Then he wasn’t sure he could stop himself from taking a taste of those lips. All of them.
Chapter Two
“It makes no sense!” Josie said to her friend Sara as she tried to peel back the wrapper on her cream cheese packet. “I mean, why is this happening to me? I can’t go within two feet of Dr. Hayes without dropping something.”
It only happened whenhewas in the room.
Left on her own, she was capable and confident. But when Houston Hayes approached her with his deep, penetrating stare and towering strength, blood pressure cuffs seemed to jump out of her hands and to the floor. Scalpels dropped and spun like bottles. Her hands shook, her hips knocked into gurneys and surgical trays, and she tripped over intravenous tubing.
It had to stop.
She was a grown woman of twenty-seven, with a medical degree, well-respected by the hospital staff and her patients. She was starting the second year of her orthopedic residency with relative ease and competence. Except for the Dr. Hayes-induced Dropping Medical Equipment Syndrome.
Sara raised her eyebrow and stirred cream into her coffee. “It’s called sexual tension, Josie.”
All Josie heard was sex. The top pulled back with a sudden jerkand the cream cheese container went sailing out of her hand. It skidded to a stop under the table next to her, where two male doctors were eating their dinner by the windows that boasted a view of the Florida coastline. She sat there stricken while Sara grinned at her. Josie was not amused.
“It’s not sexual tension,” she whispered urgently, standing to retrieve the now useless bagel spread.
That was a lie. No matter what he felt, it was definitely sexual tension on her part.
For one simple reason.
Dr. Hayes was a god.
Every inch of him—from his short black hair, to his gorgeous ice-blue eyes, and all down the length of his muscular, toned body—screamed power. Control.
A man who knew what he wanted and took it without any doubts or delays. The desire to be the taken had been creeping up on her steadily until she had found herself suffering from chronic klutziness in his presence.
So maybe what Sara said did make sense. But that didn’t make it any easier.
Josie bent under the neighboring table and said to the pair of doctors, “Sorry, guys, I dropped my cream cheese.” They moved their legs while she fished out the wayward package, neither surprised nor upset to see Josie on the floor collecting fallen items. Her colleagues at Acadia Inlet Hospital were starting to expect it.
“No problem, Josie,” Mark Givens said with a grin, tucking into his hamburger.
His grin said it all. Everyone thought she was a royal idiot, incapable of holding onto a simple pack of cream cheese. How in the heck could she expect to be a surgeon if her fingers weren’t steady on snack foods? Eight years of education and in a matter of three months she had jeopardized all of that.
Because of sex. Or lack thereof.
She blamed a certain orthopedic surgeon entirely. If hewouldn’t stare at her with those probing ice-blue eyes, and stand way too close for comfort, she wouldn’t get nervous. And when she got nervous, she dropped things.
She sat back down with Sara and sighed. “I’m ruining my career before I’ve even gotten started. Dr. Hayes is afraid to trust me with a scalpel, and who can blame him?”
Sara pulled to tighten her blond ponytail. “You’re caught in a vicious cycle. He makes you nervous, so you act like a klutz, which makes him doubt your qualifications. Then you get more nervous, and on it goes.”
Josie knew she was right. From the first day she had met Houston three months earlier when he joined the staff, she had been intimidated by him. By his confidence, his coolness, and his surgical skill.
“So what am I supposed to do? He won’t even let me close a case, let alone conduct a surgery on my own. And I certainly can’t go to the resident chief and complain about it.” Josie felt even worse just thinking about it. “I’d look like a whiner and besides, what if Dr. Hayes tells Dr. Sheinberg I’m an idiot who needs my medical degree revoked?”
Becoming a surgeon was a lifelong goal, one she had been working towards steadily since high school. When her dad had died, himself a surgeon, she had been doubly determined to be successful.
Tripping over thin air and scrambling around on her hands and knees for X-rays wasn’t the way to do it.
Sara tossed her spoon down on the table and grinned. “You know what they say if someone intimidates you. You need to picture them being powerless. Like standing in front of you in just their underwear.”
Underwear?Josie’s face began to burn. The sudden image of six-foot-three, tanned, muscular Dr. Hayes standing in front of her in a pair of black boxer briefs sent her senses into a tailspin. “Are you trying to torture me?” Her voice was a strangled whisper.
Sara shrugged. “Or you could just sleep with him. That ought to reduce him to human status.”