Beyond Just Us
Kimberly Kincaid
BEYOND JUST US
© 2020 Kimberly Kincaid
All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locations is purely coincidental. The characters are all productions of the author’s imagination.
Created with Vellum
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Kimberly’s books
Dedication
To all the doctors, nurses,
and healthcare professionals
who keep us all well
no matter the cost.
This book is yours
with my deepest thanks
and gratitude.
Acknowledgments
As always, I have an amazing team of individuals who make my books possible. Nicole Bailey, Jaycee DeLorenzo, Wander Aguiar, and Andrey Bahia, thank you for always making me look better than I deserve. Rachel Hamilton and Jen Williams, thank you for always wanting more words even when they’re ugly. Avery Flynn and Robin Covington, thanks for being the best ride-or-die friends a girl could ever ask for.
Huge thanks to my family, for this book especially. We found a whole new meaning to “balance” as I wrote this one. I’m so, so grateful for your willingness to go with the flow. And Mr. K, here we are again, with me wondering how on earth I’d get through a day without you. Your unwavering support is everything. I love you (more).
1
Tess Michaelson had been yelled at, bled all over, and thrown up on, and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. But that little trifecta was like amateur night when it came to being an emergency attending physician, and anyway, the yeller/bleeder had been a twofer with a ten-inch piece of rebar stuck through his hand, and the captain of the vomit comet had been unblessed with a nasty strain of the stomach flu. Legit reasons if ever there were any to go all volume-up, body fluids-out.
And Tess was there to cobble them back together, no matter what. She might not be able to fix her own shit, but she could Humpty-Dumpty other people like a fucking boss.
It was, as it turned out, her only superpower.
“Hey, Dr. M!”
She looked up at the sound of the familiar voice belonging to Connor Bradshaw, who was a former flight nurse-turned-clinic director, a good friend, and a great guy—not necessarily in that order. He sidled up to the spot where she stood at the nurses’ station, which should’ve been a physical impossibility, considering he was basically a (really muscular) house with legs, but of course, the big oaf not only sidled, but did it well. Tess would’ve looked like a grade-A idiot moving her hips like that.
Honestly, Tess. Don’t you think you’re too…I don’t know. Old for that sort of thing now?
“You have that look on your face,” she said, chucking the memory—and the chagrin it had sent through her chest—aside in favor of the hand-crafted sarcasm she wore like armor. “You know, the one you give up when you want something, but you know I’m probably going to say no. And don’t try to get on my sweet side. I’m sure you’re well aware I don’t have one. So, spill, Ginormica.” She looked up, up, up at her friend, who earned his nickname in spades. “What is it that you’re here to wheedle me into?”
Rather than going the contrition route like most folks with a pulse would have, Connor threw back his head and laughed. “See, this is why I miss it here enough to pick up a shift on my day off. You don’t beat around the bush.”
“Good Lord, no.” Damn it, her eye-roll was so much less effective when her smile decided to hone in on the action. Happy little bastard. “I don’t see much purpose in not getting to the point.”
Well, most of the time, anyway. She had hung on to her dumpster fire of a marriage far longer than she should’ve, even though she’d known things between her and Alec couldn’t be fixed far before she’d told him she’d wanted a divorce.
Guess everyone was allowed to wear idiot pants at least once. At least now she knew better than to believe in all that happily ever after crap.
Wasn’t she too old for that, anyway?
“I’ll go ahead and rip the Band-Aid off, then.” Connor’s grin deposited Tess back to terra firma in the ED, and she vowed to stay there as he said, “Dispatch just got a call from Ambo Twenty-Two. They’re bringing in a guy who’s all hopped up on God knows what.”
“Can you give me the bullet?”
“He’s breathing and conscious and was stabilized in the field. GCS 10.”
Now her smile came out to play in full force. “That sounds like an intern’s problem.”
On a scale of one to coding, a high-in-the-sky patient with decent vitals and an equally decent GCS hardly required her attention. She was already on her second pair of scrubs today. Plus, she’d be nearby if the guy started to tank. “Young is on my service today. See if she can—”
“Can’t,” Connor corrected, holding up his hands in surrender as Tess pinned him with her Sunday-best glare. “Dude decided to take on a window in an effort to fly. He only fell four feet,” Connor added quickly. “It was a first-floor window. But it was closed at the time, and Slater said between whatever the guy took, the possibility for a head injury, and the unbelievable amount of lacs the dude sustained…”
“Right.” This one did call for her expertise. The big man wasn’t wrong about the paramedic’s assessment. Still… “You’re helping me out, though.” Sighing, Tess adjusted her ponytail and turned toward the ambulance bay. “This guy gets squirrely, and I’m going to need all the muscle I can get. Let’s grab Young, too. After all, sharing is caring.”
“Copy that.”
Five minutes later, Tess, Connor, and Erika Young stood gloved and gowned in the ambulance bay. Sunlight streamed down, filling the space with warm, pretty light that Tess hadn’t enjoyed in far too long. But between her not nine-to-five shifts in the ED and her adorable but totally teething nine-month-old son, she was lucky she knew that it was June, and that she’d remembered to put on pants this morning.
She turned toward Connor, who had saved her bacon before the sun had fully risen, and she had to smile. “Hey, thanks again for filling in today. Even our charge nurse is down for the count. I didn’t even know where to begin when she said she needed so many shifts covered.”
Last night, a group of the ED nurses had gone out for sushi. Only one of the seven hadn’t got
ten violently ill, and Tess—not wanting her ED to do its best shit-show impression—had agreed to help make the calls in an effort to fill today’s shifts.
“Oh, it’s all good,” Connor said with a grin. “I like when you owe me favors for a change.”
Tess lifted one corner of her mouth, allowing her tart smile half of an escape. “I did help train your staff when you first took over at the clinic,” she agreed. Connor had needed all the bailing out his inked-up, muscle-bound ass could get when he’d become the co-director of the hospital’s wellness clinic earlier this year. “But you paid me back, remember?”
“Of course I remember.” Connor arched an auburn brow. “I sang that Baby Shark song to your mini-me until I was practically purple.”
“Hey, you offered to babysit and send me for a pedicure,” Tess reminded him. “No single mother in her right mind turns that shit down.”
Young tried to suppress a laugh, but failed. “I don’t have kids, but my sister does, and that sounds pretty accurate.”
“Oh, I’m not complaining,” Connor said, lifting one massive shoulder in an easy shrug that highlighted his words as the truth. “The song is kinda catchy, and Jackson’s pretty cute. For someone who wears diapers and drools.”
Warmth took a head-to-toe trip through Tess, and not just at the thought of her son. Her friends at Remington Mem were her only family, other than Jackson. Most of that was choice—her idiot ex lived across town, and her mother and both sisters were in Greenville, which was a two-hour hop-skip by car. But she hadn’t seen much of any of them since Jackson had been born, because that choice thing? Was real, and Tess had made it with her and her son’s best interests front and center.
Her friends and her kid were all she needed. Judgy, holier-than-thou asshats who did nothing but highlight-reel her every flaw need not apply.
Connor slung his tree trunk of an arm around Tess’s shoulders, his unyielding camaraderie turning her choice into a no-brainer. “Plus, taking care of people here in the ED is just like old times, and Harlow’s got things under control at the clinic. She knows where to find me if something weird goes down.”
The big, goofy grin shaping his face at the mention of his live-in girlfriend sent a pang of something unidentifiable through Tess’s belly. She liked Harlow a lot—the woman was scalpel-sharp and took neither prisoners nor crap from anyone, plus, she made Connor happier than Tess had ever seen the guy—and with his laid-back demeanor, that was really saying something. But all of her close friends had paired off. Hell, her best friend Charleston had just (re)married the guy of her dreams, Parker Drake, who just happened to be one of Remington Memorial’s interns. In a move that had surprised exactly no one who knew them, her fellow attending and hotshot trauma surgeon, Jonah Sheridan, had proposed to another fellow surgeon, Natalie Kendrick, last month as she’d entered the maintenance part of her chemo for the leukemia she’d beat twice now. Connor and Harlow were shacking up. Even the goo-goo eyes Young and her fellow intern, Christopher Boldin, had been making at each other a few months now had grown more serious than short-lived.
Tess was happy for her friends, and not in that shitty, always-a-bridesmaid sort of way. If anyone deserved love and to be loved, it was Charlie, Parker, Nat, Jonah, Connor, and Harlow. For her, love was just going to come from a different place, in a different form. Because that whole soul mate/share the covers/no-you’re-the-schmoopie thing wasn’t going to happen. Ever.
That’s what vibrators were for.
God knew Tess’s had given her far better orgasms than her ex-husband ever had.
Is it really my fault you’re so frigid?
“Here we go,” Tess bit out, gesturing to the rig trundling into the ambulance bay before any heat could reach her face over the unbidden thought. Quinn Copeland jumped out of the driver’s side (annnnd cue up another person who was getting hitched…seriously, there was, like, a true-love epidemic going on in this place), the ambulance’s back door swinging open courtesy of Connor’s grab-and-pull, and Tess thanked her lucky fucking stars she’d elbowed her way into a trauma gown, because even from ten feet away, she could tell her new patient was a hot mess.
The other paramedic, Luke Slater, a.k.a. Quinn’s fiancé, unlocked the head of the gurney as Young unlocked the foot, with Connor on the assist to guide the thing out of the ambo. “Adult male, conscious but altered, possible head and neck injuries from a four-foot fall, no obvious skull or spinal deformities. Obvious multiple lacerations—”
“Understatement of the year,” Tess muttered. None of the wounds appeared particularly deep at first glance, but damn. The guy was going to need more stitches than an Amish quilt. Not to mention the debriding they’d have to do before they could drop a single suture.
“GCS 10 in the field.” Slater finished with the guy’s vitals—holy heart rate, Batman—and yeah, there was no chance this guy wasn’t somehow chemically polluted.
“Hi, Mr…” Shit. Tess split a glance between Slater and Quinn. “Do we have a name?”
Quinn’s smile spanned ear to ear. “According to him? Captain James T. Kirk.”
“Awesome.” This from Connor. Naturally. But Tess had heard worse—seen it, too—so she simply shrugged and did a closer once-over of the guy.
“Hi, Mr. Kirk. My name is Dr. Michaelson, and I’m here to help you.” To her surprise, the guy tracked a glassy, wide-pupiled look in her direction. At least, with his eyes. His neck had been completely stabilized by a C-collar and the rest of him strapped to the backboard on the gurney. “Can you tell me if you feel any pain?”
“No, no, no,” Kirk said, his grin all teeth as he sent it to the sky. “No pain, sweetheart. That’s the idea! No pain! I just wanna fllllllyyyyyyyyy…”
He dissolved into a fit of giggles. Man, Tess did not want to be around when he crash-landed back to reality. “Do you know where you are?”
“Heaven,” Kirk crooned. “I’m in heavennnnn, and my heart beats so that I can hardly speeeeeeeak…”
Right. “Okay.” Tess looked at Connor and Young. “We’re headed to Trauma Two.”
The trip was quick and, thankfully, uneventful. They went through the motions of transferring the Captain to the gurney in the trauma room so Quinn and Slater could reclaim their gear and hit the road—the lucky ducks—then Tess got down to the business of a rapid trauma assessment. Her patient was in rough shape, but not life-threateningly so, just as long as the head and neck films she’d just asked Connor to shoot came back clean.
“Looks like other than these lacs and some nasty contusions, there aren’t any serious injuries.” Tess said, looking at Young. “While we wait for the films to back that up, where do we go from here?”
“I’d order a CBC and BMP. And a tox screen, obviously,” she replied, but Tess shook her head.
“Nothing’s obvious in emergency medicine, ever. You have to tell Connor exactly what tests you want ordered. He’s good, but he’s not clairvoyant.”
“Right.” Young, who might’ve been intimidated by Tess’s response a few months ago, turned to look at Connor. “Let’s run a CBC and BMP, along with a full tox screen. In the meantime, start a line and run some saline, and let’s get as many suture kits in here as possible, please.”
Tess translated her attagirl into a smile. “There you go.”
She took the films Connor handed over, popping the first one onto the backlit screen on the far wall. “Ahhhh, it seems you’re a lucky man, Mr. Kirk. You don’t have any major injuries to your head or neck.”
“I’m invincible!” her patient called out, turning to look at Tess as she carefully removed the C-collar from around his neck. “Are you an angel? Oh, shhhh! I am in heaven! Don’t tell the others.”
Tess slid a glance at Connor. “Can we get a rush on that tox screen?” To Kirk, she said, “I’m afraid this isn’t heaven, sir. But you’re in very good hands.”
“Okay. Will you marry me?”
She barked out a laugh that matched Connor’s. “Sor
ry, no can do, Mr. Kirk.”
“I see,” the man said, nodding gravely. “It’s because they’re listening, right?”
For some reason Tess couldn’t quite explain, she replied with the truth. “Nope. I’m just not the marrying sort. We’ll get you fixed up in no time, though, okay? Don’t you worry.”
She went through the final steps of sending the request for labs upstairs and having Young and Connor start in on the poor guy’s sutures. The memory of the sunlight on her face, the fact that it had taken her this long to realize how long it had been since she’d felt it, popped back into her head. Tearing off her trauma gown and disengaging from her gloves, she washed her hands and headed out to the ambulance bay on a what-the-hell. It really was nice outside, the kind of day that wasn’t hot enough to scorch your Pop-Tart, yet was still sunny enough to warm a girl right up.
No one else was around, having probably opted for more scenic spots, like the courtyard in the middle of the hospital grounds or the outdoor eating area by the coffee cart. Tess didn’t mind, though. Yeah, the view was mostly of the brick-wall variety, and okay, so the faint smell of diesel was only a slight improvement on the eau de sanitizing gel that clung to Tess like the lover she tooootally didn’t have. But the shot at solitude gave her a chance to lean back against the bricks at the mouth of the alcove and let her eyes drift shut.
Beyond Just Us (Remington Medical Book 4): A Single Parent Marriage of Convenience Romance Page 1
