Deliver Me (Silver Oak Medical Center Book 1)

by Aiden Bates

  The advantage to being a doctor at the hospital where he was having his miscarriage was that no one was delaying treatment. Carter was in a treatment room within thirty seconds of asking Carter to page Allen. He was getting a blood transfusion within a minute; apparently he'd bled more than he'd expected.

  The disadvantage to being a doctor at the hospital where he was having his miscarriage was that everyone at his workplace was a personal part of Carter's business. He'd asked for Allen to help him, and to make sure that nothing was left inside of him when he finished because that could get dangerous. He hadn't asked for every nurse in the place to be in the room while he did it, looking at his junk.

  He hadn't needed for everyone from the lab, the same people to whom he sent samples every day, to come up and draw even more blood from him, to swab at his newly formed birth canal, to ask him invasive questions.

  Huntington admitted him overnight at least, if for no other reason than because he'd lost so much blood. Someone from the hospital chaplain's office came up to pester him, and he wanted to scream until the heavens themselves fell down. When the chaplain tried to talk to him about the wages of sin, though, Carter had enough.

  "If you don't leave my room this instant, I will personally ensure that your commission for this hospital is revoked for the rest of time." He met the chaplain's eyes. "I have no time for your talk about sin and shame."

  The chaplain opened his mouth to object. He must have recognized the look in Carter's eyes, though, because he fled. Carter was alone now, to process what had happened.

  People miscarried every day. He'd helped countless people through their own miscarriages, and he knew that this was part and parcel of being an omega. The ability to become pregnant came with the ability to lose a pregnancy. Carter had even known that he was more likely to miscarry. He was older than other first time pregnancies. He wasn't the most well-rested person and he was in a high-stress job. And, possibly most significantly, he had a close family history of miscarriage.

  He'd fought against letting himself get attached to this pregnancy, precisely because he knew that he was more likely than other people to suffer a miscarriage. He'd given in, though. In only four weeks or so, he'd broken his rule and gotten his hopes up. He'd let himself believe.

  What was to believe, though? He tried to convince himself that there hadn't been anything to latch onto. Sure, a baby would have been okay. It would have been nice to think that there could be something to his life, but raising a child on his own would still have been more of a challenge than he thought he was up for. He would have wanted to do it well, but he didn't know if it would have been something he could have done.

  When the tears came, soaking through the pillow, he pretended that they were nothing but the product of his own hormones.

  Finn had been excited about the baby. He hadn't started out excited, but he'd also brought a pile of baby stuff over to the house and made a minor fuss about it. He'd stated, outright, that he was excited about the baby. Right now, though, he was back at that ridiculous Gilded Age palace of his up in the Sedgwick area. He wasn't anywhere near Carter's lonely hospital room.

  Carter understood why he couldn't be there with him. Carter hadn't even been able to inform him of the miscarriage himself; he hadn't been able to get a second's worth of privacy until now, and even now the door was open to nurses and whoever else might want to wander in. If anyone knew that Finn was the father, the complaints about sexual harassment would never stop.

  That didn't change the fact that Carter wanted Finn with him, right now. He wanted Finn's strong arms around him. He wanted Finn's baritone voice in his ear, assuring him that he would be all right, and that he wasn't damaged goods. He wanted to be blanketed in Finn's leather scent, safe and secure.

  Maybe that was just hormones too. He and Finn had been getting along better since the baby, but they didn't have a relationship and hadn't discussed starting one. It was ridiculous to pout because someone who hadn't given him any of those things wasn't providing them now.

  Maybe Carter was just sad because he'd thought that things could change. He'd had hope, and now it was gone again. That, he thought, was good reason to mourn.

  ***

  Finn got the text from Carter's supervisor, the chair of the Obstetrics Department. Dr. Idoni suddenly ill. Likely to be admitted to hospital. In treatment now. As soon as Finn saw those words, he knew. He didn't need to ask about maybes. He didn't have time for hopeful platitudes about how one never knows what's going to happen, and how every pregnancy is different.

  He knew that the baby was gone.

  Finn avoided his parents that night. He tried to go up to Carter's room, but there were too many people up there. It would have exposed them. It would have exposed him, and if there wasn't a baby around to worry about, was there really any value to taking on that kind of risk?

  His heart kicked and screamed. What did he care about exposure? What the hell kind of man cared about risk and exposure? His omega was hurting. Finn's job was to take care of him. That was all that there was to it.

  Finn hadn't ever developed the habit of listening to his heart, or to his alpha instincts either. He was here to make money, that was all. Even assuming that he and Carter ever decided to make a go of it, and stay together in the long term, it wouldn't benefit either of them to have Finn making waves for getting involved with a subordinate. Carter understood that.

  And Finn needed to figure out how he felt about the whole miscarriage thing anyway. So he slunk back off to his house after his parents went to bed, leaving Carter alone in his room. Carter was in good hands anyway. Finn wouldn't be any good to Carter without knowledge, so he sat down with his computer to do some research.

  He didn't like what he learned.

  Carter was sent home the next day. His friend Allen, the nurse practitioner, recommended that he stay away from the office for a week. Finn frowned at that. A full week seemed like a lot for someone who'd been in early pregnancy. "I went online to check and see what's normal, and most women only take a day or two if that," he objected, crossing his arms across his chest.

  Allen crossed his arms over his chest and yelled out for someone named Huntington. Who was Huntington again? Oh, right. Huntington was that other surgeon, the one who had been a resident here and was serving two years to pay off his loans. "Dr. Huntington, since our CEO isn't interested in the medical opinions of a nurse practitioner who's worked on omegas for years, maybe he'll listen to you. Can you explain to him why Dr. Idoni needs a full week off for his medical issue? Or should I maybe wait for someone from HR to come down and then explain it?"

  Finn rolled his eyes. He didn't have time for self-righteousness, especially on a subject so near to his heart as this. "I don't think that we need to go quite that far. I'm just telling you what I found online when I researched it last night."

  Allen snorted. "Because I'm sure you had Carter's best interests at heart."

  Huntington glanced at Allen, a little shocked. Finn could understand that; usually Allen was the good-natured one. "Dr. Idoni experienced a severe medical emergency yesterday," he explained. He spoke slowly. "I'm going to try to balance patient confidentiality with the need to keep him from getting fired and suing the hospital here. I can tell you that he did lose an immense amount of blood. We had to give him two units before all was said and done, and no, that's not normal under those circumstances." He clasped his hands behind his back. "I'm not sure that I entirely understand your animosity toward Dr. Idoni, but I wouldn't feel comfortable having him treat patients, never mind in a surgical setting, until he'd had time to process that blood and recover from the physical trauma involved."

  "Two units of blood?" Finn flinched away from the words. That sounded terrible.

  "He could have died, Mr. Riley. As his doctor, my orders are that he stays at home. If you want to override his doctor's orders, you'll be impacting patient care in a negative way and I'll be forced to escalate my concerns to the state boa
rd of health." Huntington lifted his chin and met Finn's eye.

  Finn threw his hands up into the air. "What is it with omega obstetricians and insubordination? I wasn't asking you to change your orders and I wasn't asking him to ignore his orders. All that I was asking was why those orders were out of sync with the information that I found for myself." Carter had almost died. Carter had almost died. His worst fear had come within a hair's breadth of coming true.

  Allen's lip curled. "Well for starters, birth is always riskier for omegas. Miscarriage is even more so. Maybe if you'd done your research on omegas, instead of on women, you'd have had more luck. You might have even found his book on the subject."

  Finn felt the growl starting up in his throat before he could stop it. "It's my job to question things, Frye. Don't get mad at me for doing my job."

  "It's your job to take care of the hospital and the employees in it. He's your employee. Try acting like it." Allen stormed off.

  Huntington shrugged as he watched them go. "He and Dr. Idoni are close. I have to say, though, Dr. Idoni's a popular man in this department. I wouldn't let anyone else hear you suggest that he'd ever shirk his responsibilities again. He's a good man, and I think he'd rather be anywhere else but alone with his own thoughts right now. He really just can't be up and around yet."

  "Thank you for your explanation, Dr. Huntington." Finn forced a thin smile to his face.

  He canceled his appointments for the rest of the day. Once a respectable number of hours had gone by, he left the hospital, citing family business, and headed to the liquor store. He grabbed a bottle of high-end bourbon on his way out to Carter's house.

  Carter looked terrible when he answered the door. Dark circles ringed his eyes, and he hadn't bothered to style his hair. Finn lifted his eyebrows at the sight of him. "Even your pajamas are black?"

  Carter shrugged, leaning on the door for support. "Saves time."

  Finn snaked an arm under Carter's shoulders and helped him back to the couch, kicking the door closed behind him. "How are you feeling?"

  "Honestly? Kind of terrible." Carter gave him a wry grin and let Finn settle him back on the cushions. "Never have a miscarriage in front of your co-workers. That was probably one of the most humiliating experiences I've ever had."

  Finn frowned. "Humiliating? That's your word for it?"

  Carter looked up sharply. "I had people that I work with and see every day looking at, and poking at, my bits. Asking personal questions, little things like 'Who was the father and should we call him?' while I had to sit there and pretend I didn't know. I had some guy in a clerical collar walk into my room to talk to me about sin and shame, because I'm a single omega who had a goddamn miscarriage, at midnight. Yeah. Humiliating seems like a good word. We can go with degrading if you'd like."

  Finn looked down. "I'm sorry. Thank you for keeping our secret." He knit his eyebrows together. "Are you allowed to drink, or are you on some funky painkillers or something?" He hadn't thought about that stuff. He'd just thought about the baby, and the fact that Carter had almost died.

  Carter stared at him for a long second, and then he looked away again. "They wanted to give me the good stuff but I didn't want it. I didn't want to risk getting hooked."

  Finn opened the bourbon and passed it over to him. "I'll get us some glasses." He went into the kitchen and grabbed a couple of tumblers. He came back. "Are you worried about getting hooked? Do you have a history of addiction? Is that why…"

  Carter's eyes bulged, and Finn knew that he'd said the wrong thing. He couldn't take it back now, so he just poured the bourbon as Carter spoke.

  "I don't have a history of addiction. I do know that those things are highly addictive, and I've seen too many patients come through my doors who got hooked after getting prescribed opioids for perfectly legitimate reasons. I've seen plenty of people turn to other things when they couldn't get the pills anymore, too. If there's a good reason for it, I might take it, but for now, I don't need it bad enough to risk it." He snorted. "The miscarriage isn't my fault."

  Finn frowned and passed Carter a tumbler. "What makes you so sure?"

  Carter raised an eyebrow. "You mean besides that MD after my name and the years of training in obstetrics?"

  Finn sighed and took a sip from his glass. Bourbon hadn't ever been his drink; he'd gotten it for Carter, because Carter was from Tennessee. "I mean, something caused it, Carter. It's not me; I wasn't anywhere near you. Nothing happens in a vacuum."

  Carter's face flushed red for a moment, but his color evened out after a second. "I think you need to do some basic research. No one knows what causes the majority of miscarriages. They're probably chromosomal or genetic abnormalities with the fetus—or embryo—that are incompatible with life. Sometimes there's a virus or a pathogen that the carrying parent might have been exposed to, or some kind of chemical or toxin, but most of the time there isn't any reason for it that medical science can detect. They just happen."

  "That doesn't make sense." Finn closed his eyes and shook his head. "Come on, Carter. This was our baby. We were excited. You're a scientist. You can't sit there and tell me that you don't want to figure out what went wrong."

  "What went wrong was that there was a hole in the condom." Carter glared up at him and took a sip of his bourbon. "I have a family history of miscarriage. I don't work in a low-stress job, either."

  "And you've still been working out." Finn leaned back and pursed his lips. "You can't tell me that didn't have anything to do with it."

  "Working out didn't have anything to do with it. I stopped sparring when I found out I was pregnant, so I wouldn't take any hits to the belly." Carter's chin jutted out. "Running is fine, for a runner. Swimming is fine, for a swimmer. Hitting the heavy bag is fine, since it can't hit back."

  "That's crap. Pregnant people are supposed to take it easy, put their feet up."

  Carter scoffed. "Oh, how cute. Do they have air conditioning in your cave, Finn? Pregnant people can do pretty much all of the same things that non-pregnant people can do without increasing their risk of miscarriage. Yeah, the stress of my job might have been a factor, but anything would have been. I'm predisposed to miscarry. Maybe if I'd stopped what I was doing when I started to cramp, but—"

  "And you didn't do that because?" Finn jumped to his feet.

  "Because I had a gangrenous patient with his abdomen slit open bleeding out in front of me. The hell is wrong with you, Finn?" Carter blinked and shook his head. "Why are you so determined to make this my fault?"

  "Because I'm angry!" Finn's shout echoed off of the walls. "This was our baby, and it's dead, and I'm angry! I don't see why you're not angry. Someone's responsible, and it's sure as hell not me!"

  Carter took a deep breath, and then he put his bourbon down. "You know what? It was our baby. It was our baby, and I told you from the beginning that I was likely to miscarry. And then you convinced me to look forward to it. And then it died, like I told you it would.

  "I'm grieving, when I shouldn't have to. I've got all of those fun postpartum hormones flooding my body, and I've got no little bundle of joy to go cuddle to help me through it. What I usually tell my patients who go through this is to go lean on their partner, or at the very least their families. What do I have? I have the baby's father, who's sitting here desperately trying to convince me that everything I know through science and experience is invalid just so he can punch down at me in grief for someone who never existed. Instead of having you to console me in the hospital last night, or a shoulder to cry on, I had to put on a stiff upper lip after two units of blood so that I could protect your precious reputation.

  "You want to see angry? You're going to see angry. But right now, you're not going to see a goddamn thing. Take your bourbon and get out."

  Finn doubled over. Carter hadn't needed to punch him. He'd just had to speak. "Carter—"

  "Did I stutter? Did I speak in tongues? Did I suddenly switch it up to Latin? Get out of my house, don't come back, and if y
ou're going to come at me with something medical or scientific you'd better do your research first. Do I make myself abundantly clear, Riley?" Carter's chestnut brown eyes were harder than flint, and he'd gotten himself to his feet again. His skin had gone so pale it had turned gray, and sweat poured down his face, but he stood his ground.

  Finn turned on his heel and left the house. He got into his car and drove, paying little attention to his direction until he found himself at Skaneateles Lake.

  Once there, he put his head down on the steering wheel and sobbed. He hadn't wanted the conversation to go that way. He wasn't the kind of guy to let his emotions get the better of him. He'd wanted to go and check on Carter, check in with him, maybe get him some food and see where they should go from there.

  Instead, he'd admitted that he blamed Carter for losing the baby. He couldn't help it. It had to be someone's fault, and Carter had the responsibility for carrying the thing. Sure, Carter hadn't meant to miscarry. That didn't change the fact that Carter had done something to cause himself to miscarry, to lose that baby that was bringing them together.