The Surgeon's Convenient Husband

by Amy Ruttan

  “Right,” Ruby agreed. She took a deep calming breath and stared at the door. “We can do this.”

  “We can.” He took her hand. “Come on, Mrs. Atkinson.”

  “That’s Dr. Mrs. Atkinson, buster,” she teased, and Aran laughed.

  His blue eyes were twinkling and it reassured her. He took her hand, just as he had on their wedding day, and it calmed her.

  Aran opened the door to the boardroom and Agent Bolton, who had been pacing by the coffee table, stopped and turned. He didn’t look particularly threatening. He was a man in his mid-fifties, in a suit, and he looked like someone you could trust—which was probably exactly what he needed to look like.

  Someone you could really open up to.

  Someone who was good at catching lies.

  It’ll be okay.

  She and Aran were friends. They weren’t strangers. There was some intimacy. They were in this together.

  Though she still really didn’t completely understand why he’d done it.

  Don’t think about it. Focus.

  “Dr. Atkinson and Dr. Cloutier, I presume?” Agent Bolton asked.

  “Yes,” Ruby answered. “Sorry to have kept you. We weren’t expecting you.”

  Agent Bolton smiled, but she could tell that the smile was not sincere. It was business, and it was calculated.

  “That’s fine. We do like to do preliminary surprise checks on our applicants before the official interview. I thought you two would be here in the city. Not up near the Canadian border.”

  “You mean in Whitehead?” Aran asked.

  “Yes,” Agent Bolton said. “Whitehead is not far from the Yukon—where your wife is from.”

  “No, Ruby is from the Northwest Territories. Behchokǫ̀. Which is, I believe, near Yellowknife and one territory over.”

  Ruby breathed an inward sigh of relief at Aran’s quick thinking.

  Agent Bolton grinned again. “So it is. Why don’t we have a seat?”

  Aran pulled out a chair for Ruby and she sat down. She could feel her palms sweating and was glad when Aran put himself between her and Agent Bolton.

  Agent Bolton looked unassuming and friendly, but right now Ruby was not a fan of his, and she was pretty sure that he wasn’t a fan of hers.

  “What were you two doing in Whitehead anyhow?” Agent Bolton asked.

  “I was making my quarterly visit to a clinic up there. They have a nurse practitioner, but I fly my team in with me and we do all the medical procedures the nurse practitioner can’t. I usually only go up there for a day, but a storm hit after I’d had to perform an emergency appendectomy and it wasn’t safe to fly.”

  Agent Bolton nodded. “How admirable of you. That patient has been transferred here?”

  “Juneau,” Aran said. “During the night the nurse on call asked me to come and check on him. As my wife is the pilot, and needed her sleep, I ascertained that the patient had developed a blood clot and called for the Medevac service to transport him to the nearest hospital.”

  “It’s a good thing that storm hit, then,” Agent Bolton remarked.

  Ruby gritted her teeth. She didn’t like the way this agent was operating. “A very good thing,” she said.

  He nodded and opened the folder that sat on the table. “I have your file, Dr. Atkinson, about your service here for the last five years. Five years is a long time for a newly married couple to be apart, don’t you think?”

  “Yes,” Ruby answered. “We wanted to marry because we were in love.”

  “Right,” Aran said. “I didn’t want to leave my girlfriend behind when I shipped out, so I made her my wife. She understood that I needed to serve my country, and she was focused on her career here.”

  “How long was it before you decided to get married?” he asked, and he looked at both of them.

  “We dated for a year,” Aran said.

  “A year?” Agent Bolton asked.

  “We were surgical residents together. It’s how we met.” Ruby smiled at Aran. “You grow close to a person when you work a forty-eight-hour shift together.”

  Aran grinned back at her, making her pulse slow. It was calming and reassuring.

  “As soon as I knew I was going to get shipped out I asked her. I wanted her to be my wife. Sometimes you just know—and I knew. I knew from the moment I met her that she was the one.”

  Ruby’s stomach did a flip-flop and she blushed.

  Agent Bolton nodded. “But a long-distance relationship? That doesn’t always work.”

  “I know,” Aran answered. “It didn’t work for my parents, but for me it was right. Ruby loves it here in the north. She’s from the north, and I completed my training at Fort Irwin in San Bernardino.”

  “I thought you were from San Diego?” said Agent Bolton.

  “My father is from San Diego, and I grew up there. My mother lives in Anchorage and I visit her here—but I’m sure you have my military records and can see where I completed my basic training.”

  Agent Bolton shut his folder. “Okay, then. Well, I won’t take up more of your time right now. I’ll come back in a week and we’ll do separate interviews then, and a joint interview before I determine whether or not a Green Card will be issued to Dr. Cloutier.”

  Ruby stood, and Aran did as well.

  Agent Bolton got up and shook their hands. “See you both next week. I’ll call and arrange a day, so you two won’t be off on a jaunt somewhere in the bush. Good evening, doctors.”

  Ruby watched him leave the boardroom and when he was gone sank down into her chair, resting her head in her hands.

  “Whew! That guy was intense,” said Aran.

  “So it wasn’t just me that was unnerved by him?” Ruby asked.

  “No. He’s good at his job.”

  Ruby shuddered. “I thought he might be a serial killer or something.”

  Aran chuckled. “No. He’s probably got ex-military, though. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s a Marine, or something like that. Most of those agents have military training.”

  “Well, we should go home and talk about next week.” She didn’t want to say too much because she was suddenly feeling slightly paranoid that the boardroom might be bugged. “Besides, I need my own bed tonight.”

  “Agreed.”

  They got up and left the boardroom in silence. She was still trembling when they walked down the hall toward the attendings’ lounge. As much as she wanted to go home and formulate a plan, she was still on duty. She had to calm down so that she could focus on her patients.

  It was for them that she was doing this.

  It was for her patients—for all the lives that could be saved because of her work. Just like Mitchell. He had a fighting chance because she had been there to do his appendectomy. Aran had given him a further chance by being there and finding that thrombophlebitis. Because of their work Mitchell was in Juneau and alive.

  Even though she was scared about what had just happened with Agent Bolton, and about having to see him again, she was glad she’d done it.

  If she wasn’t here to help, who would?

  No one had been there to help her father when he’d needed it the most.

  She was not going to let that happen to another family.

  She was not going to let anyone die if she could help it.

  Even if it meant faking a marriage to a man who made her want to lose control completely.

  * * *

  It was close to midnight when Ruby and Aran finally stumbled back to her house. Sam had taken Chinook over to his place and left a note, but Ruby was tired and it was too late to go over there and get him. She just wanted to sleep in her own bed and try to forget about the events of the last couple of days.

  “I think before we go to sleep we should figure out our story,” Aran said as he took off his shoes.

&
nbsp; “Really? I’m exhausted. I’ve flown down from Whitehead. Been grilled by a government agent. And worked a five-hour shift at the hospital.”

  “I’m tired too, Ruby, but we need to strategize. I don’t know why you insisted on waiting so long to talk about it.”

  “We were at work...and I thought the place might be bugged.”

  Aran laughed softly. “Okay...well, we’re home now. Let’s come up with something.”

  “I liked your off-the-cuff explanation about a long-distance relationship. And how we dated in residency.”

  “Well, we knew each other then, and we did work all those awful shifts together,” he stated.

  “I know. It was perfect.”

  “Yeah, but now they’ll ask us things like what side of the bed do you sleep on? Where did you honeymoon? How many windows in your bedroom?”

  Ruby rubbed her eyes. “Wait—did you just say how many windows in the bedroom?”

  Aran nodded. “I’ve heard that’s been asked before.”

  “Well, I can easily answer that. My bedroom is a loft. It’s all skylights.”

  “How many?”

  “Four.” She frowned. “No...wait...”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I don’t lie there and count my skylights.”

  Aran rolled his eyes and headed to the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “To see how many skylights are in your loft.”

  Ruby crossed her arms and waited for him to come back down.

  “You were right. There’s four,” he said.

  “See? You know...this is the most bizarre conversation ever.”

  “I think our conversation about sheep and what kind of drink we’d like to be was weirder,” he teased.

  “Right, I’d forgotten that.”

  “You never did answer that question.”

  “And I won’t. It’s still the weirdest question ever. What kind of drink would I be? That’s weird.”

  He smiled—that handsome devilish smile she liked so much.

  “So, besides us dating in residency, let’s figure out our proposal story. Our current one is just me offering to enter into this marriage—it’s not really great. How did I do it?”

  Ruby could feel her blood heat. She didn’t really want to talk about this with him. It came dangerously close to the territory they’d found themselves in when they were in Whitehead. When he’d suggested they kiss.

  Just thinking about that kiss made her body thrum with excitement. She was trying to forget about that kiss, but she couldn’t.

  The sooner she got her Green Card the better.

  Really?

  “I think you got down on one knee,” she said quickly, and walked over to the cupboard to make herself a cup of the decaffeinated tea that always relaxed her and put her to sleep. She set down a mug and filled up her electric kettle.

  “That’s it?”

  “Why does it have to be elaborate?” she asked.

  “What if they ask specific questions? Like where I did it?”

  “By a lake,” she said quickly.

  “What lake?”

  Ideally she would have loved to have been down by the shores of Great Slave Lake, or beside the McKenzie River, where you could see the Deh Cho Bridge. She loved being by water, which was why she bought this house.

  “My lake. I bought this house before I married you. Maybe we were out on a walk and talking about your deployment and you got down on one knee and asked me.”

  His expression softened. “See—was that so hard?”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t do this,” she said quickly. “Relationships are not my thing. I’m not good with relationships. I never wanted to get married. The only thing I ever wanted was my career. That’s it.”

  “I feel the same way,” Aran said. “I didn’t want to get married either. But marrying you was a convenience for both of us. It gave me an excuse not to get involved with anyone and it gave you a chance to get a Green Card. For better or for worse we’re in this together, and we need to convince that agent that we married for love.”

  “How many relationships have you had?” she asked as her teapot whistled and she flicked it off.

  A strange expression crossed his face. “What do you mean?”

  “How many girlfriends have you had in the past?”

  “A couple—but once they knew I never wanted anything serious they left. And that was fine by me. What about you? Did you leave behind someone in Canada?”

  “Not really. It was the same thing. I just wanted casual and had no real time to date. A lot of men didn’t like it when I took the initiative. They didn’t like me being in control.” They also hadn’t liked how emotionally unavailable she was.

  He smiled, and his eyes twinkled as he moved closer. “I don’t mind that you have control.”

  Her pulse began to race and she knew that she was blushing again. Every part of her was crying out to kiss him. To give in to what he was making her feel. But she couldn’t. This marriage of convenience was nothing more than a business arrangement when she came right down to it—and she never mixed business with pleasure.

  Even if she wanted to.

  But it had been so long since she’d been with someone. Since she’d had human contact...

  “It’s late. I think I’m going to drink my herbal tea and just read in bed for a bit.”

  He nodded and rubbed the back of his neck. “Right. That’s a very good plan.”

  “I’ll see you in the morning?”

  Aran nodded and headed to his room. “Yes. Have a good night, Ruby.”

  “You too.”

  She went up the stairs and heard his door shut. She let out the breath she realized she’d been holding and tried to calm her nerves.

  What was it about him that made her run so hot and cold? She felt as if she was losing all control around him. Being around him made her do things and say things she’d never thought she would say or do.

  And she should’ve known. The moment he’d walked into the hospital and introduced himself to her during their first shift together she should’ve realized that he was nothing but trouble.

  And trouble was exactly what she didn’t need.

  She only wanted it.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ARAN GOT UP early and went outside to chop some wood. It had been cold in the night and there was no wood by the fireplace because they’d been trapped in Whitehead. It was still kind of damp and drizzly, but he didn’t mind going out and chopping some wood.

  Besides, he couldn’t sleep anyways.

  All he could think about was Ruby.

  That kiss that they’d shared in Whitehead just kept playing over and over in his mind. He’d kissed other women, but somehow that simple kiss had stuck with him. And he wanted to do more than just kiss her.

  You don’t want a relationship and neither does she. What could it hurt?

  And it was true. Ruby had told him herself that she didn’t want anything serious beyond their sham of a marriage. She was only legally bound to him because she wanted a Green Card.

  That was it.

  He knew that she was attracted to him, and he was attracted to her. What could it hurt? The thing was, he knew that if he indulged then someone was going to be hurt by this and he didn’t want that to happen.

  Aran had seen what had happened to his father when his parents had divorced. It had nearly broken him to leave his wife behind in Alaska. Aran’s mother had always told him that she’d married his father out of lust, that they’d rushed into it and hadn’t really talked about what they wanted, but that was not how his father viewed it.

  Aran’s father had loved Jessica.

  Sure, he’d
found love again, with Aran’s stepmother, but he’d been broken for so long, pining after Jessica.

  Aran never wanted that. He never wanted to feel that way and he certainly didn’t want anyone to feel that way over him.

  He liked Ruby. She had a bit of a tough exterior, but she really cared for people. She wanted to help people and give them everything she could. She was dedicating her life to them, flying out and rescuing people from natural disasters and accidents. Or flying to remote communities and doing a job that no other doctor or surgeon wanted to fill, because no one really wanted to live out in the middle of nowhere in one of the world’s harshest climates.

  Aran admired her for that.

  He wished that he could stay on after they were divorced, but once this whole thing was over with he was going to return south and try to get a job somewhere. Anywhere. As soon as he got his PTSD under control.

  He almost had it under control.

  Who are you kidding?

  He brought down the ax in one swift movement, splitting the log in two. It felt good to swing the ax—it helped him forget how he’d jumped at Ruby when she’d woken him in the clinic. For a brief moment he’d been back on the front line, lying on a stretcher after having being found in the wreckage after the IED explosion.

  He could still feel the pain in his leg. The agony. And his leg gave a twinge when he thought about it. He wished that he hadn’t been pieced together the way he had been. He wished that they had just taken his leg.

  Then he remembered Ruby’s gentle touch. Her delicate hands on his leg, working the muscles, and how good it had felt. How she made him forget about the pain. How she’d made him forget about the horrors of the front.

  He winced as he picked up the logs from where they’d fallen and started a little pile.

  “It’ll take you all day, doing it like that.”

  He looked up to see Ruby leaning against the open back door in flannel pajamas, holding a cup of coffee. The steam was rising out of the top and melting away in the damp mist that clung to the trees surrounding her cabin.