“No, not bad.” Good, in fact. Very good. “But I’m not sure how you’ll feel about it.”
His cup went down hard on the table, and coffee sloshed over the rim. He ignored the puddle on the table and his hand and winced. “Okay, tell me. I can take it. What did I say?”
She pushed a napkin towards him and stood up, trying not to grin, with little luck. “I’ve really got to get back now.”
“Josie,” he ground out.
“Yes, Dr. Hayes?” She tugged on her scrub pants to pull them up and raised her eyebrows.
He gave her a pained look. “What did I say besides commenting on your hair? Come on, put me out of my misery.” Josie decided to tell him the truth, and see where things went. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. “You didn’t say much,” she said with a shrug.
Then she couldn’t prevent herself from staring down at him with a little smile. “You just asked me to take your trunksoff, mentioning that I’d seen you naked before. You reprimanded me for calling you Dr. Hayes when I had called you Houston when we spent the night together. And you told me if it wasn’t for your father, I would be the woman you would want to be with.”
Let’s see what he did with that.
Josie turned, her sneakers squeaking on the tile floor as she sashayed towards the door, her nicely curved hips hugged by her scrub pants, and Houston wanted to crawl under the table.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Oh, hell. It was worse than he had thought.
Not only had he made his lust and longing for her perfectly cleat, he had actually brought up his father? Good God. He was never doing drugs again.
It explained Josie’s showing up at his condo day after day, though. He had confessed feelings for her, and Josie was a nice person. She cared about him, wanted to take care of him.
Only he couldn’t have her taking care of him, because that was a complication in his life he didn’t need. Life was challenging enough without having to guard his heart against a Josie invasion.
Starting with simple tasks like cleaning up his own clumsiness. Trying to mop up the spilled coffee on his left hand without use of his right was damn near impossible. He ended up turning his hand over and rolling it back and forth across the napkin, which ripped and stuck to his skin.
He cursed under his breath in frustration. Every day since the accident had been a constant struggle. Total hell. He couldn’t even zip his pants without three or four attempts and ten minutes. Forget about buttoning a shirt. Or cutting food with a knife andfork. Showering was like participating in a comedy act, with all the stops and starts and slips and spills.
And wet underwear was impossible to deal with.
That’s why he had to come back to work. He couldn’t sit around his condo one more day and discover all the things that he wasn’t capable of doing anymore. And maybe never would be.
He stopped his thoughts there ruthlessly.
He would get better.
It was out of the questionnotto.
Where would he be if he couldn’t be a surgeon?
It was just time, that’s all. He needed time to heal. In two weeks he could start PT, and then he would regain the majority of his mobility, enough to do his job as well as he always had.
In the meantime, he was going to have to learn to use his left hand if he wanted to function without the help of his mother. At thirty-three, he was a little old to have his mother buttoning his shirt for him. And Josie couldn’t touch his underwear again and expect to keep her own clothes on.
And that wasn’t going to happen. Because most important of all, he had to learn to ignore his ridiculous feelings and his overactive hormones and pretend that Josie Adkins was just another orthopedic resident.
That’s all.
Which was about as likely as Houston going back in time and beating that shark off with his board.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Josie was nervous. Okay, make that terrified. She had seen this surgery done half a dozen times by Dr. Hayes, but today she was going to be holding the scalpel.
She shouldn’t be intimidated, she told herself firmly as she walked down the hall to meet with the patient. During her stints in ER trauma, she’d done minor solo surgeries as well as several under the tutelage of Dr. Sheinberg.