A Bad Case of You
Taylor Holloway
Contents
Also by Taylor Holloway
About This Book
Prologue
Prologue
1. Eric
2. Faith
3. Eric
4. Faith
5. Eric
6. Faith
7. Faith
8. Faith
9. Eric
10. Eric
11. Faith
12. Faith
13. Eric
14. Faith
15. Eric
16. Eric
17. Eric
18. Faith
19. Eric
20. Faith
21. Eric
22. Faith
23. Eric
24. Eric
25. Faith
26. Faith
27. Faith
28. Faith
29. Eric
30. Faith
31. Faith
32. Faith
33. Eric
34. Faith
35. Faith
36. Eric
37. Eric
38. Faith
39. Faith
40. Eric
41. Faith
42. Eric
43. Faith
44. Eric
45. Eric
46. Eric
47. Faith
48. Eric
49. Faith
Epilogue
Epilogue
Coming Soon: Touching Me, Touching You
Admit You Want Me
Also by Taylor Holloway
Also by Taylor Holloway
My books take place in the same world and share locations and characters. Here’s the suggested reading order.
Lone Star Lovers
Admit You Want Me - Ward
Kiss Me Like You Missed Me - Cole
Lie with Me - Lucas
Run Away with Me - Jason
Hold On To Me - Ryan
Soulmates of St. Vincent
A Bad Case of You - Eric
Touching Me, Touching You - Christopher (Coming Soon)
This one’s For You - Ian (Coming Soon)
Bad For You - Will (Coming Soon)
For fans of exciting, romantic mysteries full of twists and turns, check out my Scions of Sin series!
Prequel: Never Say Never - Charlie
Bleeding Heart - Alexander
Kiss and Tell - Nathan
Down and Dirty - Nicholas
Lost and Found - David
What happens when a shy, sheltered virgin wakes up married to the unattainable man of her dreams? It looks like I'm about to find out.
Every other woman I know would be over-the-moon to wake up married to Dr. Eric Carter.
I’m not saying he’s not tempting, because he definitely is, but I just wish I could remember how it happened.
Now the guy who famously doesn’t commit, is trying to convince me to play house with him.
It turns out our surprise marriage has resulted in some unforeseen career benefits.
If we can just keep it together, we’ll both make out like bandits.
The trouble is, I’d rather just make out with Eric.
I bet he could teach a good girl like me a thing or two.
Pretending to like the smoking-hot, effortlessly confident, brilliant guy I married will not be a problem. Going back to the way things were before might be.
All I have to do is keep up this massive lie in front of all my friends and coworkers, prevent my very conservative mother from learning the truth, and stop myself from falling in love for real and getting my heart broken. Who said love was easy?
A Bad Case of You is a full-length, standalone, accidental-marriage story featuring a bold alpha hero and his sweet and sexy heroine.
Prologue
Eric
I sprinted full-tilt down the hospital corridor. People were smart enough to get out of the way of the big guy in the white coat, but if they hadn’t been, I’d have gone right through them. I always obeyed the siren call of my pager, but this was no ordinary page. This was a page that required sprinting. A man whose heart had been arrhythmically skipping as it struggled to supply his vital organs with oxygen for the past hour throughout surgery preparations, had just gone into cardiac arrest. I was almost at his room when I first heard it echoing down a hallway:
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
and auld lang syne?
Like most people, I barely understand a word of that damn song (is that even English?), but I knew what it meant. It meant that it was New Years’ Eve, aka the very most depressing time of the year to be single. At least on Valentine’s Day, you can hate the commercialism and manipulation of Valentine’s Day. But New Year’s is different. There’s an extra special, existential loneliness about spending New Year’s alone and knowing the next year might be as lonely as the past one.
Luckily, I didn’t have time to dwell on my inability to find a relationship worth having. People were dying all around me. I suppose that’s fairly normal in a hospital, but one person in particular wasn’t allowed to die: Mr. Ochoa. Grandfather of eight, husband of Agnes Ochoa, nearly blind, diabetic, age eighty-two.
“Doctor, he’s basically gone,” the nurse assistant told me. Her eyes were focused on the clock over my shoulder, waiting for me to call a time of death. I bit back a rude reply. The guy was practically still breathing. I wouldn’t want anyone to give up on me that easily.
“No, no he’s not, Lucy.” Not until I fucking said so, at least. “Get the paddles.”
Lucy nodded and went to work. Mr. Ochoa shouldn’t have to die while listening to Auld Lang Syne. Not on my watch.
He was only mostly dead. I’d seen The Princess Bride a time or two. I’d also been to medical school. I knew that mostly dead could be a reversible condition. Sometimes. I hoped it would be today.
“Faith, what’s his pulse ox?” I asked, looking around for the nurse who’d sprinted down the hallway by my side. “Faith?”
Faith had actually beat me to the door, but now she was nowhere to be found.
“She’s in the hallway, stopping the patient’s wife from coming in here,” Lucy replied. “Pulse ox is forty,” she added. I nodded. Grimaced.
Forty was a bad number. It should be at least double that. Hypoxemia would kill him—properly, permanently—within minutes. His cells were starving and literally beginning to die and decay while his heart was still beating, albeit weakly. The most messed up thing about death, at least to me, was how long and drawn out a process it could be. Parts of the body die off at different rates. Mr. Ochoa was, in my estimation, at least sixty percent dead already. And now I was going to have to fix him without Faith’s help.
I couldn’t spare more than a moment’s thought on Faith, but what I did spare, was pure gratitude. The last thing poor Mrs. Ochoa needed to see was her husband dying on a table. If any nurse could deal with that situation with equal amounts compassion and aplomb, it was Faith. Satisfied that situation was under control, I rolled up my proverbial sleeves (scrubs don’t really roll, and you wouldn’t want them to) and got to work.
When I work, I barely even register what happens around me. The distractions recede into a dull, washed-out tapestry of light and color. Only the task in front of me stays real. All I saw for the next hour was Mr. Ochoa’s life, slipping away in front of me, slipping right through my grasping, empty hands. That wouldn’t do. I grabbed onto the pieces of the situation I could control and pulled, correcting the arrhythmia with a series of electric pulses, forcing oxygen down into his lungs, shooting a ton of diffe
rent chemicals down his bloodstream, and hoping—no, demanding—that it would be enough.
And miraculously, it was enough. After an hour, Mr. Ochoa was stable. As my own blood pressure approached the normal range again, awareness started to pervade my senses. The first thing I heard was Faith.
“Once the doctor is sure it won’t endanger your husband more for you to be in that room, and your husband is resting, of course you can see him,” her voice was saying from beyond the doorway. Her light, melodic soprano tone was honey-sweet and soothing. “He’s working very hard right now to make sure of that.”
Faith always talked so nicely about me in front of the patients. You’d think I was the greatest doctor ever. I was disappointed to learn that she did that for all the doctors, though. Actually, most nurses did. It was kind of a thing. So, it was with the knowledge that Faith didn’t like me nearly as much as she was pretending to, that I poked my head out.
Mrs. Ochoa was sobbing inconsolably in Faith’s delicate arms. Her eyes were closed tightly as Faith continued to reassure the frail, older woman that she’d see her husband again soon. Faith met my eyes over her shoulder. Electricity shot through me. Faith’s eyes were a deep, chocolaty brown and every time I looked into them, I felt like she could see far more of me than I was comfortable with. She had to know that I was crazy about her. I pushed the thought away. I needed to be professional.
“He’s sleeping,” I told Mrs. Ochoa, touching her on the arm to get her attention. “But if you want to go sit with him, you’re welcome to.”
The woman blinked up at me, teary eyed and obviously grateful. She didn’t seem to know what to say, so she merely nodded, got up with as much dignity as she could and passed by me into the room. Once she was out of earshot, Faith sighed, stretched, and shook out her long black braid.
“How is he?” she asked.
I frowned. Faith wanted an honest answer, not the measured-but-optimistic professional one I’d give Mrs. Ochoa shortly. “Terrible.” I took a deep breath. “I don’t think he’ll survive the night. He might not survive surgery.”
She nodded. “When he goes, she will too.” Her expression turned wistful and she watched Mrs. Ochoa gently pick up her husband’s frail, unconscious hand and hold it to her cheek. “It’s almost comforting to think about, isn’t it?”
It was something we’d both seen before. When one member of an older couple starts to have serious health problems, the other tends to follow on their heels all the way up to death’s door and over the threshold. Sometimes the couple died within hours of one another. It was a phenomenon there was no medical explanation for. It was just… love.
“You think it’s comforting that she’ll die too?” I asked. I wasn’t sure I found it particularly comforting. Given that I was about to spend another New Year’s Eve alone and had to work next to the indifferent woman of my dreams, just about nothing felt very comforting.
“I think it’s comforting that neither one of them has to do anything alone. Even when that thing is dying.” Faith’s voice was very soft, and more genuinely vulnerable than I was used to hearing. She usually had a witty comeback for everything, but not tonight. Tonight, she looked just as lost as I felt. Faith was also correct, of course; I didn’t want to die alone, and I didn’t know anyone else who did, either.
“They do seem very in love,” I admitted. Mr. Ochoa had woken up at his wife’s touch. He was smiling at her like she was his own, personal angel. Mrs. Ochoa was telling what looked to be some kind of bawdy joke, complete with whispered curse words and big hand gestures. She was trying to cheer him up, even though she’d been crying her eyes out thirty seconds before.
“They are.” Faith sounded uncharacteristically wistful. “Can you imagine what that must be like?”
“I don’t know.” I had a pretty good imagination, but I’d never been in love like that. Still, “I wouldn’t mind giving it a try.”
Faith was barely listening to me, and she definitely didn’t see that I was staring at her. “Me either,” she said. Then she blinked, colored, and cleared her throat. “I better get going.”
“Are you ok?” I asked her, wondering what had changed. There was a crack in Faith’s steely resolve to freeze me out. I wondered if her cat had died or something.
Faith’s big brown eyes flashed back to my face. “Of course, doctor.” My heart froze, and not out of excitement. Faith was setting up her professional walls again. My repeated attempts to get her to call me ‘Eric’ and not ‘doctor’ when we were in private had not been successful. It was an obvious attempt to maintain a professional relationship. She always seemed to do that whenever I got within emotional touching distance. “I’ll go let the staff nurse know she needs to check on Mr. Ochoa in twenty minutes.”
This was the same dance we’d been doing for months. Every time I thought I might get a genuine moment with Faith, she bolted. She was willing to be so honest, so open, and so empathetic with everyone else. Not just patients, either. She was that way with the staff. All except for me. She held me at arm’s length and it was driving me nuts.
If I thought she simply hated me, that would be one thing. I could accept that a woman might just not, you know, like me much. It wasn’t exactly great for my bloated doctor’s ego, but I could accept it. Yet that didn’t seem to be the case with Faith. She seemed to like me, and I’d even caught her staring a few times. Maybe she only liked looking at me.
I certainly liked looking at her. With her dewy white skin, long shiny hair, huge brown eyes, and hourglass shaped figure, she was incredibly pleasant to look at. She looked like a pre-Raphaelite beauty who’d tired of sniffing roses and combing her hair all day and stepped out of her painting to become an RN. I could look at her all day. But I never got the chance, because she was always walking away.
Today was no exception, but something had changed for me, too. I was tired of being alone. It was New Year’s Eve, and I wanted someone to kiss at midnight. I wanted that someone to be Faith. I might not be successful, but even rejection would be preferable to whatever-the-hell we were currently doing. You might be able to be mostly dead, but I knew that I didn’t want to feel that way tonight. Besides, alcohol would be plentiful at the party tonight. At least if I struck out, I could get very, very drunk.
Prologue
Faith
“Ok, what is going on with you today?” Caroline asked me. She was looking at me over her glass of champagne with an expression of disapproval. Her blue eyes also held a mild suspicion that I was keeping an important secret from her. I winced, feeling guilty for my stick-in-the-mud mood, and my secret. “You’re even more uptight than usual.”
“You sound just like my mom,” I mumbled. I was deflecting. The truth was that I knew exactly what was wrong with me, and my mom had commented on it herself, although she knew perfectly well what my problem was. Today, New Year’s Eve, was the eleventh anniversary of my dad’s unexpected death. I was like this every single year on the anniversary of his death, and for a few days in either direction. If anything, my terrible holiday mood seemed to be getting worse as time went on.
“Would your mom recommend that you do a shot of tequila to cheer your grumpy ass up?” Caroline countered. She aimed a sly grin at me, and I couldn’t prevent myself from returning it.
Actually, she might. My mom was a very conservative Catholic (having reembraced religion in a big way after my dad’s death), which meant that she wholeheartedly supported the use of alcohol for medicinal and healing purposes. We’re also Irish.
“I hate tequila,” I grumbled. I was really a mess today: grouchy, irrational, and a ticking, emotional time bomb. I shouldn’t even be at this party, bringing Caroline down with my shitty attitude. I should have stayed in, alone.
“Hold your nose then,” Caroline told me, grabbing a bottle off a nearby table and handing me a sparkly shot glass. “Because this is happening.”
I poured, drank, and repeated until I lost count. It didn’t taste as bad after the seco
nd time. By the fourth or fifth, I actually didn’t mind it. This was not my ordinary M.O., not at all. But I was sick of feeling sorry for myself. I knew I’d pay for the drunkenness tomorrow, but tonight, the edges dulled, and I felt a lot less awful. Mission accomplished.
“Satisfied?” I finally asked, slamming down the shot glass a final time. I hoped she was, because I didn’t need alcohol poisoning tonight. I knew how much I could drink safely, and I was right on that line.
Caroline smirked. “For now. Let’s go dance.”
I followed with a less-aggressive frown on my face. In truth, I was lucky that my friend Caroline had a nurse’s patience even if she was actually a physical therapy intern. I didn’t deserve her. I’d been a pain in the ass since we’d arrived at the hospital’s New Year’s party. If it weren’t for my mom’s silent judgment when I announced that I was going to sit on my butt and watch Raiders of the Lost Ark instead of going to the party, I wouldn’t be here. Her quiet frowns scream louder than the entire newborn room.
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