by K. C. Crowne
Doctor Lucky Charms
A Holiday Romance
K.C. Crowne
Copyright © 2021 by K.C. Crowne
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Also by K.C. Crowne
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
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Epilogue
Irish Doctor's Secret Babies (Preview)
About the Author
Also by K.C. Crowne
K.C. Crowne is an Amazon Top 8 Bestseller
All books are FREE on Kindle Unlimited and can be read as standalones.
Kilts and Kisses (This series)
Doctor Lucky Charms
Mountain Men of Liberty Series
Baby for the Mountain Man| Junior for the Mountain Man| Knocked Up by the Mountain Man| Baby For Daddy's Friend | Triplets for the Mountain Man | Taken by the Mountain Man| Secret Baby for the Mountain Man | Mountain Man’s Accidental Surprise | Quadruplets for the Mountain Man | Delivering His Gifts| Mountain Daddy’s Fate | Mountain Man’s Lucky Charm | Mountain Man's Rival | Small Town Mountain Daddy
Doctors of Denver Series
Doctor’s Secret | Doctor’s Surprise Delivery | Irish Doctor’s Secret Babies | Millionaire’s Surprise Triplets | Doctor's Baby Plan| Knocked Up by the New Zealand Doctor | Doctor’s Duties | Billion Dollar Mistake
Lumberjacks of Grizzly Falls Series
Lumberjacked | Lumberjack’s Baby
Rainbow Canyons Cowboy Series
Taboo Cowboy |Cowboy’s Baby|Her Cowboy Daddies | Southern Charm| Cowboy’s Bride
Big Bad Daddies Series
Big Bad Doctor | Big Bad Daddy| Big Bad Taboo Daddy | Big Bad Prince|Big Bad Mountain Man| Big Bad SEAL| Big Bad Boss| Big Bad Sugar Daddy| Big Bad Mountain Brothers
Bearded Brothers Mountain Man Series
Her Mountain Daddy| Beauty and the Beard| Bride and the Beard| Built and Bearded |
Firemen of Manhattan Series
Big Bad Fireman’s Baby| Big Bad Firefighter| Big Bad Fire Daddy|
Spenser Sisters Reverse Harem Series
Men on a Mission| Christmas with Four Firemen| Dirty Cowboys
Checkout KC’s full Amazon Catalog
All books are FREE on Kindle Unlimited and can be read as standalones.
Description
This holiday season, there's more than gingerbread in the oven.
I met the hottest man ever...
Then proceeded to tell him to shove his money up his Irish rear.
It wasn't like I'd run into him ever again.
Not like I'd see him while visiting my OBGYN.
Wearing a thin paper gown on an exam table.
Wait...
That's exactly what happened!!
The Irish guy I told to go to hell is my OBGYN. FML!!
The humiliation doesn't stop there.
Dr. Lucky Charms is apparently famous.
Him and his siblings are the stars of a reality TV series.
And every woman in Ireland is obsessed.
I came to a foreign country to start something new.
Now I'm convinced I've thrown my entire life down the drain.
Couple all that with a positive pregnancy test...
And I'm convinced I'll have the craziest holiday season ever!!
Chapter 1
JOANN
I stood over the papers in the courtroom in a triumphant, hands-on-my-hips pose, like a general looking over maps of the territory he’d just conquered through brilliant strategy and genius tactics.
As I began packing the sheets up and slipping them into my bag, I realized it made a certain sense that I’d reach for a metaphor like that. I was a lawyer, after all, and going to court was pretty damn close to going to war some days.
Most of courtroom had filed out by that point. Ricky Mendoza, the defendant and the man I’d just finished putting away for likely another decade or two, was thankfully long gone. Ricky, a member of the Escarra drug cartel, had been busted for trying to stab a guy to death in county lockup.
Actually, scratch that – first he’d been busted for trying to move a few dozen kilos of heroin over the Colorado-New Mexico border. Then came the attempted murder thing. And God, the look on his face as Judge Waller read the guilty verdict…it’d made my blood run cold. During the weeklong trial Ricky had worn the same dead-eyed, million-mile-stare, as if he were totally mentally checked out from the courtroom proceedings. When the verdict was read, however, a look of pure, animal rage had flashed across his face.
Then he’d turned those murderous eyes to me.
It’d been thirty minutes since he’d been carted out in cuffs and I was still shaken, my blood running cold and my heart going thud-thud-thud in my chest. That was strange for me. In my five as a prosecuting attorney in the Denver DA’s office, I’d met my fair share of hardened criminals. There’d been something about Ricky though that’d shaken me to my core.
Didn’t matter. I’d done my job and put his sorry ass away where it belonged. I was ready to get out of the courtroom, get home, and park myself in front some mindless reality TV to unwind – maybe along with an extra glass of wine on top of my usual one as a reward.
After the last person had gone, I stepped out of my heels and slipped on my flats, and when I was ready, I slung my briefcase over my shoulder and headed out.
“Jo!” a booming voice from behind me made nearly jump out of my shoes. I spun around on my heels, my hand instinctively going for my purse where I kept my mace.
The person behind me was James Whittaker, senior prosecutor for the DA’s office and shoe-in for the DA position once Lisa Sugar, the current lawyer it the role, finally took her retirement in the next few years.
His expression fell at my reaction, and I felt like a total jackass. James, tall and stocky with silver hair and a neatly trimmed beard, a gray, windowpane suit on his broad frame, was something of a mentor to me. He furrowed his thick, dark eyebrows in concern as he approached, his black oxfords echoing through the bustling hall of the courthouse.
“Hey, kid,” he said, a curious smile on his face.
“Hey, old man.” “Kid” and “old man” were our little nicknames for each other, what we’d called one another since my first week at the DA’s office.
“Now, that’s not
the kind of reaction I was expecting to get when congratulating you on your big win today.”
I sighed, shaking my head. “Sorry, James. Guess I’m still a little jumpy.”
James gently placed his big hand on my shoulder and gestured for us to start down the hall. “Judge Waller put the fear of God in you? I don’t blame you if so. He was the first judge I tried before back when I started at the DA’s office. He was scary then, and he’s only gotten worse the less hair he has.”
“It’s not Waller,” I said, James and I making our way down the arched hall, lawyers and clerks zipping here and there. “It’s that guy I put away.”
“Oh, that Ricky kid? He got you shaken up?”
“I hate to admit it, but yeah. He was barely old enough to drink but still had this look in his eyes, like he’d cut my throat and not even think twice about it.”
He nodded. “Sociopath-type. Seen it time and time again. And you’re right – you can always tell by the look in their eyes. Window to the soul and all that. But hey, you did the right thing and put him behind bars. Cases don’t always work out this clean and simple, but they did here. Bad guy in jail, one less criminal on the streets.”
James spoke with his usual even, calm tone. While it managed to put me slightly at ease, I still felt a little out of sorts.
“You’re right, James,” I said as we entered the main hall of the courtroom, the rotunda grand and gorgeous above us. “I guess…I don’t know. It’s kind of silly what I’m thinking.”
James stopped and turned to me, his eyebrows knitted in concern. “What is it?”
I glanced aside for a moment, wondering if I ought to spill my guts.
“You can tell me,” he said.
“If it were just this one guy, fine. He’s in jail and that’s that. But it’s not just him, it’s-”
“The whole damn cartel,” James said, understanding right away what I was worried about. “Those Escarra pricks.”
“Am I being paranoid?” I asked. “Or maybe I’m not being paranoid enough?”
He pursed his lips and nodded, seeming to give himself a moment to put together the right answer.
“Here’s the thing, kid – I’m not going to tell you that you’ve got nothing to worry about. The Escarra cartel…they’re ruthless. But the good news is that groups like that tend not to mess with the lawyers. They pull a stunt with one of us and it’d be statewide news. They like to flex their power, but they also know that keeping a low profile is how they can continue to operate.”
He spoke clearly and calmly and, most importantly, rationally. By the time he was done, I felt a little better. James gestured toward the front doors of the courthouse, and we continued on.
I glanced around, taking in the sight of the holiday decorations. A huge Christmas tree was in the middle of the rotunda, garland hanging on the walls.
“I swear,” I said, shaking my head. “It’s barely November. Why is there a Christmas tree up already?”
“Not a fan of the holidays?”
“Not a fan of taking time off work.” James chuckled at my comment.
“All the same,” he went on. “Might not be the worst idea in the world to keep one eye open. It’s a crazy world out there.”
We headed out, James and I waving to the officer stationed near the metal detector. My eyes moved from his badge to his gun, and, for a moment, I felt a little safer.
“You’re right, you’re right.” James held the door for me, and we left. The day outside was perfect fall weather, the air crisp and the scent of turning leaves on the air. The sky above was thick and gray. All in all, it set the perfect mood for a cozy night in. “I mean, not like I ever go out where someone would find me.”
James laughed, and I could tell my light-hearted comment had made him feel a bit better about me and my situation.
“You should be going out more. Forgive me if I sound old-fashioned, kid, but I can’t believe that a woman like you isn’t beating guys off with a stick.” Together, we stepped out onto the parking lot.
“Believe me, I’ve given them a chance. Thing about us lawyers, which I’m sure you know, is that we all tend to be cut from the same cloth. You know – headstrong, stubborn, our-way-or-the-highway types.”
“That can work sometimes,” he said. “When Meryl and I went on our first date,” he raised his left hand to draw attention to his gold wedding band, “I was convinced that we were both so bull-headed that we wouldn’t last the night without killing one another. And you know how that story ended.”
“With thirty-two years of marriage, three successful kids, and five grandkids who’re so cute I can hardly stand to look at them.”
He smiled, a twinkle in his eye. “You know it as well as I do at this point. Hell, I can’t shut up about it.”
“And I love to hear about it,” I said. “Good to know there’s still true love out there for some people.”
James cocked his head to the side as we approached my car. “You say that like it’ll never happen for you.”
“Well, it might not! I mean, not everyone’s destined to find someone. And on top of that, I’m so busy with work that I can’t even imagine finding the time to go on a date, let alone enough dates to end in a marriage.”
“Now, what about your sister?”
“Jolene? What about her?”
“She found love, right? Met that guy who took over his father’s tech company. Those two were the talk of the town.”
“Yeah, Jolene and Sawyer – classic fairy-tale stuff.” I said the words with a sassy tone and James flashed me a wry look. “Didn’t mean to sound bitter there. I mean, I love those two like crazy and I couldn’t be happier that they found one another.”
“As you should be. And it’s all the more reason to think you’ll find someone too.”
“Sawyer is perfect for Jolene. Me finding a guy who’s as good for me as he is for her…it’d be like lightning striking in the same place twice.”
Then, as if right on cue, a flash and a rumble came from one of the thickening storm clouds. We reached my car at that point, and I pressed the button on my fob to open the locks.
I sighed, the subject all seeming so overwhelming.
“Thanks for the pep talk, old man – I really mean it. But we should get going before this storm hits. And give my best to Meryl, alright?”
He winked as he stepped away. “You bet. Drive safe, kid.” He headed off but called out over his shoulder. “And no more working tonight! Relax and celebrate!”
“Celebrate?”
“I don’t know, go to the Cheesecake Factory or something!” he waved one more time before turning forward.
I slipped into my car and started the engine. A half-hour later I was back at the office. Sure, James had told me not to work, but after the kind of day I’d had, I needed to work out a little of the tension. However, as soon as I’d stepped into the downtown office to find that I was one of the only people there, I regretted it.
I was seeing people moving in the shadows, every dark corner hiding some cartel member with a switchblade in his hands and murder in his eyes – that same, dead, animal look that Ricky had possessed.
I hurried to my office, locking the door behind me before sliding into my desk chair. Once I was seated, the door locked, I let out a sigh of relief. Rain gently pattered on the window behind me, the view looking out from the tenth floor onto the downtown Denver area.
I turned on my Mac and waited for it to boot up, hurrying around my small office and flicking on as many lights as I could to make the place a little warmer. I hated that I was acting like that, jumping at shadows like some scared kid, but I couldn’t seem to shake the sense of foreboding.
Once the computer was on, I opened my email and clicked around until I found the message from the DA with the outline for my next case. Maybe James was right that I didn’t need to be working, but I needed to do something, anything to take my mind off the case.
An hour flew by before I was
interrupted by two rumbles – one from the thunder outside, the other from my belly. I checked my phone to see that it was after eight. A little mental math told me that it’d been nine hours since lunch, and that’d been nothing more than a shoved-down sandwich in one of the breakrooms at the courthouse.
I needed food, and I needed to get home. The storm had been steady and, if Apple Weather was any indication, would only get worse. Italian sounded good, so I pulled up the online menu for Fusilli’s, an amazing hole-in-the-wall spot nearby that I’d eaten at more times than I could count. After clicking in my order for veal parm and a side of cheesy garlic bread that I most definitely did not need but that sounded amazing, I turned off my computer and headed out.
However empty the office had been before, it was even more desolate now. The few other stragglers were long gone, the only other person remaining being one of the maintenance crew finishing up the vacuuming.
