Chapter 5

There is something about Katy Barrows that immediately makes me lose my head. And considering one of the reasons I'm here and not still at Mayo, I need to get a grip on myself. It wasn't like this before. Seeing her makes me forget. She distracts me from my hard-earned rancor and teleports me back to a happier time in my life. She reminds me of the guy I once was—the guy before my life crumbled around me—and I react accordingly, desperate for any sliver of that I can get.

Even if it's wrong.

In the past, I never said inappropriate things to her. I never touched her unnecessarily. The only time I allowed myself to lose control wasn't even a loss of control. It was planned. There was no way I was moving across the country without knowing what it felt like to kiss her at least once.

But prior to that?

No. I never lost control with her—because I never lose control with anything, or at least that used to be the case—despite the massive temptation she presented. I saw her and we were alone again, and I didn't know how to stop myself. She was scared, and I wanted to make that better. My mouth just ran. My body moved in.

And it can never happen again.

I could lose myself in Katy Barrows. In the filthy, perverse thoughts I only allow to consume me at night. But I'd start to make mistakes if she became the star of my show, and mistakes are not something I can afford again. I'm not going to cross the line with her—there will be no more stolen kisses with Katy Barrows—so what good did all that flirting and touching do?

Other than tempt me to want something I can't and won't have.

"Dr. Lawson, there's a woman on the phone who says she's your wife," one of the nurses calls out to me as I walk by the station.

Christ, she is fucking relentless. How much of my blood is this woman determined to spill?

"I'm not married," I tell the nurse without any further explanation and continue down the hall toward the ORs, though my jaw is clenched tight. I went from smiling like a high school kid with a crush to practically cracking a tooth all in a matter of seconds. What a fucking day this is, and it's nowhere close to done for me.

"Hey," Wes says, coming in beside me. "How's your first official day, Chief?"

It was going well. Until I got in an elevator when I knew better and then heard my ex has now taken to stalking me at work.

"It's going. How's your first day as non-chief?"

Wes grins the grin of a happy man. He's pulling back his hours, and starting next week is going to be on sabbatical as he and his artist wife Aria travel around Europe for three months as part of some art tour thing she's doing.

"I can't say I miss the paperwork. Or the stress."

"That I can understand." I glance around, making sure we're alone. "Listen, I want to thank you again?—"

He holds up his hand, stopping me. "There truly is no need. I think you're going to do incredible things here, Bennett, and for what it's worth, I think Mayo was wrong to let you go. Especially the way they did it."

I sigh. I owe Wes and his son, Jack, everything. I did my fellowship in LA with Jack, and he happened to be in Minnesota one week and called me to grab a beer and catch up. I broke down and explained everything to him, and when he heard what Liz did to me and about my mom's cancer, he called his dad, who he knew was interested in stepping down, and everything fell into place.

"That said, Cricket Peterson is looking for you, and I'm glad she's now looking for you instead of me."

Ah, yes. Cricket Peterson. Annoying suck-up with a weird name. I watched her in the OR this morning. She's one of the other fifth-year trauma hopefuls vying for a fellowship here, along with Katy.

"I'm heading in to watch Katy Barrows do an ex-lap on a car accident patient, so Dr. Peterson will have to wait."

Wes glances around, ensuring we're still alone. "Cricket is very talented, but she is a win-at-all-costs sort of surgeon, whereas Katy does it with heart and passion. Katy is one of the best surgeons I've seen come through these doors in a very long time, and I'm not just saying that because I'm friends with her uncles and aunts."

I shake my head. "One of these days someone will have to explain the whole uncles, aunts, and cousins thing to me. She said she calls you a bastard as a term of endearment."

Wes laughs, leaning against the wall and folding his arms. "Katy is a pistol, and her mouth is loaded at all times. Sometimes she fires it without thinking through the resulting trauma. Still, you can't help but love her. She's a ball of sunshine. I hope she wasn't inappropriate with you."

No more than I was with her."No. She was fine. In fact, I'd like to be there at the start of her surgery. I'll catch up with you." I smack his shoulder and head for the surgical part of the floor.

The moment I catch sight of Katy at the scrub sink, that's when it happens. The smile my ex wiped off my face curls back up of its own goddamn volition. Katy is wearing her mask and surgical cap, bopping her head back and forth, singing softly to herself as she scrubs.

You can't help but love her. She's a ball of sunshine.

And right now, I'm in the aftermath of a category-five tornado that could use a little sunshine in the worst of ways.

For a moment, I stand here, watching her, wondering what it is about her that makes her stick to me like glue. She's enchanting, distracting, and terrifying because she's both of those things. I'm her boss and she's my resident and that automatically makes her off-limits. Though neither my brain nor my body seems to care about that.

I slept in my mother's guest room last night and spent half the night helping her when she was sick, but no matter how hard I tried, Katy managed to flicker in and out of my thoughts on vicious repeat.

I told myself it was to be expected after what I've been through. With where I find myself now—miserable and alone, feeling wrecked and betrayed. Katy is a happier past, a breath of fresh air I can't help but want to inhale over and over again.

Something about her got under my skin almost immediately all those years ago and hasn't left. Something that drew me to her, that had me giving her time I didn't even give my primary residents. But now, she's nothing more than an inconvenient attraction.

I like the way she looks at me and talks to me. Not like I'm her boss or she's trying to suck up the way Cricket Peterson does. But like she has no filter and doesn't care. Like she's too good for me and she knows it, but she tries to rein it in when she remembers I'm her boss.

Fuck. I need to get a grip. And laid.

This isn't a bar, and Katy isn't just any woman I could lose myself in for a night. I haven't been single in over five years, and now I run into her. The girl I thought about more than I had any right to. But that was a long time ago, and our timing isn't any better now. More than that, I'm not looking for it to be.

I shake it off—I shake my ex-fucking-wife off—and get my ass back into what I'm here to do.

Surgery. Teach. Restart my life.

I head toward the sink and ask, "How's your patient's CT?" I don my mask and scrub cap and move to the basin beside her. Stepping on the water pedal, I slide up the sleeves of my shirt and start scrubbing in.

Katy gives a quick glance at my forearms and then returns to her sink. "He has a grade three, possibly grade four, laceration to the spleen and some bruising to the bowel without obvious signs of bleeding there."

"Your plan?" I watch her out of the corner of my eye as she scrubs her hands and forearms with precision, only to force myself to concentrate on what I'm doing.

Katy is all business as she answers. "Removal of the spleen and explore the bowel to ensure it's intact without any leaks. Then I'll explore the rest of the abdomen to make sure I don't miss anything."

I nod in approval. "Good. Show me how it's done, Dr. Barrows."

"I intend to, Dr. Lawson." With that, she pulls away from the sink, forearms wet and held out in front of her as she enters the OR backward.

A few moments later, I follow after her, and the nurse gowns and gloves me up. Katy is already at the table, talking with the scrub nurse and the intern who's waiting on her.

I linger back, watching how she works, how she commands and runs her OR. She conducts the time out and then orders, "Ten blade, please," without even acknowledging me. "Alexa, play Katy's alternative mix," she calls out, and some indie rock song that I'm not familiar with comes blaring from the speaker in the corner with a snarling guitar and upbeat, almost pop bass. "Yes. Good. Let's do it."

I'm not here to her. She's one hundred percent focused on her work and on her patient. She makes a perfect incision, packing off and cauterizing any bleeders she can, and then has the scrub nurse use the retractors so she clearly visualizes the field.

She pauses, tilts her head, and emits a rueful sigh. "Well, that sucks."

"Are you going to have to remove the spleen?" the intern whose name I don't yet know asks.

"Yep. Tell me, Dr. Fields, why is the spleen so difficult to repair once it's been lacerated?"

The intern falters for a moment. "Um. Because of its location beneath the rib cage? And because it's, um, difficult to stop it from bleeding once it starts?"

Those come out like questions, and Katy nods. "Yes. Good," she praises, and the guy preens like a show pony. "Both of those are accurate. But don't forget that the spongy nature of the spleen makes it difficult to suture, it has minimal regenerative capacity unlike the liver, and there is a higher rate of postop complications like bleeding, infection, and clot formation. See." She drags her instrument along the bleeding organ. "Once it starts, it doesn't like to stop. But actually, the reason I said that sucks is because of this."

"What is it?" Dr. Fields questions.

"Dr. Lawson, can you come here and give me a second opinion, please?"

I step forward and peer over the patient's open abdomen. "What am I looking for?"

"This," she tells me, briefly glancing up and meeting my eyes before returning to the surgical field. "Is this…"

I pick up the dissector and touch the small, firm mass on the liver. "It looks like your patient?—"

"Mr. Jacobs," she inserts.

"Mr. Jacobs," I correct. "It appears as if he's very lucky he got into a car accident today. Though I suppose we won't know for sure until we dissect it and have pathology take a look."

"So that's…"

"A tumor," Katy tells Dr. Fields. "We'll remove it and send it down to pathology to see if it's benign or malignant, but the rest of his liver looks healthy and there was nothing on his labs that indicated it wasn't. Which means, if it is cancer, we hopefully caught this very early."

"Wow," the intern says, his voice laced with awe. "That's wild."

"We'll see. For now, let's finish saving his life. Thank you, Dr. Lawson."

I smirk beneath my mask at her dismissal of me. She wants to do this on her own. She wants to show off for her new boss, and I'm only too happy to let her.

Katy continues to work quickly and diligently, pressing her intern for answers to questions she continues to throw at him, and once the patient is stable and she's getting ready to close, the circulating nurse asks her, "What was his thing?"

"Alexa, stop." The music cuts out and Katy looks at her intern. "You can close. Have you ever done that before?"

He shakes his head.

"Okay. I'll walk you through it." She shows him how to staple and then steps back to allow him to work as she addresses the scrub nurse who asked her the question. "Mr. Jacobs trains service dogs. Every year or so, they bring a new dog into their home, and he trains it to be a good service animal for people with disabilities or medical conditions that benefit from them. That's where they were headed this morning," she continues. "To pick up a new dog to train."

"That's a really good one," the nurse says. "Way better than that guy from last week. What was his name? The one who admitted to collecting doll heads because they remind him of his ex-girlfriend."

Katy chokes on a laugh. "His name was Mr. Lawson." Now it's my turn to choke. Only I'm not laughing. Katy pins me with an amused stare. "I'm assuming they're not related to you, Dr. Lawson. Unless you have a brother or cousin, we don't know about."

"No. Definitely not." I hold my gloved hands up in surrender. "I'm an only child with no cousins, unlike you with your six hundred, and thankfully Lawson is a pretty common last name."

Katy gives me a taunting shrug. "If you say so."

Brat. "I definitely say so, Dr. Barrows." I raise a pointed eyebrow at her since that's all she can see of my face other than my eyes, but then I realize how harsh and stern I sounded and try to soften myself. "Doll heads? Really?"

"All the same type of doll too. The ones where the eyes open and shut with how you move the doll. He has a thing for blondes with blue eyes and has over a hundred he's collected. He was very proud of that when he told me, and I was very grateful my hair is brown and not blonde."

A small laugh ripples through the OR. "You and me both," the circulating nurse deadpans.

"And I assume he lives in his mother's basement and his ex has a restraining order out on him? What did he do with the bodies of the dolls, or do I not want to know?"

"I have no clue. I didn't get that far with my questioning, nor did I want the answer. I stopped pressing after he said doll heads."

I give an exaggerated shudder, making Katy laugh.

"Nice work, Dr. Fields," Katy applauds. "You can breathe now. Your staples look perfect. I'm going to speak to the family. Thank you, everyone."

We leave the OR as the nurses, along with Dr. Fields, finish up with the patient before they move him to the PACU or post-anesthesia care unit, and we go and scrub out. Katy is singing quietly to herself again. She did that a few times during the surgery and was doing it before while she was scrubbing in as well.

"That was excellent, Dr. Barrows. So far, I have to agree with Dr. Kincaid. You know what you're doing in there, and you do it with heart and passion." I shoot her an approving glance. She was great. A thoughtful and patient teacher. Calm at all times. Skilled at a higher level than her fifth-year peers.

The pleased smile on her lips makes me want to kiss it just so I can feel it for myself, and I clear my throat, shoving my fixation with her back into the recesses of my mind. How am I already so fucked with this girl? It's only been twenty-four hours.

"Thank you, Dr. Lawson. I appreciate that, and it means a lot coming from you. Wait till you see me kick some ass with a serious trauma."

I smirk at her arrogance. "What was all that about the patient's thing?"

She glances at me as she takes her foot off the pedal and dries her hands with paper towels. "Whenever I can, I ask either the patient or a family member something about them I should know. Something I can take with me into surgery. Something beyond the mechanics of what I'm there to do."

"Something personal," I contribute.

She removes her scrub cap and holds it in her hand, staring down at the pink fabric with what I think is a small blush tinting her cheeks. "Yep."

"What? What aren't you saying?" I dry my hands and lean my hip against the sink, facing her with my arms folded expectantly over my chest. "There's more, I can tell."

She puffs out an annoyed breath, making a few flyways of hair dance around her face. "I need to work on my poker face." She sighs, still not meeting my eyes. "Fine, but we're back to that no-judging, can't hold it against me thing."

"Promise."

She gnaws on her bottom lip, shakes her head, sighs again, and then utters what I think is "fuck it," only to quickly go on. "When I was a third-year medical student, the chief resident told me that surgeons like to cut and sometimes in doing so, we forget the person on our table is a person and not simply a patient there for us to work and learn on." She looks up at me, her stunning, bright blue eyes locked on mine in a way that makes me feel their intensity. "That stayed with me, especially as someone who has been through a similar traumatic event. So I ask that question because when I walk into that OR, I want to remember it's not just a cool case or another surgery. It's someone's someone I'm trying to save."

Fuck. I wish I hadn't asked. I wish I didn't know that. For a moment, I can't do anything other than stare unblinkingly at her. Taking in every perfect line of her beautiful face that easily outshines every other woman I've ever laid eyes on.

"Sounds like a good teacher," I quip, hating the thickness in my voice and hoping she doesn't hear it. Her truth is making me feel way more than I want to feel right now. The warmth flowing through my veins is like a drug made out of sweet, delicious poison, and I find myself once again staring at her lips, remembering just how equally sweet and delicious they were.

"He was." She pushes away from the sink, oblivious to my inner turmoil. "I'm going to update the family and then head out. I'll see you Monday, Dr. Lawson."

"See you Monday, Dr. Barrows."

She leaves me here, and I take a few extra minutes to get my head back on straight. Again. Something I seem to have to do with annoying frequency anytime I'm near her.

My phone vibrates against my hip, and I pull it out, read over the text, and then head for the computers so I can put in the order the nurse needs. I log in, reading through the patient's chart when I hear a squeal of delight followed by a loud laugh. When I look up, I see a little girl, maybe five or six, running straight for Katy, who crouches down and scoops her up into her arms, twirling her around the middle of the surgical floor.

The little girl wraps her arms around Katy's neck, and Katy kisses her cheek before a tall and good-looking man approaches her and snakes his arm around her waist, drawing both of them into his side. They talk, all smiles and laughter, and then the girl says something to Katy, who nods enthusiastically in response. After that, the three of them head for the exit together.

And that sweet, delicious poisonous drug I was feeling high on only moments ago turns corrosive, burning me from the inside out.

I'm an asshole.

A huge fucking asshole.

I never asked Katy if she was with someone. If she was married or a mother.

I never asked her anything personal about herself at all.

I just assumed she was single the way she was seven years ago. As if time hadn't moved for her the way it moved for me. I flirted with her. I made inappropriate comments. I touched her.

But the worst of it? That's not even what has me feeling like total and absolute shit right now. I'm jealous of that guy.

The one who gets to have Katy and their daughter.

The one who gets to have it all when I'm left with nothing.