserted central catheter, which is a long-term IV site that allows the chemo and other medications to be given. "I'm having chemo for stage three lung cancer. Of course I'm fucking pushing it. Just think about that, okay? You can still have it all, even without the wife."

I grunt because as much as I hate to admit it, she's right. I could. And it's something I want. Not to mention, it is her dream to have grandchildren, and there is nothing more in this world that I want than to have my mom meet my children.

But it's also not nearly as easy as she's making it sound.

Adopting as a single man who works long hours and has no family other than a sick mother is nearly impossible. And it's not exactly like women are lining up to have babies with men without love and commitment being part of the equation. So that leads me back to square one, which is nowhere.

Thankfully, my mother grows tired, and the argument is left at that. I read the first five chapters of Surprise Baby for the Billionaire Doctor until it gets to a sex scene, and when my mother is done with her chemo, I drive her home and stay the night at her condo, making sure she has everything she needs.

Even if I can't give her everything she wants.